Register: MS patents .Everything. Historically Microsoft has not used patents to protect its business, preferring to tinker with the APIs themselves. Quite explicitly, as Brad Silverberg told Andrew Schulman in 1993: if Microsoft stops “evolving” the APIs they become commoditized. This policy, we can assume, is changing.
(UPDATED)Ominous, even though this is just an application, not a final issuing of the patent (though the current U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is prone to issuing absurdly expansive patents). And it makes you wonder if Miguel and his compatriots at the Mono project got snookered when they based their framework on .Net.
Of course, as you may have noticed in recent weeks, .Net has been disappearing from sight. It’s all just Windows again — and it probably always ways just Windows.
Now that the U.S. government no longer enforces antitrust laws in Microsoft-related businesses, the company is free to leverage its Windows monopoly without any restraint. Some observers always thought .Net — with its supposed openness and interoperability — was a con. I thought that was a cynical view. I seem to have been naive, a foolish move when it comes to guaging the intentions of Microsoft.
(NOTE: Thanks to reader Jim Taylor who pointed out that this was an application, not a final patent.)