When I wrote the article about the Microsoft patent application on Friday, I hoped that the visibility it might generate would help our case against this application.
It did. And much more quickly and efficiently than I expected.
It seems that Microsoft will withdraw the application. They have apologised. And all that on a weekend.
Wow. That has caused a little more than a ripple.
Yesterday, I wrote the article titled “Microsoft patents BlueJ” about Microsoft’s patent application. I thought a bit of public visibility can’t hurt our case.
It certainly has generated some visibility. The story made the front pages of digg, slashdot, reddit and del.icio.us. The article has had more than 20,000 hits in the last 24 hours.
Many people have asked me to keep them updated, so I’ll do this with a short summary.
Okay, okay. You know what it’s like with writing headlines: Short and catchy. Accuracy counts as a distant third.
This is my attempt at catchy headline writing. But the truth isn’t far off. It really should have said: Microsoft applies for patent for core BlueJ functionality.
And that’s really true. After blatantly copying BlueJ (without reference or attribution), Microsoft have now filed for patent for the functionality they knowingly copied from us.
Why? To sue us out of the market? To make us pay? Who knows. Sad fact is that this could destroy BlueJ.
As the next Greenfoot release nears, and I mentioned sound support in my last post, there’s now a short demo video available. It shows smooth animation, and sound support in Greenfoot (in an “Asteroids” scenario).
Watch it here.
And come the next Greenfoot release, do it yourself!
And the best thing about it (or at least one of the best): this whole program is written with only about 280 lines of code (in Java)! Not too bad, I reckon.
Greenfoot, the microworld framework we’re working on at Kent, is getting closer and closer to providing a full game programming platform.
Initially, it was designed for simulations. Then it got key control. Now it gets sound.
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