Information Week has a story up about a newly approved patent for Balthaser Online Inc. The owner of Balthaser Online, Inc is the former Vice President of Strategy for Macrommedia, Neil Balthaser. The patent, 'Methods, Systems, And Processes For The Design And Creation Of Rich-Media Applications Via The Internet,' appears to cover a wide range of RIAs including Flash and AJAX based applications. Unfortunately, this may cause all kinds of headaches for all companies who develop Rich Internet Apps and those who make the software to make those apps, and so on. The Inquirer believes the owner may sell in order to grab himself a nice island somewhere. If we are lucky, this patent will be disputed and revoked (see RIM v NTP) soon and fought tootha nd nail by Adobe.
Update: FlashAnt has really good rant up that talks about this in detail from a Flasher's POV.
1. It appears the patent only covers an application using the internet as its platform to develop RIA's. So using your Mac/Win version of Flash to create Rich Internet Apps isn't a violation of the patent. Now, develop something like http://wufoo.com/ and you might have a problem.
BTW, this patent is BS and I fully expect Adobe/Macromedia to take their ex-VP to court and squash this once and for all.
Posted at 12:06PM on Feb 27th 2006 by Sean