Some of you may have seen the recent hubbub related to Microsoft and BlueJ. If you haven't you can get up to speed from articles such as Microsoft copies BlueJ, admits it, then patents it. An update to this story was posted by Dan Fernandez in his blog post entitled Update: Response to BlueJ Patent Issues where he wrote

On Friday, an alert reader emailed me about a new article by Michael Kölling, the creator of BlueJ, about a patent issued by Microsoft for features in Object Test Bench that are comparable to BlueJ's Object Bench. I'll post the full "anatomy of a firedrill" some time later, but for now we can officially say that the patent application was a mistake and one that should not have happened. To fix this, Microsoft will be removing the patent application in question. Our sincere apologies to Michael Kölling and the BlueJ community.

I'm glad this has been handled so quickly. I hope the news of Microsoft withdrawing the patent application spreads as fast and as far as the initial outrage at the news of the patent application being filed.