Published February 24th, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran
SQL Server Patent Dispute
In this article The Reg brings us the news that SQL Server developers could be up big $$$ after a licencing dispute.
A Washington court ruling could see SQL Server developers liable for millions of dollars in licensing fees.
Timeline, who’s patents have been involved in the dispute have posted more details on their web site.
Timeline takes the position that Microsoft Analyst Services databases built with Microsoft’s tools (Manager) provide all necessary steps to infringe one or more of the independent claims of the ‘511 patents. It would follow that third party products which provide the additional material feature or function covered by a dependant claim to one of those independent claims would cause a new infringement outside the scope of Microsoft’s license. Microsoft does not concede that its products in fact infringe, nor was such a statement required under the Timeline patent license it procured. Also, not every user of SQL Server will use the allegedly infringing portions of SQL Server. However, that is now moot. A combination where all material steps are present, and at least one material step is performed by a third party, requires its own license; regardless of whether Microsoft itself provided sufficient steps to independently infringe a different claim.
While I’m not a lawyer, it would appear that because our products don’t use Data Transformation Services (DTS), we’re not affected by this. Thank god I decided to implement our own product file import facilities and not use DTS to do the job.