So Kodak now apparently wants $ 1.06 billion from Sun, for parts of Java violating some shitty old patents Kodak got hold of via the acquisition of Wang in 1997.
The patents (5,206,951, 5,226,161, and 5,421,012) basically describe the concept of an object request broker, so lots of other software (including CORBA, .NET, COM, plus some that I wrote) seems to be affected as well, if Kodak gets this through. Just another example that shows how the concept of software patents is thoroughly flawed. Unfortunately, we Europeans are already laying the ground for a similar situation as in the US. We can only hope that the EU legislators put a little bit more brainpower into the issue than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.
By the way, just on Friday, Jonathan Schwartz wrote in his blog about his strong believe in IP, including software patents. I wonder if the recent events maybe motivated him to change his mind.
And on a related note, I really hope that all those "intellectual property" companies whose brilliant business idea is to buy patents and make money from them by filing patent infringement lawsuits against everybody else all die a painful and horrible death.
Posted by guenter at October 3, 2004 08:38 PM