Summary: Microsoft participates (although liability gets passed) in child labour and modern sweatshops; Live service for Xbox officially dies
LAST MONTH Microsoft was accused by the US Senate of “enabling tyranny” [1, 2]. The Senate was referring to Microsoft’s engagement with the Chinese regime. It is now found out that Microsoft contracts sweatshops (wage slavery) in China, very much like Apple. This problem is not specific to Microsoft, but in many ways Microsoft is worse than others.
Microsoft Emil has come up with some PR quoting Microsoft employees. From his piece of “damage control” we have:
The report says that the workers have virtually no rights, every single labor law in China is violated, and codes of conduct like those of Microsoft and HP have zero impact. Over the past three years, photographs showing exhausted teenaged workers have been smuggled out of the KYE factory, along with worker interviews and accounts. Smuggling was necessary because factory management prohibits anyone, including clients like Microsoft, from taking pictures inside the factory or in the workers’ primitive and dirty dorm rooms.
KYE recruits hundreds of “work study students” as young as 16 or 17 years old (in 2007 and 2008, dozens of them were reported to be just 14 or 15). Management likes the high school students since they are easy to discipline and control. For the same reason, KYE prefers to hire women 18 to 25 years of age, who are often sexually harassed by security guards, according to NLC.
More pointedly, the original Xbox Live service is, as of today (April 15) no more, after Redmond-based Microsoft officially yanked the gameplay rug out from beneath faithful Xbox owners at midnight of last night.
“On April 15 we will discontinue the Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox v1 games playable on Xbox 360 and Xbox Originals,” outlined Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten in a February announcement.
Thanks to Ryan for pointing this out. He used to own an Xbox 360, but after about 5 units of Xbox 360 went defective for him he had abandoned this console altogether. █
“A key lesson from Nature is that we should never forget that diversity is mandatory to permit adaptation to a changing environment. To insure the continuity of technological development we need vigorous competition, preferably by totally different approaches. The Microsoft model, while having clear economic advantages, contains the temptation to engage in heavy handed copying and then snuffing out the competition. Not pleasant. And certainly not fair. But, probably legal, provided you have hired enough high priced lawyers to define reality in its most favorable light. My concern is that this over-concentrated, single, universal approach lacks the very long-term diversity necessary for the adaptive evolution necessary in the longer range interest of society.”
A third of 60 anti-malware products for Windows XP failed to make the grade in independent security tests.
20 out of 60 security products tested by independent security certification body Virus Bulletin flunked its rigourous VB100 certification, mainly because of false positive problems. False alarms in scanning benign files from major providers including Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Sun tripped up many of the products under test. Failure to detect complex polymorphic viruses also acted as a stumbling block during Virus Bulletin’s largest ever test of anti-malware products to date.
Security software maker McAfee is being sued over alleged sneaky tactics in promoting third-party services to consumers buying its anti-virus technology.
Firstly, this is NOT the year of Linux on the desktop, because frankly it has been on the desktop many years already. Read my recent article: Why Linux on the Desktop is Wrong! So can we lay to rest the phrase “the year of the desktop” and all variations? May it rest in peace!
Secondly, the desktop is NOT dying because someone came up with another clever idea. People sliding their greasy fingers all over their iPad touch screen while drinking coffee isn’t going to somehow end people sitting at a desk and typing on a keyboard.
With Linux and free software making a name for itself in the world of big business, many people are testing the feasibility of switching small and home office software to their open source equivalents.
Regardless of how you feel about the Linux desktop, this is one area in which Linux can have a real impact, both financially and productively, and any small or home office has the potential to be transformed by just switching one application or two to their open source equivalents.
[...]
Free software is full of alternatives, because developers like choice. And because the code that’s used to create this software is open, once one application has invented a new kind of wheel, you often find its open source competitors catching up and providing many of the same features.
That said, Ubuntu 9 worked flawlessly on this laptop and ran quite fast thanks to the dual-core processors and higher-than-normal RAM allocation. For developers, the system represents a forward-looking laptop that could well provide the hardware required for testing touch applications, especially for creating kiosk applications or for contributing to a Ubuntu touch-screen version at some point.
It is pretty common these days for laptops, and even desktops, to be able to boot from a USB flash memory drive. So you can save a little time and a little money by converting various Linux distributions ISO images to bootable USB devices, rather than burning them to CD/DVD. Oh, and one other reason – it is getting more common, especially with pre-releases, for the Live image to be too large to fit on a CD so it requires a DVD, and I don’t keep blank DVD media as close at hand as CD.
One of the most important features in this latest version of the Cray Linux Environment is the introduction of the new Cluster Compatibility Mode, which provides users with a full-featured cluster environment. Cluster Compatibility Mode is a fully standard x86 Linux environment that allows for simple, out-of-the-box installation and running of parallel ISV applications without porting, re-linking or recompilation. Cluster Compatibly Mode also allows for multiple MPI libraries.
I’m talking about purchasing and installing a brand new Linux cluster in a pure Windows shop and having any expectations that it will be used. Your co-workers will probably look at you funny, and they might stand way over on the other side of the elevator during that ride up to the fourth floor, but don’t count on them knocking your door down begging for access to your shiny new Linux resource.
[...]
Finally, it was time for our first full production run. Voila! In just two hours our little 176-core 64-bit cluster ate up data and spit out the results for 1,500 runs — previously a task that took 3 – 4 people three days. Yesterday I checked on the cluster and noticed that our new users had recently finished their 4,400th run. I called on them to pass on my congratulations and was told that their P/I was thrilled at the increase in productivity the cluster was providing.
Now that word of this is out we have new application porting activities identified and in the works. A Linux success story!
CG: As Linux gets more “productized” in the mainstream, where is the sense of community that was such a fundamental part of early Linux success? Everywhere we look we see more and more people using Linux for their embedded solutions, but fewer and fewer people seem to be actively engaging with the open source development communities. There are exceptions (the folks at PogoPlug, for example, seem to be doing a good job cultivating a community with their user enthusiasts), but I think the bulk of Linux deployment is following the Google model: use it for hosted solutions, and only share a tiny fraction of your customizations. Will Meego only exacerbate this? How are the big mobile companies adopting Android and Meego “giving back” to the larger open source community?
At the Linux Foundation’s annual collaboration summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Executive Director Jim Zemlin kicked off the event with some interesting perspectives on the state of the Linux marketplace today.
The short version: Linux is going strong and getting stronger.
[...]
Zemlin argues that the new PC economics look much more like the cell phone industry than it does the PC value chain. One example of this is Apple’s 30 percent take of the gross revenue of App Store apps. The new model takes the value off the platform itself and instead moves it to the applications.
File-system benchmarks have become quite common to Phoronix in the age of EXT4 and Btrfs with these new file-systems driving much of the interest and as we have also been finding the Linux file-system performance to change between kernel releases (and in some cases, the performance has changed a great deal). Most recently we delivered benchmarks of EXT4 vs. Btrfs vs. Reiser4, but now a month later we are back with more Linux file-system benchmarks as we look to see if the disk performance has changed with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel.
Our consulting firm has had a rash of problems recently that required the help of Linux rescue tools. From corrupt partition tables to severely infected machines, Linux tools come in handy when the host system won’t boot. But because of the plethora of tools available, it’s sometimes tough to sift through the cruft and find the ones that are usable. So I decided to highlight some of the better tools. I hope one or two of them will find their way to your toolkit.
Here is a new build with some very nice fixes for PowerPC and our initial work on KDE 4 integration. Neither is perfect but we hope that you will see that we are finally getting somewhere.
GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) is a desktop environment created for the operating system GNU / Linux Desktop Environment is recognized as the official GNU project. With the announcement of version 3.0 was introduced GNOME-Shell, which integrates various functions into a ‘single window. The desktop area is divided into several parts depending on the activities and workspaces is dynamic: you can add or remove workspaces and you can move any applications in different areas of work, as already happens with Compiz.
LXDE (the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is new to the Linux desktop scene, having been launched in 2006. It aims to provide a fully-functional desktop environment whilst being as lightweight as possible, to both speed up your desktop and reduce its environmental impact (by using less CPU and RAM). A quick-and-dirty benchmark courtesy of the LXDE edition of Linux Mint indicates that it measures up pretty well on speed and RAM usage. In the third of my series on desktop alternatives, I took a look at it to see how it shapes up from the user’s point of view.
In in an old screencast for Plasma Mobile, you seen a demonstration of an on-screen keyboard, it was a working proof of concept, but the interactin was still a bit wonky…
Even the embedded Linux-Libre kernel includes no elements that aren’t explicitly under a free license. In the new Dragora release, the kernel is version 2.6.32.11.
One thing I always loved about the Ubuntu community is that whatever you did to contribute to Ubuntu, you could become an Ubuntu member and be part of the big circle of friends quite easily. In the earlier days of the Ubuntu project the Community Council was handling the approval of Ubuntu membership and I loved meetings where you heard inspiring stories of what people had contributed to Ubuntu.
Over time those meetings, inspiring as they were, got a bit long. It got up to four hours every now and then. That’s why we set up the Regional Membership Boards who take care exlusively of membership approval and they are doing fantastic work.
All in all the system seems faster than Karmic and pretty darn stable for a beta release. I took the unprecedented-for-me step of making this the actual working system on this machine; I dd’ed it from the spare drive onto the system’s main hard drive and am now using it on this machine full time. I’ve never found a beta release that I liked enough to do that with, until now. So I think Canonical has a winner here.
If you’re a Linux Mint KDE user then this upgrade is pretty much a no-brainer. This release gets you up to date with the latest version of Ubuntu (though Ubuntu 10 isn’t far off so I’ll be reviewing this again soon enough) and KDE.
If KDE isn’t your thing though, there’s nothing here that will make you want to use it instead of the GNOME version.
Can you tell us more about Qt and what it brings to the MeeGo project?
Jaaksi: Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide looking to create amazing user experiences on Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Maemo devices. Qt will be the primary application framework for MeeGo and both Intel and Nokia are committing their investment in it. For developers interested in MeeGo, Qt helps increase the scope for their applications and services across multiple platforms, all using consistent application APIs.
Three months ago, these same statistics showed version 1.6 leading the field with more than 50% of users, with version 2.1 not even listed. Such statistics are useful for developers, who need to test their applications on different versions. They also reveal, however, that companies selling Android smartphones seem to have little interest in supplying existing customers with updated versions of the OS.
The HTC Incredible brings some powerful hardware to America’s largest network, Verizon, and should help Android continue its campaign of rampant growth.
After last month’s Pwn2Own Contest, Mozilla once again was the first to issue patches for the bug found in the hacking competition, beating Microsoft and Apple to the punch for the second year in a row.
Free and Open Source Project Management Software: A project management software is a program that can help apply knowledge, techniques, skills, and tools for planning and controlling resources, costs and schedules to meet the requirements of a particular project. It includes integrated functions such as calendars, charts, budget management, scheduling, and quality management and documentation.
Project management software can be implemented as either a desktop or as a web-based application. The advantage of using a desktop-based project management software is that it gives the most responsive and graphically-intense style of interface. Meanwhile, web-based project management software has the advantage of being accessible from just about anywhere with internet connection and without the need to install software on user’s computer.
The talks were fascinating as well. Aaron Seigo’s talk on creating Plasma widgets with Javascript almost made me want to get back to coding. Almost. Bruce Byfield’s presentation on sexism in FOSS was enlightening. Dafydd Crosby, in his oddly quiet way, managed in two separate talks to get people totally wired and jumping in to the conversation with enthusiasm; there was more than a little pontificating going on as well. Meanwhile, Daffyd smiled quietly and wrote one liner comments on his notebook, projected in Matrix green on the big screen (beware those quiet types). Richard Weait’s enthusiasm about the Open Streetmap project was palpable and I suspect more than one person will be attending a mapping party sometime soon.
The surprise panel for me was one given by Brad “Renderman” Haines. It was a surprise because it didn’t really have anything to do with FOSS and yet was utterly and completely fascinating. If you thought the locks on your front door, on your locker in the gym, or guarding the entrance to the server room with all its secret corporate data was safe, think again. Every lock I own and every lock I’ve ever installed is suspect now. Who knew you could open a Master combination padlock in five seconds with a shim cut out from an empty beer can. Spooky! I will be booking an appointment with a locksmith shortly.
* Before: Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Culver City, CA, Fonality is a leading developer and marketer of open source IP PBX business phone systems and unified communications solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Intel Capital and Azure Capital Partners.
* After: Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Culver City, Calif., Fonality is a leading developer and marketer of cloud-based business phone systems and unified communications solutions for small to medium sized businesses. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Intel Capital, and Azure Capital Partners.
A pair of vendors that offer proprietary solutions based on the open source memcached project are updating their products this week. While both Gear6 and Schooner are adding their own proprietary bits to enhance their respective memcached-based offerings, both vendors are also ensuring that they also are contributing back to the open source core.
Oracle has stopped the free OpenSolaris CD shipping program. A posting on the OpenSolaris website discussion mailing list by Oracle’s Derek Cicero says the related links and icons have been removed from the opensolaris.org site. Downloads of OpenSolaris are still available from the OpenSolaris downloads site.
That parallel is why this ten year old book is still worth reading. The open source process is still creating magic, marshalling armies of creative people who work for nothing — or rather, as C&D points out, for gains that are not material. The technical prowess of the OSS world is not in doubt: Linux, Firefox, Apache, and a host of other projects show that the bazaar can still out-code the cathedral.
The FreeSWITCH team is proud to announce the official release of version 1.0.6, the latest release of the popular open source soft-switch library. FreeSWITCH 1.0.6 builds upon previous FreeSWITCH releases and brings dozens of new features and scores of enhancements in codecs, SIP processing, CPU utilization, TDM hardware support, and more. In the eight months since the release of FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, the core developers and key contributors have made improvements in almost all areas of the project.
The Perl 6 project, which aimed to radically reinvent the open source programming language, first began to take shape in 2000. A decade later, there are several implementations with varying levels of completeness, but it is still not ready to replace Perl 5 in production environments.
In order to ensure that Perl doesn’t completely stagnate during the protracted revamp, a group of developers have decided to pull Perl 5 out of maintenance mode and begin actively enhancing it with new features. The result is Perl 5.12, which was officially released this week. It was preceded by 5.11, an experimental development release that was issued last year.
Montgomery is right. It’s unlikely that open sourcing VP8 is going to kill Theora. There will still be a small but dedicated community supporting the format, and there are going to be cases when it actually makes sense to use Theora and not VP8. What it will kill however, is the notion that Theora could one day become the standard of the HTML5 video web. For that, it would need to be a codec that’s superior to existing commercial solutions, and Theora just never was up to that challenge.
Google’s apparent decision to open source the VP8 video codec will mostly be discussed today in terms of Google’s ambitions, about Google TV, and about HTML5.
During the last days, I was working on an introductory paper on how a GSM cellphone actually works. It is titled Anatomy of contemporary GSM cellphone hardware and should provide a good technical text for anyone who generally is into technology and understands a bit about both software, computer architecture as well as radio, but who still feels like he has no clue what is actually happening inside the phone, particularly the hardware side.
Perhaps taking a page from a Star Wars script, NASA said today it will send its newest humanoid robot known as Robonaut2 – or R2 — capable of using the same tools as humans letting them work closely with people into space onboard the space shuttle’s final mission.
Former astronaut Neil Armstrong has issued a strongly worded rebuke of President Barack Obama, criticizing the president for proposed revisions to the U.S.’ space program.
Creating the massive bureaucracy was a mistake. Even though the quality of airport screening was low before Sept. 11, it was not a failure of the “rent-a-guard” screeners that let those 19 terrorists board planes “armed” with box cutters. Those “weapons” were perfectly legal at the time. The real failure was one of policy, which didn’t make use of passenger history and law enforcement information that should have flagged most of the terrorists as suspicious characters who warranted enhanced scrutiny.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Barclays PLC, DRW Trading and CME Group Inc. are likely to be protected from lawsuits seeking to recoup losses associated with the auction of Lehman Brothers Holdings’ futures book, according to a court-appointed examiner.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. may have grounds to sue Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc after they obtained assets from CME Group Inc. for less than half their value, bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas said.
Goldman Sachs has done a lot to try and stem the rage over some people’s belief that the Masters of the Universe did not deserve their nicely-sized bonuses this year. They’ve taken away the cash portion of Lloyd and Co’s, they’ve made senior management fork over a bunch of their money to charity (including a special fund set up specifically to “help Matt Taibbi get the help he needs”), they canceled plans for the annual DuckTails-esque money pit for the distribution of the young employees’ comp, and so on and so forth. And yet. People still won’t get off their asses.
According to people with direct knowledge of the incident, during the event, which was held in a private room at a lower Manhattan restaurant, Reid was verbally harangued by several senior Goldman executives, including Cohn himself, for being part of the growing chorus of politicians who are using anti-Wall Street rhetoric to score political points.
One of the attendees told Reid that Wall Street, and Goldman in particular, is being “persecuted by the Democratic Party.” Another complained that Goldman, as a “long-term, major supporter of the Democratic Party,” was tired of being publicly attacked.
Killinger replied about an hour later: “I don’t trust Goldy on this. They are smart, but this is swimming with the sharks. They were shorting mortgages big time while they were giving CfC [Countrywide Financial Corp.] advice. I trust Lehman (Lehman Brothers news) more for something this sensitive. But we would need to assess if they have the smarts we need.”
Top White House officials last week pressed the chief executive officers of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to stop lobbying against a financial-regulatory bill advancing in Congress, according to people who attended the meeting.
President Barack Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers met with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan and about 12 other executives at an April 6 event in Washington hosted by the Financial Services Forum, said the people, who declined to be identified because the meeting was private.
The Federal Reserve has ended its probe of Goldman Sachs contracts with the Greek government that distort the country’s debt levels, without taking any action, said Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke on Wednesday.
We are the sponsors of a shareholder resolution that seeks pay-disparity disclosure from Goldman Sachs, which was a major beneficiary of taxpayer largesse when the federal government intervened to avert the collapse of the nation’s biggest banks and much of Wall Street.
On March 23, the day after Google pulled its search operations out of mainland China, a woman who uses the online pseudonym Xiaomi arose in her Shanghai apartment and sat down in her bedroom office for another day of outwitting Internet censorship. She leads a confederation of volunteer translators around the world who turn out Mandarin versions of Western journalism and scholarly works that are banned on China’s Internet–and that wouldn’t be available in Mandarin in any case. That day, working in a communal Google Docs account, she and her fellow volunteers completed translations of texts that ranged from a fresh New York Times interview with Google cofounder Sergey Brin to “The Limits of Authoritarian Resilience,” a seven-year-old analysis of China’s Communist Party from the Journal of Democracy.
We’ve all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA’s own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three.
Can we trust any of these claims about piracy?
The US doesn’t think so. In a new report out yesterday, the government’s own internal watchdog took a close look at “efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods.” After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded (PDF) that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.”
The proposed amendments to the Copyright Act (1957), slated to be tabled in the second phase of the budget session of Parliament that begins on Thursday, has disability rights activists up in arms.
The copyright exception, which aims at allowing persons with disability easy access to copyrighted material, is “restrictive and discriminatory,” disability rights organisations believe.
Their demands for reworking this “exception,” that leaves out a large section of disabled persons who cannot access “special formats” (which include only Braille and sign language), have thus far gone unheeded. While a sub-committee was formed to look into the film industry-related parts of the legislation, the demands of disability activists have been ignored. In the run-up to the budget session, disability rights activists cutting across party lines are lobbying for their cause.
We are pleased to announce that as of April 12, 2010, the Pirate Party of Canada (PPCA) is officially eligible for Party Status.
After ten months of dedication and hard work, we have reached eligible status, which only leaves a 60-day “purgatory” period. After that, we will field candidates in subsequent federal elections, and begin the real work of a political party.
The ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’ (ACTA) might sound like it’s aimed exclusively at the crooks selling pirated DVDs at the markets, but it’s really about curbing the behaviour of individual internet users, according to one of Australia’s leading legal academics.
With the Wellington round of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) talks underway, organised opposition to the proposed treaty on intellectual property rights and enforcement is also gathering in the New Zealand capital.
Long-standing ACTA critic Dr Michael Geist from Canada is also in Wellington, and iTnews.com.au caught up with him there and asked him a few questions on the proposed treaty and what it means for all of us.
Internet users that download pirated material can expect a “three strikes system” in the wake of ACTA even if it isn’t legislated, according to one of Australia’s top legal authorities on the controversial trade agreement.
As reported yesterday on iTnews, University of Queensland law lecturer Kimberlee Weatherall has written a 37-page comprehensive analysis of the latest leaked draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and concluded that netizens do indeed have a lot to be concerned about.
Despite assurances from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) that Australia has no intention of introducing a “three strikes” system compelling ISPs to disconnect users suspected of file-sharing, Weatherall’s reading of the leaked draft of ACTA suggests the agreement will likely allow rights holders to achieve the same result through different means.
Internet Industry Association (IIA) chief executive officer Peter Coroneos has said he plans to ask his members to sign a declaration calling for more transparency in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) talks being held this week in Wellington, New Zealand.
The agreement aims to establish international standards on how to enforce intellectual property rights given the changes the internet has brought to copyright. There have been a number of rounds nutting out details for the agreement, involving delegations from multiple countries such as Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, Morocco and the US.
SJVN responds to Müller over at his blog in IDG. Müller keeps slamming IBM 24/7.
I just really can’t see why IBM should be singled out as patent public enemy number one for open source because of this one business dust-up. I also can’t help notice, as Pamela Jones of Groklaw recently pointed out, that there’s reason to believe that TurboHercules isn’t so much an open-source company as it is a proxy, along with OpenMainframe, in a battle between IBM and Microsoft over cloud-computing.
Again, I find myself asking, “Who’s really the open-source enemy here?” It’s not IBM.
Both sides are wrong for one simple reason: the people who run companies like IBM or Microsoft or Novell or HP, do not have friends or enemies. What they have is strategic interests. That’s all.
The GPL triggers upon public distribution of licenced code: “if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.”
Your “only money speaks” ditty is an anthem for outlaw corruption a la Microsoft.
Indeed. One ought to concentrate on the fact that Microsoft is still using “dummy” companies to sue competitors. Microsoft should be taken to court over this.
Open Invention Network (OIN), the company formed to enable and protect Linux, today extended the Linux ecosystem with the signing of Ulteo as a licensee. By becoming a licensee, Ulteo has joined the growing list of companies that recognize the importance of participating in a substantial community of Linux supporters and leveraging the Open Invention Network to further spur open source innovation.
Ulteo is a small company from the super-talented Gaël Duval, creator of Mandrake. He blogged about it too.
“The opinion pieces of IBM partners/apologists sometimes assume that IBM is untouchable when it comes to criticism from the Free software community.”The IBM-created/led OIN has actually been helpful in the past [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It’s one of those cases where IBM’s involvement actually defends GNU/Linux from hostile patents (although a permanent solution would just eliminate software patents). The opinion pieces of IBM partners/apologists sometimes assume that IBM is untouchable when it comes to criticism from the Free software community. This oughtn't be the case.
Dana Blankenhorn says that “the IBM open source pledge [has been] amended.”
The real news is that Eric Raymond agrees with Mueller. The author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which did so much to define open source as distinct from Richard Stallman’s free software ideal, says IBM is digging itself into an ever-deeper rhetorical hole.
Blankenhorn also brings Jay Maynard into it. Groklaw accused Maynard of playing for Microsoft, but some of our readers deny this strongly.
Jones got into this with a long Groklaw post that has 11 updates (so far) acting as exhibits. It’s the fiercest debate there since the end of the Novell case, which is to say in about two weeks.
A summary is that TurboHercules started this mess, that IBM has not even filed a case, and that it looks like a shakedown by Hercules’ Roger Bowler and Jay Maynard. (Raymond credits Maynard with bringing him into the case.)
Florian Mueller, Open Source Patent Activist, just released the following information. He believes that patents already used by IBM against TurboHercules are also a threat to other major FOSS projects. He now calls on the community for action.
Calling him “Open Source Patent Activist” is rather odd given that he attempted to derail Munich’s migration to Open Source. Corpwatch.org calls Müller “Open-source Advocate” in this new article and someone from Red Hat says that Müller “plays a strange role. Comes out of the blue. I smell more.”
Steve Stites writes about abolishing software patents in response to an article about IBM and TurboHercules:
I think that the best way to defend open source against software patent attacks is to abolish software patents. The U.S. Supreme Court might abolish software patents this month in the U.S.A. New Zealand is close to passing a law abolishing software patents in New Zealand. We are making progress from the days when people considered abolishing software patents just a flaky idea.
This brings us to the next subject.
New Zealand
Thanks to software developers, New Zealand is rejecting software patents — a move which drives some lawyers mad [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Here is a new report on the same subject, along with legal analysis.
Commerce Minister Simon Power says the Government will back changes proposed by a select committee that will mean computer software can no longer be patented.
Parliament’s commerce select committee proposed amending the Patents Bill, which passed its first reading in May last year, after receiving many submissions on the controversial issue.
The recommendation has attracted considerable attention outside New Zealand, particularly from the open source software community, which claims large software makers have gamed the patent system and stifled innovation.
The local solicitors (“lawyers industry”) actively protest against this (no derivatives on software? Think about the children!). This whole situation is very revealing; lawyers consistently insist on more patents, whereas developers reject them. Who again is actually producing software? Should the insurance cartel also get to define policies on medication?
Europe
As proof that the European patent system (primarily the EPO, as opposed to the UK IPO) is still relatively sane, here is the news about Amazon’s mind-blowing one-click patent getting rejected on the grounds of obviousness.
From the IPKat’s friend Kristof Neefs (Altius) comes this link to Decision T 1616/08, in which the European Patent Office’s Technical Board of Appeal ruled that the subject matter of Amazon’s controversial One-click patent is obvious. In the decision of 11 November 2009, the application to patent a “Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network” was opposed by the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V., Fleurop-Interflora European Business Company AG and the Förderverein für eine Freie Informationelle Infrastruktur e.V.(FFII e.V.).
This bring us to the European Interoperability Framework.
Microsoft and Front Groups
Microsoft’s pressure groups such as CompTIA are still lobbying for software patents inside European standards. Microsoft does not want to be seen doing this directly, so it has been using moles and lobbyists. Here is the latest warning bell:
Commenting on previous efforts to introduce a European Interoperability Framework (EIF), CompTIA, a global ICT industry group with member companies such as Microsoft among its members, said it was ”concerned about the proposal’s promotion of ICT standards and development models that reject valid intellectual property’.’
For more information about Microsoft’s lobbying against real standards in EIFv2, see:
Palm is up for sale (pretty much like Novell) and after receiving patent threats from Apple, numerous reporters ponder the value of Palm’s patents [1, 2].
Indeed, Palm has a range of intellectual property assets, from hardware to software patents and its well-regarded webOS operating system.
I’m sure you can already see the problem. What software startup has $5 million to burn on defending a case with no value-add? Even $500k? I’d say it takes $1-2 million or thereabouts just to get through claim construction, which will give the parties a better sense of the overall merits of the case. One patent suit with a slightly determined plaintiff could very easily end a software startup just in legal fees, let alone the impact of the suit on gathering customers in the future.
So, software startups have to settle patent cases very early, and at high settlement amounts, because they have absolutely no leverage. Invalidity takes years to litigate, so you can’t threaten to invalidate the patent; same with inequitable conduct. Non-infringement arguments are great in theory, but the plaintiff won’t have a judgment day until the middle of the case at the earliest, after claim construction, when summary judgment motions are allowed (on most schedules), and that’s several years of litigation and several million dollars away. The defendant could file for a re-exam, but once it’s filed, the defendant has no control over it, and it takes a few years to get through the PTO.
In the 1981 Diamond decision, the majority effectively reversed 1978′s Parker v. Flook decision to disallow software patents. As Lee has persuasively argued, software patents have proven an overwhelmingly destructive force that inhibits economic growth by crippling small, innovative software developers. In both of these decisions Justice Stevens worked to limit the power of the government to reward entrenched interests. Yet this is a kind of jurisprudence that many, on the right and on the left, object to on grounds of judicial restraint.
There are growing predictions from many authorities that Stevens might be the primary author of the Bilski patent case which has yet to be handed down.
There are patent concerns, but Google has a very good record on patents, so I am optimistic there.
Lastly, on another more positive note, the president of the FFII says that “Abolishing the U.S. Patent System Is Coming Soon”; he points to this:
Patent Resources Group (PRG), the nation’s leading patent educator, will be hosting a panel discussion on “The Future of U.S. Patent Law” on June 11, 2010 in Washington, DC. This in-depth, one-day event, offered in partnership with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, will bring together some of the best minds in intellectual property to inform, discuss, and debate the future of U.S. patent law. The one-of-a-kind program will include brief lectures, lively panel discussions, and audience participation.
Major topics will include:
* U.S. patent reform
* Latest developments at, and tensions between, the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
* Approaches to improve pendency and efficiency at the USPTO
Meanwhile, looking at Obama’s office, their document on the subject[PDF] (which they wrote in Microsoft Word) states: “Protect intellectual property rights. Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. We must ensure that intellectual property is protected in foreign markets and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere. The Administration is committed to ensuring that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has the resources, authority, and flexibility to administer the patent system effectively and issue high-quality patents on innovative intellectual property, while rejecting claims that do not merit patent protection.”
Summary: India is unloading the yoke of patents while Microsoft takes its business to India, where it is patenting software and paying people a pittance to develop software that is limiting the Indian population rather than enabling it
BIOLOGY THE “OPEN SOURCE” way is one area where we find the applicability of Free software to humanitarian efforts. We wrote about the subject before and offered many references in this old post. The gist of it is that more and more companies decide to share their findings in drug development in order to make drug discovery more rapid, less wasteful, and beneficial to the population. Exclusion and isolation can make one company very rich, but it’s neither good for the industry as a whole nor for the population which would suffer more deaths (slower response to pandemics and higher cost for essential remedies).
“The population understands the impact of being dependent on expensive drugs from abroad (or from multinationals).”Solidarity in India seems to be improved by the fact that the local population understands imperialism (some have experienced it “first hand”). The population understands the impact of being dependent on expensive drugs from abroad (or from multinationals). This probably contributes to the fact that, as an official record at least, there are no software patents in India (in reality, loopholes are being exploited to bypass the law).
“Open Source Drug Discovery” has just received a good shot in the arm with the news that Indian researchers won’t patent tuberculosis genome, unlike some of their peers in the West. The news is rather massive and it got covered in the following sources (mostly from India):
Scientists said that though 1.7 million people die of TB every year globally, there has not been any new drug discovery for last the four to five decades.
“OSDD is a completely new formula across the world. Here we are making all our progress available to public. Anyone can take advantage and develop a drug based on our research. The aim here is not patents but drug discovery for a neglected disease,” said Rajesh Gokhle, a senior scientist associated with the project.
So it’s nice to see that even now that India does allow patents on pharma (and, as we noted in the original story, Indian patent laws have been abused by foreign pharma firms in order to jack up prices on commonly used medicines), some Indian scientists have mapped out the tuberculosis genome, which should help creating new drugs that can help respond to that disease.
Here is the Tim Berner Lee of medicine. He is right here in India and is the latest hero of science students and drug researchers across the world. Samir Brahmachari, director-general of the Centre for Science and Industrial Research and founder and mentor of the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) programme initiated by India, dreams about making drugs for poor man’s diseases. He also dreams of making these drugs available to the poor, just as Tim Berner Lee, with his larger-than-large heart, made world wide web freely available to the world at no cost.
The TB gene map, developed under the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) initiative of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) will be available in the public domain for drug makers.
At a conference on Sunday, the Government’s Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) initiative released the findings of its ‘Connect 2 Decode’ (C2D) project to re-annotate the biological and genetic data concerning the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) genome.
This news from India demonstrates healthy doses of ethics, but there are still some multinationals in India and “local” companies which work on behalf of monopolists from the West. “Slavery” (unacceptable labour conditions) is an accusation commonly thrown at Infosys, which acts like an offshoot of Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]. Infosys is also a patent nuisance in India, as we have shown before. Here is the latest patent shame of Infosys:
Infosys Seeks U.S. Patent On Offshoring U.S. Jobs
theodp writes “It’s interesting to see that famed offshoring firm Infosys is now seeking U.S. patent protection for its Framework for Supporting Transition of One or More Applications of an Organization, which Infosys explains ‘relates generally to the field of outsourcing or offshoring of one or more applications of an organization.’ Prior to this invention, Infosys says it was necessary for a vendor organization to incur hefty visa and travel costs to allow a ‘significant number’ of employees from its offshore location to ‘visit the client’s location to interact with the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)’ before returning ‘to the offshore location to transfer the knowledge to the offshore team.”
Software giant Microsoft has outsourced the global management of its internal IT software infrastructure to Indian outsourcer Infosys for the next three years.
In a bizarre move for the Redmond-based software giant, Infosys has been contracted to help Microsoft manage a deployment of enterprise software coded by Microsoft in the first place.
As our reader Marti put it this morning, “Windows is so hard to manage, even Microsoft have to get outside help!” A lot of Windows is being developed in India since the days of Vista. We wrote about it before and cited the mainstream sources (including the press).
“When it comes to Free software, Indian developers are at least given independence as freelancers.”Here at Techrights we point out that technology companies have too many rights*, whereas technology users typically have none (we seek liberation for the users). The same goes for developers. The balance ought to be changed such that developers are paid better and their superiors feel afraid, rather than those poorly-paid developers always being afraid (of being sacked) while their superiors are paid obscene amounts of money and can get away with anything.
When it comes to Free software, Indian developers are at least given independence as freelancers. Here is a new report about Joomla development/setup in India.
TIS India has become a preferable choice all around the world for specialized Joomla Development outsourcing services at competitive pricing.
At least they distribute Free software which their clients are free to modify as they see fit. This is how development used to be some decades ago and this is how it ought to be. █
___ * In this modern world of technology, companies are sometimes treated like organisms with feelings and thus with rights and securities.
Summary: Microsoft discriminates against platforms other than its own, but more interestingly it may be trying to suppress OpenOffice.org adoption (and thus development)
MICROSOFT is all about exclusion sometimes. To give just a bunch of recent examples:
“They [Microsoft] didn’t cite the Mac and Linux versions [as reasons for the refusal] but it’s quite clear that’s the reason.”
This relates to Xbox, which performs rather poorly. The short story is that Microsoft allegedly turned down a company because it was cross-platform-supportive, not Windows-exclusive. There were many other reports about that, including for example this more complete quote:
Amanita founder Jakub Dvorsky told Joystiq: “They told us, ‘It’s not Microsoft-exclusive, we don’t want it.’ They didn’t cite the Mac and Linux versions [as reasons for the refusal] but it’s quite clear that’s the reason. It means if we want to release the game on XBLA we must throw, probably, most of the profit out of the window — to the publisher. Just because we created Mac and Linux versions.”
Perhaps provoked by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth’s pronouncement that “we want to put Ubuntu and free software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move,” Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) saw fit to shed some new light on Office Starter 2010, Ina Fried, over at CNet, reports. This free edition of its Office software — which will not include PowerPoint but will have crippled versions of Excel and Word — will be given away with consumer machines in an effort to poison the well for competing open source productivity suites like OpenOffice (which includes a PowerPoint-compatible presentation application and full-featured spreadsheet and word processing programs.)
Microsoft appears to have woken up to the fact that free open-source Office clones like OpenOffice may prove to be the thin end of a very slippery wedge, and if users discover they can get by with it instead of paying for a full version of Microsoft’s Office, then the next step will be to switch to Ubuntu (or some other Linux) instead of paying for Windows. Far better to nip the whole thing in the bud by giving away Office — albeit a cut down version with cheesy ads that rotate every 45 seconds — for free, while dangling the chance to upgrade to a fuller featured version instantly (by purchasing an unlocking key) in front of frustrated users’ noses.
Is Microsoft just trying to starve the competition which is the biggest ODF bearer? In relation to Netscape, former Microsoft Vice President Paul Maritz once wrote: “We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they’re selling, we’re going to give away for free.” This strategy ought to be familiar. █
“They [Microsoft] have the deepest of pockets, unlimited ambition, and they are willing to lose money for years and years just to make sure that you don’t make any money, either. And they are mean, REALLY mean.”
Summary: Apple is not interested in ‘foreign’ APIs entering its environment, so why do GNOME-based distributions of GNU/Linux tolerate Mono, which squarely corresponds to Microsoft’s APIs and makes Microsoft stronger?
EARLIER this week we wrote about MonoTouch, namely about it being blocked by Apple [1, 2, 3]. MonoTouch brings Mono to Apple products and in turn it can also bring Moonlight, which would only contribute to proprietary software plug-ins like Silver Lie and Adobe Flash (which Apple also blocks). From Apple’s point of view, it is doing the right thing and we cannot complain. “Whining to Apple” is “an exercise in futility,” says this new article on the subject.
Apple has set the developer guidelines in a way that benefits them and doesn’t care whether Novell is worried about the standing of MonoTouch or not. You either believe, or even just agree to the terms of the Apple vision or you don’t Apple and Jobs couldn’t careless even if that means that like Adobe and possibly Novell your company has to take a big hit.
One of the Mono boosters [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] has just published an article where he quotes Novell’s product manager for MonoTouch. He says that “Novell is reaching out to Apple for clarification on its intentions, and it will advocate for the license agreement to be amended prior to the release of Apple’s iPhone 4.0 SDK this summer.” He also writes:
Third parties, including Adobe and Novell, have released tools that translate code for execution on the iPhone. Adobe produces the Flash-to-iPhone cross-compiler, and Novell develops MonoTouch, a tool that brings .NET development to the iPhone.
Microsoft boosters like Larry O’Brien are also quoted in this article (Microsoft boosters love Mono) and another longtime booster, Gavin Clarke, has published his rant too (characterising Apple’s actions as an attack on Free software). They basically use this as an opportunity to denounce Apple, which is a risk to their professional livelihood because they depend on Microsoft’s performance.
The coverage from IDG was reasonable and writing on behalf of Ars Technica — surprisingly enough — is Microsoft’s booster Peter Bright, who turns this against Apple (not surprisingly). He too characterises it as an attack on Free software, Android to be precise (Novell whines over Monotouch and Clarke talks about SugarCRM).
Things just got a whole lot more restrictive for iPhone developers. What this change means is that developers can no longer use software like Novell’s MonoTouch, Unity3D, or Ansca’s Corona to develop iPhone applications, and tools like Appcelerator’s Titanium and PhoneGap are looking questionable. MonoTouch, Unity3D, and Corona allow developers to use the C# language and Lua scripting, respectively, to write iPhone applications. Titanium and PhoneGap allow application development using JavaScript and HTML; because they use WebKit behind the scenes to run that JavaScript, they might be OK.
A January 2009 Ars Technica article by Ryan Paul explains how Mono had been getting past Apple’s rules and regulations up to now: For iPhone, it uses a concept called ahead-of-time compilation, which involves pre-compiling the assemblies in such a way that the Mono platform can convert them into native code, before a JIT compiler would have done the equivalent.
Why is Novell so desperate to put .NET on Apple’s products? Is that part of Novell’s commitment to Microsoft? Maybe an implicit one (that it should spread Microsoft’s APIs and GPL-violating kernel patches for proprietary software [1, 2, 3])?
SJVN argues that Adobe might be preparing to sue Apple.
Adobe, the king of Internet video with 95% Web browser market penetration, is not one bit happy about being locked out of Apple’s lucrative mobile device market. Novell’s MonoTouch group is “reaching out to Apple for clarification on their intention, and believe there is plenty of room for course-correction prior to the final release of the 4.0 SDK.” Adobe, which doesn’t want to let go of its hold on Internet-based video, isn’t anything like as optimistic.
According to this article from CNET, to Novell it’s about “Microsoft’s C# programming language and associated .Net technology.”
But Gruber couldn’t figure a way out of it for Adobe and sees implications for a range of programming tools, many of them designed to let programmers target different devices with the same project. Another one is Novell’s MonoTouch, which lets programmer’s using Microsoft’s C# programming language and associated .Net technology write for the iPhone and iPad.
Would “associated .Net technology” include something like Silver Lie? Either way, Apple would be better off denying it all and blocking API intrusions. Given that some GNU/Linux sites already promote Mono-dependent software which is not safe for use by non-Novell customers, distribution makers should do the same as Apple by denying Mono like they already deny Flash (by default). Here we have another new example of Mono traps being promoted for Ubuntu, with similar Mono problems (developed by Canonical staff) being promoted for all GNU/Linux distributions. This ‘cross-pollination’ with Microsoft is a recipe for disaster and Canonical’s appreciation for Novell software gives us reasons for concern. A lot of Novell software is fee software, not Free software. █
“‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.”
