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Dave Johnson pointed out this ridiculous development today:
GROKLAW: "Here's a truly disgusting story. Kodak bought some patents from Wang in 1997. The patents cover a method by which a program can "ask for help" from another application to carry out certain functions, which is more or less what Java does. Kodak's business is suffering from the digital revolution, so it decided to sue Sun for infringing its purchased patents. It claims that Sun pilfered its technology."
The patents (5,206,951, 5,421,012 and 5,226,161) appear to address a system for operating on resources (organized data of some kind) within an object hierarchy with a serialized format. The whole thing looks a lot like AppleEvents (and in fact references Inside Mac and an article about MacApp), CORBA, java serialization, .NET and a host of things I am forgetting (or never knew about).
The whole software patent issue is going to get worse before it gets better.
Just finished the comments, looks like others who read the documents came to the same conclusions I did.
Posted by Dave at October 3, 2004 03:54 PM