SINCE his appointment [1, 2, 3], Sean McCarry has had a couple of opportunities to speak to the British press. He last did this a week ago when he was asked hard questions and this week he faces some more questions, some of which are harder to address than others. For example:
If you create a dual boot Microsoft/Linux desktop, by installing Windows then Linux, Linux will recognise the Windows OS, if you install Linux first and then Windows, Windows won’t recognize Linux, do you think that will change at some point?
I can’t comment on the desktop, but in the datacentre Novell SLES can act as the host or the guest operating system for Windows Server 2008. So I think we’re really strong in the datacentre with the Microsoft relationship, but you’d have to ask Microsoft about their desktop strategy for Windows/Linux co-existence.
Nothing has changed. Vista 7 sabotages GNU/Linux-installed MBRs (master boot records). Microsoft just refuses to live in harmony with competition. So why is Novell so gullible that it walks into Microsoft’s badroom[sic]? █
“This is WAR, and in that regard, I believe we should design Janus such that if this multiboot partition (has a unique partition number (11)) is found, we should warn the user a foreign OS has been detected, give them a chance to exit and read the docs and possibly make a backup, and then repartition the disk, removing the multiboot partition. This way, we disable OS/2 2.0 in *all* cases.”
If they are laying off 100 out of their 4200 employees, I’m wondering why they are targeting OpenSUSE developers. You’d think that among those 4200 there is a fair share of “fat” that could be cut (middle managers, old-time hangabouts), instead of getting rid of developers in the first place.
I think you will find that the article does not say that OpenSUSE has been targeted, just that it has not been spared. What is more troubling is that while they are laying off openSUSE folks, they are brining on .NET developers to help with MONO.
Novell is becoming too good friends with Microsoft as far as I can tell…
That’s ironic. I’m typing this on OpenSuSE 11.1 x64 and the one thing that’s wobbly is Mono. In fact one flagship Mono app doesn’t work at all and I be surprised if it ever has since it seems OpenSuSE haven’t yet got around to updating it to a newer, patched version. Another flagship mono app causes freezing and general weird behaviour. Hmmn …
Like most declines like this it is a long and slow process, but it’s yet another nail in the coffin. Novell have been laying a lot of workers off over the past few years and it has made no real difference, so in the current climate the squeeze will get even tighter. There are even a lot of rumours that there are more layoffs being covered up within the company.
While Novell’s real GNU/Linux engineers (not those mimicking Microsoft technologies) are clearly being shafted, Miguel and his friends get the red(mond) carpet. Yesterday from de Icaza’s blog:
My friend تلة جوزيف (Youssef) and myself will be heading out to Redmond for the ALT.NET Seattle event this weekend.
What’s it all for? To reference CMS Wire, it’s for making GNU/Linux a third-class citizen [1, 2, 3, 4] (after Mac OS X and Windows). Microsoft deliberately excluded GNU/Linux under the premise that Novell would do this job poorly.
Is Moonlight A Day Late and an App Short?
[...]
While Moonlight provides Linux users with the ability to access, view and develop Silverlight applications and Silverlight is already available for Mac OS X, Adobe has been cross-platform for years now.
So the question presents itself, is Moonlight too far behind the widely praised and widely used Adobe Flash set to be a viable competitor?
So at the end of the day, Novell has GNU/Linux striving to become something it cannot ever be. As Stephen O’Grady pointed out 2 years ago, GNU/Linux must not become a cheap(er) copy of something from Microsoft. It needs to compete based on its own merits.
MonoDevelop is a similar example of this. The Microsoft-friendly Gavin Clarke has just published this article to say that Microsoft wants FOSS developers to use Visual Studio. It would be easier for Microsoft to achieve this goal had GNU/Linux users and developers been addicted to Mono and MonoDevelop from Novell, respectively.
Microsoft has invited the open-source community to build plug-ins for Visual Studio 2010, and has improved database support to help build partner backing for its planned integrated development environment (IDE).
There is one goal here: make developers dependent on Microsoft, no matter what platforms they focus on. When Microsoft offered SourceForge its sponsorship it also used SourceForge as a platform to promote the proprietary Visual Studio for FOSS developers [1, 2, 3, 4]. It’s an embrace-and-extend-type strategy, which is assisted by Novell’s misguided endeavors. The Provo-based David Canar is meanwhile creating Qt4 .NET bridges which bring back concerns about Mono in KDE [1, 2, 3, 4]. █
Novell also has acquired a perpetual source code licence to ActivIdentity’s single sign-on solution, SecureLogin. The product has already been available to Novell customers, but will now be better integrated with Novell’s identity management solutions.
Novell today announced two new acquisitions designed to extend its identity and access management capabilities.
[...]
Novell also announced that it has acquired a perpetual source code licence to ActivIdentity’s single sign-on solution, SecureLogin.
The entities acquired are very small and the financial details not disclosed.
Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) has quietly bolstered its ID governance portfolio after acquiring the technology assets of a tiny British company and signing a ‘perpetual’ licensing deal with California-based ActivIdentity.
[...]
Novell said it will use the Fortefi assets in its Novell Privileged User Manager, which will be due sometime in the second quarter.
Novell acquired the technology assets of Somerset, UK-based Fortefi, a provider of compliance and ‘privileged user management solutions’. Essentially, Novell is getting two Fortefi products, namely Command Control and Compliance Auditor.
Novell plans to use the firm’s Command Control and Compliance Auditor products to introduce the Novell Privileged User Manager in the second quarter of 2009.
It is possible that, amid difficult times, the feeble ones just sold out cheaply to Novell. But it any event, this was not significant and it is completely irrelevant to Novell’s open/mixed source strategy. █
A SUFFICIENTLY LARGE HEAP of developments may have come at the beginning of this week, so here is a quick rundown through various interpretations and how things are inherently connected.
Citrix Ruins Xen for Linux
The latest announcement from Citrix is one which was covered yesterday and here is the press release from the company. There is nothing particularly shocking there.
Former Microsoft employees (Ignition Partners) put money in XenSource, which other companies have come to depend on as means of enabling GNU/Linux and choice
At least one crony was put in charge of Xen (former Microsoft General Manager)
XenSource was sold to Citrix without resistance
Microsoft took Xen’s agenda from Citrix, which was crowned Microsoft Partner of the Year (2008) after buying XenSource
According to Parallels, it’s not surprising that Xen is no longer what it used to be, which leads to a cascading effect (companies dependent on Xen.org).
“I make the further prediction that Citrix will stop developing XenServer altogether since it is not needed to make XenApp work. This will signal the eventual end of XEN. You really have to applaud Microsoft’s Server group here: XEN could have been a serious competitor to them, but instead it ended up being a partner and technology provider. Now, when the difficult economic climate could have created considerable opportunities for the open source XEN offering, it is instead largely out of the picture due to its relationship with Citrix, and by extension with Microsoft.”
[Y]ou can safely bet that Novell will soon be joining up with Microsoft and Citrix to try to shove VMware out of the game with Citrix’s free XenServer.
Particularly prior to the interoperability announcement between Red Hat and Microsoft, some bloggers were attacking Novell for moves such as improving interoperability with ASP.NET, getting the Novell/Microsoft Moonlight project included in Ubuntu Linux 9.04, and increasing its hiring of .NET developers.
It’s a case of focus shifting. Is Novell’s fate similar to that of Xen?
Novell and VMware said Tuesday that they are collaborating so independent software vendors can build SUSE Linux Enterprise virtual appliances. The two companies will also develop VMware-ready appliances on SUSE Linux.
Red Hat Goes It Alone
The Microsoft-Red Hat agreement remains a bit of an enigma. This has been the subject of much debate recently, but it’s not known what the agreement actually meant in technical terms and whether it involved KVM or Xen (or both) on the non-Microsoft side. Sam Varghese wrote about the subject and also included a valuable quote from Samba’s lead (Samba has always been against the Novell deal).
Said Tridgell: “I certainly have no objection in principle to interoperability agreements, and I am pleased that Red Hat have gone to the trouble of pointing out that the agreement does not contain any of the patent components that are so problematic with the Novell agreement.”
“How does this impinge on Microsoft/Novell’s ‘virtualisation interoperability’ deal? What do Novell get out of it? Or what did they think they were getting out of it,” asks one reader.
“As far as I can see, Novell signed away some IP rights and agreed to get out of the desktop business in return for Microsoft collaboration in the data center. Now it seems that Microsoft has signed a similar deal with Red Hat, without signing away any patent rights, and now VM ‘partner’ Citrix is ‘giving away’ its offerings. Seems like Microsoft stole the wind right out of their sails.”
Red Hat Monday introduced an entire line of virtualization software aimed at disrupting the current market and leader VMware’s position by giving customers an open-source option for virtualizing their data centers.
Red Hat unleashed another press release about its ISVs and the role of virtualisation, which it is careful not to label “cloud” or some other buzzword.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced its virtualization agenda and roadmap for 2009, including confirmation that its broad ecosystem of applications tested and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are certified to run in a Red Hat virtualized platform with no modifications. Red Hat offers a broad ecosystem of certified applications, enabling expanded flexibility and choice for customers.
Red Hat is a player in operating systems and middleware, and it wants to be a player in server virtualization – at least more of a player than it has been since it parked the Xen hypervisor inside its Enterprise Linux 5 distro back in March 2007.
Despite Red Hat’s surprising announcement last week that it would be partnering with Microsoft on virtualization, on February 23rd, Red Hat’s announced that it would be switching its virtualization strategy from a mix of virtualization programs, including the Microsoft-friendly Xen, to focusing on Linux’s baked-in KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)
KVM, as Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens admitted during a press call, is still a work in progress. But, Stevens assured the audience, by working with IBM and Intel, Red Hat will be able to deliver its full Red Hat Virtualization portfolio within the next 12-months. The first fruits of this switch will appear in RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 5.4, which is due out in August 2009.
“The Microsoft-friendly Xen,” it says right there. Paula Rooney rightly opines that Red Hat has lost interest in Xen:
More importantly, Red Hat issued its war plan against Xen.
So Microsoft turned Xen from a friend of GNU/Linux almost into its foe, at least from some companies’ perspective. What a difference cash infusions can make. █
The number one reason for choosing Linux, people have reported building a Linux media center with $400 total cost. Top that! Of course if you have unlimited budget this is not an argument. On the other hand what can be defined as unlimited? With equal money you will always be capable of building more. That’s why big movie studios use Linux.
* A whole house media system build with cheap diskless hardware
Have some old PC’s laying around? You can use them as pxe bootable thin clients for your Linux MCE system, most cheap graphics cards support tv out for a while now. Make a pc pxe bootable over the network and use it as a media director. And you can have one master system serving media throughout the whole house.
I am increasingly aware of more and more “regular” people using Linux. They bought a netbook, their son or daughter installed “this thing called Ubuntu” on their aging hardware, or maybe they just thought they’d try something new. There is indeed a quiet, but sizable group of Linux users out there who want to buy consumer products that “just work” with Linux. Frankly, I am one of them. I would be ecstatic to use the Eye-Fi card with my Acer Aspire One on the road, but someone thought I was not a viable part of the consumer market.
Amazon uses a scalable, decentralized, fault tolerant server structure to guarantee 99.9% data availability at a cost far less expensive than building a data center and renting space. The only concern for the user is the reliability and speed of the local Internet connection.
Vertica is competing with database machines, a database system preloaded on a piece of hardware, by offering a column-oriented database appliance, a copy of its system optimized to run with CentOS Linux in the VMware virtual machine. (CentOS repackages a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 or earlier.) The analytic database is designed to be used in organizations that frequently want to deploy a data mart, have highly seasonal data leading to periods of intense usage, or have analytic databases that grow rapidly, said Menninger.
Linux is an alternative operating system to Windows and Mac OS. It’s powerful, and many versions of it are free.
Using Linux to “put the fun back into computing” will be the topic at the March meeting of the SLO Bytes PC Users Group, with Alan Raul demonstrating how to use Linux for everyday computing tasks. He will show how to run Linux from a CD or flash drive without affecting your present operating system.
In early January we had delivered Linux Solid-State Drive Benchmarks of an OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, which was a low-cost low-capacity single-cell drive. The increased performance and decreased power consumption compared to a 5400RPM Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive was nice for a netbook, but how are the higher-end solid-state drives performing? In this article, we have a high-performance Intel X25-E Extreme SSD on a System76 notebook running Ubuntu Linux.
Flashy movies aside, though, is there a real advantage to having faster boot times when most of us don’t shut down and reboot to begin with? And if so, is it worth touting as a feature on the same order as, say, support for cellular network connectivity?
When you’re on the run, opportunities to hop online to check e-mail, flight status, or a favorite Web site tend to be infrequent and of limited duration. That’s why, when you do get a chance to fire up your notebook, the time it takes to boot and load Windows can seem like an eternity.
Enlightenment is perhaps the least known and the oldest Windows manager still being actively developed. KDE and Gnome (Desktop Environments) made their first release few years after Enlightenment had its first release way back in 1996. Enlightenment features an iconbar, which the “Dock” of OS X is based on, and is quite different from the traditional WM and DE that we are used to. The current version, E17, has been in development since 2000 with slow update cycles and perhaps one of the reason why it is not as widely adopted as other WM and DE out there. Earlier version of gOS was based on E16-17 (they moved to gnome). Elive, OpenGEU and Maryan Linux are three distribution that has Enlightenment installed by default.
When you tell someone, “I’m going to buy a car,” you usually hear, “Which one?” Ford, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda, Saturn? Two-door, four-door, minivan? And so on.
Likewise, if you say “I want to run Linux,” you’ll get the same question: Which one? There’s no one “Linux” in the same sense that there’s no one “car.” There are things common among all cars as there are among all Linux distributions: All cars have an engine, and all Linux distributions share the Linux kernel and many of the GNU utilities.
The specialized Linuxes in this roundup showcase the advantages of customizing both OS components and user-level software. I look at a pair of firewall Linuxes, IPCop and m0n0wall; a Linux SAN/NAS appliance, OpenFiler; two Linuxes for musicians, Ubuntu Studio and Musix; and a final duo of distributions, Ubuntu Christian Edition and Ubuntu Muslim Edition, targeted at members of those corresponding religions.
That issue aside, Carlos also clarified to me that the distro costs $80 for a reason. It includes Codeweaver’s Crossover Office, which is something I overlooked the first time around. Since that product on its own costs $70, it makes a bit more sense as to why the distro itself isn’t cheap. But, with that feature tacked on, this distro is not for most Linux enthusiasts, but rather those who come from Windows and want something a little more familiar.
Kongoni’s second baseline release will be the first public release of the distribution. At this point in time it is extremely close to being released and you can expect it to be officially announced sometime in the next 48 hours (don’t hold me to this as a promise though – we are community project and we do not set or do deadlines).
The VectorLinux developers have released a new version of the Slackware derivative, VectorLinux 6. This version of the lean system is the first to offer installation via a graphical installer, although text-based installation is still supported. VectorLinux Standard is based on Xfce version 4.43 and includes LXDE and Openbox as desktop alternatives. The developer team is offering a commercial deluxe version, with KDE 4.2 and other extras, from the project’s online shop. The Gnome desktop environment can be installed using the VectorLinux software repository.
VEProxmox VE is a “bare metal” ISO Linux distribution that is a virtual machine platform. It is geared towards enterprise users and designed to be installed on enterprise grade hardware.
[...]
PVE is a viable alternative to other products like VMware or Xen. I have been using PVE since the initial 0.9 public release. I currently run about 30 virtual machines on a Proxmox VE cluster including several mission critical servers and have had no issues with the core functionality in the 8 months that I have been using it. It is missing some features that the commercial offerings provide but no other open source application offers the functionality provided by Proxmox VE.
Taking advantage of that concept is Qimo, a desktop operating system geared toward kids that is based on the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. Developed by a husband-and-wife team Brian and Michelle Hall, Qimo was released in mid-February.
Steve McIntyre, the leader of the Debian Project, has appointed Kurt Roeckx as the new Debian secretary. The decision was made in close cooperation with Bdale Garbee, the current acting secretary. Neal McGovern was confirmed as an assistant, “due to his recent experience as assistant to the previous secretary.”
Does this mean that Red Hat will be getting back into the Linux desktop business? That’s the question I posed to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, in a phone call after the Red Hat/KVM press conference, and he told me that, “Yes. Red Hat will indeed be pushing the Linux desktop again.”
Among a horde of other features to be introduced with Fedora 11 (a.k.a. Leonidas), the Nouveau driver will become the default NVIDIA driver on this Red Hat distribution.
Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth recently announced that the next version after “Jaunty Jackalope” is codenamed “Karmic Koala”. This ended some humorous speculations that Ubuntu 9.10 will be called Kinky Kangaroo.
Ubuntu’s upcoming 9.10 release now has a name: Karmic Koala. However, all of the news wasn’t so cute and fuzzy this week in the FOSS blogosphere. One blogger posted a Linux virus how-to, which got quite a bit of attention. Turns out the vulnerability has been known since 2006.
Well, I’m going to leave Crunch Bang Linux on my laptop. My first real test will be when I travel in a few weeks – as that’s usually the time I use my laptop. I’ll probably be using it to watch videos or play games. At that time I’ll know if Crunch Bang can meet my needs or if I need to go back to Ubuntu. If I go back to Ubuntu I’ll be sure to blog about it. I intend to blog about my feelings of Crunch Bang, Conky, and Gwibber after an extended use, but I can’t guarantee I’ll get around to it – especially if there’s nothing extraordinary to report. In that sense – no news is good news.
If you want to embrace open operating systems, quit the Microsoft monopoly or the Apple cult, Ubuntu is one of the most powerful operating systems based on the popular open source Linux kernel. It can do everything that the costly operating systems, only oh so much more, and for free!
First, to be clear: Unison’s unified communications software is not open source. But Unison will offer a free, advertising-driven version of its unified communications software to customers running Ubuntu Server Edition.
The big question: Will ad-driven unified communications software take off? Nobody will know for sure until Unison for Ubuntu Server Edition ships shortly.
Though 2009 has only just begun, it looks like this year’s going to be a busy one for Chumby Industries. The makers of the hackable, completely open, Linux-based, internet-enabled, so-much-more-than-an-alarm-clock — well, alarm clock — have announced a number of partnerships since January’s Consumer Electronics Show.
Broadcom has incorporated the scalable Linux-based widget platform into a system-on-a-chip for TV-based hardware, equipping the latest Internet-connected devices with all of Chumby’s partner content, which includes Pandora, The New York Times, SHOUTcast, CBS, The Weather Channel, and MTV.
It actually has a mini Linux computer inside, letting you watch internet video or place widgets on that wee screen, front and center and tiltable for your viewing pleasure.
Marvell announced today a new type of computer. It’s about the size of an AC to DC converting wall outlet plug, but is really a full SoC with a 1200 MHz CPU, built-in 512 MB Flash, 512 MB DRAM, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support. It runs small versions of Linux, consumes about 5 watts max while allowing remote users (presumably those authorized by the owner) to access data stored on the device from remote locations including local intranets or over the Internet. The $49 device opens up a wide array of extremely low-power, low-volume, always on applications.
Wind River will buy Tilcon Software, a vendor of Linux-compatible, embedded GUI (graphical user interface) toolkits targeting industrial, defense, medical, automotive, and mobile devices. Alameda, Calif.-based Wind River will pay $3.5 million for Tilcon, of Ottawa, Canada, in a deal set to close Feb. 27.
Working through the OSADL, German embedded-systems vendor Denx is seeking community participation and funding for a Freescale MPC512x Linux BSP (board support package) suitable for inclusion in mainline Linux. Based on a PowerPC core, the MPC512x targets automotive telematics, building automation, medical diagnostics, surveillance, digital home, and gaming applications.
After the fanfare faded, we ended up with Android-a platform that launched with some limitations but nonetheless has significant potential. Although the first Android devices leave a lot to be desired when compared to competing products, the platform itself is evolving quickly, and it offers the advantages of openness and collaborative development. In this article we’ll take a close look at the underlying technology of Android and what the platform means for developers.
T-Mobile’s Android phone hit only last October 17, 2008, early in Q4. Here’s a telling quote from the report: “Motorola, currently holding onto fourth place in smartphones thanks largely to its Linux-based models, recently announced it would move away from using the Symbian OS and focus more on Android.” Which is also Linux.
General Mobile demonstrated a dual-SIM, XScale-based Android cameraphone last week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Based on a design by Chinese telecom ODM (original design maker) Yuhua (aka Yuhuatel), the DSTL1 could be among the first Android phones to ship, when it launches this summer.
And concerns regarding Google’s open-source mobile operating system Android are not far behind.
“I think the dynamics with Linux is changing somewhat,” Ballmer said. “I assume we’ll see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones, and we’ll see Google more and more as a competitor in the desktop operating system business than we ever have before.”
With the grim economic climate weighing on all sectors of its business, Microsoft reiterated warnings about slowing revenues and profits for the second half of the year, but vowed prudent spending as the company looks ahead to new fronts in its war with Google.
Although it is still early enough in development that it may not become a shipping product, Asus has confirmed that it has been developing a netbook based on Google’s Android platform. Asus’ Eee PC division lead, Samson Hu, told Bloomberg that engineers are working on a possible end-of-year release window. We’ve written before about Cupcake, a version of Android that is friendly to non-phone devices, and there have already been successful efforts putting Cupcake on netbooks.
Slowing PC sales and rising netbooks shipment has been adding to the woes of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). An estimated 30% of all netbooks sold come with free and open-source Linux operating system. Moreover, Microsoft has been selling its Windows operating system at a discount to get it installed in the machines, which in turn is hurting its software business. Last month, the Redmond, Washington based company reported a meager 1.6% rise in quarterly sales. While announcing 5,000 job cuts, the software giant blamed netbooks for a drop in Window sales. “Client revenue declined 8% as a result of PC market weakness and a continued shift to lower priced netbooks,” the company said in a statement. Windows sales were down 8% in the latest quarter.
According to current figures from Netbookdigest.com, Microsoft has lost $435,000,000 over the last year in netbook sales.
While Microsoft has maintained about 90% of the desktop and notebook market, netbooks come in at only 70%. Part of the reason is Linux, but part is Microsoft itself.
The miserly constraints spurred her to be fiendishly resourceful. Instead of using a spinning hard drive she chose flash memory—the type in your USB thumb drive—because it draws very little juice and doesn’t break when dropped. For software she picked Linux and other free, open source packages instead of paying for Microsoft’s wares. She used an AMD Geode processor, which isn’t very fast but requires less than a watt of power. And as the pièce de résistance, she devised an ingenious LCD panel that detects whether onscreen images are static (like when you’re reading a document) and tells the main processor to shut down, saving precious electricity.
Bob Morris, head of mobile computing at ARM, tells ZDNet UK why a firm best known for its work on mobile-phone chip architecture could have a major impact on the netbook market
The European Commission’s Open Source Observatory and Repository project (Osor.eu) invites anyone working on open source to launch their own community-section on the OSOR website.
Open source policy-makers, software developers and other users of the OSOR website can, for example, start a community section based on their area of expertise, country or language. For instance, European specialists on public procurement of open source software can in this way easily start working together with colleagues in other EU member states.
QQ’s growth should not overshadow this month’s other significant event: Apache has gained 7.8 million sites, making it the first vendor to be used by more than 100 million websites.
Bourne-again shell (Bash) version 4.0 has been released and includes several fixes to serious bugs from the 3.x releases and some significant new features. Bash 4.0, a free software Unix/Linux shell written for the GNU Project, is released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License and is the default shell for most Linux systems.
The latest news from Harrison Consoles (a company that pioneered the use of Linux in high-end audio applications) announces that Universal Studios has upgraded their massive theatrical mixing console with Harrison’s latest Linux automation system.
The HTML 5 video element will also arrive in Firefox 3.1. This will allow video content to be embedded directly in Web pages, controlled with JavaScript, and manipulated through the DOM. It’s a major step forward for rich media content on the Web. Firefox 3.1 will ship with built-in support for the Ogg Vorbis and Theora formats—open audio and video codecs that are believed to be unencumbered by patents. The actual codec implementations are integrated directly into the browser itself, so content in those formats will be playable without requiring any external components or plugins.
Today Mitchell Baker was announced as a winner of The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) Women of Vision Awards in the Leadership category. Please see the post on Above the Fold for more details, crossposted below:
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) announced that Mitchell Baker is a winner of this year’s Women of Vision Awards in the Leadership category. Mitchell, along with Yuqing Gao, IBM Research, and Jan Cuny, National Science Foundation, will be honored for her accomplishments and contributions as a woman in technology at ABI’s fourth annual Women of Vision Awards Banquet at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose on April 30th, 2009.
This is because Internet Explorer is tied to Microsoft’s dominant computer operating system, giving it an unfair advantage over other browsers. Compare this to the mobile market, where Microsoft cannot tie Internet Explorer to a dominant operating system, and its browser therefore has a much lower usage. The value of competition for users (even in the limited form we see today) is clear: tabbed browsing, faster downloads, private browsing features, and more. Even greater competition will drive more innovation within browsers themselves – as well as in web design, enabling sites to load faster and offer new kinds of interactive tools and applications.
Linux Fund has partnered with Inkscape developer Milosz Derezynski to improve the text dialog of this open source vector graphics editor. This work will improve Inkscape’s usability by enhancing its text tool to provide numeric control over kerning and other essential text attributes.
Linux Fund welcomes three new members to its Board of Directors: consultant and community activist Michael Dexter, consultant and professor Dan Carrere, and developer and community activist Ilan Rabinovitch.
Could your company become a victim of vendor lock-in? If you rely entirely on proprietary software, you very well could be. What exactly is this vendor lock-in of which I speak? It is a way of ensuring that you, the consumer, will only be able to use specific products as set forth by select manufacturers.
A classic, old-school example of vendor lock-in would have to be with ink jet printer cartridges. When you purchase any major brand of ink jet printer, you will be stuck relying on ink they themselves produce, no matter how hard you might wish to use something else.
[...]
So by now, you get the general idea — lock-in is a huge negative. Finding software solutions that provide you with an out should you need it is key. For example, let’s say I wish to migrate my email from Thunderbird to Evolution. And to make matters even more complex, let’s say I am moving this email from Windows over to a new Linux PC. One might think this to be a really scary kind of deal.
Personally, I’d say the main thing it needs is what only Microsoft can provide: true interoperability, guaranteed, with Microsoft’s ‘standard’. I am hearing from one and all that the crutches being offered for ODF to try to do so don’t really work very well. That is wrong. Period. It’s what I expected, but it needs to be fixed. What if there were another natural disaster, like Katrina? Interoperability and the ability to communicate with government agencies can mean your life. It’s that serious, and who is to argue that the lives of Linux users don’t matter?
In a letter sent to ISPs across the country last week, the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) disclosed the deal and warned others to follow suit or face legal action.
Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.
THERE ARE some bad news and some good news this week. We’ll begin with some of the bad.
Microsoft Against Free Software
Microsoft has just entered a extortion licensing deal with 123map.
Microsoft Corp. and 123map GmbH & Co. KG, a supplier of high-quality geographical services, announced a patent licensing agreement that will enhance 123map’s ability to bring digital point-of-interest mapping technology to its customers.
The text above is pseudo-journalism, recasting a press release [1, 2]. The press release also comes from Redmond and it more or less tells which side is winning.
According to this report, there might be an element of open source software involved.
Microsoft in pact with semi-open source map maker
[...]
“123map’s products are developed with a diverse mix of proprietary and open source software, and this business agreement is a testament to the importance of mutual respect for IP, regardless of development models,” Microsoft officials said in a statement today.
Once again they label "open source" a "development model" (nothing to do with rights or freedom) and they use the term “IP” in order to blur the gap between copyrights, trademarks, and software patents in this case. Why does a German company engage in such a deal? Are these patents legitimate over there at all?
AXIGEN (http://www.axigen.com/), the professional messaging solution vendor, announces it has joined the Empower for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) initiative, partnership program designed by Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/), worldwide leader in software, services and solutions. Empower combines deep industry knowledge, useful tools, powerful research expertise and innovative thinking aimed at supporting global business growth.
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Winner of the ServerWatch 2007 Product Excellence Award for the Communications Server category, AXIGEN Mail Server features a carrier class technology and outstanding support. Now at version 6.2, AXIGEN runs on several Linux and BSD distributions, on Solaris, on Windows operating systems, on PowerPC and SPARC architectures and is becoming the messaging solution of choice for a growing number of service providers and enterprises worldwide.
The nuisance which is Rambus [1, 2, 3] has been leeching off its competitors using patents that it hid inside standards. The European Commission did strike back with accusations, but over in the United States it has been a subject of active debate. Well, sadly enough, Rambus eventually got its way.
The Supreme Court rejected the US Federal Trade Commission’s request to resurrect antitrust accusations the District of Columbia Circuit tossed out in April. Its latest rebuff effectively kills the regulator’s seven-year saga against Rambus for allegedly monopolizing four key technologies found in DRAM chips.
The FTC accuses Rambus of deceiving the memory standard-setting group JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) by not disclosing its intentions to patent technologies that would become part of the DDR SDRAM specification.
This important development which can serve as precedence is also covered in:
Philips is one of the most vicious lobbyists for software patents in Europe. It even uses ‘attack dogs’ to do its extortions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Well, Digital Majority has just found this text from Philips regarding the Enlarged Board of Appeals referral [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. It says:
Observations: In view of the above discussion on the statutory background, the examples in Article 52(2) EPC should be understood in the light of the principle that all technical inventions are patent-eligible, while all non-technical subjects are not. So, it is not relevant whether some computer-related wording is used in a claim, as the question that needs to be answered is whether the claim relates to a technical invention. Moreover, it is not that relevant whether a claim in the area of computer programs avoids exclusion under Article 52(2)(c) and (3) EPC by using some smartly chosen wording, as it still needs to be new and involve an inventive step in order to be patentable. As has been aptly mentioned in T 154/04, only technical features can contribute to novelty and inventive step, so that there must be technical features that distinguish the invention from the prior art in a non-obvious way.
Also in Europe — the spats-thirsty lawyers from IPKats are trying to force software patents upon the UK using ZDNet as their platform. Glyn Moody rebuts.
Professionals who work in the field of intellectual monopolies have a problem. Most of them are quite able to see there are serious problems with the system, but since their entire career has been built on it, they can hardly trash the whole thing. Instead, they not unreasonably try to come up with a “reasonable” compromise.
[...]
There are simply *no* good reasons for software patents, and hence no justification for halfway houses, however reasonably framed, and however intelligent and reasonable the framer.
Economics of Software Patents
Another good find from Glyn Moody is this paper which shows that patents decrease innovation and therefore harm consumers.
This work basically shows that recent attempts to introduce intellectual monopolies into science in order to “promote innovation” have actually been counter-productive.
[...]
In this context at least, it’s openness that leads to more innovation, not its polar opposite.
The Chicago Tribune has an article claiming that intellectual property sales are “growing” despite the recession, as companies look to sell off what they’re not using. Except… the article doesn’t present any evidence whatsoever
The Free Software Foundation today announced funding for the End Software Patents project to document the case for ending software patents worldwide. This catalog of studies, economic arguments, and legal analyses will build on the recent success of the “in re Bilski” court ruling, in which End Software Patents (ESP) helped play a key role in narrowing the scope for patenting software ideas in the USA.
The EFF is doing its own share of activism and reporting, as well. It typically targets one patent at the time as opposed to the system which makes them possible in the first place.
In April 2007, as part of our Patent Busting Project, we asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to revisit its decision to grant NeoMedia a patent that broadly claimed to cover database lookups using things like barcodes. In October 2007, the PTO agreed to take another look, and last July, it issued an initial opinion that all 95 claims of the NeoMedia patent were invalid.
The next battleground for Free software is likely to be legal, not just technical. Programmers prefer to focus on technical aspects alone, but ignoring all those ‘peripheral’, man-made aspects does not mean that they will magically disappear. The maximalists always work on new laws to protect their monopolies and banish their competition. █
“Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. “Don’t bother us with politics,” respond those who don’t want to learn.”
A third-party add-on for eBay used by thousands of sellers is being flagged by Google as potentially malicious, after it became infected with a trojan.
Auctiva provides tools for sellers on the popular auction website.
An unnamed Telstra executive has sparked a major security scare at Microsoft after a phone loaded with a secret upcoming version of the Windows Mobile operating system was stolen out of his pocket in Spain.
The notorious pickpockets of Barcelona have struck again – but this time the target was more precious than a handbag or a leather wallet. A prototype mobile phone loaded with Microsoft software built to rival Apple’s iPhone was filched from an executive’s pocket during an evening function at the Mobile World Congress, an annual gathering for the industry being held in the Spanish city this week.
Microsoft broke ground on building 83 earlier this fall, but the company has said that as part of a set of cost-cutting moves it will delay further work after the construction reaches a certain level until 2013.
