Patent-busting for fun and profit: Greg Brown, a software designer at the now-defunct Netobjects, helped piece together the patent mess between Adobe and Macromedia.
Apparently Macromedia bought 11 patents from Netobjects earlier this month, including the patent they're hammering Adobe with. And, although Brown was unaware that Clay Basket was developed in 1995, he confirms that my work in this area predates theirs by about a year.
I wasn't hiding it. I wrote a DaveNet in 7/95 about Clay and there was a public mail list and lots of users. I eventually came to believe that the Web is a groupware environment, and that the central app couldn't be a wizzy productivity tool. Netobjects probably eventually realized that too, but they had already promised their users something they couldn't deliver. Outliners play an important role, but the HTML web is not an outline.
BTW, I visited the production area of Smolan's 24 Hours project in 1996, and saw the Netobjects tools in use, and thought “Oh yeah I did that last year, it doesn't work.”
BTW, I started working on outliners in the mid-70s. I have a feeling there were a lot of patents filed in the 90s on art that was published in the 70s and 80s.
The Wayback Machine could be useful for patent-busting. But the server is having problems, and it would be great if Google could index it. (Maybe they already are.) [Scripting News]