What impact on the Tcl plugin will the Eolas patent have?
Scott Gamon - IMO, none. It will be years more before a final legal decision is reached. In the event that Eolas actually does prevail, there may be a simple hack to route around the patent.
The initial jury decision went against Microsoft, but as we all know by now, that is just the opening round in a long line of appeals. Meanwhile, the web community snapped to attention, suddenly realizing how crappy this patent could make life in the browser. Ray Ozzie and Tim Berners-Lee suddenly discovered their own prior art. The Patent Office suddenly decided to re-review the patent. Last week, they rejected it, but that is just the start of a separate endless legal process.
Shortly after the jury decision, Microsoft posted a page of instructions for how to work-around the patent. Essentially, the idea was to call in an external javascript file that used the document.write command to write the plug-in object tag. Microsoft has subsequently removed that page, which might or might not mean something, given the general state of the Microsoft site.
DKF (10-Nov-2005): Michael Doyle as publically stated that he won't be using the patent to stop open source browsers from doing plugins (i.e. OSS gets a free license). He's also said that it might be possible that distributing the Tcl plugin (or something compatible with it) might be a condition of such a (free) license. But in all cases, he's the guy to ask about this stuff instead of endlessly speculating about it.
David Gravereaux has written on comp.lang.tcl that the original plugin thread model differs from the threading model in Tcl and that the plugin's model results in some problems with IE.
jima(09/11/2005) How does the project WebWiseTclTk relate to the new version of the Tcl Plugin?
Does WebWiseTclTk work with it?
I read that WebWiseTclTk would work with plugins version 2.0 or higher, but that was back in 2003.
Any info on this? Could the ideas of WebWiseTcl be included in actual Tcl Plugin development?
Please Note: This page has been designed using information from the original TCL Plugin page. If you are in the know, please feel free to adjust, simplify, clarify or update any or all of the information on this page.
LV 2009 Aug 07 When using the plugin, would would the plugin look for packages that the tclet would package require?