Summary: Latest warnings about Microsoft’s ruthless and sometimes criminal behaviour comes from Samba Supreme, Jeremy Allison
THE TITLE is of course spinning the words of Linus Torvalds, who is not paying attention to what Microsoft has been up to. Yesterday we wrote about Jeremy Allison's latest warning that Mono should not be used (he said this last year as well [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]) and that Microsoft intends to harass its competition with the help of software patents.
Microsoft is already suing Linux over filesystems and the president of the FFII has just said that “Microsoft has a new license for exFAT, charging a flat $300,000 fee to manufacturers who want to use it in their products”; here is the news article he cites. We wrote about this subject before because it’s an attack on Free software.
Allison contends the OOXML case shows the lengths Microsoft will go to in order to create lock-in, where consumers are forced to buy software or hardware from one vendor or its partners and freedom of choice is restricted.
“One of the worst things that happened out of that, [is that the ISO] which was previously respected by people that didn’t know it so well, became absolutely despised,” he said. “There are some countries now thinking of pulling out [of ISO] because it is simply not worth participating in a process that is so obviously corrupted.”
However, the result was followed by two European Commission anti-trust probes into Microsoft’s behaviour which led to a settlement where the software giant had to offer customers a choice of internet browsers.
The second probe into Microsoft’s limiting of file format choices in its Office productivity suite also led to the vendor changing track. In the end, the ODF and other non-proprietary formats were offered to consumers to fend off European Union (EU) antitrust regulators and block massive fines.
The OOXML corruption was undeniable proof that Microsoft is a criminal corporation that would not be allowed to operate unless the legal system remained dysfunctional and fearful of the corporation. Microsoft can get away with everything and here is another new example:
A federal judge has killed class-action allegations in a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers when it fed them anti-piracy software under the auspices of a critical security update, according to court documents.
The move means that Microsoft will not be faced with millions in potential damages. Last fall, Microsoft’s lawyers argued that a class-action lawsuit could involve “tens of millions” of customers who might be owed “hundreds of millions of dollars” if the company lost the case.
A class-action would have let virtually anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid-2006 to join the case without having to hire an attorney.
Without accountability for misbehaving corporations, the market is truly in trouble. We saw this with the banks when the economy collapsed, but no lessons were learned. When criticism of outlaw operations is suddenly frowned upon, what hope is there? █
Summary: Citizens of India finally comprehend how their rights are abolished through unjust policy making; the Economic Times reports
EARLIER this week we showed that software patents were being pushed into India by Microsoft [1, 2]. This is a very serious matter which for some reason only the Indian press is sometimes reporting. The press in the West does not seem to care.
Here is some of the latest coverage about inexcusable exclusion or demotion of Free software (both articles courtesy of the Economic Times):
India’s open source software (OSS) lobbyists allege that popular software solutions from large companies, such as Microsoft, are being favoured in the proposed draft recommendations for the country’s e-governance policy. The policy aims to adopt open technology standards and software for automating different government departments and functions.
It intends to guide the billion-dollar e-governance purchases and tenders, across government departments, for software and hardware over the next few years. The government has already allocated about $6 billion for various projects under the national e-governance plan.
India’s open source software lobbyists allege that the country’s proposed draft recommendations for adopting open technology standards and software for automating different government departments and functions favours popular software solutions from large companies such as Microsoft.
According to people familiar with the draft recommendations, a meeting of the apex body on Standards for e-Governance was held last week, and the policy is close to being approved. ET was shown a copy of the proposed recommendations by one of the persons who requested anonymity.
In the above, proponents of software freedom are wrongly described as “lobbyists” when it fact they are probably just concerned volunteers and public figures, not necessarily employees of some company. The representation in the house does not equate to the actual population in the sense that it is not representative of the population’s interests. Microsoft is definitely not working in the interests of India; It takes extreme discipline to believe otherwise. █
Recently many Software Freedom activists have started to question bundled operating systems. If one goes to buy a PC, you will have to pay for the pre-installed Microsoft Window. Today there are many alternatives to Microsoft Windows — GNU/Linux based Ubuntu is one of the most popular Operating Systems. It is not only free in terms of cost, but also free in terms of control that the user has over his or her computing. GNU/Linux operating systems are very much more secure than Microsoft technologies.
If you want buy a branded PC from HP or any other major player and you want to run GNU/Linux on it then what are your choices? Irrespective of what software you want to run on your machine, you will have to pay the cost of pre-installed Windows, even if you are going to remove it and replace it with GNU/Linux. Will Mrs. Clinton take measures to save citizens from paying forced Microsoft Taxes?
The ideal situation would be that one should be able to buy hardware with or without Windows pre-installed. There should also be policies to ensure that Microsoft doesn’t kill Linux offers by ‘subsidizing’ Windows PCs.
Thank you Mrs. Clinton for giving hope to citizens of the free world. Let’s see how much goes into practice.
Nine years after it first played host, Brisbane has been awarded the rights to host the Australian national Linux conference again.
The winner of the bid for the 2011 conference was announced at the formal closing ceremony of the 11th Australian national Linux conference, held at the Conference Centre in Wellington this evening.
[...]
Linux Australia derives its yearly budget from the conference and thus things have to be on the plus side for the organisation to be able to plan any activities, apart from the purely ceremonial.
The Unix file system hierarchy has been used for decades and remains the model for most of today’s modern Linux systems, but one distribution, GoboLinux, is making software management easier with an innovative directory structure.
Speaking at this year’s Linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Wellington, New Zealand, GoboLinux developer Michael Homer said the standard Unix directory structure has survived for many years, but sometimes it is not optimal for contemporary computing.
A key question that emerged in government use of open source and open ICT standards is whether failures to date lies in a lack of policy or a lack of will to put the policy into effect.
“The policy is clear,” insisted former government CIO Laurence Millar, displaying policy statements from the e.govt.nz website “encouraging” agencies to look at open source software. “This is not about policy; it’s about changing attitudes.”
In a push to bring the open source software message to the non-hacker public, the Wellington open-source conference, linux.conf.au, is holding an Open Day at the Wellington Town Hall tomorrow.
More than 30 exhibitors from business, education and community groups will be demonstrating some of the software they have developed, organisers say.
The London Stock Exchange has begun a twelve-month migration to its new trading platform, based on Linux, as trading fell sharply.
In a busy three months for the exchange, it also agreed a framework plan for its newly-acquired controlling stake in Turquoise, a large volume ‘dark pool’ trading platform.
The LSE suffered a heavy fall in sales of real-time trading data. While the group’s IT revenues, from selling information and server hosting, grew three percent to £55 million in the three months to 31 December, real-time data sales fell nine percent, nearly three million pounds.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Millennium Global Investments (MGI), a specialist in developing and managing alternative investment products for institutional investors, has selected JBoss Enterprise BRMS (Business Rules Management System) for its mission-critical business rules repository.
Prial: The most important thing to do was to bring a complete IBM Linux solution-hardware, software, and services-to market. We had what was then the IBM PC Company supporting Linux machines, Linux on z, services around Linux, and a very varied portfolio of software running on Linux. We had IBM’s first major presence at LinuxWorld in 1999 and a consistent IBM story.
Our 2.6.32 file-system benchmarks compared the performance directly of EXT3, EXT4, XFS, ReiserFS, and Btrfs. These results remain relevant so check them out if you are interested in the performance of these other Linux file-systems. For this article we are simply comparing the performance of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems using the Linux 2.6.33-rc4 kernel.
BAE Systems Bofors (Karlskoga, Sweden) has selected MontaVista Linux to power its latest naval and artillery gun systems.
The use of a commercial quality embedded Linux is intended to provide for rapid development, combined with the long-term support required for military applications.
Synology announced it is shipping a Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device called the DiskStation DS1010+, offering a dual-core Intel Atom D510 and up to 10 drive bays. Earlier this month, the company also shipped a single-bay (2TB) DS110j NAS aimed at SOHO customers.
The phone is Sony Ericsson’s first to be based on Google’s Android operating system and is part of an effort to carve out a name for itself with phones that include social networking as well as entertainment functions such as music and movies.
Operating under the moniker Cyanogen, the hacker released the updates on Wednesday. The hack came as Google formally made the Nexus One operating system, Android version 2.1, open source, paving the way for much more advanced modifications of the phone.
ViewSonic demonstrated an Android-powered 8.9-inch, 1024 × 800 tablet device at a trade show in Beijing, China, yesterday, reports Mobile.163. The VTablet 101 incorporates an ARM Cortex-A9 based Nvidia Tegra system-on-chip (SoC), plus WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4GB of flash storage, says the story.
Smartbook manufacturers will seek to minimise the cost of the devices by using a lightweight OS, such as Android or Google’s forthcoming netbook OS Chrome, that require a modest amount of processing power and memory to run, she said.
Free Software is defined by four freedoms, and intends to create ethical relationships in the digital age of society, based on trust, responsibility and freedom.
In a world where we rely increasingly upon Information Technologies such as software and networks, it is important to realize software is more than code. The effects of programs go beyond the limited scope of developers, and contribute to shape our future.
The Free Software movement aims at making this future possible for everyone by ensuring fundamental principles of freedom for all, equally.
Collaboration has not started working properly in our software development society. The main idea behind OSS is to create a platform where ideas and knowledge are shared productively, hence creating a broader base for development and innovations. It is still rooted in our attitude to maintain total ownership and control over whatever is ours. Sharing our original ideas such that others can contribute to it and thus be a part of its improved version is a thinking that is naturally alien to us.
We need a system that would facilitate open sharing of ideas and collaboration where innovations are supported, nurtured and protected. The only way we can come about this is if we believed that we should be proud of advances made in our local software terrain, whether little or massive. We need a true beginning.
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the state of California has issued an IT policy letter to formally affirm that open source software is acceptable for use by government agencies in California.
Twitter has been open about its use of Ruby on Rails as its foundation and Jabber/XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) instant messaging. These are both open source technologies. This means that open source products keep the social networks up and running.
A project of the MIT Media Lab, SourceMap aims to provide insight on the origins of the products we consume, tracking their every component. The open-source tool gives registered users a platform for building a database composed of the origin, carbon footprint, and other impact-relevant characteristics of manufactured items. The project provides analysis tools such that producers, businesses owners and consumers can gather information concerning the impact of various supply chains to guide sustainable decision-making.
You could even argue the point that the community of users around many open source technologies like MySQL, JBoss, or Apache are more significant than the technology itself. After all, there are plenty of open source databases, app servers, and Web servers to chose from. What made these particular products stand out in the marketplace? If you’re using open source or trying to build an open source business, how do you tap into that community?
At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate.
Ifbyphone, a company offering a suite of its own web-based voice and phone applications, announced today that it has acquired Cloudvox to give its customers the tools they need to build their own open-source, customized phone applications to fit their business needs. No financial deals were disclosed.
Open Source Software reached critical mass in the decade of the noughties. The open source model caught on like wild fire among developers and quickly became adopted by entrepreneurs looking to build companies by providing services for these OSS technologies. And it worked. Marc Fleury founded JBoss around the JBoss application server and later sold the company to Red Hat for more than $350 million. Rod Johnson founded SpringSource around the open source Spring Framework, and last year sold it to VMware for $420 million. VCs saw an opportunity and began to get behind the best and the brightest. And organisations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Eclipse Foundation sprang up to, among other things, foster community involvement in various open source projects. Although the ASF was founded in 1999, it saw some of its best days in the noughties.
Dmitri, on the other hand, is a Linux developer. His power management code has been mainlined into the Linux kernel steadily over the last few years. He’s even been invited to Kernel Summit. Behemoth Consumer Products (BCP) employed Dmitri for the last three years, for work on their version of Linux that they embed in their devices. They, too, hit a rough patch, and Dmitri is out looking for work.
Luckily for Dmitri, his colleagues in the Linux community all work for companies who use embedded Linux. It’s easier for him to network, and employers don’t have to count on Dmitri for a description of his work. It lives in the open, in the kernel tree, for anyone to inspect. (He can even make it in the “Who Writes Linux” report that the Linux Foundation publishes every year.)
OpenGeo engineers will provide training on popular open source geospatial components including GeoServer, OpenLayers and PostGIS, as well as review courses on the new, integrated OpenGeo Suite. Training is available at OpenGeo’s new training facility in downtown Manhattan.
Sadly we met few children at this year’s show but any that ventured near met a sticky end in that the price for a lollypop was a free copy of Ubuntu and a ‘talk’ . Also young teachers were thin on the ground. Maybe ICT is uncool?
Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched Data.gov.uk, giving access to a wealth of public data, and the Guardian launched a website to make finding that data easier
For developers, Firefox 3.6 supports the latest HTML5 specification, including the file API for local file handling, font support (in addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, it supports the new Web Open Font Format), CSS gradients (linear and radical), and device orientation – it exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to web pages.
Customizing how Firefox looks has now also become easier, thanks to the integration of the Personas add-on directly into Firefox 3.6. With Personas, users can change the way Firefox looks without restarting the browser.
The Mozilla Labs Bespin project, to create a web based integrated development environment which makes use of cloud functionality, is undergoing a reboot aimed at making Bespin easier to work with and extend. Bespin was introduced in February 2009 by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almear. In September 2009, Galbraith and Almear moved to Palm, which in turn led to an opportunity to remodel the project. The reboot’s progress has been detailed in a posting by Kevin Dangoor on the Mozilla Lab’s Bespin Blog.
Oracle moved closer to sealing its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Thursday, as the European Union’s antitrust body formally signed off on the deal following a three-month investigation into its impact on competition in the IT sector.
“I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned,” said EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes, in a statement. “Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Kroes.
Oracle will provide more details about its plans for Sun Microsystems at an event next Wednesday, the same day European regulators are expected to sign off on the deal.
CEO Larry Ellison will host the event at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, where executives will outline Oracle’s strategy for absorbing Sun, including details about product road maps, Oracle said in a statement.
During his tenure as CEO of Sun, Schwartz was best known as the pony-tailed lover of all things open source, quixotically dressed on stage in pinstripe suits. I’m betting he has serious doubts about Oracle’s intent to advance Sun’s open source efforts.
I had a really good lunch the other day with Bob Suh, ex-CTO of Accenture, at the Four Seasons in Boston discussing his new venture OnCorps. (As an aside, the Four Seasons clearly believes we are out of the recession because with one hour of parking my burger cost $42.)
Liferay, Inc., the leading visionary for open source portal and collaboration technologies, today announced that it experienced tremendous growth in 2009, underscoring its impact and influence in a fast-growing and dynamic open source software industry. The company’s successful penetration into the enterprise market with Liferay Portal, its leading web platform for the enterprise, provides a strong basis for leadership in portal and collaboration technologies in 2010.
With the New Year underway, it’s common for many businesses executives to take time to reflect on the evolution of their industry and where their company stands today. And Digium, Inc. the Asterisk (News – Alert) Company, is no exception.
Danny Windham, president and CEO, Digium, Inc., discussed how the ever-changing telephony market reached its current model and how open source technology has played a role to help reduce margins and costs in the communications space at a keynote session at ITEXPO today.
With the launch of a new marketplace where vendors can reach out to integrators and solution providers, Asterisk sponsor Digium is says it will make available a range of products and services based on the open-source platform.
Sauce Labs, the Selenium Company, today announced that it has closed a $3.1 million round of Series A financing led by the Contrarian Group, Peter Ueberroth’s investment management firm. Founded in July 2008, Sauce Labs makes open source Selenium-based cross-browser software testing easy for businesses developing and testing web applications. Sauce Labs offers a cloud testing service called Sauce OnDemand, commercial support for Selenium, as well as commercial-grade versions with premium features. Selenium’s creator, Jason Huggins, is a co-founder of Sauce Labs.
Sauce Labs also uses cloud services to make testing with Selenium testing easier than running on your own server infrastructure. Sauce On-Demand, is a hosted offering that allows you to remotely test web applications across various browsers in the cloud.
Huggins said this is an intersection between open source and the cloud that makes sense. By offering a cloud-based version of Selenium, users have the ability to parallelize their test and use cloud resources on demand in order to take advantage of a large number of instances in the cloud and get test results and bug reports must faster.
As increasing numbers of applications move online, the need for functional cross-browser testing continues to grow, which is good news for the open source Selenium project—a popular automated application testing tool with nearly 3 million downloads to date.
The company chose to license a JMS server from an unnamed OEM because its customers were encountering reliability problems with Apache ActiveMQ, said CTO Ross Mason. MuleSoft customers had previously used ActiveMQ.
A South American startup, Chamilo is a collaboration platform and an open source e-learning solution. As they put it on the site, their objective is to bring people “the best e-learning and collaboration platform in the open source world”. As it stands today Chamilo can be installed anywhere, and educative contents can be easily created and implemented through it.
GroundWork Open Source, a provider of open source system and network management software, has released Monitor Enterprise 6.1. that includes enhancements to the GWOS platform for customers with heterogeneous IT environments.
I agree, license and copyright are factors in creating and fostering communities but I don’t think it’s the most important set of factors. License and community, while related are very much separate issues. Open source tends to fetish license and thus it’s over-emphasized in conversations where it at best a contributing factor.
The one point that really does need to be refuted is that he seems to believe that artificial scarcity somehow makes people pay. He talks about the importance of a “social contract” to have people “pay for others’ brains.” He says “people need to be secure that they’re earning their dignity and don’t need to sing for their supper every night.”
With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix and match these “DNA parts” in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.
The first way GSK plans to encourage drug research is by setting up an “Open Lab” in Tres Cantos, Spain, where as many as 60 independent researchers will be able to access the the lab’s data and scientific equipment. GSK is also seeding the lab with $8 million to help fund research projects.
The first departure from the conventional business plan is that the designs of the car will be released under an open source licence. This allows people to freely build on ideas and designs, speeding up innovation and enabling technologies to be quickly improved, meeting the needs of people rather than markets.
The design of everything else is up to you, and its modular nature means that it can be tailored to virtually any application – from futuristic connected tram systems for commercial fleets, to high-performance hot rods, to neighborhood-friendly EV’s perfect for a jaunt around town.
The 3D printers from HP are designed to be cheap, but will struggle to compete with open-source designs like the MakerBot.
[...]
Thankfully, other innovators are stepping up to fill the gap: from the completely DIY RepRap, which is built on the von Nuemann-esque concept of a 3D printer capable of printing other 3D printers, to the kit-form MakerBot which offers an open-source alternative to HP’s new range with kits starting at just $750 (£460).
Willow Garage group hopes to push forward the field of open-source robotics generally. It could allow researchers to draw on common hardware and software programs for robots instead of needing to start from scratch, hopefully advancing the field of robotics.
A while ago, YouTube launched a simple demo of an HTML5-based video player. Recently, we published a blog post on our pre-spring cleaning effort and your number one request was that YouTube do more with HTML5. Today, we’re introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player.
HTML5 is a new web standard that is gaining popularity rapidly and adds many new features to your web experience. Most notably for YouTube users, HTML5 includes support for video and audio playback. This means that users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin.
YouTube on Wednesday announced that the popular video-sharing Website will now support HTML5 for video playback. HTML5, for the uninitiated, is an in-development Web standard that aims to add various niceties and enhancements to the modern Web-browsing experience.
Unfortunately…The World Wide Web Consortium, the people who draft and implement web standards, were coerced by a cartel of corporate bad guys like Apple, the RIAA/MPAA (the MAFIAA), and Google, to drop an unpatented, fully documented, public domain, royalty free set of codecs that *any* browser or user can use (Ogg Theora and Vorbis) in favor of the heavily patented, restricted license, royalty-encumbered h.264 and AAC, which only the aforementioned cartel can afford to implement or use.
Yes, I know that these codecs are widespread, and it’s mainly because Apple sells them on iTunes, but using AAC (or any other patented codec) in and of itself is nearly as bad as using a DRM-encumbered AAC that had everyone up in arms. (Yeah, I would say that MP3 is the least bad of your proprietary options, if you have to use proprietary. That doesn’t make it peachy.) Patent-encumbered codecs are the next best thing to DRM.
A Google spokesman indicated that the choice of H.264 over Ogg does not mean the company has picked H.264 for an eventual Flash-free version of YouTube. “Support for HTML5 is just a TestTube experiment at this time and a starting point,” he said. “We can’t comment specifically on what codecs we intend to support, but we’re open to supporting more of them over time. At the very least we hope to help further this active and ongoing discussion.”
I suspect that what’s going to happen now is that as the moment of truth approaches, bloggers will increasingly search around for the NYT’s replacement as online paper of record: the way that blogs work is that they’re backed up by links to reliable sources, and a link is worthless if the person clicking on it risks running straight into a paywall, unable to read the information in question. The NYT’s journalism might well continue to be reliable, but its website won’t be, any more. (For the record: I feel very comfortable in saying that Reuters stories are just as reliable as those of the NYT, if not more so, and that if a link to a story works for you, it will work identically for anybody else in the world.)
With many companies investing heavily in algae-based biofuels, researchers from the University of Virginia’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have found there are significant environmental hurdles to overcome before fuel production ramps up. They propose using wastewater as a solution to some of these challenges.
The admission today followed a New Scientist article last week that revealed the source of the claim made in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not peer-reviewed scientific literature – but a media interview with a scientist conducted in 1999. Several senior scientists have now said the claim was unrealistic and that the large Himalayan glaciers could not melt in a few decades.
Goldman Sachs has a new enemy—as if it needed another one.
Hank Greenberg, as we sit in his Park Avenue office, is telling me how to do my job, saying reporters need to get to the bottom of the events that preceded and followed the government bailout of AIG, the insurance company he built into a global giant.
In particular, they need to get to the bottom of the part played by the investment bank of Goldman Sachs. He waves a sheaf of press reports from the New York Times, Washington Post and McClatchy papers about the firm’s doings before and during the subprime meltdown. “We’re dealing with a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are not in the box. Bit by bit, we’re getting the pieces. The pieces are failing into place and the picture on the face of the puzzle is not a pretty picture.”
Let me get this straight. Is Mr. Greenberg saying the machinations of Goldman Sachs were responsible for the disastrous failure of AIG amid the recent financial crisis? “Well, it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to come to that conclusion.”
The enormous size of the thefts here (in the trillions of dollars) threatens U.S. national security, and global stability. We have seen the dollar implode, retirement accounts savaged, and major institutions brought to their knees and worse, much worse in many cases. These thefts have been implicated in the destruction of investor confidence, and there is no form of security that has not been impacted, from stocks and bonds, currencies, physical and forward commodities, agencies, to commodities, and more. These same thefts could never have been executed except with the wholesale cooperation of not just hedge funds, and investment banks, but only with the implicit cooperation, support and protection of every form of financial service monopoly involved in trading, clearance and settlement of securities globally in all forms of assets along with the major international money center banks, a pliant press, and a corrupt research industry perforated by criminal interests who pay top price for the purchase or sale of research for securities they specialize in. Oversight provided by our U.S. government branches and agencies hasn’t been deficient, it has been non-existent, a canard by every perspective.
As Democrats continued to grapple with the consequences of their loss in Massachusetts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday eliminated the most obvious avenue for completing health-care reform, saying the House will not embrace the version of the legislation already approved by the Senate.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday said the Massachusetts election was a “wake up call” for Democrats and that his party had better change course or it could suffer devastating losses come November.
“People elected Democrats in 2008 to change the country’s direction,” he told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview.
Clinton’s announcement that fighting Internet censorship would be a top priority for the Department of State is welcome news for dissidents in Iran, said Ashraf, co-founder of AccessNow.org, a group focused on providing Internet tools allowing freedom of expression.
Anyone hoping that 2010 was the year when they could produce smut or violence for direct release to DVD, without undergoing the tiresome process of having their work checked and classified by the British Board of Film Classification, can hit pause now.
Polish government wants to enforce Internet filtering to eliminate online gambling and child pornography. Everything for the benefit of our children, as this is the argument which is hard to stay against.
However, a notable group of Polish lawyers, journalists, academics, enterpreneurs, politicians and bloggers think otherwise and signed a letter (written by myself, btw) to President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, asking him to turn the law down (in Polish legal system, president has the right to do this, but the parliament can then overcome president’s opposition if 2/3 of the delegates vote for it).
For the record, here are the EFF’s four latest inductees:
* Peabody Energy, for issuing outstandingly spurious trademark claims against a spoof site criticizing their “clean coal” group;
* Yahoo, for an impressive attempt to return a cat to the bag after a leak of its guide to snooping services for law enforcement was posted to a whistleblower site;
* Perez Hilton and the Miss Universe Organization for endeavoring to stop a non-profit from airing an ad commenting on a public same-sex marriage controversy initiated by their videos; and
* Universal Music Group, for attempting to muzzle online criticism of the rapper Akon.
Amazon has added a new tool to its Kindle self-publishing service that lets authors and small publishers easily choose between DRM and no DRM when uploading texts to its online book store.
Amazon tells The Reg that no-DRM was always the default with its Digital Text Platform – used by small publishers and authors as opposed to large publishing houses. In the past, the company says, if authors wanted to add DRM, they had to download separate software. Now, they can add DRM simply by checking a radio button.
It’s that time of the year when the IFPI comes out with its annual fear-mongering report, and this year’s has really gone overboard into the ridiculous. The basics are pretty much what you’d expect (“piracy bad! industry dying! governments must break everything to protect us!”). However, the details are just downright laughable. The entire report seems premised on the idea that direct music sales is the only thing that really matters (a blatant confusion about the difference between the recording industry (which the IFPI represents) and the music industry (which the IFPI pretends to represent).
Tim Lash points us to a CNN interview with The Wiggles, the massively popular pop band for toddlers. The whole interview is interesting, but the most interesting part is the explanation of how the band went it alone.
John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), said the industry is considering civil proceedings against Ellis in a second bid to collect the £180,000 it claims he made from running the invite-only file sharing website.
Alan Ellis, the ex-admin of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, was cleared of Conspiracy to Defraud by jury of his peers last week. But now it seems that as one battle ends, another begins. IFPI says it is considering civil action, and is committed to reclaiming the money donated to the site in order to give it back to the artists.
We’ve talked in the past about some of the many rather innovative efforts by David Bowie to come up with new business models. He’s been a huge pioneer in embracing what new technologies allow — and also new markets and financial opportunities.
The government has refused to give MPs access to papers on international negotiations about copyright enforcement on the internet and at national borders.
Junior business minister David Lammy said he could not put documents about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in the House of Commons Library, because other countries wanted to maintain secrecy.
Lammy said he was “sympathetic” to calls for more transparency and had told his officials to press the point at the talks, but added: “Disclosure of any documents without the agreement of all our ACTA negotiating partners would damage the United Kingdom’s international relations.
Of course, BPI can’t accept those numbers, so its commissioned its own study which (of course!) claims that the cost to ISPs would be tiny. Hell, they’d barely be noticeable at all.
The first involves prisons in the UK who are refusing to pay the licensing fees, and thus are telling prisoners (hey look, real thieves!) that they can’t listen to music any more in any area where multiple people might be (the kitchen, workshops, restrooms, etc.) since others might overhear it. Yes, listening to music in a prison apparently requires a separate performance license.
Summary: Patent tax is rammed down people’s throats in New Zealand; Rambus gets about a billion dollars from Samsung after an ambush; Google vainly claims ownership of MapReduce
AT the behest of big corporations, politicians are now trying to advance ACTA [1, 2, 3], which is the wishlist of those seeking to maximise profits and marginalise rights.
As we have shown here before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], the ACTA [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14] is also a weapon for a monopolist like Microsoft, not just the copyright cartel. ACTA can make Free/libre software illegal and this issue is being raised in LCA, which takes place in New Zealand (NZ). To quote the opening of a new IDG article: (also published here and here)
Open source under threat from ‘grey’ IP laws
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In a presentation at this year’s Linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Wellington, New Zealand, Jackson said free software remains under threat from the expansion of copyright, misguided software patents, the desire to control the Internet by companies whose business model it threatens and the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty.
I know this to be true because I’m at what’s undoubtedly the geekiest place in the Southern Hemisphere right now: linux.conf.au 2010, the annual gathering of Australian Linux enthusiasts. With commendable broad-mindedness, this year’s event is actually taking place in Wellington. Yes, in New Zealand. You’ve probably heard of it.
You might just have heard of Linux, the open source operating system favoured by people who know Windows is too unstable and Macs are too expensive. If you haven’t, just imagine a random mixture of your work IT department, some super-enthusiastic students and some scarily clever people, and a penguin mascot. There’s about 700 Linux supporters in Wellington this week, and they know more about technology than you (or I) will ever manage.
But back to the main issue. When ACTA got mentioned during a linux.conf.au keynote presentation by NYU anthropology professor Gabriella Coleman, the audience reaction was instantaneous: much booing and hissing. This crowd knew that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was potentially very bad news. But that bad news hasn’t been passed along much, even though a crucial meeting to decide the future of the proposal will take place next week.
FurnaceBoysays that “there’s a bit of history there in NZ… regarding the pro-Microsoft factions there, especially lobbying government.”
“The patent ambush is shameful and Rambus should be denied the patent and forced to refund their extortion money (the loot)…”New Zealand hopefully pays attention to the worrisome developments which are occurring in its patent law [1, 2]. Microsoft New Zealand, which is in a bit of a chaos these days, is always trying block Free software in New Zealand — if not by back-room deals, then using legal means. This afternoon we mentioned the New Zealand government attempting a migration to GNU/Linux on the desktop. It is a development like this which usually leads Microsoft CEO to making emergency trips (like the one to Munich [1, 2]) and ‘pulling an EDGI’.
Controversial Rambus Ambush
In other patent news, the Rambus ambush (submarine patent) is again being exploited in order to extort competitors [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. The patent ambush is shameful and Rambus should be denied the patent and forced to refund their extortion money (the loot); instead, Rambus’ extortion racket finds another victim, this time Samsung.
KOREAN ELECTRONICS GIANT Samsung has raised a white flag and agreed to pay $900 million to make Rambus lawyers go away.
It was a good day at the office yesterday for Rambus; it made $900m when Samsung caved in on the eve of a court case, which the Korean firm had planned to fight alongside Hynix and Micron.
theodp writes “Two years ago, David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker deemed MapReduce a major step backwards (here are the original paper and a defense of it) that ‘represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago.’ A year later, the pair teamed up with other academics and eBay to slam MapReduce again. But the very public complaints didn’t stop Google from demanding a patent for MapReduce; nor did it stop the USPTO from granting Google’s request (after four rejections). On Tuesday, the USPTO issued U.S. Patent No. 7,650,331 to Google for inventing Efficient Large-Scale Data Processing.”
Ars Technica correctly points out that Google may just be claiming ownership of a public good (taking away from the commons).
The USPTO awarded search giant Google a software method patent that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce, a strategy for parallel processing that is used by the search giant. If Google chooses to aggressively enforce the patent, it could have significant implications for some open source software projects that use the technique, including the Apache Foundation’s popular Hadoop software framework.
The concept of mapping and reducing fuctions has been a fundamental idea behind distributed parallel processing for many years, and in a dispute it could be reasonably claimed that Google didn’t invent MapReduce itself, but that would just move the argument on to the specific claims within the patent.
For Google, this already acts as a weapon that intimidates competitors. It gives Google leverage that it probably does not deserve; the matter of fact is that many nice inventions are never claimed by anyone in the form of a patent, until some greedy corporation comes along and decides to become “first to file”. Many simple “inventions” — PageRank included — come from academia (Stanford in Google’s case) and TechDirt debates whether or not academic research should be eligible to earn patents; after all, the purpose of patents is not to promote creation but to exclude parallel innovation, which is crucial in the mostly taxpayers-funded academic community, unlike in a shareholders-driven industry.
Should Data Collected For Academic Research Get Intellectual Property Protection?
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Now, while the economic setup in the academic world may seem to be slightly different (researchers aren’t necessarily trying to maximize revenue), the overall incentive structure remains effectively the same (and money is still a part of it all). Freeing up your data so that more people can analyze it increases the overall value of the data and is more likely to lead to additional breakthroughs or interesting findings from that data. In turn, that can lead back to more interest for the original data collector and more opportunities to do more or to be involved in more relevant projects. Locking up the data, on the other hand, takes away many of those incentives for no clear benefit.
In my thesis I was strictly required to exclude others by including a statement about ownership of something called “intellectual property” (which I don’t believe in and in fact all my code is Free software). Universities really ought to rethink this if they want to innovate rather than exclude. Ideas do not spread and inspire others by decreasing their distribution and means of dissemination. The Internet has changed everything and regulations should change accordingly (in the arts, in software, and in knowledge). █
“People naively say to me, “If your program is innovative, then won’t you get the patent?” This question assumes that one product goes with one patent.”—Richard Stallman
“The day that the software sector forms a clear front against software patents, as pharma does for a unitary patent system… will be the day our cause comes close to winning.”—Pieter Hintjens, Fosdem07 Interview
Summary: TiVo is preemptively sued by Microsoft for alleged patent violation and Microsoft’s PR puts together some lies to disguise the real cause
Microsoft publicly insisted that it’s not suing anyone with patents, unless that someone happens to sue Microsoft first. Microsoft lied however; we know this because of cases such as Primax [1, 2, 3] and even TomTom, where Microsoft took a direct hit to intimidate Linux distributors.
Now, to be fair, TiVo is a patent aggressor which has been suing with software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], but still, Microsoft was never targeted by TiVo. Nevertheless, Microsoft is suing TiVo, though it has nothing to do with Linux* based on Groklaw’a quick and detailed analysis. To quote portions:
That’s, in my view, Microsoft spin, that it’s doing this to help out AT&T. I would describe it more like this: remember when SCO sued AutoZone for using Linux in its business? AutoZone didn’t write Linux. It just used it. So SCO sued an end user. Similarly, TiVo is suing AT&T. But AT&T didn’t write Microsoft Mediaroom, the implicated software. Microsoft did. So naturally, AT&T has demanded that Microsoft indemnify AT&T, and so here comes Microsoft, essentially defending itself, because if AT&T loses, it’s Microsoft who has to shell out the bucks.
[...]
In short, the PR version is that Microsoft is defending AT&T as a Good Samaritan. The reality as I read this is the Microsoft is defending itself, because if AT&T loses, Microsoft faces having to pay yet another pile of bucks for having infringed someone’s patent, just like what just happened to it in the i4i v. Microsoft patent case Microsoft lost and is appealing. That is what is at stake in this picture. You can see that very clearly in footnote 1 on that same page:
1 If TiVo is willing to state on the record that it is not accusing and will not accuse the software used in the U-verse product and/or service, including any aspect of Microsoft Mediaroom, of infringing the TiVo patents, intervention by Microsoft would be unnecessary.
[...]
So, this isn’t about helping out a friend. This is about Microsoft selling software that someone is claiming is patent infringing. Again. AT&T is just using Microsoft Mediaroom. That’s why when it got sued, it called up Microsoft. So Microsoft is defending itself. You have to hand it to its PR people, though. They get their spin in print.
[...]
In short, friends, this story has absolutely nothing to do with Linux. I knew you’d wonder, because that was my first thought, too, that maybe this was another TomTom. It’s not. And as for TiVo, TiVo may use Linux in its business, but it has not shown any inclination to adopt FOSS values. Linux folks don’t sue people over patents. Some of us remember the GPLv3 discussions, and I’d say we nailed it.
It doesn’t matter if Microsoft lies about the motives; the press blindly believes anything that PR departments are saying, so reality is suddenly an illusion and “war is peace”, as the famous line goes. Almost everyone — including The Register, Joseph Tartakoff and the business press — repeats the same Microsoft talking points:
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is suing TiVo Inc. (TIVO) as part of a broader attempt to provide legal cover for partner AT&T Inc. (T).
Microsoft late Tuesday filed a suit against TiVo in a San Francisco federal court, claiming that the Alviso, Calif., maker of digital video recorders illegally uses technology related to purchasing and delivering video and the ability to display programming information. Both are seen as an attempt to counter an earlier suit filed by TiVo against AT&T, which uses Microsoft’s technology in its television service. Microsoft on Friday requested to intervene in the case on AT&T’s behalf.
Microsoft is standing up for AT&T because the telecommunications company is the largest, and most influential, customer of its Internet video platform. When AT&T chose to go with an Internet-based TV service, it opted to work with Microsoft, which powers the video delivery platform, as well as the digital video recording technology. As a result, it feels the need to shoulder the legal burden for AT&T.
Microsoft has filed a patent-infringement case against TiVo in one federal court and asked to intervene in a dispute between TiVo and AT&T in another federal court — setting the stage for a legal battle over some of the most popular features used to watch television on digital video recorders.
But they are wrong. That’s just Microsoft’s excuse, for the reasons given above.
In any event, as Microsoft goes patent lawsuits-happy, it is possibly repeating the mistakes of old Apple. TechDirt has a short new essay about it, titled “When Declining To Enforce Your Intellectual Property Rights Strengthens Your Market Position”
Over the years we’ve shown many examples of times when it makes much more business sense not to enforce your intellectual property rights, but reader Jerry Leichter sends in another example.
The fact that Microsoft is suing everyone with patents confirms what Jeremy Allison has just said; Microsoft is in trouble, and like any cornered animal in this type of situation, it is attacking. Only a Microsoft MVP [1, 2, 3] would trust Microsoft at this stage. █
_____ * This causes damage to Linux only indirectly, as without TiVo there would be less Linux use. According to Comes vs Microsoft exhibits, Microsoft wants to plant .NET/Mono in devices like TiVo (because of software patent royalties).
Summary: The LUG of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi complains about attempts by Microsoft to poison Indian standards with software patents; LCA receives a wakeup call regarding Novell’s malfunctioning Mono
Microsoft is trying to impose software patents on India, despite these patents being against the law (Indian patents exclude software). Microsoft behaves the same way in South Africa; it is so desperate to illegalise its competition that it breaks the law in order to change or overcome the law. Under a saner system, Microsoft would possibly be put before courts across the world. Microsoft deliberately ignores the law.
“Under a saner system, Microsoft would possibly be put before courts across the world. Microsoft deliberately ignores the law.”Indian citizens understand suppression fairly well because stories about the British are not so distant in their history. They too are some of the most active when it comes to resisting the invader, whose patents are being used as a tool to tell locals that they are not permitted to write their own software. Instead, they must rent software from a company that was found guilty of tax evasion in their country — a company which was actually found guilt of monopoly abuse in many other parts of the world. It really takes some nerve, does it not?
The GNU/Linux Users Group of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi has just responded to the latest round of lobbying for software patents in Indian standards. To quote a portion:
This document examines the Draft Policy on Open Standards for eGovernment v2.4 dated 25.11.2009 and the process followed in adopting the same. You can download from http://fosscomm.in/OpenStandards .
If v2.4 is adopted as official policy, it will result in:
1. The legitimization of proprietary standards that entail the payment of royalty fees and huge foreign exchange outflows. This cost will be paid by Indian taxpayers and pocketed by monopolistic vendors located in foreign countries, since most proprietary standards are controlled by entities outside India. Unlike royaltyfree open standards, the usage of proprietary standards will mean that users will, directly or indirectly, pay a royalty to a private entity for the privilege of communicating with the government.
2. Reduce eGovernment in India to a mess of incompatible systems that cannot communicate with each other, thus defeating the very purpose of eGovernment, if multiple standards for the same purpose are allowed.
Further away near Australia, LCA takes place and it seems to be spectacularly well organised based on press coverage.
Jeremy Allison, a Brit, has just given a talk at LCA and he repeats his warning about Mono [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. ITWire reports:
LCA 2010: Allison warns of patent traps in Mono
Patents are the only threat that Microsoft can brandish against free and open source software and that is exactly why people should be wary of the Mono project, free software advocate and Samba hacker Jeremy Allison told a packed auditorium at the 11th LCA today.
Allison’s presentation, titled “Microsoft and free software: the elephant in the room” was held in the second largest auditorium but it was difficult to find standing room once he got going.
Sporting a T-shirt with the Samba logo on the front, and “opening windows to a wider world” on the rear, Allison presented a meticulously prepared set of arguments to show that patents were the only way which the word’s largest software company had left to attack FOSS.
Mono is an attempt to create an open source clone of Microsoft’s .NET development environment; the project was begun by Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza who claims this will pull Windows developers over to GNU/Linux.
Allison said the patent war would be a never-ending conflict. “All the patent promises about Mono count for nothing,” he said. Other methods of harming FOSS had not borne the expected fruit.
Microsoft to declare patent war on iPhone/Android?
A key Linux developer has predicted Microsoft will use its huge patent portfolio to cripple smartphone competitors and boost its woeful Windows Mobile market share.
Microsoft will increasingly utilise its patent library to try and stifle any competition for netbook OSes and reassert itself in the mobile phone space, a prominent open source developer has argued.
[...]
That strategy is likely to be particularly prominent in the market for non-PC devices such as netbooks and smart phones, where Windows doesn’t enjoy the same strength of market share. While co-marketing schemes have seen former Linux supporters such as Asus largely shift to Windows, maintaining overall share and eliminating new competitors is critical to Microsoft’s survival, Allison said.
Connecting the dots, however, I’m tempted to push this a little forward. Contrary to what Microsoft envisioned or hoped or simply told us, the Windows ecosystem is not moving towards a .NET centric solution, but .NET is only a powerful and sophisticated execution and development environment on top of Windows .
The #1 framework or language is Java, based on data from those who track programming. █
“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
Summary: Microsoft goes to Washington again, hoping to influence the government it has already funded by offering secret agents (“law enforcement” with the pretext of “security”) a free ride in datacentres
BRAD Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, gave $25,000 to the Obama inauguration (he essentially paid Obama) and although he is not making visits to the White House like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do [1, 2, 3] (Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Steve Ballmer, and his wife Connie Snyder each gave $50,000 to Obama), he still goes to Washington, along with the legion of lobbyists.
“Gathering intelligence on enemy activities is critical to the success of the Slog.”
Watch Brad Smith as he now lobbies the Obama administration for self gain (and potential harm to Google). He wants to allow access by officials, even on the very same week that we learn about the FBI breaking the law with illegal snoops (see references 1 and 2 at the bottom). Let’s not forget that Microsoft assembles dossiers about its critics [1, 2, 3, 4] (Microsoft “dissidents”, which it calls “enemies”).
During a visit to Washington, D.C., this morning, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, asked the U.S. government to overhaul its laws to make cloud computing more secure and private, and to make it easier for cloud-computing providers and law enforcement officials to track down and prosecute online attackers.
So now we know who determines the law of the land. It’s the corporations, not the supposedly-impartial and independent officials. █
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. Also young teachers were thin on the ground. Maybe ICT is uncool?
