03.24.10
Posted in Apple, Bill Gates, FSF, GNU/Linux, Google, Kernel, Microsoft, OIN, Patents at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Contrary to common misconceptions, the FSF’s philosophy and work actually defend Linux from the patent attacks it currently faces from Apple, Microsoft, and possibly their henchmen at Intellectual Ventures
SEVERAL days ago, TuxRadar (a Linux Format magazine Web site) decided to run a strange poll with a strange introduction that can be seen as bait (the question seems like push polling [1, 2, 3]), or maybe an attempt to make the FSF look bad. That’s fair enough as they can express an opinion or seek opinions, but as Jason from The Source put it:
This reminds me of a GNOME Foundation poll.
Jason refers to this incident [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which ended up with tears.
“The FSF is actually fighting against the problems and the associated corruption of the patent system, for example.”Anyway, that poll about the FSF was seemingly alienating GNU/FSF and it led to this troll headline from ECT, which says “Would Linux Be Better Off Without the FSF?”
This is ludicrous. The FSF is actually fighting against the problems and the associated corruption of the patent system, for example. On the contrary, Linux is backed by some of the very same companies that are part of the problem. They have many software patents that they are not prepared to give up or give away (bar OIN).
Ciaran from the FSF has produced a full transcript of Andrew Tridgell’s recent talk (video here) and The Source remarked on it as follows:
Well worth reading, especially in light of increasing patent-based FUD attacks against Linux from Microsoft and the doom-and-gloom appeasement arguments and anti-community actions from Microsoft lackeys.
In the comments, Jose_X points at this old article from Richard Stallman. It’s about patents. The FSF should be commended for its work on the issue of software patents, not denounced or ostracised by people who choose to ignore reality. The reality is not as simple as “Linux is cool”; there are many legal attacks or even corruption (white-collar crime) involved in marginalising Linux and those who are blind to it are not helping the cause of GNU/Linux promotion. Moreover, those who stomp on the FSF are doing more damage than they realise.
Glyn Moody has published this follow-on post after a previous post where he wrote about Intellectual Ventures.
Free Software’s Secret Patent Weapon
Yesterday I was warning about the threat that the super-troll Intellectual Ventures represents. To provide some balance, here’s a surprisingly upbeat piece from Samba creator Andrew Tridgell on how to read software patents. It’s incredibly well done, and I recommend it to everyone.
Tridgell’s warnings were first mentioned by us in a post about "Apple's Patent Threat to Linux". We more or less foresaw what shortly afterwards became a reality because Apple sued Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and received Microsoft’s support [1, 2, 3]. It smacks of racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. HTC and Google will fight back and as Lora Bentley put it, the circumstances make it apparent that Linux indeed is the target (Android).
The fact that Google issued a statement in support of HTC before HTC even commented on the lawsuit also lends credence to the idea that Apple is actually gunning for Google here.
Google is also harassed (sued for patent violation) by a company called Red Bend. It does not appear to have a software product (maybe just licensing). The company’s Web site is vague about it and all the company talks about are some big numbers (new press release) and FOTA [PDF].
“People are gradually beginning to ask questions about the role of Intellectual Ventures and their immense holding of software patents.”
–Simon PhippsIt is worth noting that Red Bend chooses Windows for its Web site and its latest blog post is about Microsoft.
Going back to Intellectual Ventures, which was funded by Apple, Microsoft, and Bill Gates, this patent troll has over 1,000 ‘satellite’ firms that it is said to be using to sabotage the business of companies which refuse to pay “protection money” (secretly, under NDAs). Simon Phipps has this to say about Kodak's latest revelations about Intellectual Ventures: “People are gradually beginning to ask questions about the role of Intellectual Ventures and their immense holding of software patents. Kodak is not a company I like (they trolled Sun for a fortune) but this accusation is very serious. Getting to the bottom of it would take some serious and well-funded investigation. Or, plan B, we can ask our legislators to remove the mechanisms used for trolling…”
Stephen O’Grady explains why he is against software patents and uses Intellectual Ventures to make his case:
Still others expect me to argue that the greater good – a dangerous phrase if ever there was one – demands that software be unpatentable. That Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures is the epitome of evil in the world, with a revenue model based strictly on extracting value from an antiquated patent system that has been mistakenly applied to an industry that requires no such protections. But while I personally believe that Myhrvold’s company is based entirely on extracting profit from a broken system rather stimulating invention as he claims – that Intellectual Ventures is just a version of those infomercials seeking ignorant “inventors” to exploit writ large – this isn’t why I’m against software patents.
TechDirt also has this new example of why software patents have gone extremely silly.
Why Real Programmers Don’t Take The USPTO Seriously: Doubly-Linked List Patented
[...]
It’s pretty difficult to find software engineers who take the patent system seriously. There are a few, but it’s still pretty difficult. For the most part, they recognize that code is just a tool: you can make it do all sorts of things, given enough time and resources, but that doesn’t mean that doing any particular thing in code is an “invention” that no one else should be able to do. And then, sometimes, they discover that something pretty basic and old has suddenly been given a patent. Brad Feld discusses his discovery that doubly linked lists were apparently patented in 2006 (patent number 7,028,023)…
In the news this week we have: “Cognex and Fuji Resolve Vision Software Patent Dispute”
As we continue to emphasise, a lot of the bullying with software patents comes from Apple and Microsoft (among the large companies, IBM and Google do not do this, even though they have software patents). But there is more to Microsoft than just Microsoft itself; for instance, look at former Microsoft employees who created companies such as LikeWise [1, 2]. They are playing with software patents and with Microsoft. They bring that over to UNIX, Linux, and even VMware, which is also run by former Microsoft employees and it shows. Microsoft is trying to feed Linux with software patents by shoving them down its throat. What is Linus going to do about it [1, 2]? If it weren’t for the FSF and FFII, for example, where would we be? █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Search, Ubuntu at 4:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.” –Jim Allchin, Microsoft
Summary: Microsoft hugs “open source” in order to change what it actually is and Matt Asay, a former Noveller who came to Canonical, denounces Microsoft critics and defends engagement with Microsoft
YESTERDAY we mentioned de Icaza’s latest boosting of Microsoft. He helps Microsoft promote OData. Here is what The Source has to say.
Mr. de Icaza continues to fawn over / promote Microsoft technologies. I find it amusing and revealing at the same time that his infatuation isn’t simply with COM or C# or .NET or Silverlight, but has over time come to be more and more fanboy-like.
I don’t recall any big blogs or tweets from Mr. de Icaza about gData – but I’m sure I just missed them. But when it comes to Microsoft’s .NET-based knock-off, well then boy howdy that’s an exciting topic for Team Mono!
This “Team Mono” admires everything from Microsoft, which is why it spends its time mimicking Microsoft with Mono and Moonlight. It’s about money and about the people whom Novell hired in recent years. Novell pays their wage (and Microsoft pays Novell), so their admiration of Microsoft doesn’t come cheap. Novell continues to spread the illusion that there is something “open” about .NET and Silver Lie.
“Canonical hires people from Microsoft and Novell, thus making the most fundamental human resource mistake and not surprisingly the company is suddenly willing to put Microsoft behind its back.”Pointing to this ACT/Microsoft lobbying event (see the original page at EuropeanVoice.com), one reader tells us that Microsoft is faking "open source" again, even when it comes to Silver Lie. “Open Source on top of Silverlight and other MS technologies” is what our reader calls it. He also shows that Microsoft promotes these lies, whereby bogus claims of “open source” neglect to mention prerequisites. See the Twitter page where Microsoft lists some familiar crooks from the OOXML fiasco in the side picture.
We are genuinely concerned about what Microsoft is doing to “open source” because it’s no accident that Microsoft causes harm to it. First of all, Microsoft is controlling the debate with former Microsoft employees like Mr. Walli, who still try to tell open source people how to do business.
Then, there’s more nonsense from former pseudo-journalists who spin Microsoft’s work as “communicators” on the company’s payroll [1, 2]. They won’t admit that it’s about harming Free software (GPL) and GNU/Linux, undermining the foundations that “Open Source” initially relied upon. It’s as though Microsoft wants to change its opposition party from the inside, essentially taking control of it or changing its nature so as to weaken and assimilate it.
Watch another former Microsoft employee (who occasionally promotes Mono) pushing into Linux news sites his story which is titled “Should Ubuntu Have Been Created?”
Microsoft knows damn well that you need to get behind someone… before you stab that someone in the back. Canonical hires people from Microsoft and Novell, thus making the most fundamental human resource mistake and not surprisingly the company is suddenly willing to put Microsoft behind its back.
What will Canonical’s COO Matt Asay say about those remarks from former Microsoft employees? Well, based on this new post, he is willing to reconcile with Microsoft, maybe conditionally (well, if only Microsoft stopped attacking with software patents, lawsuits by proxy, smears, et cetera). The sad thing is that Asay daemonises Microsoft skeptics who merely interpret the company’s present actions, not just its history of endless abuse. The Source responds to this post from Asay by saying:
People that do want want Microsoft baked into every level of their Linux experience are not “spewing invectives”: Perhaps they see no need to rely on a court-convicted abusive monopolist. Perhaps, having finally broke free of Microsoft lock-in, they hesitate to expose themselves again. Perhaps they see how far Linux has come despite Microsoft’s best efforts, and see no margin in changing.
People that have moral, ethical and philosophical objections to the restriction of user freedoms are not “spewing invectives” – they are simply attempting to live a life in harmony with their beliefs.
Stop trying to paint all criticism as “invectives” or “zealotry” or whatever derogatory and dismissive label you would rather apply than actually deal with the substance of the criticism.
[...]
I do agree with Mr. Asay that “it gets old”. Which is why I honestly don’t understand those who intentionally fire things up by promoting Microsoft technology. You know it will be controversial. You know it will cause problems. That is obvious, inarguable and proven time and time again.
So, why do it? And, then having done this thing you knew would be divisive, pretend to be suprised and against divisiveness?
That’s what gets old to me.
This is why we still generally distrust Asay. Microsoft has been trying to suck up to him for several years in order to soften Alfresco (Microsoft had meals with him) and now to weaken Ubuntu, which already uses Mono and Microsoft for search (via Yahoo!) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Let’s not forget what Microsoft did to Yahoo! It ought to give Asay a clue. Yahoo! is a wreck after Microsoft crashed the company and Yahoo’s chief technologist is the latest person to quit. Given Canonical’s flirts with Microsoft, it treads on some very shaky ground and simply refuses to see this because, as Allchin once put it when he spoke about Novell:
“We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger….If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.”
–Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Platform Group Vice President
Asay should really get his eyes open. Canonical is listed as a risk factor in Microsoft’s filings for investors. Microsoft wants Canonical destroyed or deformed such that it serves Microsoft like Novell does. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Free/Libre Software at 3:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Now that customers who were forced to get Windows with a new PC choose an additional Web browser, the declines in Microsoft’s share are seen
AS we noted last week, given real choice on Windows (there is still no operating system choice and it ought to be rectified), customers choose to avoid Internet Explorer and according to some statistics (which we take with a barrel of salt for obvious reasons), Microsoft loses market share in Europe.
According to Statcounter, IE use in France has dropped 2.5 percent since last month’s implementation of the ballot, 1.3 percent in Italy, and 1 percent in Britain. It’s still early days, and it’ll take more than this to chip away from IE’s 62 percent lead in the browser war, but it’s certainly not a good trend for Microsoft. With that in mind, we’re going to have to ask you to place your bets now.
Lora Bentley adds some necessary background about the problems with this ballot [1, 2, 3, 4].
That ballot debuted at the beginning of this month, and immediately, IBM’s Rob Weir had a problem with it. According to Computerworld, Weir said Microsoft failed to use a random shuffle algorithm. He said: “This was a rookie mistake. [It] is more in the nature of a ‘naive algorithm,’ like the bubble sort, that inexperienced programmers inevitably will fall upon when solving a given problem. I bet if we gave this same problem to 100 freshmen computer science majors, at least one of them would make the same mistake.”
More than anything else, it ought to say something about Microsoft’s poor programming skills and as we pointed out last week, it seems like Microsoft just copied someone else’s code. It would not be the first time and Microsoft does this illegally sometimes [1, 2, 3, 4]. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Novell, Ron Hovsepian at 3:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell BrainShare has the company’s CEO, Ron Hovsepian, avoiding the subject of Elliott Associates, which still wants Novell acquired
IN the news we keep hearing about Novell spurning a buyout offer but not ruling out an acquisition in general [1, 2, 3, 4]. In fact, based on the reaction of the vulture fund, there is expectation that another buyout offer is on its way. “Novell Says ‘No’ but Elliot Hears ‘Maybe’,” says ECT.
An offer of $2 billion just wasn’t enough for Novell’s board of directors, which rebuffed a purchase offer from Elliot Associates. The board says it’s considering other options, but Elliot says it will keep in pursuit. Novell has hinted that it would consider selling for the right price, either to Elliot or another suitor. If that comes to pass, what happens to Suse Linux?
Groklaw, which wants the SCO trial to carry on and be concluded, chooses to believe that it’s over, despite the more complex reality. The VAR Guy has this short report from BrainShare:
After rejecting an unsolicited takeover bid on March 20, Novell had to communicate some quantifiable business progress during the Novell BrainShare conference this week in Salt Lake City, Utah. With that reality in mind, CEO Ron Hovsepian (pictured) and Chief Marketing Officer/Channel Chief John Dragoon offered The VAR Guy a financial and channel partner progress report on March 22. Here’s a recap.
Alas, this is longer than a simple recap.
[...]
During our discussion, CEO Hovsepian was careful not to say too much about the recent Elliott Associates bid for Novell. His standard statement: Novell will continue to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders.
If the negotiations with Elliott Associates were history, why would he avoid talking about them? Novell’s CEO only made one carefully-crafted statement over the weekend. It’s likely to suggest that he is keeping the door open; he does not want to speak badly about the vulture fund, maybe because he reckons that another bid will come with a different price, as expected right from the start (see the posts below). █
Background
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Kernel, Kyocera Mita, LG, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 3:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Kyocera introduces phones with Android, yet a lot of people do not remember the company’s deal with Microsoft and its effects
ONE of Microsoft’s lesser-known Linux deals (a patent racket) is with Kyocera [1, 2, 3] (category page here). This deal involves Kyocera paying Microsoft for Linux, which it uses in few of its products. According to this short new report, the racket will extend to Android phones (and be related to Sanyo too, being the exFAT collaborator and Kyocera adjunct).
Following the saying “The more the merrier,” I am pleased to announce that Kyocera revealed the launch of a new Kyocera (and Sanyo) branded Android device at CTIA 2010 today. The Kyocera Zio M6000 will be released in Q2.
So here we have a phone that will also have Sanyo involved in Microsoft’s racket. It’s all rather similar with Samsung, which has this new Android phone. It’s bad for Android [1, 2] because Microsoft is taxing Android here, behind Google’s back (it turns Android to Ballnux). Similarly, Samsung’s competitor in Korea, LG, makes new Android phones. These too will be taxed by Microsoft as LG will pass money to Microsoft for each one sold, based on the nature of the patent deals that are racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Considering Apple’s Android lawsuit [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] which is supported by Microsoft [1, 2, 3], this is just part of the problem. Microsoft and Apple would love to treat Linux as though it is theirs. █
“Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won’t say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: “It’s an unsafe neighbourhood, why don’t you pay me 20 bucks and I’ll make sure you’re okay,” that’s illegal. It’s racketeering.”
–Mark Shuttleworth
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.23.10
Posted in Antitrust, Europe, GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, Servers, Windows at 9:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft partners continue to attack GNU/Linux (on IBM mainframes) for its dominance that poses a threat to Windows Server
LAST WEEK we showed that Microsoft was coordinating a proxy attack on IBM’s mainframes, which run GNU/Linux (mostly SUSE but also Red Hat). The campaign is ironically called “OpenMainframe.org” as though Windows is open and non-profit. This proxy attack is not something new and we have already gathered evidence about it in posts such as:
Microsoft is just SCOing IBM like it's SCOing Google and even admits doing this.
According to the following new press release from France, some rather obscure company called TurboHercules pulls an antitrust motion against IBM. Watch TurboHercules’ connections:
IBM said TurboHercules was a member of organisations funded by rivals such as Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) “to attack the mainframe”, which is IBM’s main business.
TurboHercules, a privately-held company set up in 2009, is a member of a non-profit trade group called the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which counts Microsoft and Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) as members, but not IBM.
But wait. Microsoft paid millions of dollars to CCIA. We explained this before (see the posts above). Here it is again:
“Having yet another complaint in Europe — by an open-source company, no less — points to a systemic pattern of behavior by IBM directed at anyone who threatens its mainframe monopoly,” said Erika Mann, CCIA’s executive vice president and head of its European office in Brussels.
Who paid your agency, Erika? Remember that company from Redmond?
Either way, a lot of press coverage omitted these crucial details [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], which are so simple to conveniently ignore. Mainframes continue to replace Wintel servers (Windows on x86) in some places, so Microsoft needs to do to IBM what it openly admitted doing to Google. It requires tremendous discipline to be unable to see it. █
“On the same day that CA blasted SCO, Open Source evangelist Eric Raymond revealed a leaked email from SCO’s strategic consultant Mike Anderer to their management. The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.”
–Bruce Perens
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 8:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
It was not long ago when Microsoft Windows had a tight stranglehold on the operating system market. Walk into a Circuit City or Staples, it seemed, and virtually any computer you took home would be running the most current flavor of Windows. Ditto for computers ordered direct from a manufacturer. In the last decade, though, the operating system market has begun to change. Slightly more than 5% of all computers now run Mac, according to NetMarketShare.com. Linux is hovering just beneath 1% of the overall market share in operating systems. And although that might sound like a small number, Linux is far more than just a fringe OS. In fact, it’s running in quite a few more places than you probably suspect. Below are fifty places Linux is running today in place of Windows or Mac. For easy reading, they are divided amongst government, home, business, and educational usage.
-
Kernel Space
-
Perhaps the title should have been; ‘the lack of a suitable compressed file system on linux’. A compressed file system in this case refers to a setup where the files are saved on the disk in a predefined compressed format (such as gzip or bzip2). When you read from those files they will be automatically decompressed by the file system. Similarly when you attempt to create a new file or modify an old file, it should be automatically compressed before saving. Such a file system is sure to be very slow for random access but for sequential access it wouldn’t matter so much. It might even be faster than an uncompressed file system because hard drives continues to be the real bottleneck in most computers today.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Earlier this month AMD rolled out a new workstation graphics card driver, which is effectively the same Catalyst driver used by the consumer-oriented Radeon graphics cards but with greater testing and certification for the ATI workstation offerings. The press release announcing this new driver was titled “Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro Graphics Driver,” so we decided to see if this proprietary driver really lives up to its claims under Linux.
-
X Server 1.8 may be the first X.Org release in recent times where it’s released on time or at least close to being on schedule. Back in October, X Server 1.8 was given a release date of the 31st of March. This is just a little over a week away, but it looks like this next major update to the X Server that brings udev input handling, DRI2 updates, xorg.conf.d support, and other changes.
-
-
Applications
-
Interaction With Proprietary
-
While Apple provides support for the iPod and iPhones on Mac OS X (of course) and even Windows, complete with iTunes support, they provide no such love for those wishing to use their gadgets on Linux. This has led the Linux community to reverse-engineering Apple’s USB protocol for the iPod/iPhone devices, developing different hacks, and in some cases even needing to “jail break” the product in order to use it fully under Linux. There’s a few different projects around that seek to implement iPhone/iPod support on Linux, but one of them that takes an entirely free software approach and does not depend upon any DRM or proprietary libraries is libimobiledevice. This week the libimobiledeviceproject is celebrating their version 1.0 release after being in development for nearly three years.
-
Were happy to announce a new open source project called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE for short. The goal of ANGLE is to layer WebGLs subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls. Were open-sourcing ANGLE under the BSD license as an early work-in-progress, but when complete, it will enable browsers like Google Chrome to run WebGL content on Windows computers without having to rely on OpenGL drivers.
-
Instructionals
-
-
KDE document reader Okular doesn’t just read multiple document formats; it also allows you to add annotations to files as you read them. Note that to get this functionality, you need version 0.8, which is in Ubuntu Karmic, or Debian Squeeze (see my howto if you want to install this on a Lenny box).
-
-
-
-
-
-
Games
-
It hasn’t been that long ago that we brought you news of 2d boy World of Goo and the Frictional Games trilogy Penumbra. Since then, things have been pretty quiet on the Linux Game Front…at least to my ear, but then again, I’m not much of a gamer.
Sure, I’ve played all the repository shooters…bloody chunks flying and monsters galore. I have a short attention span…mostly because I suck at shooter games. I just don’t play them often.
-
We would like to formally announce the arrival of Xonotic – A free (GPL), fast-paced first-person shooter that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Xonotic is a direct successor of the Nexuiz Project.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
This summer the KDE project will once again participate in Google Summer of Code! Summer of Code will allow KDE to grow and bring in new developers to the community.
-
This is the first article in a series of articles that wrap up achievements, work in progress and some background of what happened during Tokamak4, the Oxygen, KWin and Plasma sprint. Tokamak4 took place from 19th to 26th February 2010 in Nürnberg, Germany in the openSUSE premises and was kindly made possible by Novell and KDE e.V. During the sprint, 26 hackers gathered to work on various aspects of the KDE user experience. The combined sprint of the workspace and window manager teams and the Oxygen artwork team made cross-collaboration possible across these KDE software components.
In this article, we actually start off with a side-track of Tokamak4 which was hardware integration. It turned out that many people working on this were actually participating in Tokamak4, so the team took the opportunity to sit together and hack some on different aspects of hardware integration in KDE SC and specifically Plasma.
-
KDE’s Plasma Team took the opportunity of their Tokamak 4 get-together to also celebrate the release of KDE SC 4.4. The team went out for dinner and then headed straight into a Karaoke bar, where various performers brought real culture to this part of Frankonia. One highlight was Chani performing the German 80s anthem “99 Luftballons” and making everybody in the audience be in awe of her mad language skills. Previously, Sebas had taken the stage to present a KDE version of The Man in Black (Johnny Cash) performing Ring of Fire. After a good couple of hours of Karaoke, the team decided to move on and conquer a 70s-style bar in the heart of Nuremberg to lift the glasses on a great KDE SC 4.4 and a successful Tokamak 4.
-
We also need to learn how to define ourselves by our successes and see our failures as interesting, expected and required by-products of the road to those successes. There are people in the community who look at our success in countries around the world and discount it all as being “not relevant” because it isn’t in the country they live in, and therefore conclude Free software has failed generally. Similarly when we talk about using KDE (or other F/OSS) software in production usage, instead of defining our successes and positioning ourselves in line with them we too often discount all possible usage of that software because of failures that affect only a portion of the market. This leads to us eliminating ourselves from entire market segments that we are perfect for just because we aren’t (yet? 
universally perfect.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
If Gnome developers are to be believed, the desktop of the future arrived last week when the release candidate for Gnome 2.30–which could become Gnome 3.0–was made available. My CPU needed a workout, so I recently compiled the new desktop and gave it a run. Here’s a look at the desktop environment that–like it or not–may soon be coming to a computer near you.
-
Bottom line: Software can’t save a mailing list full of people who actively dislike each other. Maybe I’m crazy, though, but it seems like software that helped mailing lists function more like parties could really help mailing lists cope better with anti-social people.
-
GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.
-
-
New Releases
-
Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5, codename Awen is ready. Click on the player below to see the video announcement (HD version) we made for the LibrePlanet 2010 conference. More info after the jump.
-
Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.10 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that is based on the 2.6.29.1 Linux kernel and is only 10.6 MB in size. In addition to the usual bug fixes, the latest update includes several changes and updates.
-
The interface changes. We were planning to release these with PC/OS 11, but since we have to do an update to PC/OS 10.1 we figured what the hey. There isnt much change to the panels, just the theme. We now use the PC/OS Daylight theme, derived from Light X as the standard theme.
Up…date Manager is now included with PC/OS 10.1.1. This just delivers critical system updates and will not allow you to update to a later Ubuntu system. But for critical updates its a must have.
-
-
-
Should be 14.0 due to new kernel, new Xorg, new GCC, new GTK… but we follow Slackware versioning for compatability. Kernel is 2.6.33, Xorg is 1.7.5.
-
-
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced that IBM has selected Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a platform in its new cloud computing service for development and test.
-
Shares of Red Hat (RHT) have been red hot this past year.
-
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading higher by +0.17% ahead of its quarterly earnings release. Red Hat, world’s leading open source technology solutions provider is expected to release its quarterly results on March 24th.
-
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0. with enhanced functionality to update its JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 is a comprehensive platform designed to integrate applications, services, transactions and business process components into an architecture for automating business and IT processes.
-
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 is the latest major upgrade to Red Hat’s middleware platform. Along with the improvements to web services integration, Red Hat said the product includes an updated enterprise services bus with enhanced protocol listeners, management consoles and a new rules engine that can be managed by JBoss Enterprise BRMS (Business Rules Management System). The enhanced platform enables enterprises to deploy new applications and services more rapidly.
-
Red Hat announces new Java development tools as well as a new version of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform at EclipseCon 2010.
Red Hat has announced new Java development tools as well as a new version of its service-oriented architecture platform.
-
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was selected by Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) as the standard operating platform for its next-generation “arrowhead” trading system. Developed by TSE and Red Hat strategic partner FUJITSU LIMITED (Fujitsu), the “arrowhead” platform was designed to accelerate TSE’s order response and information distribution speeds to bring a new level of execution to the Tokyo stock market.
-
Debian Family
-
Squeeze works well enough as it is for production use here. Where are they hiding those bugs?
-
Ubuntu
-
When Ubuntu drinks, the free and open source software (FOSS) community gets a hangover. The distribution is so influential that its every development sends echoes rippling through the greater community. How else to explain how a simple change in desktop themes should spark not only debates about usability, but about how decisions are made in FOSS?
-
Still, the Lucid beta is pretty enough as it is out of the box. With its speed and performance improvements, users can look forward to an exciting, and even ground-breaking release when the final version becomes available next month.
-
-
After downloading a few tracks myself, my overall impression is positive. Canonical has largely succeeded in making the music store feel like a convenient and well-integrated part of the Ubuntu user experience. Although it’s impressive, the software is still in the beta stage of development and isn’t entirely stable yet. It functions properly, but I experienced several crashes during my tests, primarily during the checkout stage of the purchasing process. There are also some minor bugs in the HTML user interface, like links that accidentally cause it to load the regular 7digital Web site instead of the one that is customized for Rhythmbox.
-
-
ARM and its extensive Partner ecosystem can now leverage its considerable knowledge and experience working with a wide range of these elements, together with many years of Linux-based open source collaborations, to deliver innovation and diversity to enhance the end-user automotive experience.
-
Too bad it’s only for professional use the HGZ Linux based coffee machine. I’d love to have on of these. A Dream come true. The Linux coffee maker.
-
ViXS says each of the XCode 4210′s application processors runs its own RTOS (real time operating system) simultaneously. However, the MIPS core runs Linux 2.6.28, with support for the Linux DVB driver subsystem.
-
Timesys announced that its LinuxLink development framework for custom embedded Linux devices supports the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM365 DaVinci video processor. The LinuxLink for DM365 service offers Linux development tools and a pre-integrated build environment for the ARM-based chip, says Timesys.
-
Wind River and Cavium launched their original partnership to support the Octeon processors back in 2007. In September of last year, after Wind River was acquired by Intel, the company signaled that it would continue to work with Cavium when it announced that Wind River Linux 3.0 for MIPS complied with the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 4.0 networking equipment specification, thereby extending CGL 4.0 support for Cavium’s Octeon processors. The support was also extended to MIPS64-based multi-core processors from RMI Corp., which has been acquired by NetLogic Microsystems.
-
Android
-
Motorola announced what it says is the first push-to-talk phone to run Android. The rugged Motorola i1 runs on Sprint’s iDEN-ready Nextel Direct Connect service, and offers a 3.1-inch, 480 x 320 touchscreen, up to 32GB of flash, WiFi, a five-megapixel camera, plus the Opera Mini 5 browser running on Android 1.5.
-
Tokyo-based Ubiquitous Corp. announced the availability of an ARM-focused technology claimed to load Android or Linux in one second. QuickBoot Release 1.0 preferentially restores memory areas necessary for booting from nonvolatile storage to RAM, says the company.
QuickBoot, which is available in a Linux SDK (see below), is aimed at TVs, STBs, automotive infotainment systems, smartbooks, and smartphones, says Ubiquitous. QuickBoot 1.0 supports ARM9, ARM11, and Cortex-A series processors, says the company, which develops “compact, efficient and high-speed network and database software” for embedded devices.
-
But right now, the N1/Android 2.1 combo is in a really sweet spot.
-
At 7:45 AM on Monday the 15th, I and a bunch of really nervous-looking new employees stood together in a lobby at the Googleplex, waiting to be led in. Here are some random first-week notes while my eyes are still fresh.
This might turn into a series, because I recognize that my current employer is sort of a technology tourist attraction and people might want to read about it. On the other hand, it has a culture of very cautious communication, so I’ll have to be careful.
-
This phone is announced along side the first pair of GSM webOS smartphones, Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, to make it to the United States. It also marks the second Android phone to come to AT&T since the Motorola Backflip. We can only hope that the Dell Aero does not follow in the Backflip’s disastrous footsteps. No release date known yet.
-
With the addition of the three new phones, AT&T is the only U.S. carrier to offer devices representing all major OSes, says the company. Two weeks ago, AT&T added Motorola’s Backflip to its lineup in a so-far exclusive arrangement, thereby making the carrier’s Android debut. In October, the company began selling the GarminAsus Nuvifone G60, which runs a custom Linux OS.
-
-
Swedish software company MoSync AB today announced support for Android devices in its cross-platform mobile development SDK.
-
Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Sprint (NYSE: S) today released details of a new push-to-talk, Android-powered smartphone, the Motorola i1, combining the popular ruggedized form of the iDen device family with the features typically found in smartphones.
The curtain was raised on the i1 at CTIA 2010, being held this week in Las Vegas, and is expected to be available this summer. While pricing details were not disclosed, the two companies had plenty to share in terms of features and specifications.
-
-
Miguel: We are in Grenoble in the Alps, 3 hours from Paris and also pretty close to Switzerland and Italy. The Bonita Open Source project was created in 2001 at INRIA labs. Then, in 2003 Bull was interested in building a middleware stack based on Open Source and Bonita became one of the key pieces of this stack. Bull supported Bonita development between 2003 and 2008 and by the end of 2008 we had released version 4. We got quite good momentum from a community point of view, with thousands of downloads. And we started to sign some big customers, mostly in Europe.
-
Tim asked a question to the audience: “Could anyone in the Open Source community build the infrastructure to deliver Google Voice Search?” The response: a stony silence. The implication? Vendor lock-in is lo longer about proprietary source code. It’s about massive, hard-to-replicate data sets — making Google a potential Microsoft of the next decade. The corollary? The future will be about who has the most data, and who is able to extract meaning from it and deliver it in real time.
-
IBM executive Bob Sutor had a message for attendees at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco last week: “Ask the hard questions.”
Sutor, despite himself being an open source software enthusiast (his full title is vice president of Open Source and Linux in IBM’s Software group) said, compared to traditional software vendors, too many companies give open source a pass when it comes to due diligence and scrutiny. And while he said open source has matured quite a bit to where it’s now a proven enterprise asset, that doesn’t mean it should get a rubber-stamp approval.
-
Athena Security’s Firewall Browser offers network admins a number of options for troubleshooting on firewalls. According to the company in its press release on The Open Press, Firewall Browser was developed in the spirit of other free and open source network tools like Nessus or Snort, based on the value that functionally-rich non-commercial alternatives should exist for practitioners.
-
Konstatin Dmitriev’s Morevna Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation’s Open movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source software, and license the source content and final product under free, re-use-friendly terms. Along the way, the work provides stress-testing, feedback, and development help to the open source software used, while raising awareness of the quality of the code.
-
-
“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010.”
I have many heroes that inspired me to go ahead. Valorie Aurora, Telsa Gwynne, Pia Waugh, Akkanna Peck, Carla Schroeder, so many… but today I would like to talk about two women, who were the most inspiring for me from the beginning. One is a historical figure, other you may not know.
-
SaaS
-
Fortunately we know FLOSS thrives on servers and will continue to do so in the cloud or on a thick client or terminal server. My servers dance and provide a much better environment for users than that other OS.
The question remains whether the big guys can lock us in on the cloud so that the monopoly moves from the thick client to the cloud and nothing really changes regarding the cash-flow of the big guys.
-
A new company is launching today to helped popular web applications handle their growing data management needs. NorthScale built its tools around the open source memcached technology, and it has already enlisted some high-profile venture firms and customers.
-
People with an open source background prefer this solution because they instinctively distrust the idea of proprietary platforms controlled by a single vendor. The open source movement has demonstrated the ability of software to move ahead at a rapid pace of innovation when many top developers all have a stake in moving the code forward.
-
Oracle
-
The Italian revenue agency has just released the list of ONLUS and volunteer organizations that are eligible for tax payers’ donations (5 per mille), and PLIO, the Italian OpenOffice.org association born in 2007 ,is among them!
-
An anonymous reader writes “Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract. Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures. What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications.”
-
-
The vast majority are still at Oracle, some have left, but plenty are still there. This got me thinking about “who wrote what”. Innodb is a sizable piece of code and it continues to be at Oracle. Without Innodb, you don’t really have a database that is 24/7. Innodb has been there for years.
-
Russia’s anti-monopoly regulator (FAS) said on Friday it had approved a $7 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems JAVA.O by Oracle (ORCL.O) on condition that Oracle continues to develop Sun’s MySQL database.
-
MySQL still has one major ally, however, and it’s the one that most people thought was its biggest enemy:
Oracle.
-
It is now one year since a few colleagues and I left Sun to start our own company, Monty Program Ab (after which more have joined). A lot has changed during the year. For instance we ended up producing a full fork of MySQL rather than focusing on the Maria engine as I planned a year ago.
This February we released the first stable version of MariaDB, version 5.1.42, which is our enhanced and backwards compatible MySQL branch/fork. You can download it from the askmonty.org website. Please test it out and comment upon it here or on Launchpad, the code host for the MariaDB project.
-
The fact is that if you run a business website, you need to perform proper backups, and not just the stuff that gets put on a tape and thrown in a closet each evening.
I am writing this article specifically for those beginning Linux web administrators who need to know how to properly backup their website. Just because you’re new to Linux and web serving does not mean it is difficult or that you should try to avoid performing proper website backups.
-
Business
-
-
The releases of Nuxeo DAM and Nuxeo Studio are also planned for 2010. The Nuxeo Digital Asset Management offering, Nuxeo DAM, helps organizations catalogue, process, store, retrieve, and distribute rich media content, including images, audio, and video. Nuxeo Studio is the configuration and customization environment for Nuxeo EP, Nuxeo DM and Nuxeo DAM.
-
Releases
-
Google has released an open source scanner that allows web application developers to test their applications for security holes. The application, called Skipfish, offers a similar functionality to that of tools such as Nmap or Nessus, but it’s said to be much faster. Using fully automated heuristics, it detects code that is vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), SQL and XML injection attacks and many other attack types. The tool’s comprehensive post-processing of the individual test results is designed to help with the interpretation of the final report.
-
Government
-
That shouldn’t affect too many people, though, if there are any photographers still left with a business. The Party believes that “in this fast moving world [sic] 10 years of copyright protection is long enough”. The creator would need to re-apply after five years, however, or the work would fall into the public domain.
“An exception will be made for software, where a 5 year term will apply to closed source software, and a 10 year term to open source, in recognition of the extra rights given to the public by open source licences.”
-
The speech is a clear sign of the parties’ maneouvring ahead of the election, expected to be called on 6 April to be held on 6 May. In the past month the Tories and Labour have been jockeying for position over their commitment to creating more accessible online government services, broadband and also public access to non-personal government data, with the Tories saying they would introduce a “right to public data” bill to let people request and receive public datasets, publishing details of government contracts worth more than £25,000 online, encouraging use of free open-source software in government development, and encouraging telecoms companies to offer superfast broadband.
-
Not only do we have the key words “open” and “open source” in there, but the UK government is talking about “the will and willingness of the centre to give up control” (and if you believe that last part, then I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.) And yet there is something deeply disturbing about this speech that makes me wonder what on earth Gordon Brown was thinking when he uttered it.
-
Instead of civil servants or politicians being the sole authors of government information, he claimed that open source information will allow citizens to shape information for their own needs.
-
Open source technology was cited as the ethos on which Digital Britain will be built. The PM used the shared services centre in the Department for Work and Pensions (the Dole), which already supports 140,000 staff in three departments and plans to take on four more in the next year, as an example of what he wanted.
Needless to say the Open Source companies are thrilled. Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide operations, Ingres, the world’s largest open source database provider released a statement saying that this was just the beginning.
-
Until now, businesses and government agencies in Israel have been heavy users of Microsoft software, but the open source movement is gaining traction thanks in part to the help and encouragement of the French tech community, says Stolar. “We hope HaCantina will create the necessary ground for collaboration and development and new innovation,” he says. HaCantina doesn’t yet have a physical home, but Kesos and Stolar hope to find a location soon.
-
Licensing
-
I was intrigued by an excellent (as usual) post by Matthew Aslett of 451 group, titled “On the fall and rise of the GNU GPL“, where Matthew muses on the impact of cloud computing and other factors in the decreasing role of the GPLv2 versus other type of licenses. Simon Phipps twitted “you only consider number of projects and not volume of deployed code.
-
Openness
-
First there was Open Source — for software. The next phase is about data — Open Data. And local, state and federal grovernments are setting the trend.
-
Programming
-
Our goal is to create the EclipseRT community for runtime technology similar to what Eclipse has done for developer tools. The foundation of EclipseRT is based on the OSGi standard, supporting a wide spectrum of contributing organizations/individuals. EclipseRT delivers the ability for organizations and developers to build customizable runtime solutions from existing open source technologies.
-
Sonatype, caretaker of the Maven project and leading provider of enterprise software development infrastructure, today announced Sonatype Maven Studio for Eclipse. The Studio is the only Eclipse Integrated Development Environment specifically optimized for Maven, the de facto standard for Java project and build management used by more than 3 million Java developers worldwide.
-
Applications
-
There are a host of smaller tools (QJackCtl is indispensable and worth special mention) that help round out a project studio, but the biggest shift in thinking was from running one program, to connecting multiple ones together via Jack.
It’s funny because in that sense even GUI-heavy big applications mirror the “do one thing and do it well” Unix philosophy.
-
A British worker on night shift was arrested and later sacked after he helped himself to a few biscuits from a colleague’s desk, a media report said on Tuesday.
[...]
Pamela Harrison said that taking biscuits from her desk on December 9 had invaded her privacy, adding: “I’m disappointed that someone who is working as a work colleague finds the need to prowl around people’s personal space and take items which, though of low value, can make someone feel insecure.”
After the hearing, Campbell said he couldn’t believe that he was being prosecuted.
-
She was a young American journalist living in East London – and she was fed up the secrecy of officialdom. Then Heather Brooke decided to ask for MPs’ expenses receipts. In her new book she tells how she changed Parliament forever…
-
A federal appeals court said it can be acceptable for a judge to conduct an Internet search to confirm an intuition about a matter of common knowledge.
-
Science
-
A new type of nuclear reactor that could permanently “destroy” atomic waste is being developed by French scientists, according to the chief executive of Areva, the world’s largest nuclear energy company.
Anne Lauvergeon told The Times that the French group was developing a technology to burn up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes that are the waste products of nuclear fission inside a reactor. The technology could be critical in winning greater global public support for nuclear energy and cutting emissions of carbon dioxide.
-
China
-
China’s state media has attacked Google for having what it said were “intricate ties” with the US government.
Google provides US intelligence agencies with a record of its search engine results, the state-run news agency Xinhua said.
-
It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.
-
Security
-
Research just released claims to show that 58% of business software is vulnerable to the same security breaches as a seen on Google, the US Department of Defense, and other sites.
-
In this the heavy tax season where billions of dollars and tons of personal information is relayed to and from the government, it’s more disconcerting to hear that the Internal Revenue Service is still struggling to keep private information secure.
-
Rep. Phil Hart, R-Athol, has some serious concerns about the use of whole-body imaging machines, which are becoming more common in airports and government building. Thursday, lawmakers approved Hart’sbill to restrict use of the machines in Idaho.
-
But the overall impression one gets reading this survey is that it is all about building a profile for each person in the area, so that they can be targeted and sold-to at every opportunity. The state wants to know what we eat, drink, smoke and feel because it already knows where we go, how much we spend and what our interests are.
-
Environment
-
Patel’s career – spent at Oxford, LSE, the World Bank and with thinktank Food First – has been spent trying to understand the inequalities and problems caused by free market economics, particularly as it relates to the developing world.
-
Activists around the world marked World Water Day 2010 by highlighting the growing presence of industrial hazardous chemicals in the world’s water supplies.
-
Murkowski, who once seemed to represent a pro-environment voice among Republicans, is now among the most effective forces obstructing legislation to help the environment.
-
As chairman of FreedomWorks, the group credited with mobilizing the Tea Party movement, Armey is the movement’s de facto leader. Yet Armey’s years spent lobbying for a group recognized by the State Department as being a terrorist organization—should give Tea Partiers pause.
In the weeks before April 15, 2009, local newspapers began reporting that groups calling themselves TEA, or Taxed Enough Already, were planning rallies to protest wasteful government spending. By the time Tax Day rolled around, over 300 protests were under way in all 50 states. More than 100,000 people took to the streets, gathered in parks and city centers with signs, slogans and costumes evoking America’s revolutionary past.
-
With just five words quietly slipped into legislation, Illinois lawmakers are moving to include tire burning in the state’s definition of renewable energy, a change that would benefit a south suburban incinerator with a long history of pollution problems.
-
Finance
-
-
In another of those court decisions that infuriate critics of intellectual property, Judge Denise Cote, of the United States District Court in New York, ruled in favor of Barclays, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. The banks claimed that the website, theflyonthewall.com, violated their copyright when it published headline news like changes in stock ratings link here. The site must now wait until 10 a.m. to publish news about research that was issued before the 9:30 a.m. opening bell or if issued during the day, by a full two hours.
-
With over 400 amendments readied for the committee debate on Senator Chris Dodd’s financial reform package, Banking Chairman Dodd decided to ditch the democratic process and vote his own version of the bill out of committee. This moves the real debate to the Senate floor and worsens progressive’s chance of improving the bill.
-
In the banking world, there are generally four types of risk; liquidity risk, credit risk, operational risk and reputational risk. Of these, only reputational risk failures threaten the entire value of the business and its goodwill. If our questions remain unanswered, the entire financial system will remain dangerously exposed.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
TROUBLE-plagued Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has fallen on his sword to make way for fresh blood in a new Labor ministry.
[...]
He has been dogged by a string of controversies – think internet censorship, stashed cash, Ashbourne-Clarke and the senior magistrate defamation case.
He also has attracted national criticism over his refusal to allow an R18+ rating for video games.
His humiliating backflip over internet censorship laws on the night of Februrary 2 came after a furious reaction on AdelaideNow to The Advertiser’s exclusive report on the new law.
-
In a nutshell, Howard said that anonymous comments were an abomination (I’m paraphrasing somewhat) and were in fact unethical, since commenters on a news site had a “fundamental right” to know the identity of the other people commenting. I tried to make a number of points, including the fact that anonymity is a red herring, and that the more important thing in encouraging a strong and healthy community conversation is standards of behaviour, regardless of anonymity. I also tried to make the point that anonymity has its benefits, and that many people — some of whom might have valuable contributions to make — would never comment if they had to use real names (Howard made the point that allowing anonymity excludes other people).
-
Egypt has begun enforcing a ban on international calls made through mobile internet connections, the head of the telcoms regulator told Reuters on Tuesday, potentially boosting voice revenues at landline monopoly Telecom Egypt.
-
With the help of the University of California Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents from the government about how they monitor and use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn to gather information for investigations. The EFF struck gold with this request, as both the IRS and the Department of Justice released training presentations on social networking sites. While this may seem benign, the training material from the DOJ suggests that feds go undercover on sites such as Facebook to gather information on crime.
-
Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
-
It then goes into a list of specific policies, which pretty much all focus on adding lots of external links to stories. Of course, given how UK newspapers are suddenly working hard to block links from others, you have to wonder if those same papers are going to start blocking the BBC as well…
-
True to form, Cablevision decided the best thing to do with Newsday was to spend $4 million redesigning and putting up a paywall that drove away some writers and convinced 35 people to sign up in its first three months. Yes, 35. Of course, Cablevision insisted that the goal was really about reducing churn by offering the newspaper website to Cablevision cable TV and broadband subscribers, but it still seems like a pretty big failure all around.
-
Basically, there’s proof that free-to-the-consumer video has worked in the past, and can work again.
-
Craiglist was told by the spammer that he’d sold about $40,000 worth of the autoposter software. Craigslist pursued both Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201 (“DMCA”) and the TOU (Contract) claims.
The spammer did not hire a lawyer to defend the lawsuit and failed to respond to pleadings and court notices.
Craiglist obtained default judgments pursuant to Rule 55 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure under both the DMCA for statutory damages of $470,000 and under the TOU (Contract) for $840,000. The court found the liquidated damages clause of $200 per unauthorized post to be enforceable. The court accepted Craigslist’s lowest estimate of unauthorized posts. The spammer, Igor Gasov was held personally liable.
-
So please pay careful attention to the actual arguments being made here. No one is saying that copyright infringement should be allowed on YouTube. The only question is whether or not it should be YouTube’s responsibility to proactively monitor that content and stop it from being uploaded. The law is pretty clear that this is not required — and, as Google’s filing makes clear, even if it were required, given Viacom’s own actions, this would be impossible.
-
With these big professional reporters, you might think they would try to fact check a claim like “90% of all “pirated” DVDs come from camcorded movies.” They might have trouble doing that, because the actual research suggests something quite different. A study that we wrote about a few years ago found otherwise. Specifically, it found that “77% appear to have been leaked originally by industry insiders.”
But, of course, we need to save the AP, because they do real fact checking, right?
-
I agree. Copyright infringers should not be called pirates. A pirate is a robber, plunderor, predator. The term much better describes the patent and copyright lobbies, which use state monopoly grants to plunder and rob the masses.
-
Via Michael Scott, we learn that there was recently a debate over whether or not the government could use the phrase “music piracy” to describe the actions of an individual who had been charged with criminal copyright infringement.
-
WHEN the Walt Disney Company agreed in August to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel Entertainment, the comic book publisher and movie studio, it snared a company with a library that includes some of the world’s best-known superheroes, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four.
-
ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
-
1. Copyright and Related Rights
2. Trademarks
3. Geographical Indications
4. Industrial Designs
5. Patents
6. Layout-Designs (Topographies) of Integrated Circuits
7. Protection of Undisclosed Information
-
The ten defined terms include:
* days
* intellectual property (See below)
* Council (ACTA Oversight Council)
* measure
* person (natural or juridical)
* right owner (includes federation or assicaitons that have legal standing or authoirty to assert rights)
* territory
* TRIPS Agreement
* WTO
* WTO Agreement
-
Sometimes a story is so insane that you can’t help but wonder if someone has slipped you some crazy pills. See, for example, the Google prosecution in Italy. I honestly thought that story could not be topped. But lo and behold, it appears that the EU has proposed to add third-party CRIMINAL liability to the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA). This essentially outlaws the entire Internet. Insanity.
Background: Third party civil liability for copyright infringement is an emerging, but still controversial, doctrine as applied to the Internet. A site may be liable if it has incited and/or facilitated the violation of copyright, see Grokster. The limits of this doctrine are still being tested: it is not clear what level of hosting or facilitating actually triggers liability. For an example of this endemic uncertainty, the § 512 of the DMCA creates a safe harbor for ISPs, provided that the ISP expeditiously removes infringing content after the ISP is put on notice. However, it is unclear what material is so obviously infringing that its very presence should put the ISP on notice (this is the controversial “red flag” test).
-
DEMOCRACY:
ACTA aims to create a new model of global governance that bypasses the normal procedures of multilateral international institutions, the European Parliament and national legislatures.
A FAIRER WORLD:
ACTA is a vast protectionist initiative to defend a few economic interests of the richest countries and to limit access to knowledge and other socially essential goods like medicines in the developing nations. Poorer countries will be forced to agree to ACTA’s unfair provisions as a condition for free trade agreements and other bilateral accords.
ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE, SAFE MEDICINE:
ACTA willfully confuses fake, fraudulant drugs with legal, generic drugs under the same suspicion and same possible confiscation. Draconian border measures and criminal enforcement imposed on third countries will create barriers to trade in essential, life-saving medication and other goods.
-
The European Commission hosted a fascinating consultation on ACTA today. Luc Devigne, the lead European negotiator, opened with a brief presentation and proceeded to field questions for over an hour. The full consultation video is available online. The discussion touched on many issues including Devigne arguing that the WTO consistently blocked any attempt to address IP enforcement issues and stating that the treaty is limited to enforcement and not new substantive provisions (this assumes that anti-circumvention rules are a matter of enforcement, not substance).
-
So far, over 10,000 people have written to their MPs demanding that the government does its job and holds a proper debate on the Digital Economy Bill. If you haven’t done so already, send a letter to your MP now, and ask your friends to do the same. It’s a simple, quick and easy process. You can either email the standard letter provided on that site, or write your own.
Ricardo Mireles, Free Open Source Software advocate in Los Angeles 01 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in IRC Logs at 8:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Read the log
Enter the IRC channel now
To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
