Short cuts

Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT

Published: 01/02/2010 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

eXtensible Microsoft Lawsuit

It wasn’t the ribbon after all: the custom tag capability in Word 2007’s XML Structure Pane (no, we’d never heard of it either) turned out to be the actual source of Microsoft’s i4i woes.

Panic over as last summer’s top silly-season news story, entertainingly headlined “Microsoft Banned From Selling Word” (see Short Cuts issue 45) turned out not to be a threat to the whole of XML, Web 2.0 and Life As We Know It, but merely a not entirely unfamiliar tale of Microsoft meeting a small vendor with an interesting product, then coming out with something not entirely unlike it a couple of years later. It all started in August with Canadian software house i4i asking a Texan court to ban Microsoft from selling Word because its custom XML technology infringed their patent on storing formatting information separately from text. The court obliged, throwing in $290 million damages. This set alarm bells ringing among the wider XML community since in a language with no intrinsic vocabulary all tags are arguably custom, while separating presentation from content has been the mantra of XML since its inception. On that basis XML might violate i4i’s patents just by being XML. Microsoft went to a Federal appeal, with predictions of biblical-scale chaos in the app and OEM markets if Word was banned. Unimpressed, the Feds said ‘Tough’ and gave Microsoft until 11 January to stop shipping Word with the offending code. Cue more worrying (especially among OpenDoc fans) until, pretty much at the last minute, Microsoft issued a patch to render existing stocks of Word street-legal for future sale, and the true nature of the lawsuit was revealed. It turns out that in this case ‘custom XML’ meant something quite specific, namely allowing users to add their own tags (such as ‘‘) to documents, giving free-format text a structure that external applications can recognise. i4i had developed a nice trade in doing just this, with clients including, appropriately enough, the US Patent Office. This had led, they claimed, to ‘extensive’ discussions with a certain Microsoft Corp about possible collaborations. The discussions came to nothing, but soon afterwards Word 2003 appeared, supporting XML documents including – you’ve guessed it – user-defined custom tags. Microsoft’s patch takes the custom tag capability out, although you won’t have to apply it if you bought your copy of Word before 11 Jan, or if you live outside of North America. The company says that the feature was not used by most people anyway, which makes you wonder why they bothered including it in the first place. • ‘i4i’ means ‘Infrastructures For Information’, although post-lawsuit a change to ‘i4ani’ might be appropriate. The company’s chairman, Loudon Owen, says he’s not willing to license its technology to Microsoft, and instead wants to make i4i ‘the Oracle of unstructured data’. Whether unstructured data actually needs an Oracle is open to debate.

Apple iPad “larger than expected”

Like the rest of civilisation we were glued to our screens on 27 January, waiting for a first glimpse of Apple’s new tablet PC. When it came, courtesy of Web site gdgt.com, we were shocked to see the monstrous device looming over Steve Jobs like one of those lit-up British Airways ads on the side of the Hammersmith Flyover.

Web site gdgt.com reveals the monstrous truth.

It could have been an optical illusion, of course, but with Apple you never know. Had a simple CAD error combined with Apple’s legendary isolation from the outside world to produce the 21st century’s greatest product disaster? Had Steve got carried away with his desire to out-gun netbooks and decided to take on the 256-inch plasma market as well? Or had medical science got carried away and shrunk Steve? In the end we were relieved to find that it was an optical illusion after all, and that Apple had merely resized its iPhone drawings until they were big enough to kill off Amazon’s Kindle. However hard we pinch ourselves though, it’s still not a dream and Microsoft’s Surface is still the size of two breeze blocks and destined to spend its life playing table-top poker in pubs.

Oracle takes on the full Monty

MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius is unimpressed by the words of Oracle on MySQL’s future.

It’s finally a done deal then as Oracle, cruelly eclipsing smaller hardware vendor Apple, chose the day of the iPad launch to announce that its purchase of Sun Microsystems had been completed, nearly ten months after it was first announced. The US Department of Justice had quickly waved the deal through, but there had been some local difficulty with the European Commission, who’d originally thought that putting the world’s biggest database vendor in charge of Sun’s MySQL, the database that’s done most to keep Web 2.0 out of the clutches of big database vendors, might not be a good idea. Some soothing words from Oracle boss Larry Ellison about non-enforcement of patents and non-imposition of support contracts sorted that out though, and by New Year the EC had rolled over (sorry – approved the acquisition) too. That left MySQL co-founder Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius to take up the cudgels, which he did with a 17,000-signature petition to the EU and a threat to get the governments of Russia and China, which he described as “open-source-friendly”, involved (some might say that Russia and China’s attitudes to source – and executables – are a bit too friendly, but that’s another matter). In the end though Oracle just ploughed ahead, stating that “combination of the local entities worldwide will proceed in accordance with local laws”, which we think may translate as “we’re shutting the Sun office in Beijing”.