08.21.09
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Law, Patents at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Steve Jobs wanted to collude with Palm
Apple’s abuse of Linux and Palm [1, 2] recently led to a formal complaint from Palm. It is part of an ongoing pattern where Apple uses patents, breakage of interoperability, or total lack of interoperability to stifle adoption of GNU/Linux or Linux-powered devices [1, 2]. What is Apple so afraid of? That people will find out that more affordable products are just as good — if not better — than Apple’s?
Now we come to discover that 2 years ago Apple was quietly attempting to sort of collude with Palm, as some other companies do. Palm declined the offer, which came from no-one other than Steve Jobs himself. Here is a summary from The Inquirer.
Former Palm chief executive Ed Colligan discussed the matter with Jobs in August 2007, as the smartphone war heated up. According to AP, he rejected the proposal, calling it wrong and “likely illegal”.
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Jobs’ comments have come back to haunt him as the US Justice Department is very interested in how tech companies are trying to lock in staff with bizarre employment contracts.
Derick Mains, a spokesman for Palm said the company had not been contacted by the Justice Department yet.
Got to love the “free market”, eh?
The original report came either from AP or from Bloomberg, which wrote:
Former Palm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan rejected a proposal from Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs to refrain from hiring each other’s employees two years ago, calling it wrong and “likely illegal,” according to their communications.
In The Register they write:
Two years ago, Apple chief exec Steve Jobs suggested to Palm’s then-CEO Ed Colligan that the two companies agree not to hire each other’s employees. Colligan reportedly refused, saying such a deal would be “likely illegal”.
This does not look particularly good. A year ago we also wrote about alleged involvement in backdating, but Steve Jobs — like all rich men — was eventually acquitted of all charges. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The Linux version of Synology Assistant is designed for Ubuntu distribution. In addition to the existing Windows and Mac version, users can now install Synology Assistant on Linux environment. “The Linux version completes our commitment in providing convenience of Disk Station setup on different platforms,” said Edward Lin, marketing director of Synology.
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Performing data backup and recovery in a Linux environment poses some unique challenges. Brien Posey, a freelance writer and former CIO, answers some of the most common questions about Linux data backup in this Q&A. His answers are also available as an MP3 below.
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And therein lies the biggest strength of Linux. It’s flexibility means that it can be almost anything to almost anyone in need of a good operating system, on almost any piece of hardware. And it’s here to stay.
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Virtualisation
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This type of Linux choice is not typical of two-person IT staffs, especially those who are in the middle of major upgrades, analysts say.
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But perhaps the advantage that came through most strongly was in terms of ‘flexibility’ to run software on whatever physical platform may be wanted. For example, TheBloke mentioned it being possible to employ “Linux as the host OS while allowing me to continue to use the Windows apps I want – Microsoft Office, Toad for Oracle, Photoshop and more. Plus it allows me to use all those USB peripherals I have that don’t work properly under Linux. My mobile phone, for example.” He then made the valid point that “Having lots of RAM is important of course”.
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Kernel Space
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As of the spring, nVidia had shipped over 100 million CUDA-compatible GPUs, although most of them were probably not in supercomputer clusters. The nVidia Tesla GPU co-processors are supported in both Linux and Windows environments.
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The Linux Plumbers Conference today announces the speakers and conference program for the 2nd annual conference to be held September 23-25 in Portland, Oregon immediately following LinuxCon Portland 2009. Both events will be held at the Marriott Downtown Waterfront in Portland, home to one of the largest Linux communities worldwide.
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As part of its LSB Infrastructure Project, the Linux Foundation has released a tool for testing the ABI compatibility of different versions of a C or C++ library. The ABI Compliance Checker tests whether data types or parameters passed to functions have changed between two versions of a library. Applications can behave incorrectly or crash where the binary interface is not compatible.
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Google
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Google has begun work on a 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux, a move likely to whip Linux loyalists into a lather of excitement.
“The V8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I’ve had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks,” said Chrome engineer Dean McNamee in a mailing list message Thursday.
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Google engineers have been beavering away at a 64-bit version of the company’s Chrome browser for the Linux platform.
According to Chrome developer Dean McNamee, Mountain View’s V8 team has been tinkering with a Chromium Linux 64-bit for several weeks now. V8, in case you were wondering, is the web kingpin’s JavaScript engine.
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Desktop Environments
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KDE 4.3 is a great desktop, but there are improvements I think should be made to make it perfect. I have high hopes for KDE 4.4 and I’m hoping some of these ideas will be considered for the next release, which will probably be due in January. I’ll definitely make sure to submit them to the KDE team for consideration, as you should too if you have any suggestions. With all that out of the way, let’s get started.
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Red Hat Family
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For me as the operator and head of the StartCom Certification Authority, every computer application making use of SSL and cryptography is of importance, specially those of the various platforms from the house of Microsoft. That’s one of the reasons why I’m today extremely pleased to announce the upcoming default support of the StartCom Authority by Microsoft. Starting approximately the 22nd of September, Microsoft intends to distribute a non-security update package to the Windows operating systems which includes the trusted StartCom root certificate and the automatic root certificate update service will update the cryptographic certificates root store on those systems whenever a StartCom issued certificate is encountered.
This not only means that Internet Explorer will finally support web sites secured with StartCom issued certificates by default, the implications for SSL security and the Internet at large are potentially reaching further than that:
StartCom is the only public certification authority providing digital certificates for free!
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The open source revolution may have yet to happen, but with company budgets on the line, change is in the air.
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Thus far, Red Hat has been focusing that help on the infrastructure side of corporate IT, so the kind of behind-the-scenes software on top of which applications run. It has branched out from its core Linux OS into all kinds of infrastructure software that enable things like clustering and virtualization.
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Debian Family
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Recently I wrote about installing Ubuntu Linux on my MSI Wind netbook. Now that my netbook is happily running Ubuntu, my MacBook Pro is feeling deprived and slighted. It is time to do something about that.
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New Distributions
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Freescale says a Linux board support package (BSP) and multimedia codec library for the i.MX233 is available now, along with an EVK (evaluation kit) discussed later in this story.
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Datasound Laboratories has announced a pair of Linux-ready, fanless box PCs employing 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processors. The ACS-2663 and ACS-2664 include hard disk and CompactFlash storage, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, plus both VGA and DVI video outputs, the company says.
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Phones
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Those developing applications for the Linux-based Pre smartphone can now submit them to be considered for inclusion in an upcoming “Palm App Catalog” beta. The test version of Palm’s online store will open in mid-September, the company said in a blog posting yesterday.
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The phone runs on Linux (the first smartphone to do so, to the best of my knowledge).
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Sub-notebooks
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It seems that every vendor is getting on the netbook bandwagon-and if they’re not, they’re trying to get their own bandwagon rolling with a raft of similar form factor devices. Consumers love netbooks as a cheap, internet-enabled PC substitute and carriers seem happy to subsidise them in order to drive mobile broadband subscriptions.
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Linux will be the glue that holds the joint effort together
Both companies have their own in-house Linux projects-Intel with Moblin and Nokia with Maemo-and will align their respective strategies around a number of key open source technologies such as oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, and PulseAudio. Incidentally, Intel recently acquired mobile and embedded devices software firm Wind River for $884m and said it would licence Nokia’s HSPA 3G modem technologies to complement its own mobility platforms.
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Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system has been fingered for powering mobile devices beyond the smartphone for some time now. On Sept. 15, Archos Technology will unveil just such a device, a tablet computer.
At the Sept. 15 press conference, the company will showcase the touchscreen device, it said this week. The tablet will have a 5-inch display, with 720p video support, an HDMI output and native OpenGL libraries, all with a Texas Instruments processor.
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Despite all the nifty, gee-whiz technology that the Web 2.0 craze brought the software industry, it’s still stodgy enterprise software that continues to command a significant price tag.
That’s because however much we may enjoy Facebooking, Twittering, etc., ultimately we pay for what helps us get our jobs done.
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For Chris Lundberg, open source is as much a philosophy as it is a method of software development. Open source and open access represent the idea that solutions are often better found via many, than via few, he says. Those are some of the ideas he takes to the table as a member of Open Source for America’s advisory board.
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fluid Operations today announced a breakthrough in the use of storage-assisted virtualization to drive IT efficiencies. After the initial publishing of the VMFS technology in March 2009 and making it available with an open-source license, the market started to anticipate new private cloud management features that would become possible.
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Computers get faster and smaller every year, but in the case of servers – the building blocks for many modern businesses – the tasks we expect them to perform have increased to match. We so rely on these servers that we increasingly need to monitor what they do, how they do it and when they hit problems.
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The BBC is starting work on what it calls its first ever open-source documentary, a collaborative blend of blogging and broadcasting that will chart the impact of the internet over the past 20 years.
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Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the opening of its newest office in San Francisco. The expansion is in response to growing demand for Pentaho offerings, and represents the latest in a series of 2009 achievements and milestones.
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Many of us are consuming video and audio content as part of our working lives; some of us are broadcasting it and encoding it, too. For both types of tasks, one of the best applications that you can get is the free, open-source VLC Media Player. It recently came out in a significantly updated version 1.0, and is now out in a stable version 1.0.1. I’ve been using the new version, and highly recommend it, whether you’re running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
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OSSEC is an open source HIDS that merges log analysis, file integrity monitoring, rootkit detection and active responses. It started as a side-project to help me solve some problems that I had on a previous job (6-7 years ago). They had the need to do integrity checking on multiple systems (Linux, Solaris AIX, etc) and Tripwire just didn’t scale for us. We were forced to make it scale, and started using it because was the only solution available at the time, but it was a pain to manage individually on 100+ servers.
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Openness
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The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization responsible for the operation of the Wikipedia free online encyclopaedia, has received $500,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
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Now, Moxie is among a consortium of academic groups that is developing the open-source caLIMS2 software, which will likely play a key role in its business plans.
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Programming
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Eminent Java developers Richard Hall, BJ Hargrave and Peter Kriens have formulated a new proposal for a simple module system for Java, which could be developed as part of Java Specification Request (JSR) 294 ‘Improved Modularity Support in the Java Programming Language’. The authors hope their proposal will bring the different ideas on modularisation into some sort of harmony.
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The Qt-Python bindings might not be 100% stable, say the PySide project developers, but it’s in a usable shape — “especially if you can tolerate an occasional rough edge and unpainted surface,” as they put it in their announcement. Along with the Qt bindings, PySide provides automated binding generation tools. It thus not only targets Qt developers in the narrow sense, but is also applicable for other Qt-based or more general C++ bindings.The Qt-Python bindings might not be 100% stable, say the PySide project developers, but it’s in a usable shape — “especially if you can tolerate an occasional rough edge and unpainted surface,” as they put it in their announcement. Along with the Qt bindings, PySide provides automated binding generation tools. It thus not only targets Qt developers in the narrow sense, but is also applicable for other Qt-based or more general C++ bindings.
Jack Vice, Founder of robot maker Anthrotronix, Inc. 01 (2005)
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 News Roundup at 9:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Personally, since I bought my own USB turntable, I’ve been enjoying albums that I haven’t listened to in years because they were in storage. Not only that, but, despite the fact that the cult of vinyl seems likely to be around for a few more years, I can’t help being relieved that I’ve transferred my old music to a more accessible format while I still can.
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The other release worth checking out is the updated version of Open Discovery, a USB turnkey bioinformatics Linux distribution with a customized MPI specifically designed for multi-core processors. Open Discovery 2 ships with an MPI compiled GROMACS V-3 3, the molecular dynamics software application. You can download Open Discovery 2 here.
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Desktop
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For this series of articles we set out to build a high powered workstation with the latest Linux virtualization software capable of running multiple operating systems (OS) at the same time. Our goal was to get the fastest multiple-core processor and most memory while staying close to the $500 price tag of the other off-the-shelf machines. We also wanted the ability to install at least three hard drives to help with performance issues when running multiple OSes from the same disk.
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Linux is not struggling anywhere, at-least not in my knowledge or on my Desktop.
Linux is a Free, Rich featured, Fast, and Powerful Operating system.
That does not mean everyone should use it. Objective of Linux is not to get installed on every computer in world, but to provide a free Operating System to anyone who NEEDS it.
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This was the message that FOSSFA brought to OSCON. Open source is not only about technology. It is about the people who use the technology to solve day-to-day problems. Being an advocacy and a support group, FOSSFA emphasizes the opportunities that open source offers to Africa in reaching its development goals in all socio-economic areas.
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Interview
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I know for a fact that there are many other interesting women working and playing in open source, and plenty of them I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet. Last week I met Kelaine Vargas at OpenSourceWorld and she sat down and answered my questions in person. I enjoyed that meeting so much that I’ve decided to continue my efforts to find out what women in open source are doing and why they do it. And if I can’t meet you in person, I’ll try to track you down online.
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In this interview we talk with Stephen of Songbird. In specific, we talk about:
* How Songbird fits into the Mozilla pantheon
* Aligning user interests with those of content providers
* How Songbird fits into the larger world of open source media players
* Songbird’s business and revenue model in the near term and beyond
* Usability and expandability as strategic precepts
* Apple as an inspirational model
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One metric is to refer to the popular Linux-tracking website Distrowatch which logs interest in the various distributions. There are certain limitations to using Distrowatch to pinpoint the best Linux distribution because it only tracks user interest in each distribution which can be affected by ongoing news, frequency of releases and many other intangibles. But as a list of the ten most popular distributions it is a useful guide.
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As you might imagine, Austrumi Linux is not geared toward competing with Ubuntu, Fedora or any of the larger desktop distributions. Rather it’s all about portability and the ability to maximize utility while minimizing the actual size of the distribution.
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The documentation is extremely good, is updated often and covers everything from basic installation and configuration to getting X up and running and installing and configuring most the popular DE/WM.
The Arch Linux repos have recently received the new KDE 4.3 packages which allows includes many, many great features, however the one the more interesting ones is that now you can download specific packages from KDE without needing the entire desktop environment, again giving you more level of control over things. I will definitely give KDE a try when I get back home (I am a GNOME user at the moment) especially since the have upgrade kwin, the X Windows manager in KDE, to include Compiz-like effects.
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Ease Of Installation & Setup: 4/5
Stability & Speed: 4/5
Community & Online Support: 3/5
Features: 5/5
Overall: 4/5
Overall I had a lot of fun with Pardus and it may even have finally taught me the virtues of KDE, which was no small task indeed.
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So it looks like we are going to have CentOS 4.8 before RHEL 5.4 after all. I blogged about the big 4.8 release delays a week ago and we can expect CentOS 4.8 on Friday if all goes well. Maybe the weekend ?
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Debian Family
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Karmic won’t bring any revolutionary changes to the default desktop software stack, but there have been some useful overhauls of individual components. Provided the backend of the system is also solid (note to Ubuntu developers: I’d love to have an ath5k wireless driver that finally works without a fuss), Ubuntu 9.10 looks to be a promising release.
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In the first of a series on what new software users can expect to find in Karmic Koala come October, we take a peek at the ‘Gnome Control Centre’. Akin to the Windows Control Panel, it will better help users make all-important changes when/if needed…
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Appearance
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Time for a collection of screenshots, as an illustration of Qt applications on OpenSolaris, both on a local display driven by a Radeon X1200 and on a Sun Ray thin client. Not from KDE applications (although we have KDE 4.3.0 packages for OpenSolaris now) but from qtconfig — possibly the first Qt app you will want to run in OpenSolaris to set up some of the fonts correctly. Before running this version of qtconfig, I removed ~/.config — the whole directory tree — so I would get the default settings. There are screenies of the same 300×100 section of the application on four setups: local display or Sun Ray thin client, and system fontconfig or one built from our own packages. I switched my set of package builds to use the system’s fontconfig a while back, but the specfile for fontconfig (useful if you care about Solaris10) is still there. Both are version 2.5.0; for freetype system is 2.3.7 and the specfiles build 2.3.6.
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While surfing the internet I came across this blog article about the Balanzan theme. I saw it and realized it’s a nice looking theme and decided to share the view with you.
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The amount of support for Android has been pretty astounding so far, with Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Garmin-Asus and Lenovo all planning or releasing phones with Google’s OS. Some of these manufacturers are using WinMo as well, but it’s not the everyman Windows was for PCs. Perhaps that’s due to 6.5′s lethargic pace of development.
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If you’re already a geocaching fan or want to give it a try but don’t have an iPhone, try out these open source apps for your computer, netbook, or cell phone.
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Picok is developed in Switzerland so most of the existing modules, or portlets as they’re known in this app, are aimed at European users. Current portlets include a Swiss weather radar, Pons German-English dictionary, and European rail schedule. However, the project wiki has clear instructions for creating custom portlets on your own.
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We’ve covered Dimdim a lot here at OStatic. It’s a full-featured free Web conferencing app that raised $6 million in Series B funding last year and has taken aim at expensive commercial options like Cisco System’s WebEx and Microsoft’s Placeware. Up to 20 people at a time can get together withDimdim’s free version which also includes audio and video sharing, event recording, whiteboards, and private messaging.
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[Y]ou can use it to broadcast your own video content, you can use it as a video transcoder for converting video file formats, and you can listen to and manage podcasts with it. VideoLAN, which makes VLC Media Player, reports that version 1.0 has already hit 14 million downloads.
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On the other end, seeing Free Software in action has I think given us an appreciation few can match for the potential of fairly egalitarian co-operation. People argue about whether Open Source is Communist or Capitalist or whatever. I think that’s basically a category error in a way. Certainly for most capitalist businesses in practical terms, Free Software lets them save money and get more done better. That’s good for business. But I’d have to say that Free Software does refute the idea that competition is the only way to get anything done, or that self-interest is the only motivator. And we don’t see that only in the software itself.
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Fog Computing
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Today, Cloudera announced the first ever Hadoop World conference, to take place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on October 2nd, with registration available here.
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Java framework builder SpringSource is set to provide enterprise Java developers a platform for cloud-based deployments with the unveiling on Tuesday of SpringSource Cloud Foundry.
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Government
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The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is releasing an open-source code named the Open Source Corporate Management System (OSCMIS) as part of its move to support open-source software across the federal government.
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Literature
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Now, though, there are some signs that Flat World Knowledge’s effort is paying off. Wired reports that more than 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges will use digital, DRM-free textbooks from the company as the school year starts in a matter of days, and that’s up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the Spring.
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Sponsored by the University of Minnesota, Wireless Generation, and Primary Concepts, the goal of the site is to offer an alternative to many of the expensive tools and textbooks “so that schools and districts can redirect textbook funds to other valuable, highly-impactful components of education. Whether those options include professional development, technology, formative assessment or something else, FreeReading provides an opportunity for districts to rethink the return on their education investment dollars.”
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Standards/Consortia
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The state of web multimedia on Linux is pitiful. Proprietary codecs, plug-ins and closed standards are helping to keep Linux a second rate citizen. What Linux needs is not another proprietary framework like Moonlight, but more open standards. Can Google help by making YouTube a Theora-fest?
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The $5.6bn takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle moved another step toward closing as the US Department of Justice has given the acquisition its nod.
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There’s also no real consensus between cable companies on how to proceed. One result? Users not having a central resource for video content:
Bowman suggested that projects like TV Everywhere may not yield a single site that will contain content from dozens of programmers. Instead, the authentication system the industry develops may be used to point pay-TV subscribers to several different sites to view their pay-TV content online.
No standards, no consensus, and no legal agreements — no problem?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Pirate Party, which first rose to prominence in Sweden during June’s European elections, has now been officially launched in Finland, the group’s leader said on Wednesday.
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Apart from determined-sounding utterances from certain notable publishers and new pay walls erected this summer in Harlingen, TX, and Schenectady, NY, the industry has made essentially no progress in figuring out how to effectively monetize the formidable web traffic that represents its strongest asset as print franchises wane.
Jin Sato, father of humanoid robots 02 (2005)
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 FSF, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, OIN, Patents at 3:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Can an 800 lb. Gorilla coexist with little Mono?
Summary: Yet another analysis of Microsoft’s relationship with Mono and GNU/Linux
HEISE has just published a piece which insinuates that Mono is “monkey business”. The FSF too addressed the issue about a month ago. “More indication of course that Microsoft has everyone’s best interest at heart,” sarcastically claims Neighborlee, quoting the following text: “…[Microsoft] released an ‘extended’ version of the JVM for Windows, which resulted in the writing of Java apps that would work on Windows but not on other platforms, in Internet Explorer but not in Netscape…”
To quote from Heise:
This stance has been countered to some degree by Microsoft’s Community Promise, but doubts remain as to what is actually covered, and de Icaza concedes as much. “In the next few months,” he wrote, “we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.” In theory, the core components of Mono and the Mono development stack for Gnome are covered by the Community Promise. The elements that provide compatibility with Windows are not.
From the beginning Mono has been beset by misunderstandings, misconceptions and political ineptitude, not least by Novell, de Icaza’s employer, which allowed Microsoft to insert patent indemnification into its commercial agreement of 2006, souring its relationship with the free software community and giving Microsoft grounds for suggesting, without substantiation, that GNU/Linux and other free software infringed Microsoft patents – and by Microsoft’s ongoing ambivalence towards free and open source software within its own halls.
The author, Richard Hillesley, has actually been a critic of Mono for quite some time. He apparently did try to tone it down for the H, just as he did in other publications. Other writers were not allowed to even express their real opinions — let alone assessments — about Mono, especially in the press (probably grumpy editors).
This is risky judgment.
Back at the beginning (more towards middle) of the decade, people warned against invasion of Iraq, saying it was misguided and would prove rather fruitless. Major newspapers gave little or no attention to such voices, but knowing what we know today it was a colossal mistake. So, the message to get across here is that to forbid criticism of Mono is to make ourselves a lot more vulnerable. A lot of people did not denounce Novell for its patent deal with Microsoft until the middle of 2007 when Microsoft started using this deal to accuse everything and everyone of ‘stealing’.
Jim Zemlin is quoted in this fluffy new piece which is doing too much to commend Microsoft (it’s from Gavin Clarke after all).
Zemlin, though, thinks Microsoft can and should go further by ending any claim to patents in Windows that may or may not be present in Linux.
“They should take a patent license out with the OIN – put their money where their mouth is to make sure patents don’t get in the way of operating systems, make operating systems a no fly zone when it comes to patents,” Zemlin said. “That sends a clear message Linux is solid, and we validate this collective development model and we want to interoperate.”
Most of the article is pretending that Microsoft's eventual GPL compliance (after violation and boundless spin [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]) makes up for patent racketeering. Regarding the latter bits, Microsoft was invited to OIN before. Microsoft declined the invitation. Microsoft is spreading not only patent FUD against Linux; it is also spreading lies about the acceptance of GNU/Linux in the market. To quote yesterday’s column from James Gaskin:
In this case, Dell: Linux v Windows Netbook Returns a “Non-issue,” a report from OpenSource World reported Dell exec Todd Finch refuting Microsoft’s Kevin Turner’s lies that Linux netbook returns were “four or five times higher” than Windows netbook return stats.
You’d think Microsoft would treat Dell with a little more decency, since Dell is either number one or number two in PC and server sales depending on sales results in a particular quarter. But no, Microsoft spokespeople keep slamming Linux and netbooks at every opportunity.
“You’d think Microsoft would treat Dell with a little more decency,” writes Gaskin. He apparently isn’t entirely familiar with Microsoft's previous attacks on GNU/Linux at Dell. That is just how Microsoft operates, which brings us back to the question, “has Microsoft changed?” The answer is no, and thus Mono cannot be trusted. █
“I’d be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral. I could do it Friday afternoon but not Saturday. I could do it pretty much any time the following week.”
–Brad Silverberg, Microsoft
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Posted in Apple, Courtroom, Finance, Fraud, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Patents at 3:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Software patents have been nothing but trouble for innovation. We the software engineers know this, yet we actually have full-blown posters in our break-room showcasing the individual engineers who came up with something we were able to push through the USPTO. Individually, we pretty much all consider the software-patent showcase poster to be a colossal joke.” —Kelledin, PLI: State Street Overruled… PERIOD
Summary: Where patents meet formats ODF is still winning
THE USPTO has earned little love for the fact that it permits people to gain a monopoly on algorithms, despite copyrights doing the job perfectly well. According to The Register, “Apple has filed a patent application that would enable iPhone users to transfer files and typed messages to others while speaking with them during a voice call.” That is another software patent for a company that uses them against Linux devices.
Corruption was found in the USPTO, which helps its reputation not at all. From The Washington Examiner:
Minister pleads guilty to stealing $500K from U.S. patent office
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Court documents show that the patent worker stole a total of $534,338 over 32 transfers, 27 of which were to Reid. It is unclear from documents where the other $80,000 went.
Another company which people love (or love to hate) is being sued by TechRadium and Wired Magazine has the details.
TechRadium, a little known Texas-based player in the emergency mass-notification field, didn’t just wake up this month and decide to sue Twitter for patent infringement.
The company says it didn’t care about Twitter when the Twitterati was watching the tweets of NBA superstars, musicians, politicians and news outlets. But then TechRadium began seeing promotional materials and news accounts of companies, school districts and local governments using, or considering adopting, the microblogging service as their emergency notification system – muscling into TechRadium’s wheelhouse.
TechRadium’s lawsuit against Twitter was mentioned in [1, 2]. TechRadium also mutually sued Blackboard [1, 2], which was financially backed by Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4].
Speaking of companies that received funding from Microsoft, Finjan is one of them [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and right now it is suing Microsoft’s competitor, McAfee. It’s about software patents again.
INSECURITY FIRM McAfee has been whacked with an extra $13.7 million in damages because one of its acquisitions infringed patents held by Finjan Software, a Delaware judge has decided.
Finjan is unlikely to ever sue Microsoft, which is — after all — its major backer. Finjan has been somewhat of a leech for quite some time.
Turning some attention to the i4i case [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], there is no sign of remedy for Microsoft, yet.
MICROSOFT MUST BE PANICKED that its recent loss in a US patent lawsuit could dampen the retail launch of its massively hyped Windows 7 operating system on 22 October.
Last Friday it filed a sealed Emergency Motion asking for a stay of execution following its loss on 11 August in i4i v. Microsoft, a patent infringement lawsuit covering Custom XML.
BusinessWeek has this article on the subject. It mentions Microsoft’s misconduct in the courtroom.
In addition to the injunction against selling one of its most popular products, the court ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million in damages to i4i, including a fine of $40 million after the judge ruled that Microsoft’s lead lawyer in the case made misleading statements to the jury.
Microsoft appears to be pretending that people would be jammed without Word, but it could not be further from the truth. Just a free download away exists a solution; people can obtain a copy of one among many office suites, some of which do not even require downloading (SaaS). It must be terrifying to Microsoft — the thought that people would discover that there is choice. as one blogger put it:
Word ban threatens industry? Not mine
[...]
Really? Believe it or not, I have acknowledged that Microsoft Office is good enough to buy for power users. However, to say that there are no alternatives is obviously ridiculous. Can you say OpenOffice? Google Apps? Zoho? StarOffice? Lotus Symphony?
No office suite supports OOXML, not even Microsoft Office, which probably comes closest nonetheless. That too is a tremendous issue to Microsoft. Not only Word is in jeopardy but its file formats too; the patent problem is inherent in the format, which ODF does not suffer from.
ODF support can now be found in Storyist. From the news:
Storyist also has an impressive export capability in case your publisher wants to see the document in Word, Open Document, or several other formats. Screenplays can be exported to Final Draft, considered by many to be the industry standard for script writing.
There is also ODF support in JDBReport. From this new reference page:
Reports can be exported to HTML, Open Document Format (Text Document, SpreadSheet), Excel XML.Version 1.3 adds Export to PDF and RTF using iText and Export to MS Excel 2003 using Apache POI.
The Register brings back memories of what Microsoft did in Massachusetts.
Open access to data’s been a growing trend in government circles, thanks to the politics of who controls information. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts typified the move in 2005 when it said official documents must use the open document format (ODF), as Microsoft’s Word would lock documents into a format owned by a single company. This was before Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) formats.
Massachusetts went on to reverse the decision following lobbying from Microsoft and local political pressure, but other national and local governments in the US and world wide have been moving in the direction of using open formats.
Also in The Register, Gavin Clarke is pushing the Fraunhofer study, which is somewhat of a tool for promoting OOXML. Coming from Clarke, however, this is not particularly surprising. Microsoft keeps pushing the false perception that two formats are needed and that ODF is deficient. Well, yes… it is deficient… to Microsoft’s revenue. █
“It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!“
–Microsoft on OOXML
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Posted in IRC Logs at 1:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
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08.20.09
Posted in Asia, Deals, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj
Summary: Digital colonialism to be pervasive in some more Indian schools
EVERY ONCE in a while, especially when GNU/Linux gains traction in India, Bill Gates makes a special visit and Microsoft resorts to EDGI. Up to 72,000 schools are targeted by this brutal programme which subjugates not just adults but also children all across the world. EDGI enables more and more educational programmes to turn into training and schools to recruitment camps. To use an analogy, it’s the equivalent of taking over an engineering school and then teaching students there how to push buttons at a factory. It may be good for factory owners, but it prohibits or at least inhibits the creation of new factories. It’s deprivation, it’s abominable.
Bill Gates visited India about a month ago and the latest victim of Microsoft’s merciless tactics is Maharashtra, India. According to The Times of India:
The government of Maharashtra has signed an MoU with Microsoft India, which will provide training in information technology to school teachers. Microsoft will also help build “employability-readiness skills” in junior college students.
We have internal documents from Microsoft to show what MoUs are all about. The move is also reminiscent of DreamSpark, which we wrote about earlier this year (many links to previous commentary). The MoU seems like a case of renewal, but it seems to affect the children more negatively than ever before, under the guise of “employability”. Teachers are also victims and for those who cannot get their heads around the size of the population, here are some sobering numbers:
Microsoft India has graph out three state-of-the-art IT academies in different places starting from Pune, Nagpur and then to Aurangabad and would trained about 92,000 teachers.
The number of teachers affected is roughly equal to the number of people employed by Microsoft. These teachers shall become a sort of ‘extended family’ to Microsoft, but Microsoft will not need to pay them a penny; who will? The government, i.e. the taxpayers. It’s the same old scam. The person from India who alerted us about it could not link to one specific article because there are so many. It’s big news in India, but very sad news to the population, which will probably be misled by the positive spin the in the mainstream press.
Look at this. They will receive a Microsoft certificate in their state schools. This is not a joke! You can’t make this stuff up.
Under the agreement, Microsoft will help deploy the Microsoft Digital Literacy Curriculum (DLC), a self learning multimedia based module which introduces the fundamentals of computing to a first-time user. The students will be assessed once the modules are completed, and awarded a Microsoft certificate, if successful.
Another big scam which is known as Live@Edu will be part of this atrocious agreement.
Rajan Anandan, managing director, Microsoft India Pvt Ltd, said that the MoU includes expanding capacity of educators at school cluster level, training of 6,000 educators who would train others in their respective cluster, building and connecting communities through Live@Edu initiative and building IT readiness among the youth.
How much worse could it get?
“To them, it’s just a negligible market in which to make a buck but also a market to suppress and punish if it happens to elevate Microsoft’s competition.”This headline says it all: “Students to be trained by Microsoft.” Yes, because the young generation needs to be educated by a company that was found guilty of crimes in several continents — a company whose felonies continue to this date. What sort of message will that get across to the children? They are trained rather than educated by a company that proudly shows that — as the old saying goes — “crime pays”. Under this programme, they will be exploited (from Microsoft’s selfish point of view) and also be treated like slaves even before they get a chance to gain independence and become innovators for their own neighbours in India.
The following set of E-mails comes from Comes vs Microsoft. It is an essential reading for those who do not understand how managers at Microsoft view the developing world. To them, it’s just a negligible market in which to make a buck but also a market to suppress and punish if it happens to elevate Microsoft’s competition. Sadly enough, Nick Negroponte has known Bill Gates for many years and he too seems to have become an assistant in such an agenda. DRM-laden textbooks are not a distant vision, especially in any school where Microsoft software spreads and prevails. █
“To illustrate how someone could react to this mudslinging by Microsoft, I have written a hypothetical complaint titled ‘Microsoft is looting the nation in alliance with Indian IT giants’. While constructing this hypothetical complaint, I have used what I call the ‘Microsoft patented mud-slinging algorithm’. I have included it as a stand alone appendix (Annexure A) to this letter. The purpose is to demonstrate that such complaints and counter complaints would lead all of us to disaster. This hypothetical counter complaint shows Microsoft as working at national and International forums to maintain and enhance its monopoly in global markets, and as attempting to ensure its monopoly strangle-hold on Indian desktop Market. It also paints INFOSYS, TCS, WIPRO and NASSCOM as willfully helping Microsoft in this evil design, and thus acting grossly against Indian National interests.”
–Professor Deepak Phatak
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Interoperability, Microsoft, Vista 7, Windows at 6:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“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.”
–Microsoft internal mail
Summary: Vista 7 disables GNU/Linux by rewriting the MBR
SEVERAL MONTHS ago we wrote about Microsoft's long history of sabotaging bootloaders/MBRs. In short, Microsoft had resorted to nothing short of technical sabotage (bar the usual excuses) to make it painful if not impossible to run operating systems alongside Windows. Moreover, Windows has a built-in tendency to wipe out competing operating systems and the evidence speaks for itself.
We now have it confirmed that Microsoft has not corrected this bad behaviour in Vista 7. It’s not as though Microsoft did not have enough time or programmers. A blogger has just published “a word of warning for Linux users planning on installing Windows 7.”
Anytime you reinstall Windows, Windows replaces your MBR (grub stage 1), meaning you can no longer boot into Linux.
This may seem particularly timely now that Microsoft claims — falsely in fact — that it helps Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Watch this deceiving new article which Microsoft virtually planted out there to seed falsehoods. This article is filled with statements from Microsoft and the article does not permit comments. In Linux Today, however, there was this one corrective comment which said: “Wasn’t it revealed that Microsoft only released this code because it was potentially infringing the GPL of some of its components??” Indeed, as Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer reminded us just weeks ago.
Microsoft continues to play dirty against Linux. There is no clear sign of anything changing, not even in Vista 7. It disregards GNU/Linux even if it resides on a separate partition and then rewrites its MBR. Is this what Microsoft calls “interoperability”? █
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