In a typically arrogant, sneaky, and hopefully futile move - Microsoft has submitted a patent on RSS (as implemented in their new IE7 browser). For those of you out there that have actually worked on this technology over the years, making blogs and podcasting work, I feel for you. For those of us who have used the technology over that time, sharing stories and songs and evangelizing it in our own way - this is another one of those classic moments in sleazy Microsoft history. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, read on…

Even if you don’t know what it does, and even if you haven’t seen this little symbol before - you will. I’ve been using Mozilla, now Firefox for a long time and it has become the default icon to represent an RSS feed is available for a webpage you are viewing. RSS is really just a file format based on XML which can be generated automatically by a script that presents a real time list of the latest stories / mp3s, etc. posted on a website when that file is read by a web browser. It creates links to those stories in the list, and may include a snippet of the stories (or the entire story). There are also boatloads of RSS-specific programs that can be used to subscribe to such feeds, including web based solutions like those integrated into the My Yahoo and Google personalized pages. Even iTunes can subscribe to podcasts using the same technology.

The latest version of Firefox (2) makes subscribing to an RSS feed very easy (just click the icon), and the feeds can be dragged to the bookmark bar and provide automatically updated drop down lists of links to posts on remote sites. The convention in Firefox has been for some time to put the icon at the rightmost end of the address bar (where you type in

'http://

etc.). Imagine my surprise when Internet Explorer 7 came looking exactly like Firefox (including tabs) and even using the same RSS icon in the same manner! Now imagine my surprise when they attempt to patent the idea as their own! But, surely they can’t pretend they developed this technology - too many people know the truth:

The genesis of RSS, as with most cool computer technology over the last decade, was at Apple with the Meta Content Framework (MCF) between 1995 and 1997. Microsoft did come out with a similar technology called Active channel in 1997 for IE4, but it went nowhere. MCF morphed into RDF after the programmer who developed it left Apple for Netscape and altered it to use XML which was a recommendation of the W3C in 1998 based on SGML (old pre-web tech writers know all about this acronym). RDF was still being used to syndicate this blog up until last year, when I switched to the newer RSS 2.0.

But this sort of sleazy thing has happened before - Microsoft made a deal to license Spyglass Mosaic code to create their Internet Explorer (and people think Microsoft actually writes software!?), and promised to pay a fee on every copy sold. Then they bundled the program with Windows, and since they made no money directly on IE, they didn’t pay anything for it. In fact, to this day they have to credit Spyglass in their ‘About IE window’ (shown is IE6).

Of course, this is a different situation - RSS is an open format, there is no license that needs to be paid to anyone to use it, so Microsoft should easily just be able to use the technology (and the icon I think) without any fear of retribution (in fact, it seems like it should win them some friends in the open source world - what a coup!), so why attempt to patent it?

This could be the first steps in trying to hobble Firefox and other open source browsers which are the conduit of choice for Google to deliver their on-demand office apps (don’t know about them?) or it could be a way to protect themselves from future lawsuits - you just never know with the evil empire.

Thanks to Wired for the heads up on this story