Investigators are blaming human error for the data breach, rather than the system design. It occurred when the author of the email — a member of the force’s CID data management unit — used the autocomplete function in Novell’s email software to include the journalist’s address along with those of five Gwent Police officials in the “CC” field of the message.
The mistake is said to have occurred when the author of the email — a member of the force’s CID data management unit — used the auto-complete function in Novell’s email software to include the journalist’s address along with those of five Gwent Police officials in the “CC” field of the message. The Register email address had been automatically saved by the system after it was used to submit two unrelated Freedom of Information requests last year.
Hitherto, there has been no response from Novell, but it would be interesting to know if there’s a deficiency in Novell’s software that makes such an error easier to make and/or harder to spot? █
Summary: As Apple pulls the switch on many developers, towards Linux/Android they begin to march
ADOBE was blocked by Apple due to Apple’s infinite arrogance (Adobe also ditched Windows Mobile, but that’s another story). Other developers state publicly that they are sick of Apple, announcing that they will ditch Apple for future development. Meanwhile there’s Adobe’s other side, which has already warmed up to the Linux Foundation and even to LiMo. Perlow said that Adobe should rely on Linux to spread its binaries and Microsoft's booster Tim Andersonsays that“Adobe [is] no longer investing in Flash compiler for iPhone, sings Android praises” (Android and Linux may soon be re-merged at the kernel level).
Chambers spends much of his post saying how well Flash runs on Android – though Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 for Android are still in beta – and suggesting that Flash developers target Android instead.
“The fact that Apple would make such a hostile and despicable move like this clearly shows the difference between our two companies,” wrote one of Adobe’s employees, whose even ruder words generated some bad-looking headlines that had Adobe distance itself from his statements quite quickly. He spoke passionately and that’s just fine. That was a few weeks ago.
It is possible that the Mono boosters will also aim their Microsoft wares at Android now that Android is growing faster than any other mobile platform (depending on the source/s of the claim). We already know that they are doing this [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].
Given the continued stream of news about Apple’s exclusion of Mono [1, 2, 3, 4], focus on this strategy may be inevitable, but Novell’s Microsoft MVP is still fighting to control Apple platforms with Microsoft APIs.
Novell VP and Mono project lead Miguel de Icasa isn’t worried that MonoTouch might fall under Apple’s new restrictions that banned Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler. He just announced the release of MonoTouch 3.0, which adds support for iPhoneOS 4.0′s new APIs. MonoTouch compiles C# to C and XCode (the iPhone IDE), unlike the Flash CS5 compiler, which compiles to machine code. Still, MonoTouch apps are originally written in a language other than the ones listed in the new iPhone terms, so like any iPhone app, it just depends on the whim of Apple. MonoTouch 3.0 was quick to add support for Multitasking, iAds, Game Center, and enterprise data protection.
As The Sourcepoints out, there are almost no Mono applications that use MonoTouch anyway. To quote:
After the whole Apple 3.3.1 “Can’t develop with non-approved toolchains” debacle a lot of people set up a Google Docs spreadsheet to list the tons of amazing apps that would be impacted by this rule change.
[...]
The numbers are even less impressive if you wished to focus on a single toolchain of interest, like say – oh I don’t know – MonoTouch, which can boast almost a whole dozen entries on the spreadsheet.
Over at the SD Times (which loves Microsoft and has Microsoft as a prominent advertiser based on what the PDFs of the magazine show), professional Microsoft booster Larry O’Brien has this new piece defending Microsoft and Mono while denouncing Apple. This is typical. We have seen just about any proponent of Microsoft doing this and only a week ago we saw David Worthington and O’Brien chatting with one another about how horrible it is that Apple blocks Mono. It’s very unprofessional when two writers from the same magazine quote one another when both basically hold the same position.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time (or you’ve gone through the archives) you know that I love the Linux operating system. I first switched to Linux in 2002, and eventually ended up running a heavily-modified version of Debian for years, until I was seduced by the elegance and stability of OS X. From time to time, though, I grab a LiveCD (usually Ubuntu, these days, though I’ve gone through most of them at one time or another) and spend an hour or so poking around to see what’s new and how quickly I can break it.
Shortly before I went to Vancouver for Eureka, I burned an iso of Ubuntu 10.4 beta, to see what all the fuss was about (short version: Ubuntu made some significant UI changes for that version, and a lot of Linux users are apparently as keen on change as Garth was in Wayne’s World.)
The Linux KVM hypervisor is gaining steam in the cloud computing market, with two major vendors using the virtualization software to create cloud platforms to compete against Amazon’s popular EC2 service.
IBM announced in March that its test-and-dev cloud service uses KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), and now hosting company The Planet has built a cloud service using a version of KVM.
The Sabayon Linux CoreCD edition is a minimalistic release designed to provide a foundation for building a customized installation tailored to the users specific needs.
Every release, we provide our community a chance to give name suggestions for the next one. Each consecutive name must be linked to the previous one, but that link must be different from the link that connected the previous releases. So for example, Fedora 12, Constantine, and Fedora 13, Goddard, are linked by being names of rocket scientists. Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 must share a different link.
We’ve got here our very first entry for “The $100.00 (USD) Coolest Linux Workspace Contest”. It’s from Mauricio, a Music Theory student. If he wins the contest, he says that he will be using the money to buy a USB mic for some serious music recording.
The Ubuntu Manual Team have decided on their goals for the Maverick Meerkat 10.10 release at the end of this year. We will continue to strive to make quality educational materials, to be an interesting project with a low barrier to entry and to use the latest technologies and develop our own applications and tools to help us achieve our overall mission as a project.
I came across this text over at www.linuxformat.gr and it got me into a lot of thinking. I would like to thank NikolaosX1 for sharing the original post in Greek and Danae for the translation in English that follows.
[...]
After discovering this article I really wanted to write a post here expanding my thoughts on it and how they relate with Free Software. I decided to just express some initial points of concern I have instead, leaving it open for discussion. Here’s what’s troubling me:
1. In general I don’t like taking words of great people out of context, nor misusing them just to make a point. I only use this quote here, with respective differences taken into consideration and respecting the analogy, to trigger a conversation. I already feel awkward, but I felt this was something worth sharing.
2. I am aware that FLOSS has other “rules” and “freedoms” to define itself and I have in mind that the quoted text is far from expressing the Free Software ideology. However I agree with the initial writer. For me, the idea behind Socrates’ words in a way demonstrates the substance of Free Software, and the “sharing knowledge” concept is one of the reasons that drove me into this community in the first place.
One of the miracles of free software is that it always begins with one or two people saying: “hey, how hard can it be?” The miracle is that they say that even when “it” is an operating system like GNU, or a kernel like Linux, or a graphic image manipulation package like the GIMP. Despite the manifest impossibility of one person writing something that usually requires vast, hierarchical teams, and months of planning, they just start and the miracle continues: others join in and the thing grows until one day, with the help of a few hundred friends, they achieve that impossibility.
The Apache Software Foundation recently announced Apache Cassandra Release 0.6, a NoSQL database. As a reformed database architect, I was intrigued by the appearance of yet another data management model.
I had so much fun writing about Ubuntu last week, I thought I would return to the topic with some new Ubuntu news and analysis. Two pieces of news on Ubuntu today. First of all they announced the imminent release of the LTS Server edition 10.4. In a related announcement MuleSoft and Canonical announced a partnership in releasing an updated Tomcat package for Debian and Ubuntu that makes it easier for developers to use.
Scientific data sharing has become big news in the wake of the theft of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit and ensuing investigations. Although the CRU researchers appear to have had an attitude towards data sharing that breached generally accepted scientific ethics, the process of actually sharing the data would have been anything but straightforward. The CRU had no procedures in place for data sharing, the data came from a variety of sources with no standardized data format, it was a mix of published and proprietary information, etc. In short, it’s one thing to decide to share the data, another challenge entirely to actually do so.
The biosciences, like other branches of research, are being dragged into the digital era. This is in part because traditional mediums of communications, including journal articles, are migrating online, and in part because high-throughput approaches to biological research are producing staggering amounts of data that can only be stored in digital form. A couple of papers released by PLoS ONE have presented new approaches to both aspects of digitization that, in essence, simply involve modifying tools that are common outside of the field specifically for use by biologists.
Queen’s University in Belfast has been told by the Information Commissioner to hand over 40 years of research data on tree rings, used for climate research.
Douglas Keenan, from London, had asked for the information in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act.
The number of contributors to OpenStreetMap has grown steadily over the years. A year ago 110,000 individuals had added or edited data. Today it’s up to 245,000 individual mappers. An average of 7,000 edits an hour are made to the data.
If the mission of the university is the creation of knowledge (via research) and the dissemination of knowledge (via teaching and publishing), then it stands to reason that giving that knowledge away fits neatly with that mission. And the branding benefits are clear.
The Open University, the distance-learning behemoth based in England, has vastly increased its visibility with open courses, which frequently show up in the Top 5 downloads on Apple’s iTunes U, a portal to institutions’ free courseware as well as marketing material. The Open University’s free offerings have been downloaded more than 16 million times, with 89 percent of those downloads outside the U.K., says Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the university. Some 6,000 students started out with a free online course before registering for a paid online course.
David Wiley has a new post expressing frustration that the Khan Academy, an OER repository, did not have a clear license. Shortly after Wiley’s post the Khan Academy added the CC BY-SA license.
The web browser was just another application five years ago. A useful app, no doubt, but it played second fiddle to operating systems and productivity software.
That’s no longer the case. Browsers have matured into multi-purpose tools that connect to the Internet (of course) and also grant access to a host of powerful online applications and services. Shut off your web connection for a few minutes and you’ll quickly understand the browser’s impact.
I got in touch with Charles McCathieNevile, Opera chief standards officer and a speaker at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, to discuss the the current role of web browsers and their near-term future. He shares his predictions in the following Q&A.
Vineet Nayar, chief executive at HCL, told the Financial Times that the companies had a “stranglehold” on the market, with almost no room for other suppliers to participate. Weeks away from a general election, the issue is becoming increasingly heated, and the Conservative party has insisted that it would open up the market to more companies if it wins on 6 May.
Nayar did not name the companies he alleged to be dominating the market, but Patrick Dunleavy, chair of the public policy group at the London School of Economics, told the newspaper that five companies including HP-EDS, IBM and BT run an estimated 90 percent of government contracts. Other suppliers commonly selected by the government include Fujitsu, Logica, Civica, CSC and Accenture.
Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing.
Sadly we know how long humans can survive if suddenly exposed to the vacuum of space. Three Soviet cosmonauts died in 1971 when a faulty valve caused their Soyuz 11 capsule to depressurise at an altitude of 168 kilometres, shortly before re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Investigations revealed that the cabin pressure dropped to zero for 11 minutes and 40 seconds, until the capsule hit the atmosphere. The crew died within 30 to 40 seconds from hypoxia. “You need both oxygen and air pressure to deliver oxygen to the brain,” says Jonathan Clark, a former space shuttle crew surgeon.
The practice of retaining genetic samples from people arrested for a crime but not convicted is growing in the U.S. It has serious human rights implications.
Last summer, The Pavement’s reports into Operation Poncho – a City of London’s scheme to wake rough sleepers in the middle of the night to “wash” where they were resting with freezing cold water – hit national headlines. Their night disturbed, many homeless people reported their inability to sleep, and felt it was a brutal attempt to damage them psychologically. Human rights legal teams labelled the process inhumane.
As global population grows and access to sanitation improves, the world’s forests are “under assault” from paper companies competing to respond to growing consumer demand for toilet tissue, the only paper product that cannot be recycled after use, writes the Worldwatch Institute.
Today, in a letter to Greenpeace, Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe sets out the steps Nestlé is taking regarding palm oil. He emphasises: “Nestlé is highly concerned about deforestation in Indonesia and other countries, and we support a moratorium on the destruction of rainforests.”
“If you think about Brazil, their two biggest industries are mining and agriculture,” Friedberg says. “That’s billions of dollars, and there’s a massive market for developing crop insurance. If we can figure out agriculture and do it right, the opportunity is huge to go country by country.” Does he believe that global warming is already noticeable? “Oh yeah,” he says. In just the three years that Weatherbill has been collecting data, extreme weather events have risen 8 percent.
Spending a week on the beautiful North California coastline with a bunch of interesting people talking about a fascinating topic is obviously a chore, but I girded my loins and took the plunge. The Asilomar meeting on the regulation of geoengineering research was intended to echo the Asilomar meeting of 1975, which set out procedures for moving beyond the moratorium on genetic engineering experiments that had been set up the year before.
[...]
The other 4 lessons are: Nobody has any clear idea how to resolve the inequalities inherent in geoengineering; People will be talking about banning field experiments; It’s all about the money; and trust is everything.
The International Monetary Fund has endorsed proposals to charge a levy on the largest banks for the cost of any future government-led rescues as well as a tax based on bank profits and compensation.
The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday pledged better oversight of the nation’s largest banks after criticism that the agency failed to spot accounting tricks at investment bank Lehman Brothers before it collapsed.
As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I’ve sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven’t got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven’t.
A year ago, I went to a London pub to speak at a meeting for the apparently doomed cause of libel reform. Simon Singh had written an article which was true and important about the dangers of the quack therapy of chiropractic healing. Then, like so many authors and publishers before him, he learned English law persecuted rather than protected honest argument and that he was in trouble.
The British Chiropractic Association was suing him for saying that there was “not a jot of evidence” that its members could help sick children by manipulating babies’ spines in accordance with the teachings of a more-than-usually nutty American faith healer.
Three bloggers from Fujian who spread information online relating to the alleged rape and murder of Yan Xiaoling were found guilty of slander on Friday. AP reported that self-taught legal expert Fan Yanqiong received a two year sentence, whilst two others, You Jingyou and Wu Huaying, will each spend one year in prison.
One the most enduring (and consistently entertaining) Internet memes of the past few years has been remixes of the bunker scene from the German film, The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang). EFF Boardmember Brad Templeton even got in on it, creating a very funny remix with Hitler ranting about troubles with DRM and the failure of DMCA takedowns to prevent fair uses. (Ironically enough, that video resulted in the Apple Store rejecting an EFF newsfeed app.)
La Quadrature du Net sent a letter to the members of the JURI committe of the European Parliament, along with a 8-page policy brief on the Gallo report. La Quadrature urges EU citizens concerned about the future of copyright and patent enforcement, fundamental rights, and the Internet, to contact them as well.
The BPI has warned that it may be forced into suing UK file-sharers, despite the recent passing of the Digital Economy Act. In an interview yesterday, Chief Executive Geoff Taylor said although the industry would prefer for file-sharing to be dealt with via ‘technical measures’, they might still have to sue some people.
A rather different view is the attack on the idea of traditional knowledge being granted legal recognition and protection. The proponent of this view seem concerned that the idea of collective ownership of knowledge will subvert their view of intellectual property. In their view knowledge can be viewed as property which can be owned by an individual or (more likely) a corporation, and as a commodity, traded, rented out and the like. Since they generally also represent those corporations that have amassed large inventories of copyrights, trademarks and designs they are also concerned that traditional knowledge will subject them to claims of ownership of the same material.
A staggering 764,448 titles were produced in 2009 by self-publishers and micro-niche publishers, according to statistics released this morning by R.R. Bowker. The number of “nontraditional” titles dwarfed that of traditional books whose output slipped to 288,355 last year from 289,729 in 2008. Taken together, total book output rose 87% last year, to over 1 million books.
The entire premise behind copyright law is that by making sure there is enough financial remuneration, people will be more interested in creating more great content. The argument of those who push for ever stronger copyright law is always based on this very premise, with the often explicit claim being “if artists can’t make enough money making art, they’ll do something else instead,” while suggesting that would be a net negative to society. Now I’m all for artists making money and being able to create more art. It’s why I spend so much time discussing business models that work for those artists. But what if that entire concept — that we need this monetary incentive to create — is bunk?
I’m just soooooo tired of the doom and gloom. It really makes one want to give up on the main stream media (like many, many, many people under 30 have). But, we can’t. We’ve got to save these guys from themselves – the institutions and the brands matter (I think). So, in that pursuit, let’s tackle the beast head on, again.
Everyone must get stoned — Rolling Stoned, that is. Starting today, the mag beloved by aging mamas and papas and young music fans alike is making its entire collection of magazines (43 years’ worth) available on the web — for a price.
Although much of the content will, in fact, be free, RS plans to charge a fee for full access to all content new and old: $3.95 per month or $2.50 dollars per month with a year’s subscription, according to AFP. The move comes as part of the mag’s overhauled website, which will also feature more audio and video content.
Our five-year projections assume a current market share of 0.5% for digital textbooks in the U.S., and an average yearly increase in sales growth of approximately 100% over the next five years. We project that growth to taper to approximately 30% annual growth for the ensuing five years (2015-2019).
Last summer, TorrentFreak encouraged its Canadian readers to have their voice heard in the country’s public consultations on copyright reform. The response to this call for action was overwhelming, and as a result a pro-copyright lawyer is now claiming that we “systematically abused” Canadian democracy.
As a writer and musician I’ve always been interested in copyright. It’s part and parcel of what I do. However until last summer I wasn’t involved in the discussion of where copyright in Canada should go. In fact you can blame my current high level of interest in copyright law on TorrentFreak.
Leaks of the ACTA text show that dangerous provisions have been pushed by the negotiators and that the agreement could have severe consequences on freedom of expression, access to medicines and innovation worldwide1. Although the upcoming establishment of transparency is a positive step, the substance of this international agreement harmonizing civil and criminal enforcement of copyright, patents and trademarks must be openly debated. This fundamental discussion is long overdue.
After more than two years of opaque elaboration, ACTA negotiators have finally bowed to the pressure of NGOs and citizens worldwide.The European Parliament, as well as various institutions and industries have also opposed the negotiating process and the potential consequences of this non-amendable plurilateral agreement.
Companies across the technology industry — from Internet access providers to social networking sites to video-sharing services — are bracing for this week’s release of a draft of a trade agreement that they fear could undermine all sorts of online activities.
[...]
The Bush administration began negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, in the fall of 2007 in an effort to harmonize intellectual property protections across different nations. The far-reaching agreement would encompass everything from counterfeit pharmaceuticals to fake Prada bags to online piracy of music and movies. Once ratified, trade agreements take full effect and a country can face complaints for noncompliance.
We’ve been covering the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for two years now, and in that entire 24 month period no official text of the agreement has been released. Remarkable, really, given the intense scrutiny, but there you have it.
When the Digital Economy Act (DEA) passed into law, it prompted many anguished posts and tweets about a broken political system, asking how MPs could cave in to lobbyists and vested interests, impose censorship, remain oblivious to the online debate (or “social media whingeing” as it was also called) and fail to recognise the impact on young people.
Posted in Apple, Patents at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Top stories about patents (found this week), ranging from patents as a business strategy to patents as ammunition for one to acquire and then attack with
A Potomac, Maryland-based company is the latest to file suit against Nintendo for patent infringement.
IA Labs, also known as Powergrid Fitness, sued Nintendo’s Japan headquarters and Nintendo of America on April 2, according to a filing obtained by Gamasutra.
The company’s Web site (http://www.ia-labs.com), a Windows site which is down at the moment, seems not to offer real products, but it does have “Licensing” and “Partners” in the menu. It’s almost like a patent troll but not quite. The company was “founded by Greg Merril and Phil Feldman in March, 2002.” It fails to show any concrete products.
Three months after Eastman Kodak sued Apple for patent infringement, Apple has filed a countersuit that accuses the film and imaging company of violating two of its own digital photography patents.
Could a broad set of patents around collective buying be the ammo Tippr needs to chase Groupon? That’s what CEO Martin Tobias is betting, having bought up the intellectual property generated by bubble-era Mercata from its investor Paul Allen.
Groupon — which is in the process of raising $130 million on a $1.35 billion valuation for offering online deals redeemed at local businesses, according to TechCrunch — is a runaway hit. And a hundred or so other companies in the collective buying space are duking it out to grab a share of that market. But Tippr, which just launched in February, has a special weapon up its sleeve: intellectual property.
The intended purpose of intellectual property laws is to promote discovery and encourage sharing of ideas. A system that rewards great discoveries and also makes the realization of the ideas available to as many people as cheaply as possible is the ideal system. Using the concepts of Abundance that system can be achieved.
The patent and copyright system creates artificial scarcity. Its stated goal is to promote the sharing of ideas but it does not work. Its not just broken, it was wrong from the start. It assumes that good ideas are scarce and the only way to get people to share their ideas is to give them a monopoly, creating a temporary scarcity.
Posted in Law, Patents at 4:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Picture by Taifarious1, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Summary: Support for software patents in New Zealand mostly comes from outsiders of the software industry — those to whom software is just something to tax with legal expenses
THIS post is likely to rub some lawyers (solicitors, attorneys, whatever) the wrong way, but it does not suggest that all lawyers are counter-productive; it does strive to show that segments of legal occupations are more concerned with taxing regular activities. They neither prevent crime nor promote science/trade.
One such example that we mentioned earlier this month involves software patents in New Zealand. Law firms in New Zealand are among the most vocal supporters of software patents in this nation, despite the fact that the New Zealand Computer Society, for example, opposes software patents (New Zealand’s largest application vendor also rejects software patents). In many ways, these patent lawyers are like the Military Industrial Complex; the only currency they grok is patent applications and patent lawsuits; they monetise friction and disputes. Is that the best which the software patents lobby can offer? One law firm after another in the New Zealand press? We have documented many examples so far and it’s a true pattern.
“Is that the best which the software patents lobby can offer? One law firm after another in the New Zealand press?”The following new story/press release (it is presented as a story but it’s ghostwritten) is an example of more lawyers from New Zealand lobbying for patentability of software. The messenger describes itself as “New Zealand’s pre-eminent law firm delivers the highest levels of legal and business performance.”
Is this the type of ‘industry’ which ought to decide ‘on behalf’ of computer scientists what type of ‘protection’ they need or don’t need? Of course not, it’s ridiculous. It’s like letting Blackwater make the decision on whether to fight Iraq or not. It’s almost inconceivable and it’s rather irresponsible for the New Zealand press to have published those self-promotional, greed-motivated pieces favouring software patents.
Software developers decided a long time ago that copyrights fulfill their needs. They don’t want to risk thousands of lawsuits or at least threats from patent holders they were not even aware of. They want to write code, not to study patent applications all day. Justice John Paul Stevens understood this and he seemingly opposed software patents, even in his own country which is one among very few that allow software patents. Stevens is leaving though (patent lawyers are openly excited about it) and Law.comlooks at his legacy. [via]
We’ve been doing a little thinking about outgoing Justice John Paul Stevens and what his legacy will be when it comes to intellectual property. Patent lawyers will surely remember Stevens as one of the justices who, along with justices Breyer and Souter, signed a strongly-worded dissent in the LabCorp v. Metabolite case. Because it was dismissed due to a technicality in the lower courts, LabCorp had no impact on the law, but the dissent showed that Stevens was one of at least three justices keen to rein in the extent of patentable subject matter. If, as many expect, the forthcoming Bilski decision places even greater limits on the patent system, it’s likely that Stevens will have a hand in that.
Summary: “It should be widely known by now. No matter why, when and where, join MS and you will be dead.” –Abe
Richard Hillesley has just published“The lost world of the Xandros desktop,” which is an article that looks at Xandros’ past and present. To quote some bits from this long article:
The latest release of the Xandros Linux desktop edition was in June 2006, which is several lifetimes in the history of Linux. Is this the end of the line for the Xandros desktop?
[...]
The ‘patent covenant’ with Microsoft has had a detrimental effect on Xandros’ ongoing relationships with the Linux user and developer communities. Ostensibly the purpose of the deal with Microsoft was to license protocols to enable Xandros’ BridgeWays and Scalix products to work with Microsoft networks.
Actually, Scalix came later. Xandros bought Scalix in July 2007 (July 9th to be precise), whereas Xandros sold out to Microsoft on June 4th.
Xandros propaganda for smartphones ? giving up on netbooks ?
Netbooks were born for children. But had a future for enterprise applications because of HDTV(broadcasting news or training film) 16:9 video format(DVD player format). So, Asus sold more XP(sp3). But for individuals, dual boot with Ubuntu maybe a choice, until Firefox shot itself in the foot(not flash9 compatible).
In the comment titled “Join MS”, Abe from Linux Todaywrites:
Those who forget history are bound to repeat it.
It should be widely known by now. No matter why, when and where, join MS and you will be dead.
Those who ignore the warnings can’t blame but themselves.
Summary: Oracle’s attitude toward (or dedication to) ODF compares badly to that of Sun, IBM, and probably even Red Hat
LAST year was a fascinating year for Sun Microsystems. It was almost acquired by IBM, but the negotiations fell through at some stage. IBM’s hardware business, office suite, and many other software products (Eclipse comes to mind) nicely complement Sun’s portfolio and even IBM’s commitment to MySQL would have been better and more natural than Oracle’s.
“OpenOffice.org and many other office suites support ODF free of charge.”IBM is not perfect. Heck, IBM is far from perfect and the word “perfect” is rather silly to bring up. As the TurboHercules vs IBM case reminds us, IBM is not a friend when it comes to software patents* (malice from TurboHercules withstanding), but IBM is a big proponent of ODF, for example. It’s one of those areas where an IBM-Sun merger would be suitable. The FSF is strongly in favour of ODF as it probably should be.
Oracle has rightly come under some fire for putting a price tag on an important enabler of ODF. This is bad move in general (not prioritising ODF), but maybe it would give reasons to just abandon Microsoft Office altogether. OpenOffice.org and many other office suites support ODF free of charge. Microsoft does not support real ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] or even OOXML, it only pretends.
Oracle start charging for Sun’s Office ODF plug-in
[...]
According to Oracle, the support cost is in line with Oracle’s support policy of approximately 22% of the license fee and is not mandatory. But the $90 per user license fee is required. As the plug-in was never open source, Oracle has not gone back on any open source assurances it gave. Oracle would not comment on the fact that the plug-in is almost as expensive as the cheapest edition of Microsoft’s MS Office suite.
Maybe if Oracle bought Novell (which is up for sale), then it would also charge $90 to download Mono. That would be nice.
Walt Hucks says: “I saw that coming back when Sun itself started requiring an account and mktg info to download the plugin.”
In better news regarding ODF, IBM’s Rob Weir points to ODF Fuzzer, which seems like a new tool that’s all about ODF.
ODF Fuzzer is a file format fuzzer developed to test star writer of Open Office.org. This will attempt to find security vulnerabilities, bugs and code flaw errors of the star writer. It uses byte mutation and insertion methods to create fuzzed files. ODF Fuzzer have a simple built in module to execute the star writer with the fuzzed files and monitor it’s behaviour.
There are also signs that Documents To Go will implement ODF support. The Product Manager says: [via Rob Weir]
Rest assured that many of the features you’ve mentioned (PDF, Google Docs integration, swirl zoom, localization, ODF support, etc) are being evaluated by our developers as we speak.
Here is what IBM’s Arnaud Le Hors wrote about Alex Brown’s [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21] attempt to pretend that he did not expect Microsoft to disobey ISO [1, 2, 3, 4].
Well, let me give you a link to a prediction I made! In my post What Microsoft’s track record tells us about OOXML’s future of March 25, 2008 I wrote:
They can, and I predict will, ignore all these additions which are optional and stick to what they have. The only reason they were added was to remove reasons for National Bodies to vote against OOXML.
So, here we are. Two years later, Microsoft has done exactly that and Alex Brown is finally seeing the light.
One can only hope that the standards community will have at least learned a lesson from this sad story: you simply cannot take control away from a vendor who has a monopoly and isn’t willing to give it up through a mere standardization process.
One area where IBM has been helpful is ODF. It’s a shame that Oracle is not so serious about it, not based on its actions anyway. OpenSolaris comes to mind in relation to this strategy. █
_____ * Here is another new analysis of the TurboHercules vs IBM case and more lobbying from Florian Müller, who criticises multimedia codecs with patents in them (he does not seem fond even of Ogg) and has harsh words for the film “Patent Absurdity” [1, 2]. From Müller’s new blog (for which he has just created a Twitter account):
I regret having had to say all of the above and I can only hope that someone else will do something better at some time, maybe with a more realistic goal, maybe with a bigger budget. But realistically, software patents won’t go away until the call for abolition is supported by some of the major players in the industry. Theoretically it could also work with small and medium-sized businesses but in my experience that just doesn’t work because those SMEs who oppose software patents don’t want to spend any significant amount of time and money on it. As long as it looks to politicians like mostly a cause for the FOSS community without major economic interests behind it, it’s hard to see how change could be brought about. Watching “Patent Absurdity” just reaffirms that view. Unfortunately.
