The victory of Eolas in its patent-infringement suit against Microsoft–to the tune of more than a half-billion dollars–is knocking the rest of the Internet software industry (and the open source community) for a loop. Eolas' patent, licensed to it by the University of California system, covers web “plugins” and “applets”–any software that runs inside the web browser.

As a result, Microsoft is going to have to rewrite parts of Internet Explorer. The changes will impact any company that depends on client-side code in web applications–like Java, ECMAScript, JavaScript, Quicktime, Flash, RealAudio…the list is a long one. It could affect Netscape and Mozilla, too, as they have plugin implementations of their own. And W3C standards could be thrown into a crisis as well, as the “OBJECT” and “SCRIPT” tags in HTML (as Noel Bergman pointed out in an Apache mailing list) may be seen as in violation of the patent.

When software depends on standards to advance, how does it go anywhere when software patents can be used to essentially hold standards hostage?