New EPO On-line Filing SW tied to MS Windows

(Forwarded from Patents list.  Blog text pasted below.  -- Seth)

-----Original Message-----
From: James Heald <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 16:05:38 +0000
Subject: [Patents] New EPO on-line filing software tied to MS Windows

See Axel Horns's blog:
	http://www.ipjur.com/2004_02_01_archive.php3#107718762240592508

You would have thought that some quasi-governmental organisations might
just be starting to wake up to the dangers of vendor lock-in by now ??

---


> http://www.ipjur.com/2004_02_01_archive.php3#107718762240592508


epoline-OLF Software is a Delphi Project tied to Microsoft Windows 
Platforms.

In my earlier posting I had reported about the open source approach 
taken by the EPO with regard to their epoline OLF software. Yesterday 
I talked to a software engineer who had inspected the source code more 
in detail. In fact, the software is written in a special flavour of 
Pascal, namely Delphi brought to market by Borland. Interestingly, 
there is also a Linux-compatible variant of Delphi available called 
Kylix. But the option to port the epoline software to Linux is 
effectively blocked by an immense number of calls to Microsoft-
specific APIs in the epoline OLF code.

The PatTrAS software issued by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office 
(DPMA) has been coded in a much more compatible and platform-
independent way. It is written in Java and seems to run quite well on 
a Linux computer having a Java Runtime Environment installed.