The Eolas case

Eolas stands for “Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems”. But in Gaelic it means wisdom.

The guys at Eolas have held a patentsince 1994 that covers embedding objects in internet browsers.

According to Eolas’s technology page, the patent covers “web browsers that support popular technologies such as ActiveX components, Java applets and browser plug-ins”.

Of course, once they had the patent they went after the biggest fish, taking on Microsoft first and winning some 500 million dollars, a story Francotirador covers at length.

Fighting Eolas

It’s more or less obvious that Eolas has Macromedia (now Adobe) and Sun in its sights. Even Firefox could be affected. This is so damaging that even the W3C had decided to fight Eolas, calling for a massive search for evidence of “prior art”, all so that the United States patent office would reconsider the patent it had granted.

But, although we don’t know where things stand, Microsoft decided that plugins definitely will have to be explicitly activated by the user.

This is a headache, because those of us programmers who have developed plugins, ActiveX controls included, are going to have one more problem to deal with. It was already hard enough explaining to users that they had to accept our components, or signing them digitally; now we have to add one more page to the manual to explain how to allow the plugin to run.

All because of Eolas.

Is it a good thing that software patents exist? What does the audience think?

For my part, this patent affects me directly, but not as much as it affects Microsoft. For me it’s an inconvenience; for Bill Gates it’s 500 million dollars, gulp.

(This post was modified to correct some historical inaccuracies; apologies to anyone who read an earlier version of it.)