03.25.09
Posted in Formats, OpenDocument, Standard at 1:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Featured article: “Taking Control of Your Documents”
Although many users simply click “Save” and give no thought to which format is being used under the covers, this unthinking use of the word processor’s default settings is a recipe for vendor lock-in. In fact, several vendors intentionally set their default format to be ones which will only work well with their own software, fostering dependency on that vendor’s software and lessening the user’s ability to take advantage of other options in the market. The more documents you save and accumulate in a vendor’s proprietary format, the harder it will be for you to consider any other choices.
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Posted in Boycott Novell, Site News at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Our new voting system suffers from an inherent flaw. It is sensitive to people who read this Web site as avid protesters against it, not frank readers of it. The distribution of votes on articles (as seen below) says it all really.
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Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell, Patent Covenant, Patents, Red Hat, SUN at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The Battle of Trafalgar
Summary: Microsoft releases — via CNET — information about its secret patent “projects”
WE HAVE BEEN AWARE for a couple of years now that Red Hat too was discussing patents with Microsoft but no deal was ever signed other than the recent virtualisation collaboration. It involves no patents at all. This issue is entirely off the table, so what came to fruition is inherently different.
Microsoft now boasts a sort of PR placement. This was seeded in CNET, which has just broken the news about Microsoft unleashing its story about patent deals and their secret history.
The story has a lot to do with Microsoft’s Marshall Phelps, who wrote a book on his patent strategy. He was not fired but instead he took some time aside to write this book, apparently. It’s a book on how to burn GNU/Linux, but it’s titled “burning the ships” — a phrase that Matt Asay recited very frequently (he said “boats” though, also in a separate context).
Here is an interesting portion of the new article:
The Novell deal, though, is the most interesting tale and the one to which Phelps and co-author David Kline go into the most detail. It began as “Project Summer”–an effort to get at least one major Linux vendor to sign a pact with Microsoft by the summer of 2004. It began with a well-regarded salesperson, Susan Hauser, being tapped to confidentially meet with customers and see how much support there was for some sort of Microsoft-Linux partnership.
The customers were game, Phelps and Kline write, but unwilling to become a party in the negotiations themselves. As the effort took longer than Microsoft wanted it became “project next summer,” the authors quip. The company met with Red Hat, starting in the fall of 2004, as part of “Project Bridge Builder,” though talks broke down after a year and a half. Just as those talks were collapsing, in June 2006, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner got a call from Novell’s then-president, Ron Hovsepian. A few days after that, Brad Smith called Hovsepian back and a new effort, “Project Blue,” was born.
The sides first met face to face two weeks later at a Hyatt near the Chicago airport. That meeting took place amid a convention of female bodybuilders. Another meeting took place in September, this time at Microsoft’s outside counsel’s office–in the same conference room where several months earlier Microsoft had hammered out an agreement with Sun Microsystems.
“Given the challenges of coming together with Novell,” Smith says in the book, “I thought it made sense to meet in the same conference room… Plus, since the room had been lucky for us once before, I figured that couldn’t hurt either.”
Talks progressed, but had not reached a conclusion. Smith suggested the two sides set an October 31 deadline for reaching a deal. Novell agreed that the deal would be “done or dead by Halloween.” After the last-minute end-run around the GPL, the two sides got the deal done and announced it to the world on November 2, 2006.
Pamela Jones added (in reference to that last sentence): “So it was a deliberate end run around the GPL, with a Microsoft goal of getting paid for each copy of Linux sold — just like SCO — but thanks to GPLv3, it was an end run that led straight into a brick wall.”
The story about Red Hat agrees with something that we already knew, but Red Hat was given a lot of flak recently because of its attitude or at least its approach towards software patents [1, 2, 3, 4]. Heise offers a very detailed analysis that we recommend reading.
The disclosure that Red Hat have applied for a patent on what might strike some as an obscure corner of the software ecosystem has caused others to re-evaluate how open and collaborative Red Hat actually are. As the AMQP 1.0 standard entered into its final phase, a 2007 Red Hat patent application, the company now refers to as a “defensive” patent, on an obvious extension of AMQP, was automatically disclosed and caused quite stir. What is AMQP, why is it important, what has Red Hat done to cause a ruckus within the AMQP community, and what does it mean to open source in general.
Red Hat could probably do a lot more to help the fight against software patents in Europe because now is a crucial time.
WMGarrison has just told us that he had “been studying Red Hat’s position on software patents [...] basically, they seem to be in favour of software patents, against business methods, and mainly for interoperability protection.”
The summary of Garrison’s long article goes like this:
In this article we revisit the historical 2005 Software Patent Directive, the most heavily lobbied European law ever, and look at Red Hat’s public policy statements regarding this law. Our conclusion: Red Hat Instead, they endorsed the propaganda term “Computer Implemented Invention” and they lobbied for amendments that would legislate for, not against, software patents across Europe where the letter of the law still forbade them.
As we respect and very much value the opinion of the FFII, giving the benefit of the doubt to Red Hat would be hard in this case. Can Red Hat make a formal clarification about its stance on software parents? Uncertainty helps not at all and it’s beneficial neither to Red Hat nor to Free software; it’s beneficial to Microsoft. █
“[The EPO] can’t distinguish between hardware and software so the patents get issued anyway.”
–Marshall Phelps, Microsoft
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Posted in Law, Microsoft, OIN, Patents, TomTom at 5:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Patent pools to the rescue?
Summary: What a patent blanket/inventory may mean to TomTom’s two-way battle with Microsoft
A FEW DAYS ago we reposted the press release about TomTom joining OIN (well, OIN mailed it to us) and now we have the chance to remark on news coverage.
One of the fastest to report on this was SJVN, who published “TomTom gets allies in Microsoft Linux patent lawsuit fight.” It’s a good short article.
When Microsoft first sued TomTom for patent violations in TomTom’s Linux-powered navigation devices, I wasn’t sure how much of a fight TomTom would put up. Legally TomTom was between a rock and a hard place. You can’t use restricted-use patents in GPLed software. If Microsoft just wanted to use the lawsuit as a hostile takeover tactic, TomTom didn’t have anything like Microsoft’s financial resources to fight them with.
Glyn Moody chose a provocative headline by suggesting that the TomTom case is the new SCO case.
I don’t think this materially affects the Microsoft lawsuit, since these OIN patents are not intended to be used for attack, more to remove possible obstacles. It simply emphasises the increasingly alignment of TomTom’s interests with those of the wider GNU/Linux community, and represents a nice poke in the eye for Microsoft.
Moody is in favour of this idea which he characterises as “Patent Commons”, but we reserve some judgment against this approach which IBM’s Arnaud Le Hors wrote about two days ago (on patent pools):
The Eco-Patent Commons has momentum
[...]
The Eco-Patent Commons was launched in January 2008 with the participation of Nokia, Pitney Bowes, and Sony, in addition to IBM.
Later Bosh, Dupont, and Xerox joined, and today WBCSD announced that Ricoh and Taisei joined the commons and Dupont contributed more patents.
How convenient it must be for IBM to say all this. How many patents does this company have again? The only solace is that IBM — unlike Microsoft — does not attack Free(dom) software. It would be counter productive.
It appears as though the editor (“Leader”) of ZDNet UK has once again slammed Microsoft for its patents-centric approach against Linux. He did so several times recently, e.g. when Microsoft signed the patent deal with Brother.
The warning sound of TomTom
[...]
[T]hose were the days when Bill Gates could say that software patents had the potential to put the industry at “a complete standstill” and with good reason. If the sort of protection Microsoft now claims for itself had been available to CP/M then, Microsoft would never have created its monopoly, nor amassed a fraction of its power.
Now it has, the rules have changed. Microsoft is perfectly happy, while proclaiming openness and interoperability, to find a company in dire financial straits and then threaten it with expensive legal action over what any self-respecting programmer would identify as a hackish kludge–something that advances the art of computer software not one bit.
David Meyer from ZDNet UK reported on these TomTom-OIN affairs, but he added no new information.
The satnav maker announced it had signed up to the OIN on Monday. By joining, it gained access to more than 275 patents and patent applications. In return, it has to open up its own intellectual property to other OIN members, royalty-free.
The implications of this are more properly discussed over at Groklaw and it remains to be seen how TomTom can use patents to fight some more patents (the GPL forbids cross-licensing in this case), as opposed to pushing for the ‘Bilski test’ — that is, seeing if it can be applied to software.
Dana Blankenhorn voices an opinion and The Register adds very little information other than some background that leads up to the OIN story.
TomTom has now thrown its name into the ring, and has probably bagged a few more supporters along the way in its noisy legal spat with Microsoft.
The software giant issued a lawsuit against TomTom in late February when it accused the firm of infringing eight of its patents.
Just last week TomTom hit back with a patent claim of its own in which it accused Microsoft’s Streets and Trips products of infringing four patents in the vendor’s vehicle navigation software.
This was also covered by Heise and Microsoft’s PR tool, Ina Fried. It was mentioned along the way in Tectonic, but there is too little in-depth analysis that we could find. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Vista 7, Windows at 4:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some quick links to news of interest about Microsoft
Microsoft Underwhelms With Preview Of Futuristic Ad Technologies
Call us crazy, but isn’t the point of a public demo to generate excitement?
Windows 7: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
It’s as if someone took a collection of day-glow spray paint cans and just sort of splattered the thing. Ugh! Truly horrible looking.
April Fools’ Day is no joke to Windows: Conficker to Phone Home on April Fools’ Day
Symantec Corp.’s Vincent Weafer, vice president of the company’s security response group, agreed with Stewart that it’s impossible to know ahead of time what stunt Conficker’s controllers will pull next week. “Nobody has any real idea,” said Weafer. “There’s no indication of what it will do April 1.”
[...]
Conficker, which is also called Downadup by some security companies, first appeared late last year, and originally exploited a Windows vulnerability that Microsoft Corp. patched in an October 2008 emergency update. In early 2009, the next version — Conficker.b — infected millions of PCs in just a few days.
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Posted in Google, Microsoft at 4:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Privacy International (PI) wants to eliminate a Google product, but PI was said to have vested/conflicting interests
WE have already shown one candidate for an anti-Google lobby and elaborated on other entities whom Microsoft encouraged to sue Google. In fact, Wired Magazine wrote about Microsoft’s “plot to kill Google” using ‘politics’ not so long in the past.
A few days ago we discussed EPIC, whose connection to Microsoft was a lot weaker (but it did exist) and EPIC acted against Google, as well. Right now, according to the BBC, Privacy International (PI) is tackling Google and trying to “shut down” Google’s Street Video altogether. In other words, it aims for product elimination.
A formal complaint about Google’s Street View has been sent to the Information Commissioner (ICO).
Drawn up by lobby group Privacy International (PI), it cites more than 200 reports from members of the public identifiable via the service.
This was also covered by IDG and by Jo Tartakoff, who adds:
The fury in the UK over Google’s effort to introduce its Street View feature to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps continues to escalate. The latest twist: A privacy group has filed a formal complaint with the British Information Commissioner, asking that the service be shut down pending an investigation, because it says more than 200 people could be identified in the street-view images.
This is not the first confrontation as such. Those two companies/entities faced off before when PI went ballistic against Google, which in turn accused Privacy International of being a shill for Microsoft. For details, see the following articles from the end of 2007:
Maybe there was some substance to Google’s allegation which it did not share in public? For Google to come up with a strong statement of this kind does take courage and requires substantial confidence. To be sure, a strong connection is certainly not evident, but Microsoft staff does exist inside Privacy International and we know what this sometimes means to Google, based on experience. █
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