Microsoft are in deep poop again.....
 

A US federal court has ordered Microsoft to pay over $290m (?175m) for wilfully infringing on a patent by Canadian firm i4i.

Judge bans Microsoft Word sales


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Wow, Sounds naughty, I wish they would infring a patent of mine :( Now, let me think :D

That is a lot of money ;)

pocket change for microsoft, they'll make that back in a day of sales :D

The 280million might be pocket money for MS (although i don't think they share that view), but having to take Word (and thus probably also suites like Office) off the market in teh US is a major blow i think.

Microsoft simply needs to adopt the Open Document Format to its fullest and remove their XML capabilities.

True, but it certainly opens the door by setting a precedence. It will be interesting to see the other companies stepping forward with similar suits against MS. I'm sure there are a ton of them ;)

Right... so you can patent something you can do with XML? XML isn't something this company created in the first place...

In any case, MS could just buy this company. :p

or run them down, either of which will kick them up the area where the sun don't shine :P

Yeah, I don't think people understand the ramifications of this ruling. OpenOffice uses similar routines and would be subject to the same patent infringement. However OpenOffice doesn't have $290 million to pay fines and court fees. There goes competition.

Not only that but hundreds of websites use XML for document and information exchange, including all of yours. The lawsuit states that Microsoft uses custom XML in their documents. vBulletin uses custom XML to exchange styles, addon products and languages. XML is supposed to be an open standard and not fettered with patents and restrictions. The implications of this go far behind Microsoft's pocketbook.

I thought XML was open, like the other programing languages? Isn't XMLx freely/openly documented through W3.org?