Here’s a bit of news that those of us who’re deeply cynical about Microsoft have been waiting years to hear:  The uncontested king of office software may be on the verge of getting a very large pink slip.

Unless something changes before January 11, Microsoft will be prohibited from the sale, distribution, or marketing of Word, quite possibly the single most often-used software in the world that isn’t a web browser.

The reason?  Apparently, Microsoft failed to properly license some code from its proper patent holders.

Ah, sweet delicious irony… it’s like a Christmas cookie for the geek’s soul.

Here’s the story.  (Of a lovely lady… who was bringing up three very lovely girls… Oops, wrong story.)  In 1998, a small Toronto-based outfit known as i4i Inc. applied for, and got, a patent on a particular method used to implement the XML markup language for document creation.  Microsoft, as it turns out, used this method in their Word software without paying proper royalties to i4i.  Unfortunately for Microsoft, this time they got caught; a federal court ruled in favor of i4i and required Microsoft to either pay $252 million (US) in royalties, or remove the offending portion of the Word 2007 codebase.  On Tuesday of this week (22 December), Microsoft lost their last appeal.  The software giant now has until 11 January to comply with the initial ruling.

What this means when all the legalities are sifted through is this:  Because Microsoft cannot remove the XML code from Word without a near-total rewrite of the program itself, it has been deemed “better for our users” by the Redmond braintrust to simply withdraw Word from the market altogether, unless they can find a way to fix the problem in-house.  This affects all software packages that include Word as a component, including Microsoft Works and all flavors of Office.

While this may end up being a nonstory when it all plays out (it’s widely expected Microsoft will find a way to continue to sell Word beyond the court-mandated “D-Day” in January), it’s still a reminder that no matter how big the target is, all it takes is one small rock hurled at just the right place to bring it down.  It also demonstrates just how utterly ridiculous the concept of software patents are, and how they can interfere with even the most seemingly implacable of entities.

Does this mean we’ll soon be seeing Microsoft make a sizeable donation to the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or some other organization opposed to software patents?  Probably not, but the thought is an amusing one to say the least…

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