Geek Speak
Some months back I became aware of the patent US 5,838,906 and the Eolas lawsuit against Microsoft, and followed a bit of conversation on the Net related to it. As many, I believed the issue would quickly go away because of ample prior art. Regrettably, this seems not to be the case. It now seems that perhaps the browser itself and the browsing experience may have to be nontrivially modified as a result of the judgment. Although a bit late, if some of us perhaps dust off our old code, is there a chance that we could still save the browser through demonstration of clear prior art? For my own interest, and for the record, I recently spent a little time pursuing my intuition that Lotus Notes R3 might be viable prior art relative to the patent in question. I am not an attorney, and I am surely not well versed in the nuances of the case, but it seems to me after initial investigation that there is indeed quite a bit of relevance. I pursued this with the assistance of my brother, Jack Ozzie, and with another of my employees at Groove, Rob Slapikoff. Both Jack and Rob worked for me at Iris Associates in the development of Lotus Notes. Although I am personally responsible for a good deal of the "browser" code in question, I asked Jack to help because he specifically did all of the work related to our “object linking and embedding†technologies - first a Lotus technology referred to internally as DIP, (Document Interchange Protocol), and later in loose collaboration with the Windows & Excel teams on what was referred to as either CDP (Compound Document Protocol) or OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). I asked Rob to help because he was, in essence, a Lotus Notes “solution developer†at the time, and was very familiar with how one would quickly weave together a solution involving multiple applications.
