Simon Willison’s Weblog

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5 items tagged “patents”

2009

From Microsoft: C# and CLI under the Community Promise. Microsoft’s assurance that it won’t “assert its Necessary Claims” against alternative (including open source) implementations of the ECMA C# and CLR specifications. The promise doesn’t cover implementations of .NET, WinForms etc- so the Mono team have announced they will be splitting their project in to two packages—a safe, ECMA based package and a package containing everything else. # 7th July 2009, 11:15 am

Codecs for <audio> and <video>. HTML 5 will not be requiring support for specific audio and video codecs—Ian Hickson explains why, in great detail. Short version: Apple won’t implement Theora due to lack of hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape”, while open source browsers (Chromium and Mozilla) can’t support H.264 due to the cost of the licenses. # 2nd July 2009, 10:16 am

2007

Questioning Steve Ballmer

This morning I attended a half day briefing at Microsoft UK entitled “The Online Opportunity—What Makes a Successful Web 2.0 Start-Up?”. Despite the buzzword laden title the event was well worth the trip up from Brighton, mainly due to the Q&A with Steve Ballmer (a pretty rare opportunity).

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VeriSign OpenID 1.1 Non-Assertion Covenant (via) VeriSign join Sun Microsystems in providing patent protection for OpenID. # 20th June 2007, 10:38 pm

Ten Reasons The World Needs Patent Covenants (via) Sun just made their OpenID patent covenant official. Simon Phipps explains why these are a Good Idea. # 22nd May 2007, 5:09 pm