Grauw’s blog

As a good show of why software patents are the most and utter piece of bullshit ever: it seems Microsoft has been granted a software patent on (de)serialisation of XML in the US. Proposterous, that’s what it is. It’s one of the basics of XML! If Microsoft were to enforce this patent, which it now legally has the right to do, in the US at least, it would pretty much mean the end of all open and free software based on XML technology. Such as like uh... web browsers. And many, many others.

I wish I had known about this during the XTech conference. It would have been a nice question to ask to the speaker of the end keynote, which was from Microsoft about the use of XML outside the web. The guy lauded XML and its applications in e.g. governments, and expected that XML would be used for 75% of the administration documents in 5 year. Well, Microsoft turning XML into a proprietary technology certainly won’t help that aim.

Perhaps that was why he only showed ‘world-changing’ XML solutions using Microsoft technologies.

(Technocrati tags: XTech, XML)