Re: Microsoft's disclaimer on their '906 workarounds

IMO in their IE6 Update v.01 Microsoft has responded with an elegant
solution that - whilst still creating some work - should cause as little
disruption as possible, in that it only affects those objects with params
that access external files.

It is a genuine relief to finally learn what Microsoft considers to be
non-infringeing. In my own company's case it has meant that we were able to
post an advisory and a sample workaround on the newsgroup of the one product
of ours that will be affected, very quickly after the release of the test
build of IE.

This gives our customers a good 3-4 month lead time to prepare for the
arrival of IE 6SP1b (which, if released, will hopefully be functionally
unchanged from the test build) should they wish or need to deploy it.
We're pleased to be able to do that.

Microsoft's disclaimer covers the use of some of their core components by
third parties. Quite rightly they have left the responsibility for
compliance to the 3rd party developers of those 'rich' client applications
whilst still enjoining those developers to enable the new behavior.

There are hundreds of thousands of corporate and commercial applications in
use which leverage those components, and it's possible that some third
parties will put the imperative not to break their own applications ahead of
making any changes. Mr Doyle's ability to attempt to sue all of them in his
(or in several) lifetimes is questionable.

Jerry Mead
http://www.meadroid.com/

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2003 14:11:05 UTC