"What's more, the inevitable fragmentation and retooling costs caused by the ability to enforce this patent, which we believe to be invalid, cannot even be remedied by individual parties choosing simply to pay licensing fees to the patent holder," he wrote. "If some parties are granted a licence while others either don't or can't obtain one, we will still be left with impaired functionality of the Web."
Whether any relevant prior art was considered at the time the patent was first examined and granted -- the W3C argues it was not -- is a matter the courts will need to adjudicate. But there's a larger truth beyond the legal minutiae attending this controversy: The Web flourished precisely because of global standards. Berners-Lee may be guilty of rhetorical overkill, but he's correct about the central importance of Web interoperability to the future of the Internet. Force Microsoft to rejigger IE and that bedrock assumption goes out the window.
This is not mere nitpicking. In the inevitable scramble to conform to the demands of a post-Eolas world, my hunch is that things could get awfully messy. Admittedly, predicting the future is always a crapshoot, and the transition may go off without a hitch. But given the choice, I doubt you'd find many developers willing to take that risk. The W3C's decision to petition the US Patent and Trademark Office to reverse itself speaks volumes about where the computer industry is placing its bets.
For Microsoft, finding friends it never knew existed must come as a welcome surprise -- even if they may only be friends of convenience. But self-interest makes for strange bedfellows, and this is a case in which even hard-core Microsoft bashers will agree -- at least in this once instance -- that what's good for Bill Gates also is good for the rest of the computer industry.
