full-disclosure - IE Changes / Software Patents

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Message-ID: <28915501A44DBA4587FE1019D675F983093E27@grfint.intern.adiscon.com>
From: rgerhards at hq.adiscon.com (Rainer Gerhards)
Subject: IE Changes / Software Patents

I just found a very interesting effect of software patents:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/oct03/10-06EOLASPR.asp

As was posted on this list not so far ago, Microsoft lost a case against
Eolas on some aspects of ActiveX embedding in IE. Their technical
reaction is a good sample of what software patents cause:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/activexchanges.asp

In short

- a lot of web pages are broken (even PDF should not work in all cases)
- the user will become educated to press OK on popups even more often
- wild workarounds are created (base64 encode the parameter instead
passing it clear-text) to avoid patented code

That last point is not written directly in the msdn document, but I read
between the lines this will be the preferred workaround.

Isn't that nicely?

Rainer