- Monday, 30 November 2009
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Intergrerty -- we've never heard of it - Doc Spinola of that ilk
Word could be saved by a workaround
IT TURNS OUT that all those headlines saying that the Vole will not be able to sell any more copies of Word following a patent dispute were not quite true.
A top lawyer has had a look at the ruling and claims that the Vole can still sell Word with a bit of a workaround involving string and some sticky-backed sellotape.
Barry Negrin, a partner with the New York firm Pryor Cashman who has practised patent and trademark law for 17 years and thinks he might be getting it right pointed out that the injunction doesn't apply to the copies of Word that have already been sold.
He told Computerworld that the injunction only prohibits Microsoft from selling Word as it exists now after 10 October.
All the Vole needs to do is disable the custom XML feature, which should be pretty easy to do, and give that a different SKU number from what's been sold so it's easy to distinguish between the two versions.
Then it just needs to sand it all down well, slap on a lick of paint and your father's brother's name is Robert.
So the news that Word will have to be pulled from the shops is a fairly typical silly season media blowout churned out by dry hacks desperate to find a beach bar [No that's just you. Ed]. µ
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While the world loves to bash Microsoft and their monopolies and <atrocity , the patent that they're infringing is quite ridiculous.
It covers reading, manipulating, and displaying XML data. Practically everything on the web does that given that HTML is XML.
This whole thing seems really similar to the RAMBUS issue from a few years back, a company patenting the use of an ISO standard. In this case, I think the patent should be revoked and the technique be placed in the public domain like everyone assumed it was.
I read that as "World could be saved by a workaround". Talk about getting your hopes up!
Jeez, you young whipper snappers and your trendy lingo.
My naive hope is that Microsoft learns from this that patents are a double-edged sword that have the power to preferentially devastate rich targets with business models such as theirs. In particular, their saber-rattling FUD campaign (and proxy-battles such as SCO) against open source really have the power to halt their revenue stream if/when they are petitioned to reveal source code which infringes on code covered by the GPL or other patents.
Just imagine: "I'm sorry sir/madam, we will no longer be selling computers with Windows pre-installed, which version of Linux do you prefer, or would you like a Macintosh? No, we do not sell Windows disks, either.".
However, since Microsoft has shown little ability to learn from its mistakes in the past (at least, according to the E.U.), I fully expect Ballmer and the boys/girls to continue pushing people around and generally making themselves unpopular enough that the Penguins will eventually shut them down and/or people no longer want to be associated as customers of a corporate bully.
What a shame. Is there a workaround that brings back the old style menus?
Retraining everyone to use the new Word is too expensive, we have been switching all users to Openoffice because it's menus's are more like Word than Words! ;-)
I haven't bought MS office since the 2000 version. I mostly use OpenOffice now. Billy has enough of my hard earned money.