Sun Exec Rips Microsoft Patent Application

Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, is not mincing words when talking about an effort by Microsoft to patent technology believed to be all-too similar to what a Kent University researcher has been laboring over for years.

"This is pretty disgusting behaviour from the monopolist," Phipps wrote Sunday on his weblog.

Phipps was referring to a patent application by Microsoft for "an object test bench" that Dr. Michael Kolling, a senior lecturer at the Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, says matches his work on the BlueJ java development environment. Sun has provided assistance to the BlueJ project.

According to Kolling, a reading of Microsoft's patent application is "almost creepy" in how it tracks with BlueJ:

Microsoft has its own lengthy description of the Object Test Bench as it relates to Visual Studio:

Microsoft says the test bench can be used for development in the .NET Framework.

Kolling says Microsoft's Dan Fernandez, lead product manager for Visual Studio Express, acknowledged the earlier work of the BlueJ developers as early as 1995, in an item posted on Microsoft's MSDN.

To that, Kolling writes:

The patent application is pending.