Remember all that nonsense Bill Gates was talking back when .NET first came around and how it, by virtue of using XML-based file-formats, was supporting open standards? I submit to you, the Microsoft XML schema patent, which I discovered referenced on the AbiWord development mailing list archive. I quote Mr. Gates: “those [XML, SOAP, etc.] are the foundation pieces that are the equivalent to what TCP/IP was many years ago, or HTML was many years ago. . .” (source). Perhaps. But, lucky for us, Microsoft never got a patent on either of those.