hutcheson - 9:49 pm on Mar 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

No language was patented.

And languages aren't EVER "open source"--there IS no source. (The language is the definition, the specification. An automatic language processor (compiler, parser, interpreter, transformer) would have source that could be "open" or "closed."

This isn't about the XML language at all. It's about a particular implementation of maintaining markup and data in different files.

The problem isn't patent trolling, or "NPE" as the lawyers like to call it. This is an ALGORITHM patent, which represents a different kind of abuse of the patent system--a kind of patent that (IMO) shouldn't be allowed, for legally and logically and ethically and pragmatially and all other kinds of reasons.

Never, in the lawsuit, did Microsoft make the claim that software patents shouldn't be allowed. (I wish they had!) It turns out that Microsoft is not only the biggest offender in SW patent infringement, they're the biggest offender in SW patent filing.

Which comes back to the usual point: Bill Gates is not Satan, no matter what Satan likes to think.