See: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3312091
Patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtm l/search-adv.htm&r=9&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=ptxt&S1=Microsoft.ASNM.&OS=AN/Microsoft& RS=AN/Microsoft
Does anyone have any idea how this would effect Ant, Maven, Jelly, JSP and
other technologies that use XML to describe scripting?
For that matter, would James' use of XML to configure matchers and mailets
into a mail application be considered scripting? We have posted examples of
using Sieve scripts within an XML CDATA block.
It is hard to see Ant being affected as its publication precedes the filing date for the patent, if that is relevant. Not sure about the other projects.
The patent seems pretty silly to me. I would argue that it fails even the most basic novelty test for a patent, but IANAL, of course. Also the patent seems to be narrowly focused as it mainly seems to cover "a method for facilitating the identification and selection of the one or more scripts for execution" IOW, collecting scripts into an XML file as opposed to using XML as a scripting system.
Ant's <script> task, however, would seem to be in the same ballpark - a system for having scripts in different languages in an XML file (in this case an Ant build file). The original CVS commit for the script task was
Revision 1.1 - (download), view (text) (markup) (annotate) - [select for diffs]
Sun Mar 19 03:35:48 2000 UTC (3 years, 10 months ago) by rubys
which also precedes the filing date for the patent so I guess that might qualify as prior art. Who knows?
Conor
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