Friday, 30. October 2009, 14:00:00
opera, widgets, w3c, patents
...
If you read the
report from the W3C Patent Advisory Group (PAG) regarding Apple's
patent claim against the Widgets 1.0 specification, you will not only see the reasons why the PAG does not think the patent is relevant, but it also reveals some worrying things about the way Apple handled the whole thing.
Read more...
Friday, 9. October 2009, 13:04:03
opera, widgets, w3c, patents
...
Back in April, I wrote about how Apple tried to
block the W3C Widgets specification with a patent claim.
After spending a lot of W3C members' money to figure out if Apple's claims were valid, the Patent Advisory Group has now come to a conclusion: The work on Widgets 1.0 will continue. Apple's patent claim does not appear to be relevant to the Widgets 1.0 specification:
The Patent Advisory Group concluded that the inventive step claimed by US Patent Nr. 5,764,992 lies in the fact that the software program can update itself absolutely independent of functions performed by any resource external to the current software program. As the Widgets 1.0: Updates Draft uses an update-manager throughout the Specification, such self-updating does not occur.
Read the full report here:
Report of the Patent Advisory Group on the Widgets Updates Specification
Tuesday, 7. July 2009, 09:39:19
gecko, mozilla, w3c, patents
...
The news that the HTML5 specification
will not specify a video codec is bad news for the open Web. What makes things worse is that a common, royalty-free codec was actually agreed on by all involved browser vendors, except one.
Apple.
Read more...
Wednesday, 17. June 2009, 14:13:34
w3c, standards
Well, not exactly.
But Opera's Chief Standards Officer,
Charles McCathieNevile (Chaals), has been elected for a two-year term to the
W3C Advisory Board:
Created in March 1998, the Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board also serves the Members by tracking issues raised between Advisory Committee meetings, soliciting Member comments on such issues, and proposing actions to resolve these issues. The Advisory Board manages the evolution of the Process Document. The Advisory Board hears appeals of Member Submission requests that are rejected for reasons unrelated to Web architecture
This group is similar to the Board of Directors in a company, although it has no formal executive role.
Tuesday, 7. April 2009, 08:48:41
opera, patents, w3c, apple
...
There's some potentially bad news from the open standards front.
Early last month, it became clear that Apple might be
causing trouble for the W3C Widgets specification. They are unwilling to make patent
5,764,992 (
W3C information), which covers
automatic software upates, royalty-free if the Widgets Update specification is found to use anything covered by the patent. This basically means a lot of additional work for the Working Group at the W3C, and might slow down the process of finalizing the widgets specification.
So as a response to this situation the W3C has put together a
Patent Advisory Group, meaning that several companies are forced to spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out if Apple's patent claim actually applies, and if it does, what to do about it.
With the recent rumours of Apple getting all
lawsuit-happy over patents, what are they up to exactly?
For Opera's position on software patents, take a look at
Opera's vision statement.
WIDGETIZE