Software patents are a particularly contentious issue with many large companies being vehemently opposed to the idea, whilst others are spending a lot of time and effort to patent everything they can think of.

Last week there was considerable discussion about a patent that Microsoft applied for. This patent was for an "object test bench", which was included in the Visual Studio product. Unfortunately, this idea had been used previously in the excellent BlueJ project which provides a simplified IDE for teaching new students the ideas of OO programming using Java. You can read the full story here.

Thankfully, according to Dan Fernandez, who is Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio Express, Microsoft will be withdrawing their application.

It's great to see that sometimes plain common sense can prevail.