In one of the larger cases in the computing world lately, Eolas has succeeded at proving that it owned the patent for "plugins". This can only mean trouble for applications that have integrated plugins to run anything from streaming video to audio files - like Internet Explorer. So, what impact will this have on the community? Read on to find out...

In Builder.com's new article, What does Eolas v. Microsoft mean to you?, the author sympathizes with those of us in web development. The Eolas v. Microsoft case has put many of us Web developers in unfamiliar territory - rooting for Microsoft to win a legal victory. [...] Now if the patent sounds to you like the description of basically all plug-ins and applets, you are not alone.. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of this from both sides in the end.

What scares me the most is that even the W3C is looking to make changes to the HTML spec before the fact to get things ready. Thankfully, right now, Eolas is focusing all of its power on Microsoft (and who wouldn't), so other developers have some time to wait, but I wonder how long it is before they go after Mozilla or Safari...