Last week, many articles went out after the Texas federal court judgment in favor of i4i, a Canadian software companion. The dispute was related to M$ usage of custom XML methodology in its Office suite especially Word, for which i4i owns the technology patent. One blog article disclosed that M$ developers knew about this technology before Word 2003/2007 was developed and that one developer's email stating "i4i will become obsolete" when the new version of Word goes out to market. Following the court's decision, M$ was ordered to stop selling its Word application and this becomes a worry to the many enterprises who had been using Word especially those companies primarily using SharePoint. the current case is still not over though. M$ had filed an appeal and might be settling this off the court... perhaps might even buy i4i! M$ has been ordered to pay around $300M and to stop selling those Word apps. You may expect M$ to either release a hotfix or patch to remove reading custom XML files in Word; or rather M$ to get into a licensing agreement with i4i for its technology.
related articles:
Jury orders Microsoft to pay $200M in damages to i4i
Judge bans Microsoft from selling Word
google: i4i+word
