[ale] OT: no more active X in IE?

[Jeff Rose]

On Sat, 2003-08-30 at 08:24, Geoffrey wrote:
> From:
> 
> http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3070591
> 
> 'Eolas' patent (US Patent 5,838,906) was granted on November 17, 1998 
> and covers technologies for the creation of a browser system that 
> allowed for the embedding of small interactive programs, such as 
> plug-ins, applets, scriptlets or ActiveX Controls, into online documents.'
> 
> Seems to me this would affect all browsers, but these guys won a .5 
> billion $ suite against M$.

I was cautiously happy when I heard about this.  Though it is always
nice to see MS lose a battle, I wonder how this will effect Mozilla and
other free browsers.  Will everyone have to pay an Eolas tax just to
include embedded object support in a browser or does this just have to
do with the way ActiveX works?  What about Java, applets, php?  From
what I have read of the patent, it is very vague and doesn't represent a
real product, just an idea.  I'm worried this will in the long run
damage the Open Source community as much or more than MS.

Jeff Rose

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