Monday, January 29, 2007

Bad News: Microsoft Applies for a Patent

Although I use Microsoft product quiet extensively I have never entered into the Windows vs Linux vs OSX war as I believe each OS has its own merits, and I most certainly have never used the term Micro$oft. Well until now.

Why? Because Micro$oft could potentially stop the development and distribution of BlueJ.

BlueJ is a fantastic IDE for the teaching of object-oriented programming using Java and is used extensively by educational establishments, including the OU (see M255). One of its key benefits is that enables you to create instances of objects, examine these instances and invoke methods on them, without having to run the whole program that is being developed.

Micro$oft has incorporated into Visual Studio a feature called “Object Test Bench” which appears to be a straight BlueJ copy, and Micro$oft have now made a patent application for “Object Test Bench”.

For the full story see here Microsoft patents BlueJ

And for a follow-up see here More on the Microsoft / BlueJ patent case

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