Eloas sues almost everybody over browser apps.
After losing the $538 MILLION dollar Eloas lawsuit against it Microsoft quietly signed a patent agreement. No doubt Apple will too. But, what about the smaller players? Can they afford to pay? Will YouTube shut down or become a pay-for-use service? Will becoming a pay-for-use service kill YouTube?
What about an in house client-server applications where the data sets on a server and is throwing out HTML pages written using APEX (or similar tools) that the client interacts with using FireFox?
While the BIG Companies may just shrug their shoulders and pass the new costs onto their customers, plus a little service fee to take advantage of the opportunity, the small fry may not be able to afford the license fee. What they may do, if they stay in business, is return to the use of client-server applications, where the server holds the data and the executable GUI that the client runs in order to play with the data. The problem is the choice of database. Dbf and similar databases respond to a query by sending the entire table over the wire to the client, which requires the client to pick out the records it wants to satisfy the query, making them VERY slow in a WAN environment, while databases like PostgreSQL or Oracle just send the selected records over the WAN, making them very fast.
Having developed apps using APEX I can say that while simple "address book" applications are easy to write, more complicated applications (ones with more than 60 controls on several tabs) can not be handled by APEX unless one resorts to dynamic, on-the-fly html objects, which are a pain unto themselves. Anyone who has ever attempted to debug an APEX application knows that. The traditional client server apps are a LOT easier to write and maintain, especially with tools like Qt/QtCreator.
So, while not the first, allow me to predict a rapid decline in the use of browser based applications, which is the ENTIRE basis of the "Cloud".
Tuesday, after receiving a continuation patent on the technology from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Eolas sued 23 more companies -- both a who's who of technology firms such as Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), as well as household names like J.C. Penney and PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay.
"Eolas has a technology invented about 15 years ago that's widely being used," Eolas CEO Mark Swords told InternetNews.com. "There are companies we feel are infringing our technology, so we're asking them to give us reasonable compensation," he added.
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Eolas' original suit against Microsoft included claims related to U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906 ('906 Patent). Meanwhile, a second patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,599,985 ('985 Patent), was granted Tuesday, thus triggering the filing of the new lawsuit.
"The '985 Patent is a continuation of the '906 patent, and allows Web sites to add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web development techniques," Eolas said in a statement.
The tiny firm is a spin off from the University of California, which owns the patent rights and shares the royalties with Eolas. However, UC is not involved in the current lawsuit, Swords said.
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The final re-examination of the 906 patent gave it a clean bill of health in February 2009.
"Eolas has a technology invented about 15 years ago that's widely being used," Eolas CEO Mark Swords told InternetNews.com. "There are companies we feel are infringing our technology, so we're asking them to give us reasonable compensation," he added.
...
Eolas' original suit against Microsoft included claims related to U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906 ('906 Patent). Meanwhile, a second patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,599,985 ('985 Patent), was granted Tuesday, thus triggering the filing of the new lawsuit.
"The '985 Patent is a continuation of the '906 patent, and allows Web sites to add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web development techniques," Eolas said in a statement.
The tiny firm is a spin off from the University of California, which owns the patent rights and shares the royalties with Eolas. However, UC is not involved in the current lawsuit, Swords said.
...
The final re-examination of the 906 patent gave it a clean bill of health in February 2009.
What about an in house client-server applications where the data sets on a server and is throwing out HTML pages written using APEX (or similar tools) that the client interacts with using FireFox?
While the BIG Companies may just shrug their shoulders and pass the new costs onto their customers, plus a little service fee to take advantage of the opportunity, the small fry may not be able to afford the license fee. What they may do, if they stay in business, is return to the use of client-server applications, where the server holds the data and the executable GUI that the client runs in order to play with the data. The problem is the choice of database. Dbf and similar databases respond to a query by sending the entire table over the wire to the client, which requires the client to pick out the records it wants to satisfy the query, making them VERY slow in a WAN environment, while databases like PostgreSQL or Oracle just send the selected records over the WAN, making them very fast.
Having developed apps using APEX I can say that while simple "address book" applications are easy to write, more complicated applications (ones with more than 60 controls on several tabs) can not be handled by APEX unless one resorts to dynamic, on-the-fly html objects, which are a pain unto themselves. Anyone who has ever attempted to debug an APEX application knows that. The traditional client server apps are a LOT easier to write and maintain, especially with tools like Qt/QtCreator.
So, while not the first, allow me to predict a rapid decline in the use of browser based applications, which is the ENTIRE basis of the "Cloud".
Talk about an example of creative genius... NOT! It takes about $10,000 to obtain a patent. Actually, the guy who filed it wasn't a rich idiot, he was a patent lawyer who just wanted to demonstrate how easy it is today to patent pure nonsense. It suggests that the "examiners" aren't even reading the patents, just rubber stamping them. If they are reading them then they have the comprehension level of a 1st grader.
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