01.17.09
Posted in Novell, Patents, SLES/SLED at 8:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Hypocrites
Is Novell antagonising software patents? Clearly it does not. In the pipeline Novell still has many more, including this latest:
Administration of protection of data accessible by a mobile device, patent No. 7,478,420, invented by Michael Wright of Sandy, Peter Boucher of Orem, Gabe Nault of Draper, Merrill Smith of Riverton, Sterling K. Jacobson of Saratoga Springs, Jonathan Wood of Orem, and Robert Mims of West Valley City, assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.
It has been only one week since we last mentioned Novell's attitude towards software patents. It’s problematic in the Free software world, especially since Novell uses these patents to create fear of non-SLE* GNU/Linux distributions.
TechDirt has this good post about the desire of lawyers to have excessive patentability, whereas engineers don’t need or want this (a point that was stressed before, using evidence).
The Cultural Gulf Between Lawyers And Technologists On Patent Law
On Wednesday I attended the Brookings Institution’s conference on “The Limits of Abstract Patents in an Intangible Economy.” The conference was organized by software patent skeptics, so that perspective has been well represented. But I was struck by the dramatic differences between the views of lawyers on the one hand (who made up the majority of the panelists and audience members) and the handful of technologists on the other.
Over at Linux Today, Carla has just called Intellectual Monopolies “a mental illness” — a point that she explains thusly:
This whole “intellectual property” mania is a mental illness that deserves its own entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s like that great movie, “Aguirre: The Wrath of God.” Give yourself a treat and watch it; it’s a wonderful film that takes place after the fall of the Incan empire. Lope de Aguirre, played by the perfectly mad Klaus Kinski, leads a band of Spanish conquistadors on a quest for El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold. The quest is doomed, of course, as they struggle through hostile terrain and hostile locals, pushed onward by their own greed and ruthlessness.
[...]
The tech industry is notorious for thuggish Tony Soprano tactics. How did this come about? Pepsi doesn’t make you agree to a EULA. DeWalt doesn’t tell you what you can and cannot do with your own DeWalt tools that you have purchased. The fashion and automotive industries copy each other openly, and don’t waste time suing each other for poaching ideas. Instead they stick to the business of trying to win customers the old-fashioned way– by making cool things that people want to buy.
The proprietary software industry nearly succeeded in killing off the second-hand software market, and then had the two-faced gall to whine about copyright infringement– they tolerate it when it opens new markets and shuts out the competition, but sooner or later those bad pirates have to pay up. Every other industry has a thriving second-hand market, instead of this loony game of wink-nudge “piracy”, and it benefits everyone– it opens new markets, and reduces the financial risks of early adopters and customers who buy new.
Microsoft has devoted considerable energy to trying to kill off the second-hand hardware market as well by going after schools and non-profits that use old, donated equipment, and forcing them to purchase new software licenses. Most OEM Windows PCs come with crippled versions of Windows that can’t be moved to different PCs, but are locked to the original.
We saw a very major example of this yesterday. █
“Small Software companies cannot afford to go to court or pay damages. Who is this software patent system for?” —Marco Schulze, Nightlabs Gmbh
Image from Wikimedia
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Novell, SUN, UNIX at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Nitpicking is easy when comments are open to everyone, but the ‘mainstream’ media rarely leaves any room for feedback from readers, even when it claims that Sun is Novell and Lotus Notes is open source*.
Consequently, Eric Schmidt arrived that year. He was a Ph. D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and had significant industry experience as an executive at Sun Microsystems, which at that time was called Novell.
This is why, as we’ve stressed before, "Journalism is Junk". Errors do occur on occasions even if they are never corrected or pointed out in public. Speaking of Eric Schmidt, the Bartz appointment in Yahoo! has gotten some coverage in the New York Times, which uses Schmidt to make its point by citing his history at Novell.
I’m not saying that the companies need to hire chief executives from their own industries. Before running Google, Eric Schmidt was an engineer and ran Novell, a network software company that has nothing to do with advertising or consumer Internet services. And the man I’d say has been the very best Internet company executive, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, was a 30-year-old midlevel executive at a hedge fund before founding his company.
As a side note, the Microsoft drone [1, 2] known as Maureen O’Gara has gone on some kind of nasty attack on Bartz, calling her a “bitch” in a new Sys-Con article. How low has so-called journalism sunk? █
“As discussed in our PR meeting this morning. David & I have spoken with Maureen O’Gara (based on go ahead from BrianV) and planted the story. She has agreed to not attribute the story to us….
“[...] Inform Maureen O’ Gara (Senior Editor Client Server News/LinuxGram) or John Markoff (NYT) of announcement on Aug 28, 2000. Owner dougmil (Approval received from BrianV to proceed)
“Contact Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly or Bruce Perrins to solicit support for this going against the objectives of the Open Source movement. Owner: dougmil [Doug Miller]. Note that I will not be doing this. Maureen O’Gara said she was going to call them so it looks better coming from her.”
(From Microsoft’s smoking guns)
____
* I corrected the author, but it was too late for him to correct a widely-spread article that disseminated misconceptions.
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01.16.09
Posted in IRC Logs at 9:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GNU/Linux
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Although the proposal is still in its early stages, the attractiveness of the proprosal to a government keen to assert its independence at all levels is obvious. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
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I also found that my backup Linux computer consumes 2 watts of power even when shut down. Most computers are shut down through a software command, rather than a physical switch. This puts the computer in a “soft off” state, with a low level of power still flowing to the motherboard. As a result, I’m paying $2.75 a year in power costs on my Linux box just to keep it plugged in. That won’t break the bank, but consider that there are a few hundred million machines in the United States running up the same tab.
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The experience has caused me to explore Linux for the Blind, or “Blinux.” This more than just screen readers and magnification. I took the time to play with the version of Orca bundled with CentOS 5 and it’s quite disappointing when compared to the expensive ZoomText my friend uses. Those who are completely blind have long had better resources, taking advantage of the superiority of Linux on the commandline.
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Most open source enthusiasts want more people to embrace Free and Open Source Software solutions, but just like how the style of products is important to Apple aficionados, familiarity with the terminal and an appreciation of the under-the-hood mechanics matter to the FOSS lovers. That said, FOSS has an added element absent from the corporate-backed technologies. Whereas fans of products made by rather large businesses need to appeal in aggregate (or focus groups) to get noticed in the product design process, FOSS is a free-for-all. Anyone is free to bring anything to the table. While a lot of folks may get corporate logo tattoos and/or pontificate about what such-and-such company did right or wrong, few of them will ever have any actual input. On the other hand, if Joe Sixpack wants to make his own Linux- or BSD-based operating system with his own logo and software, he’s free to do that. FOSS is based on empowerment and the appreciation of empowerment, and with empowerment comes responsibility.
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All manner of campaigns have been tried to persuade Windows users to make the switch to GNU/Linux and every year is heralded as the year of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Whether these things come to pass or not only time will tell, but the latest electronic assault on the integrity of computers which emanates from the British Government via a European directive might just tilt the balance in favour of free and open software. I suspect however that the hard-core Redmondnites will blunder on as usual making the internet a gold mine for any individual, corporation or government maliciously inclined to steal or plant information your computer. So, what exactly is warrantless intrusion?
[...]
I’m not a technical expert but it seems to me that the only theoretical way to defeat the government’s insatiable lust for information, power and control is to create an open source ISP funded by its members like some kind of modern Friendly Society which would be founded on democratic principles and funded by the members. It seems impossible but the Wikipedia project ought not to exist either — but it does. The other long shot is to pray for the sudden emergence of a technological singularity which moves so impossibly fast that governments cannot keep pace with counter measures. Failing that we all become Luddites and forswear computers and the internet entirely. The withdrawal symptoms would be horrendous. So, the technical hand, having written, cannot unwrite a single word. There is no going back. Uninventing technology is the stuff of dystopian fantasies.
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If you think I’m about to make fun of Windows users because one in three of them haven’t patched their PCs for a known security hole, which has been used by the Conficker worm to infect more than a million Windows PC in 24-hours, you’d be wrong. I’m also not going to make fun of Ubuntu Linux, because one Dell user couldn’t get Linux to connect to the Internet or run a word processor.
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Linux Mint 6.0 Felicia is a fabulous distro. It’s complete, well-polished, fast, simple, rich in features, and offering solid hardware support. It worked well with both my Nvidia and ATI cards and even loved my web camera. There were some small issues with a Wireless drivers and some mundane Windows media formats, but other than that, the performance was spotless.
Compiz, MP3, Flash, even Skype worked out of the box. Reading and writing to NTFS drives was a breeze. The distro was beautiful and stable. The installation was simple. Superb.
Felicia is a great choice for everyone, be they Windows users of all persuasions, new Linux users or even veterans. It has something for everyone. Combined with the healthy Ubuntu community that sort of shadows Linux Mint as a sort of an unofficial chaperon, a well written User Guide, and the now standard friendliness of Ubuntu-based distros, you’re in for a great, minty treat.
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Jono Bacon
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On this special edition of the_source I interview Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) about the demise of Lugradio, Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex and his musical pursuits.
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Bacon says that the book, which is called Art of Community, will cover a wide range community-related topics, including governance, promotion, and conflict resolution. It will also provide real-world anecdotes to provide greater insight into the subject area. He aims to have the book on shelves this Summer and will also make it broadly available on the Internet. He plans to document the process and provide ongoing updates at a new web site that he created for the project.
“This book is much more than merely a textbook on building a compelling community. I believe that we learn how to build strong community through the exchange of stories and experiences,” he wrote in a blog entry. “The Art Of Community is a compendium of stories, anecdotes and experiences inside and outside the Open Source world.”
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Australia
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Russell Coker is not a man who sleeps with his computers. But he does come pretty close – two servers are positioned in a little cabinet in his bedroom, one being his server and the other his Security Enhanced Linux “play machine.”
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January is here and it’s that time of year for penguin-lovers everywhere to make their annual migration south to Australia to flock together. Linux.conf.au is one of the world’s most popular technical Linux conferences, and for it’s 10th anniversary is being held at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. The conference runs for a week, with two days of mini-confs followed by the main conference programme and culminating in an Open Day on Saturday.
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Vs. Windows
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Coming at the time of an economy in recession it looks like Microsoft might actually be scared that customers might not spend money on a Windows upgrade. There’s no way to go back in time and prevent the damage to Microsoft’s credibility done by the Windows Vista release, we’ll just have to wait and see what the future actually holds for Windows 7. In the mean time, try and ignore the marketing thunder and check out a version of Linux. You might just find it gets you off the Windows upgrade treadmill for good!
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But that’s a rant for another day. Today’s topic is about foolish schools that let themselves get locked into restrictive, proprietary technologies that cost a mint, and then they cry about not having enough budget to retain good IT staff, and students and teachers who are wise enough to eschew Microsoft’s junkware face an uphill battle.
[...]
Is it really that hard to make smarter IT infrastructure decisions? When did higher education decide that its fundamental mission was something other that widest possible access to learning? Or that understaffing crucial functions was a good thing to do? My tax dollars at work. I feel so proud!
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Migration
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There are many articles written about the reasons why users may wish to convert to Linux. Frequently cited reasons include the favorable licensing terms, the freely distributable software (with source code), support from the Linux community, improved security, open file formats, the fact that Linux can run on a wide variety of platforms, etc. However, unless a desktop user is provided with real alternatives to the existing software he or she currently uses, migration to a different operating system is going to be very difficult.
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The HeliOS Project begins the 2009 year with a hardware drive. They hope to get enough hardware to carry them through the first half of the year. KUT, the National Public Radio affiliate in Austin is running PSA’s and calendar entries for the event for the next 30 days. It is through people like the one’s at KUT that this effort can meet the challenges of the coming year. The first week of January brought the group 19 requests for computers. Hopefully, this hardware drive will gain them the materials they need to meet the challenges that are sure to come.
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Desktop Environments
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This is the third update to GNOME 2.24. It contains many fixes for important bugs that directly affect our users, documentation updates and also a large number of updated translations. Many thanks to all the contributors who worked hard on delivering those changes in time. We hope it will help people feel better in their daily use of computers!
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Applications
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Continuing my holiday machine maintenance saga I move on to some notable trials and tribulations with Ubuntu, but not before I report on a little more holiday cheer.
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P2P (peer-to-peer) is the nature of the Net. You can fight that, or you can embrace it. Here in the US, the mainstream entertainment business has mostly been fighting it. Hollywood and its phone and cable company allies have long regarded P2P, and BitTorrent in particular, as a copyright piracy system and a bandwidth hog. In the European Union, however, P2P is more than accepted: it’s supported by the Union itself.
[...]
“Everything we’re doing is based on open source”, says Johan Pouwelse, PhD, scientific director of P2P-Next and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Delft. The good doctor also runs P2P-Next’s first trial application: Tribler (pronounced “tribe-ler”), a BitTorrent-based client with no servers and a “zero-cost” business model. Tribler provides an all-in-one way to find, consume and share media.
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Devices/Embedded
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Enea announced the availability of a new version of its lightweight, Linux-ready Polyhedra SQL RDBMS (relational database management system). Polyhedra 8.1 adds MIPS support for Linux, as well as improvements to “active query” and “historian” features aimed at process control and industrial automation applications.
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For some time now we have been talking about Splashtop, the Linux-based instant-on desktop that we’ve seen on Asus notebooks and motherboards, as well as the Lenovo IdeaPad S10e and the VooDoo Envy 133. Splashtop solves the problem of having a bloated OS (like Vista) on a computer with limited power, but it currently has to come from the factory on a notebook, netbook, or motherboard.
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Android
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Skyhook Wireless has ported its SDK (software development kit) for “hybrid” geo-positioning to the Google-sponsored, Linux-based Android mobile-device stack. The company claims its “XPS” kit can provide “iPhone-quality” fixes within a second or two — much faster than Android’s firmware running on the TMobile/HTC G1.
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The Android-based Movit tablet caused a lot of buzz earlier this month when it was displayed at CES. Featuring a nice sized touchscreen (either 4.3″ for the Mini model or 7″ for the Maxx model) with a touch-based keyboard, the question on everyone’s minds was whether this prototype was running the Cupcake development branch of Android or whether the Giinii developers had backported the Cupcake keyboard into a more stable Android release.
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I have created and installer and bootloader (download below) for getting Debian running on your Android (G1 at the moment) device, the whole install process will take you about 10 mins, and leaves you with access to the full plethora of programs available in Debian and let’s you continue using your phone as it was intended to be: as an Android device with all the capabilities thereof.
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Palm
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Andrew Shebanow didn’t imagine that asking for feedback about how Palm Inc.’s app store should work would open up a flood of input. He also didn’t expect the move would change his job description. But now both have happened.
On Jan. 8, Shebanow, who is working on a third-party application distribution system for Palm’s new operating system, posted an item on his blog looking for input from developers on how that system should work. He threw out a few questions, such as: How should application updating and installation work? Should Palm offer payment processing or leave it to third parties? Should application trials be available? How should Palm handle featured applications?
By Wednesday, he had removed the post, replacing it with one saying that its popularity had caught him and Palm by surprise. “My boss has asked me to hide the post while management decides what they want me to do about it,” he wrote.
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One of the more controversial features of Palm’s new webOS is something it doesn’t offer: a way to run Palm OS applications. However, StyleTap may change this, if it finds that making a Palm OS emulator for webOS to be doable.
F/OSS
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Thanks to social networks and tools like Twitter and RSS, online communications today are made up of much more than just simply Web pages. Yet while these technologies have increased the volume of messages on the Internet, they’re not all easily accessed through one of the most-used Internet applications — the Web browser.
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Sun
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I’d like to propose an OSUG for Kabul, Afghanistan. It could be called “Kabul OpenSolaris User Group” or “Afghanistan OpenSolaris User Group”. We don’t want to lay claim to the whole country, but I’m pretty sure there’s no-one apart from us who does UNIX here.
The initial participants of the OSUG are Abdullah Ghaznawi, Said Adil Hashemi and myself, Said Hakim Hamdani. We all work at the same place (http://www.medical-kabul.com/) and since I brought OpenSolaris with me to Afghanistan, I was able to get both of them interested enough that they are going to make their systems dual-boot with OpenSolaris and WinXP
[...]
We are located in Kabul, Afghanistan and as far as I know we’re the only Solaris users around. The computing infrastructure in Afghanistan is still pretty much in its infancy and I am doing what I can to get people to try out UNIX (best of Solaris of course) and use it for their daily computing tasks. There’s some Linux around here, but I’m not too fond of that and having seen a single (!) copy of Solaris 10 in the software market the other day, I sat down with Abdullah and Adil and we decided to try and get people more interested in OpenSolaris.
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I’m happy to announce that our Web Server product (about which I’ve been writing here for a few years now) is now open sourced and available as part of the OpenSolaris Web Stack community!
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The code is placed under BSD license, this should allow for good cross pollination with other web tier projects.
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‘Cloud’
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Just as open source itself has gathered more interest during the economic downturn because of the cost savings it can offer businesses, cloud computing is getting more attention because it can allow businesses to take advantage of IT infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go model. Increasingly, there is an intersection between these two trends: the open source cloud. Ignacio Martin Llorente has a very good roundup of the tools available at this intersection–open source cloud resources that can let businesses customize their own infrastructures. Here are some of his good citations, and several of our own.
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The data comes from a survey of 360 developers conducted in November 2008 by Evans Data. The biggest winner in terms of what cloud service developers plan to use is Google’s App Engine at 28 percent of respondents. Amazon came in second at 15 percent.
Not surprisingly developers 52 percent of developer claimed to be using a virutalized Linux environment and over half are using the MySQL database.
It all seem fairly obvious to me.
Leftovers
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Intel’s fourth-quarter profit plunged 90 percent from a year earlier, as the chip maker battled a worsening economy and recorded a steep loss from investments.
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The Mumbai, India, police have launched their previously announced plan to secure Wi-Fi networks. A team of police is using a battery of devices to systematically identify and eliminate unsecured Wi-Fi networks in the wake of last year’s attacks, where terrorists used the Internet and other communications networks.
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Following its failure to foster voluntary solution between ISPs and rights holders, the government will create a new agency and regulations to clamp down on copyright infringement via peer-to-peer networks, it’s reported today.
A proposal for a body called the Rights Agency will be at the centre of anti-internet piracy measures, according to the Financial Times, which cited sources who had read a draft of Lord Carter’s report on Digital Britain. The Rights Agency will be introduced alongside a new code of practice for ISPs and rights holders, to be overseen by Ofcom, according to the leaked draft. The final report is due out by the end of this month.
Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day
Digital Tipping Point: Dirk-Willem van Gulik, road builder for the Information Super-highway 03 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in Asia, Europe, Google, Intellectual Monopoly, Patents, Vista at 6:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
ONE OF OUR readers has advised watching the following long talk.
There is a lot more about Intellectual Monopolies in the news today. To give just a sample:
Despite the fact that South Africa is at the forefront of open source usage, it seems to be taking a very bad turn as far as open knowledge is concerned:
The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed into law yesterday.
This stems from a mistaken belief that:
the best way to get research re-used for the benefit of the economy is to lock it down, and award a monopoly to one person, rather than opening it to everyone.
Shefali Sharma wrote a EED report in which she highlights the role of Trade Agreements for the subversion of democratic decision making over IPR laws.
Gerry Gavigan contributed in the name of the Open Source Consortium to the consultation for an improved European Interoperability Framework:
We were particularly pleased to see the issue of software patents addressed in a manner that prevents them being used to hinder competition rather than the original purpose of patent law, to promote innovation.
theodp writes “With its example of how ‘ John Doe ‘ could be saved in a database as ‘John Doe’ (i.e., without leading or trailing blanks), purported patent reformer IBM dazzled the USPTO enough to earn Big Blue a patent last Tuesday for Automatically removing leading and trailing space characters from data being entered into a database system . The three IBM ‘inventors’ are also seeking a related patent for Retrieving data from a database system without leading and trailing space characters. Hey, if the patent system ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
Any more news on Intellectual Monopolies would be welcome. █
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Security, Steve Ballmer at 5:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
SOME rather disturbing news is making its way into the news just days ahead of Microsoft's announcement of layoffs (and possibly bad accompanying results). This is probably no coincidence and the company, which kept it under the wraps for quite some time, must have had this aligned to impress investors and divert attention away from next week’s bad news.
In a previous post which was titled "An Open, Gentler Microsoft: The Best Illusion Only Novell Can Buy" we covered many calls for Steve Ballmer to leave the company or be fired and this new gallery from Gizmodo speaks volumes about how people feel regarding his leadership.
Now comes another post calling for Microsoft to replace Ballmer as CEO.
“I have avoided MSFT for some time as too expensive. If you do the math, owner’s earnings have been 2-4% even though revenues have grown since 1997 and the stock was very flat. However, since 2006, they have been buying back stock and Net Income has risen so that 2009 is forecasted to be ~$2.20. With the stock under $20shr I began looking about for information and found that Ray Ozzie wants to remake MSFT into a start-up mode.
Just who is Ray Ozzie and what is the deal?
Amid the massive hijack of Windows PCs (it’s now up to 9 million, making it 6+ million in one day) and latest strike from the European Commission (for violations) comes yet another blow.
Seattle online advertising company Marchex is among those criticized in a 52-page complaint [PDF] today brought by the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group that says mobile marketers are using “unfair and deceptive practices.” The complaint, filed with the Federal Trade Commission, also cites Microsoft’s acquisition of mobile advertising startup Screen Tonic, noting how it attempted to target teenage girls with a mobile marketing campaign that captured their emails. And it points out how Kirkland-based HipCricket’s mobile marketing techniques target Hispanics.
People whose country has just fallen a victim to EDGI (or “Unlimited Potential” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]) ought to consider filing complaints (Quebec filed for a lawsuit) or even protesting. This is the type of high-level corruption we have been warning about [1, 2, 3, 4]. █
“DRM is the future.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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