[jbgreer]

Back in 2006-8 I had an NSF teaching fellowship, and my peers and I used BlueJ as an introductory IDE in high school CS classes. BlueJ has a feature called “Object Bench” whereby one can instantiate and invoke methods on an object. The main thing I remember from that period is that Microsoft copied that functionality into Visual Studio, calling it “Object Test Bench”. Microsoft even admitted they were influenced by feedback from BlueJ users. Imitation, flattery, right? Then Microsoft filed a patent covering Object Test Bench. Suffice it to say Kolling et al. weren’t happy, and the news made it to several popular sites (Slashdot, etc.). Having been called out so publicly, and having basically admitted their knowledge of prior art, Microsoft withdrew the patent application.