04.22.09
Posted in Europe, OIN, Oracle, Patents, SUN, TomTom at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest collection of news about software patents, including Oracle’s role
Oracle
Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems and the press discusses this a lot, but to repeat an issue raised by one of our readers, the question that’s scarcely answered is, “what about Oracle’s patent policy?”
“Will Oracle give money to FFII, like MySQL was doing in the past?”
MySQL’s strong policy against software patents already vanished when Sun acquired it, but Oracle — unlike Sun — is inside the OIN.
“OIN does not work,” told us the president of the FFII. OIN said it would retaliate against Microsoft to defend the use of FAT; its CEO said counter-action would come within weeks* and it has already been 3 weeks and we are still waiting.
Speaking of the OIN, yesterday they unleashed this press release.
Open Invention Network (OIN), a collaborative enterprise that enables innovation in open source and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux, today announced that it has been named one of Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Intellectual Property 2009.”
It’s worth repeating that Oracle is inside the OIN, but it’s rather disturbing to find the corrupt Gartner Group treated as though it’s an authority. Gartner sells itself to Microsoft on a regular basis and of course it likes software patents, which are OIN’s spiel. Speaking of Oracle (and IBM, which was going to buy Sun but got cold feet), the company have just been sued over database patents.
Oracle, IBM sued over database patents
Redwood Shores (CA) – Giant computer corporations IBM and Oracle have been dragged into a Texas district court over an allegation that their database software breaches existing patents.
What sort of patent protection will MySQL users receive under Oracle’s wing? Here we have yet another lawsuit taking place in a haven to many patent trolls, namely Texas districts. Oracle is based in the US and it possesses tremendous wealth. That matters to patent sharks.
Broken Patent System
The EE Times has this article which urges engineers to revolt against the patent system because it mostly favours patent lawyers (parasites) at this stage. As Richard Stallman put it in last week’s protests [1, 2, 3], if this “corrupt, malicious” organisation stands in our way, we should “get rid of it too.”
Opinion: Engineers should stage a patent strike
[...]
Corporate legal departments tell engineers which patents they can and can’t read. Sometimes engineers are told not to read patents at all, lest they be accused of deliberately infringing someone’s IP.
Meanwhile, businesspeople of all stripes pressure engineers to file patent applications for every idea. That has spawned a business of litigation and licensing that charges for portfolios by the pound. Companies now wield patents strategically to charge others for the freedom to innovate. In this sick world, patents don’t spark innovation, they inhibit it.
Patents are not there for engineers; they are there for patent lawyers, monopolists (patent aggressors), and patent trolls. They are, however, being marketed to engineers as though they defend small inventors and make people rich at no-one’s expense. This is a way to appease critics and enable this massive closed circulation of money to carry on.
There is a large thread in LWN.net, whose headline is “This isn’t validation – but it may be corruption.” It’s about the EPO, which many people — including Stallman and the FFII — protested against last week.
This surprises me somewhat, since the unaccountability of the EPO has been exploited quite effectively by advocates of extended patentability, but maybe most patent attorneys don’t really care about increasing the scope of what can be patented, or maybe they care more about only settling such matters once in a single place. If so, they need to employ more credible spokespeople who actually represent the interests of the majority of their profession’s members.
Look at this article in Hungarian. Apple claims to have just ‘innovated’ videophone (filed initially in 2007). This is absurd. No wonder emerging global powers like China turn their backs on this system and compromise interoperability by creating their own codecs and codec standards/patents. They are evading western patents and the consumer benefits in no way from this.
Over in Techdirt, a discussion continues about how to battle this failed system (citing a decent proposal from Freedom to Tinker).
…Wallach, over at Freedom To Tinker, takes this idea a step further to ask why no one talks about requiring juries in patent trials to be made up of PHOSITAs.
In Re Bilski and Beyond
Matt Asay claims to have composed an outline of the patent problem (particularly for software).
Of course, post-Bilski, we may be entering a period of court-ordered disarmament, which would be fantastic. The Bilski decision puts software patents on the defensive, and it hopefully will help to clear the minefield that currently helps only incumbents–and arguably hurts even them more than it helps them.
Here is an interesting new report [via Digital Majority] about how lawyers avoid complying with rules and manage to patent software anyway (and business methods also).
You may have heard some types of technology are not ‘patentable’. In fact, this is in a fairly limited set of circumstances. For example, you may think software is not ‘patentable’ but it is possible to obtain software patents. We’ll be looking at this in more detail in future. However, to obtain meaningful protection for any invention, it can be crucial that the patent specification is well-written by a skilled patent draftsman and this is especially true for software/computer-related inventions.
You may also think it’s not possible to obtain patents for business methods, another area we’ll look at in future. It may be possible to obtain a patent for a business method depending on the technology implemented and the country you’re trying to obtain the patent in. For instance, patents for ‘business methods’ are alive and well in Singapore today.
Et tu, Singapore? Guess who wrote this? “Michael McLaughlin is a patent attorney with at McLaughlin IP in Singapore.” █
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* Keith told this to ZDNet’s Paula Rooney, for future reference.
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 3:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Paying several times for the same competition-intolerant software
THE REASON the title states “MS-OOXML” and not “OOXML” is that Microsoft has never implemented OOXML (nor will it ever). Microsoft has several variants of OOXML and Microsoft’s Mac version of OOXML is different from the Windows version (they are not mutually compatible [1, 2]).
It is always valuable to remind people that software like Oracle OpenOffice.org (OOOo) does not just spare the cost of one copy of Microsoft Office. With Free software, upgrades are free, whereas with Microsoft Office, multiple purchases of the same software are required over time. This is famously known as the “upgrade treadmill,” which very much depends on different versions of the same software being incompatible; then, using the network effect, forced upgrades can be spurred and imposed all around. This is one of the key reasons to avoid OOXML and steer towards formats that do not change to promote the business agenda of one company.
There is a timely new report in The Inquirer:
Microsoft kills off support for MacOffice 2004
[...]
Users will have to upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac.
How much will that cost and what will be the gain? The ribbon? The bloat?
According to this report from Mary Jo Foley, the new economic depression has people wake up.
Report: Customers scrutinizing Microsoft license agreements more than ever
[...]
“There’s a perfect storm brewing,” said Directions analyst Paul DeGroot. “Customers are looking at licensing harder than ever before. And volume licenses are critical to Microsoft’s well-being. When people don’t renew, Microsoft loses immediate revenue. But these customers might not be back for two to three years,” leading to more substantial losses for the Redmond software maker.
Thanks to the reader who sent us this pointer. Now is a great time for businesses to prepare a migration plan to GNU/Linux, which contains wonderful office suites that comply with international standards. No version of Microsoft Office has that invaluable feature. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Deception, Europe, Microsoft at 3:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft sends ACT to fight back against the European Commission on its behalf
AN OBLIGATORY background to this post is presented in this story about ACT. Without knowing the genesis and function of ACT, the severity of this will remain unknown to readers. To sum it all up, it is abundantly clear that Jonathan Zuck and his “ACT” umbrella are there to serve Microsoft as a supposedly independent body [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. In its previous incarnation, known as ATL, the group was helping the writing of fake letters from dead people. That’s how unethical these people are.
And guess what?
They are now attacking the European Commission and Microsoft’s adversaries whom Microsoft injured. IDG has this report which calls ACT “a familiar ally”, but it says nothing at all about why it’s a familiar ally; It’s more of a Microsoft spinoff than an ally, as we showed the last time using compelling -- if not undeniable -- evidence. IDG is actually more of an “ally” because Microsoft is doing business with IDG [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which gives a platform for ACT at the moment (by quoting ACT extensively).
Microsoft Corp. gained a familiar ally in its latest antitrust battle with the European Commission today when the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) was accepted as an interested third party in the case.
Then there is this one from The Register, which relies only on IDG as its source.
The Association for Competitive Technology has been accepted as an interested third party in the case.
They say nothing at all about what ACT actually is, so that is just utterly poor reporting which deceives the readers. ACT was pretty much created by Microsoft to serve Microsoft, but all the reporters totally miss that point or neglect to raise it by choice. Some are Microsoft-sympathetic journalists (at least one that we are familiar with) and they echo the words of ACT as though they are trying to help Microsoft against the Europe Commission using the publications they write for.
Regarding disclosure of European lobbying activities like that of Microsoft/ACT, Euractiv published this pessimistic report a few days ago.
EU lobby register ‘will never be mandatory’
The voluntary lobbyists register introduced by the European Commission last year has been effective enough not to require a mandatory approach, Administration and Anti-Fraud Commissioner Siim Kallas said last week (17 April).
Here is an older article from the same site: [via Glyn Moody]
As the Commission’s upcoming voluntary lobbyists register occupies the mind of every lobbyist in Brussels, some have started to question exactly how many of them there are, casting doubt over the 15,000 figure originally put forward by the Commission.
That’s an obscene amount of people and Microsoft is patently the worst in this area (or best, depending on one’s point of view). For those who want to see the substance of this latest complaint against Microsoft in Europe, Groklaw has that published as HTML (text extracted from the PDF we cited last week). Pamela Jones adds:
It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the issue of Microsoft’s patent threats against Linux have been presented to a regulatory body as evidence of anticompetitive conduct.
The evidence is too hard to conceal, so Microsoft is reaching out to hired guns who in turn attack the regulators and the sources of complaint. There is nothing extraordinary here because Microsoft is doing it every single time and many journalists choose cowardice and ignorance rather than inform about the real story. They play along with ACT (i.e. Microsoft). █
“I thanked Rose for all of his trips to Seattle and his willingness to distract a lot of time for the lawsuit.”
–Bill Gates
“Did you know that there are more than 34,750 registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., for just 435 representatives and 100 senators? That’s 64 lobbyists for each congressperson.”
–CIO.com
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 2:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft loses control of MSN New Zealand
THERE ARE many examples just like that, e.g. [*], but this one just happens to be the latest.
Visitors to the msn.co.nz website are being re-directed to a site that includes a photograph of Microsoft boss Bill Gates with pie on his face.
The site usually carries news stories.
However hackers have changed the name servers which means that visitors to the site are redirected to the hackers’ website.
This is something to bear in mind when Microsoft raves about security. Not even Microsoft can keep its own Web sites secure using its very own software which it supposedly masters and keeps up to date. █
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[*] MSN.co.uk money related websites hacked and defaced
Two websites belonging to MSN (Microsoft Network) in the United Kingdom, were defaced today by an attacker who goes by the nickname “DARK LORD”.
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