A patent so broad, so vague and so far reaching that you can sue Frito-Lay Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. at the same time! They basically just listed the fortune 500 and went for broke.

Mike McKool, head of the national law firm McKool Smith and lead counsel for Eolas, says he hopes the lawsuit will put an end to the widespread unauthorized use of the company's technology patents.

Perhaps we should all get together and have a day where we make that true. One day without ajax, iframes, or plugins of any kind ought to do it.

That's not really constructive.

Its not only not constructive to the discussion, even in practice its not constructive. This group of people (or this particular man) has dedicated his life to enriching himself by exploiting the system. Yes the man is broken, but the system moreso. Simply removing him through violence or otherwise will not fix the problem. There will be a long line waiting to take his place. We've let the system get way out of hand. So far so that the normal methods for fixing such things seem to no longer be available to us. We could have filled the cavity in 1980. Now we need a root canal. Some are going so far as to say we need to pull the whole tooth.

How could this patent be approved? Seriously, this patent could only pass if filled in the '80s, with Nelson's transclusions, and the later Lee's WWW.

Ok for the plugins, but Ajax it's not a plugin.

The patent office doesn't care about "plugin vs native" functionality. They care about technology at a more abstract level.