Summary: Chips B. Malroy comments on the state of Microsoft’s business based on the latest speculations and news (of which there is an ever-decreasing amount)
“Microsoft is very slow news on the last few days,” wrote Chips B. Malroy in one of our IRC channels last night. “I think some small stealth layoffs, a few here and there, but nothing so large as to have to report it to the gov. That from comments at mini msft.”
Those stealth layoffs are a subject we covered last month and the slowness of Microsoft news is something that we have been pointing out for months. If we write less about Microsoft these days, it’s not because we are less concerned about Microsoft; it’s just because it grows irrelevant as a company, not as an aggressor. There is a lot of attention being paid to companies such as Apple and Google, typically at Microsoft’s expense. Chips B. Malroy added a couple of new references suggesting that Steve Ballmer might leave — an idea that has actually been floating around for a few weeks. Here are the latest articles on the subject:
This just isn’t my week for being right. On Tuesday there was confession: “I was wrong about Apple iPad.” Today, I make another: I was wrong about Microsoft’s CEO. Yesterday’s Windows Embedded Handheld announcement shattered my remaining confidence in Steve Ballmer. About three weeks ago, I asserted: “Steve Ballmer is the right man to turn around Microsoft mobile.” If yesterday’s announcement is indicative of Microsoft’s mobile strategy, then I was wrong. He isn’t the right man, and I must now question if he should even continue leading Microsoft.
If Ballmer stays, it will probably be worse for Microsoft and thus better for Microsoft’s competition, primarily GNU/Linux. █
“I’d put the Linux phenomenon really as threat No. 1.”
In this episode: Google releases its own command-line tool, Ubuntu drops F-Spot, and has anyone seen Mandriva? Listen to the results of our haiku challenge, and we ask, do you use open source software for freedom or function?
With KDE SC 4.4, we put a fair amount of work into Javascript Plasmoid support. This has been extended a bit further in 4.5. Javascript has also blossomed as a runtime management tool for Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook, both of which support using Javascript for first-run layouts and configuration updates. Plasma Desktop also allows you to use Javascript for templated layouts and provides an interactive console for messing about with these things, features that hopefully will extend to other Plasma workspaces such as Netbook in upcoming releases.
Clip-board managers are useful tools for users who copy-and-paste frequently or wish to copy something but use it again later. The ever-expanding resource that is Wikipedia gives two main tasks that clipboard managers such as Glippy aim to do: -
* to store data copied to clipboard, so it can be pasted after closing the host application of the data copied, and
* to make multiple clips from the history available, whereas most system-native clipboards overwrite one clip with the next.
The GNOME Foundation released their conference speaker guidelines today. This is an important step not just in helping speakers know what’s acceptable, but also in helping audience members understand in advance what the community is likely to find objectionable and ensure that they can feel comfortable in raising concerns.
With many Linux distributions receiving major updates in recent weeks and months we have carried out a five-way Linux distribution comparison of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and Arch Linux. We have quite a number of tests comparing the 32-bit performance of these popular Linux distributions on older PC hardware.
Our test system was a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook with an Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz dual-core) CPU, 1GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 SATA HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics. Below are some of the key software components for the different distributions that were tested in this article.
Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It’s approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and costs nothing.
Nobody knows quite how many Ubuntu users there are – it’s not sold or licensed, there’s no registration process and it doesn’t “phone home” and identify itself, so it’s hard to tell. Its creators reckon around 12 million, but then, the number-two distro on Distrowatch, Fedora, claims about twice as many.
I consider Simply Mepis to be among the first distro to get it “right” for people looking for a no-hassle, stable experience with a generally consistent environment from release to release.
At its core, Simply Mepis is created to make things easy to use right out of the box for any Linux skill level. Despite being a KDE-only distro based on Debian, Mepis allows the end user to setup their network, video configuration and other settings from the Simple Mepis “assistants.”
This is handy when you want to switch from the NVIDIA NV driver to a proprietary driver instead, yet wish to do so safely from a GUI environment.
The most obvious, and among Arch’s Greatest Hits, is the abs tool, which will mirror the current Arch build scripts onto your local system. From there, almost anything is possible, so long as you’re willing to take the time to build things yourself.
The latest release of wattOS is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” and features several advanced power management tools to help users consume less energy for their “daily computing needs”. According to the developers, the latest update has a much faster boot and install time and overall responsiveness is improved. Other changes include replacing the Exaile music player with Rhythmbox and the addition of the F-Spot personal photo management application
If you are testing our Unity weekly builds, you may have noticed that the Launcher is beginning to show some dramatic changes. We put a lot of effort into designing the Launcher’s deepest details, and those details will take time to surface in the weekly builds, but this post is not only about explaining you how the Launcher will be, but also to explain the rationale behind its design.
Google Android is generally aimed at mobile devices with ARM-based processors. But we’ve seen several efforts to bring the software to x86 processors, including the independent Androidx86 project as well as an Acer netbook which dual boots Windows and Google Android.
Google this week removed two applications from its Android Market, and exercised a feature that lets the company remotely delete the apps from a user’s phones.
Google did not reveal the names of these apps, and said only that they were “two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes.”
Think of Sun Microsystems, and what comes to your mind?
For me? Purple workstations–my first exposure to Sun equipment.
For others, it might be Solaris. Or Java. There’s a host of things Sun was well-known for before it was acquired by Oracle last year and systematically dismantled to fit within the Oracle ecosystem.
But I’ll bet middleware was not one of the things you initially recalled. But it’s some of Sun-now-Oracle’s cast-off middleware that may prove to be a huge business for a burgeoning new community, led by some former Sun employees.
The company is ForgeRock, which made a small splash in the open source scene when it started up this February in Norway, led by Lasse Andresen, former Central & Northern Europe CTO at Sun. The ForgeRock team was later joined by Simon Phipps, former Sun Open Source Officer, member of the Open Source Initiative’s Board of Directors, and (now) Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock.
Google rules the search engine roost today, but upstarts always have their sights (and their sites) set on a share of its success. Seeks, for instance, introduces a new breed of social search engine in which users can collaborate and share their experiences in finding results, instead of keeping that information in the hands of a search engine provider.
The Plasma team will also be hosting a Plasma Feedback Round Table. This is a session for us to sit around a room with other interested / concerned KDE folk. We will answer the questions those attending have to the best of our abilities (and record the ones we don’t have answers for to do further research on them), and discuss ideas regarding Plasma now and in the future with all in attendance.
Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash —– or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser. Mozilla, Sullivan says, believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5.
In the language of my discipline, economics, openDemocracy produces a public good. Why? First, because information, analysis, commentary and active engagement with the unfolding story of democracy everywhere across the globe is an essential part of the progress of democracy. Democracy is about self-government, and where can that be without self-understanding about government?
Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the licenses and their help with the project. We can now announce a new license to the Open Data Commons family, the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY) license. This is a database specific license requiring attribution for databases. This makes ODC-BY similar to the Creative Commons Attribution license, but is built specifically for databases. As a legal tool that only requires attribution, it complies with the Open Knowledge Definition, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s standard around defining the rights behind what something means to be “open”.
Tens of thousands of lives could be saved if major changes were made to processed and convenience foods, the UK’s leading health watchdog will say today, challenging the government and the food industry to act to improve the nation’s diet.
For the first time, an animal has drawn a breath with lungs cultivated in the lab. Although preliminary, the results might eventually lead to replacement lungs for patients.
Gov. David Paterson has proposed roughly doubling New York’s DNA database to include samples from even low-level offenders, making it the first in the nation to so broadly collect and use this evidence to solve crimes and exonerate people wrongly convicted.
But Robert Beggs, who knows Sonne, told CBC News that Sonne was a member of a group called the Toronto Area Security Klatch, a group of security professionals who share knowledge and research on matters related to IT security.
The Sunday Times carried a rather large “correction” yesterday that, once read alongside the original offending article, amounted to a complete retraction. In fact, it was a giant climbdown.
In The Sunday Times and the IPCC: Correction, the paper refers to a news page story on 31 January headlined “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim” (removed from the Sunday Times site, but available, disgracefully, on this site).
BP has been using controlled burns to limit the spread of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In the process they are burning much of what wildlife remains in the area alive. In particular, conservationists say that sea turtles—including the endangered Kemp’s Ridley—are being caught in burns. “Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out,” Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in the rescue, told conservation biologist Catherine Craig in an interview.
Do we really need to spend £10m on researching why our pollinators are dying out?
There is no doubt that honeybees, hoverflies, wasps, bumblebees, moths and butterflies are all under threat. Since the 1970s, there has been a 75% decline in butterfly species in the UK, three species of bumblebees are now extinct, and honeybees have been having a pretty hard time for the last few years.
In the initial stages of the spill, an estimated 30,000 barrels of oil per day were flowing from the well. In July 1979 the pumping of mud into the well reduced the flow to 20,000 barrels per day, and early in August the pumping of nearly 100,000 steel, iron, and lead balls into the well reduced the flow to 10,000 barrels per day. Mexican authorities also drilled two relief wells into the main well to lower the pressure of the blowout. PEMEX claimed that half of the released oil burned when it reached the surface, a third of it evaporated, and the rest was contained or dispersed.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has said that it will support legal challenges, such as those that could be brought by broadband ISPs like TalkTalk UK, against the recently passed and highly controversial Digital Economy Act (DEA). This is because the new law could be used against websites that publish material of public interest without permission (e.g. Wikileaks).
AMY GOODMAN: Are you calling for Wikileaks to post the [Garani massacre] videotape online?
ELLSBERG: I’d call for President Obama to post that videotape online. Let’s see whether it confirms what his officials and the Bush officials said about it earlier, or what the truth is. Has he seen it himself? He certainly should. He has access to it. And if he does, what excuse would he have for not revealing it? So why is he waiting for Wikileaks to use its sources to decrypt that, when he can just easily release it, as he should have some time ago?
A Hong Kong publisher said today that he had scrapped plans to publish an alleged insider account of the decision-making behind Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy student protesters.
The on-going fight against file-sharing link sites in Spain is turning into a farce. Despite many rulings which state that the sites break no laws, still anti-piracy groups waste their money pursuing them. As yet another site is cleared of wrong doing, a lawyer who speaks out for civil rights on the Internet is clear on the piracy issue – either join the revolution, or perish.
Summary: As Hollywood’s fight to subvert Canadian copyright law rages on, those who help Hollywood get named after they compare concerned citizens to terrorists (and then hide the evidence)
EARLIER today we wrote about the patent debate in New Zealand. One thing we alluded to at the time is the Canadian copyright fight which we post about on a daily basis in our summaries of Web links.
Techrights rarely covers copyright matters (due to lack of time, not lack of familiarity), but this time there is a good reason to make the exception. The parallel debates over software/software patents and copyrights also show similar tactics from those who play ball for the oligarchs, conglomerates, monopolists or whatever one wishes to call those who use copyright/patent law against the population. In both cases there is digital colonisation, usually benefiting north America (but not always). In the case of patents, far east Asia uses them extensively too.
“They are self-serving mediators/middlemen and other types (mostly lawyers) who don’t mind if they ruin Canada’s creativity.”Bad policies involve not only patenting of software (Bilski decision will be released on Monday by the way) but also DMCA/ACTA/three strikes. Last year we argued that those who wish to daemonise their opposition just compare them to terrorists and that’s the type of behaviour we find even among Canadian politicians, backed by that Old Guard of lawyers and lobbyists like Barry Sookman. They are self-serving mediators/middlemen and other types (mostly lawyers) who don’t mind if they ruin Canada’s creativity. But watch how one politician, James Moore, responds to critics:
Canada’s Heritage Minister caught covering up ‘radical extremists’ slur
Michael Geist sez, “Yesterday there was a firestorm of discussion over Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore’s speech (which was promoted by his department in advance) in which he labeled critics of Bill C-32 [ed: the Canadian version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act] ‘radical extremists’ and urged confrontation against those who argue for fair copyright, which he said is really an attempt to mislead and oppose the bill. Almost lost amidst the considerable outrage from many people over Moore’s comments, was the possibility that there was an attempt to bury the ‘radical extremist’ comment. Moore himself denied making the comment in direct messages with several people on Twitter who expressed concern about it.
“By mid-morning yesterday, attendees were not confirming the comment, Moore was denying it, and the event video did not include it. That might have been the end of the story, but IT World Canada reporter Brian Jackson compiled his own video of the event and posted it online. The Jackson video included the reference and made it clear that Moore was not being forthright in his private claims (the event organizer site later added the same video). The lack of candor is rather rich given that Moore’s comments tried to paint critics of the bill as misleading the public.”
As Glyn Moody put it (regarding Moore), “so shouldn’t he resign now?” Here is the original message from Professor Michael Geist, who also happens to be fighting against the ACTA. The corrupt politicians wish to characterise him as the fringe, even though he actually represents the interests of the majority.
There are many lawyers and Hollywood lobbyists in this debate which also involves AstroTurfing (they got caught). One of them who writes at “musictechpolicy.com” (revealing name) is conveniently calling Hollywood’s side ‘the norm’ and not liking it when people speak out their minds about those who stab them in the back. “Geist Flips the Mob Switch,” the author titled this long rant and then referred to the origin of this term — the Internet-allergic sociopath, Lanier (we wrote about him before).
Recently I was discussing the effect of the Internet on Chinese dissidents with a friend from a world that concerns itself with that kind of thing. He told me that what bothered the Chinese was not so much that dissidents had access to any particular information which bothers them, and it wasn’t so much that dissidents were able to post particular information which bothers them a bit more—what really bothered them a lot was that dissidents were able to use the social media tools to organize.
Although the tools were quite different, what is happening today in reaction to the onslaught against artists from the consumer electronics industries and their fellow travelers is not that different from the organizing efforts of the labor movement against other unfair labor practices in the past. Instead of anonymous goons with baseball bats, organizers are met with anonymous hoards “commenting” online in something very similar to what George Orwell called the “Two Minutes Hate” and what Jaron Lanier calls “the mob switch”.
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It is no surprise that Geist and his mob demonize anyone supporting compliance with international norms for creators.
So here we have the author using one of Lanier’s many freedom-hostile and culture-bashing rants. Those who are familiar with Lanier’s repertoire will probably know that he is exceptionally hostile towards software freedom and a culture of sharing. Here is a new critical review of his new book:
The main problem with “You Are Not a Gadget” is that Lanier seems determined to paint an idyllic picture of the early days of the Internet, and then contrasts current developments to that almost entirely mythical ideal that he has stored in his memory. This reminded me of Mircea Eliade and the mythological construction of in illo tempore, the long-gone times at the beginning of everything where things were perfect. In illo tempore is the period before the fall, everything was better in the past before the corrupting forces tainted the perfection. Lanier seems stuck in those mythical times where men were men, bots were bots, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. The problem with this, as with most mystifications of the past, is that it is a fictitious account. When the Internet was smaller, everyone knew each other, all of the developers were probably working within walking distance of one another, and therefore there was a strong sense of community. The early Internet was quirky and small because it was a tiny boys club where the geeks could make decisions that were disproportionately important to future developments. Nowadays development is widespread and, dare I say, more democratic. Lanier seems to resent that.
Lanier is an example of people who consistently write books to complain because people disagree with them. Those at the top of society (AI is often attributed to Lanier) don’t like the freedom of the Web as they prefer to hold cocktail parties that weed out the ‘little people’, taking away their voice in the process (so that only the affluent and powerful need apply for journals, conferences, publishers, and appointments with legislators). If those people — who happen to include rude politicians like James Moore — are left to do as they wish, how will voters know who to get rid of?
Private businessmen like lawyers needn’t and can’t be elected, but those who sign documents into law are politicians; if they are not on the population’s side (like Peter Mandelson in the UK [1, 2]), then voters ought to be told about this so that the culprits lose popular support. Remember: governments are not put in place to decide for their people; governments are elected by the people to serve the people’s will. █
Summary: New articles of interest, including one from Forbes which says that “odds are increasing that Microsoft’s business will just completely collapse.”
Once again, the Chrome/Android momentum has nothing to do with Windows. Once again, it doesn’t benefit Microsoft in any way.
Now take a look at what Microsoft’s biggest Windows customers–Dell, HP, and the other big PC manufacturers–are up to. Dell is in talks with Google to begin developing devices designed to run Chrome (and who can blame it–if it doesn’t do this, it will be left behind in the next wave of consumer devices). And HP just bought the wreckage of Palm so that it would have a better mobile operating system with which to compete against Apple. From Microsoft’s perspective, these last two developments are disasters.
[...]
In short, the monopoly “platform” characteristics that have protected Windows all these years are completely breaking down. The PC’s relative importance in the world of personal technology is dwindling, and Microsoft has not been able to transfer Windows to other platforms. Google will soon be offering a free alternative for remaining PC-like devices, which, at the very least, will put pressure on Microsoft’s margins.
Add all that together, and there’s basically nothing good to say about the future of the Windows platform.
Windows 7 Backup is getting trashed in a Microsoft forum for being unbelievably bad and stupefyingly slow.
Users are posting stories that should defy belief. Jon Hell posted on April 23 that he is backing up 900GB of data on a quad core PC with 7GB of RAM; “After twenty four hours Windows Backup had managed to complete 18 per cent of the backup, but after forty eight hours, it had got even slower, and had only reached 23 per cent of the full backup.”
For snots and giggles, this comparison between a sofa and Microsoft’s Kinect has appeared on the internet. Just because Kinect apparently doesn’t play nice with couch potatoes, that doesn’t mean it cannot be compared to couches.
Virus Teaser According to anti-virus vendor F-Secure, the number of digitally signed malware samples for Windows is increasing – and more and more scareware programs also include a valid digital signature. Virus authors use this method to overcome various hurdles on Windows systems and suppress alerts such as those triggered when a program attempts to install an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer, or before installing a driver. F-Secure’s list of potentially undesirable programs contains almost 400,000 digitally signed samples. In terms of malware, the list still includes almost 24,000 samples.
MOODLE is the acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. It is an Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). MOODLE is provided freely as an Open Source Software under the GPL (GNU Public License).
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced with the Ministry of Communication Technologies of Tunisia (http://www.mincom.tn) a program to train and certify young graduates in Linux and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The program was announced during the signing of a partnership agreement in Tunis, Tunisia with Ministry officials and LPI’s affiliate in the region: LPI-Maghreb (http://www.lpi-maghreb.net).
Amit Midha, Dell’s president for Greater China and South Asia, told Reuters Monday that Dell wants to be a leader in the “unique innovations” that are coming to market in the next two to three years. Dell is working with Google to see where Chrome and Android fit with the “new form of computing,” he said.
At this point, though, that’s a big if. “I think Dell is using this mostly as leverage against Microsoft to gain a more favorable OEM contract rather than gearing up to sell a small number of systems to the Microsoft haters of the world,” said Piland.
Dell wants to be a leader in the “unique innovations” that are coming to market and it’s working with Google to see where Chrome OS and Android fit with the “new form of computing,” Amit Midha, president of Dell’s Greater China and South Asia business, told Reuters Monday.
After many months of hard work, Nvidia finally announced on June 22nd the final and stable version of the 256.x proprietary driver for Nvidia graphics cards. Nvidia 256.35 incorporates lots of fixes and improvements, over previous releases. Unofficial GLX support was also added for a few OpenGL extensions, as well as Thermal Settings reporting improvements, Compiz fixes, many VDPAU improvements, and many more.
The fun doesn’t stop there, though. Go back to the login screen, click the list button at the bottom left of the login window, and you begin to see the advantage of having accepted the defaults on installation, and thus installed almost everything… You can now choose your session type from KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, Blackbox, FVWM, TWM and more. As I said, if you want to learn about Linux, this is an excellent distribution to use.
LEADING LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has announced the release of several cloud computing tools in what it calls Cloud Foundation: Edition One.
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Red Hat claims Edition One is the first of several cloud offerings that will give its customers everything they’ll need to build and manage a private cloud software infrastructure.
Red Hat’s JBoss middleware is landing big greenfield deals as well successes with established outfits like the NYSE Euronext. Red Hat has said its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be its most ambitious release and designed for virtual, cloud and physical IT environments.
As the graph below demonstrates, Red Hat has grown significantly faster than the industry average (as measured by the Information Age index, which collates the revenue growth rates of the sector’s largest suppliers), but like most businesses it saw a severe deceleration in growth during the past two years – from a height of 52% at the start of 2007 down to a low of 11% at the start of last year.
Red Hat has released a new version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation that integrates desktop and server virtualisation into a single platform, simplifying the management of virtual infrastructures in a single end-to-end solution, according to the firm.
Cloud infrastructure wannabe and Linux juggernaut Red Hat has announced the next rev of its Enterprise Virtualization commercial-grade KVM hypervisor, saying it has qualified it to scale further and also adding the ability to support desktop images as well as server images.
Like many other IT professionals, Gunnar Hellekson’s interest in computers was born at an early age, but it was not until college he received formal training in the field. While taking engineering classes, Hellekson put his skills and his entrepreneurial side to use and worked as a systems administrator to make some money. Not long after, he took the step to start up a number of Internet companies, doing business-to-business work and web development, eventually leading to the founding of a consulting company focused on helping small and medium-size arts and nonprofits in New York City. About four or five years ago, he traded the Big Apple for the nation’s capital and ended up working at Red Hat U.S. Public Sector as a chief technology strategist.
Now, for many FOSS aficionados, the post serves as a bright spot of comic relief in a world otherwise dominated by all-too-real, anti-Linux FUD.
” Hahha,” wrote one anonymous reader in the comments on Hoogland’s blog, for example. “One of the most hilarious article on Ubuntu ever.”
Some were even inspired to continue in the same sarcastic vein: “Ubuntu; why would anyone want to use that?” wrote another anonymous commenter. “Any fool could see that Windows is the best choice. Expensive, proprietary and restrictive is always better than free as in freedom.”
Highlights of this June 2010 release are the virtual platform simulator OVPsim, which has improved its industry leading performance by 50 percent; fast models of PowerPC processors, and a MIPS-based reference platform under SystemC/TLM-2.0 which boots both Linux and Mentor Graphic’s Nucleus RTOS.
MontaVista(R) Software, LLC, a leader in embedded Linux(R) commercialization, announced the availability of the first commercial Linux distribution and toolchain optimized for the ARM Cortex(TM)-A9 processor. Based on the revolutionary MontaVista Linux 6 (MVL6) approach, it provides a market specific distribution (MSD) and toolchain designed specifically for the Cortex-A9 architecture and provides the perfect starting point for new product designs using the low power, high performance characteristics of the ARM Cortex-A9 processor.
Virage Logic Corporation, the semiconductor industry’s trusted IP partner, today announced it is investing in its ARC processor product portfolio by releasing the ARC GNU 2.3 Toolchain for its complete range of ARC processor cores and the ARC Linux 1.3 Operating System for its ARC® 750D processor. The suite contains the ARC Linux 2.6.30 kernel for the ARC 750D processor, and a GCC 4.2.1 based ARC GNU Toolchain for Virage Logic’s complete range of ARC processor cores. Virage Logic is committed to release regular updates of the ARC Open Source Tool Suites to keep the ARC GNU and Linux tools up to date with the current standards. All of the ARC Open Source tools are available for free download at www.SourceForge.com.
To get down and dirty in mobile phone competition, Nokia decides to take on Apple and Google by adopting the Linux MeeGo platform for its new N-Series phones. Back in February of this year, Intel and Nokia teamed up to create the MeeGo mobile phone platform.
This bold move allows Nokia to compete more effectively with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android-based phones. The MeeGo platform features rich applications via the blending of the Moblin Linux distribution and Linux-based Maemo.
Nokia has confirmed that it now plans to release a preliminary version of its MeeGo platform for handsets on the 30th of June. The Linux-based distribution for mobile devices is the result of the February decision to merge Intel’s Moblin platform and Nokia’s Maemo platform under the aegis of the Linux Foundation.
We’ve been thinking a lot about the next Nokia N900 – or Nokia N9, as it will likely be called – and the features we’d like to see from this range-topping handset. We also asked for our readers’ feedback, however, so join us after the cut to find out what the public wants from the Nokia N9…
Nokia Oyj (NOK1V.HE) will use Linux MeeGo software in its flagship N-series smartphones, hoping the new platform will give it a better chance to battle rivals such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Google Inc (GOOG.O).
Nokia on Thursday confirmed that it will drop Symbian from its Nseries phones. A spokesperson said that all of the high-end devices after the N8 will use MeeGo, the OS co-designed with Intel. It’s not known if the work-oriented Eseries or other models would use MeeGo, but most are still expected to use Symbian^3 or S40.
The software, too, is changing. The mobile giant is set to release an overhaul of the popular open-source Symbian Series 60 platform with Symbian 3 and soon Symbian 4, and is in the process of bringing the first devices with its Linux-based MeeGo operating system to market. Once completed, Nokia will only have three smartphone platforms for its entire fleet – Series 40, Symbian 4 and MeeGo – which are open for development from third parties through its Qt framework which can be deployed on all of the company’s devices.
Numerous Nexus One users started receiving Google’s Android 2.2 upgrade over-the-air on their devices Wednesday night. Gauging by users’ reports, the updates appear to be hitting phones all throughout America, on both T-Mobile and AT&T, and on carriers in other countries as well. Users who were not part of the original Nexus One Froyo test group have received the software.
The Verizon/Motorola event has kicked off, and the Droid X has been announced. We already knew the Droid X had a 4.3″ display, recorded video at 720p, and had HDMI out capabilities.
In a brief blog post, Google has announced that it has released the entirety of the source code for Froyo, better known as Android 2.2, under an open-source license. The open-source aspect of the release isn’t new — all previous platform iterations have been open-sourced too — but there are a few extra modules in Froyo that have been opened up that had previously been closed-source.
Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices. If an application is removed in this way, users will receive a notification on their phone.
Apple and Google are now playing chess while everyone else plays catch up. The surge in popularity for developing tablet applications on the two leading OSes, coupled with second tier platforms seeing flat to declining interest, suggests that Google and Apple are moving the battle from phones to a broader, more long-term platform shootout for “anywhere computing.”
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Why this is significant: Developers see Apple dominating in every category related to its devices and app store. Yet Android takes top honors for OS capabilities, openness, and, long-term outlook. Despite all of Apple‟s success, developers see that the winner long-term will be the mobile operating system that has the most capabilities and flexibility in scenarios beyond phones.
As a matter of fact, word is that some Linux tablets are headed our way in the near future but they ain’t here yet. And while I think that Linux tablets will do well, it also drives me to expect a lot from them.
According to Jim Zemlin, the head of the Linux Foundation, it is necessary for mobile Linux vendors to increase their technical investments in order users could benefit Linux devices.
Dr Koray Atalag, the inaugural holder of a fellowship also endowed by the Bedogni family, says while it’s likely the winner will be working in free or open-source software, the term “open systems” was used to take in people who may be working on components of open standards.
“The spirit of this thing is open source, but it leaves the door open for people in the non-open source world,” Atalag says.
Open Computing is already being widely used and saving money. The French Gendarmarie’s migration to an open source desktop has saved millions of Euros. In Italy, children’s hospitals in Tuscany are saving an estimated 1,000 Euros per PC by moving to open source. And the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has moved entirely to open standards and open source resulting in claimed savings of 18 million Euros.
MB: What is your view on the open source movement (free software and web services). Is it anti-business as Microsoft’s Bill Gates has suggested?
RB: No, it’s not anti-business – it’s actually very pro-business. It’s enabling. It allows more people direct access to the tools and resources they need to succeed, and also gives everyone a sense of ownership as a whole community. As opposed to one corporate body retaining strict ownership and distribution rights which is more crippling to people at the coal face, particularly in times when we all face budget and resource restrictions.
Many organisations are beginning to embrace more open and collaborative approaches to innovation. Inspired by the success of open source products such as the Apache web server and the Firefox browser, many multinational companies such as Procter and Gamble, Orange and IBM have made ‘open innovation’ – the sharing of the risks and rewards of the product development process with partners – a top strategic priority.
A bit of welcome news for Linux users who browse with Google Chrome: a change has landed in the Chromium source code which adds support for the built-in, secure password stores for both GNOME and KDE.
In November 2008, Evan Prodromou — founder of identi.ca and CEO and lead developer of StatusNet — published a blog post on autonomo.us in which he argued that we need a distributed model for social networking sites.
I can remember the morning of the first keynotes for the MySQL Conference after Sun had acquired MySQL. You have Jonathan Swartz and Rich Green delivering keynotes where the underlying message was “we continue to allow MySQL to run its own business”.
Why was this?
Because Marten was going to announce the close sourcing of part of the MySQL Server. For years there were conversations around “if we did XYZ could we take out a critical…”. These conversations were always met with a dead silence. The codebase was neither modular, nor did any of the developers resonate with the message. The backup code had never been designed to be a standalone component so the entire message of “we are close sourcing it” was a delusion. We had no ability to do it.
Membase is a simple, fast and elastic data store that is optimized for demanding web applications. The software is based on Memcached, a very popular in-memory caching system. NorthScale was started by the leaders of the Memcached open source project. NorthScale also today announced the availability of the beta version of its NorthScale Membase Server.
While it wouldn’t be the first open-sourced textbook, it may well be the first not to focus on open source and the first spearheaded by a major university.
Furthermore, I try to have faith in our community’s intelligence. Regardless of how people get drawn into FLOSS: be it from the moral software freedom arguments or the technical-advantage-only open source ones, I don’t think people stop listening immediately upon their arrival in our community. I know this even from my own adoption of software freedom: I came for the Free as in Price, but I stayed for the Free as in Freedom. It’s only because I couldn’t afford a SCO Unix license in 1992 that I installed GNU/Linux. But, I learned within just a year why the software freedom was what mattered most.
Surely, others have a similar introduction to the community: either drawn in by zero-cost availability or the technical benefits first, but still very interested to learn about software freedom. My goal is to reach those who have arrived in the community. I therefore try to speak almost constantly about software freedom, why it’s a moral issue, and why I work every day to help either reduce the amount of proprietary software, or increase the amount of Free Software in the world. My hope is that newer community members will hear my arguments, see my actions, and be convinced that a moral and ethical commitment to software freedom is the long lasting principle worth undertaking. In essence, I seek to lead by example as much as possible.
Today the TYPO3 Association released the newest version of their Open Source project TYPO3. TYPO3 has been downloaded over 4.6 million times – making it one of the world’s leading Enterprise Open Source projects.
The European Commission will ensure that devices with always-on connectivity, like Apple’s iPhone, don’t lock consumers in to proprietary technology, Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for the ‘Digital Agenda’, told EurActiv in an exclusive interview. A yearly scorecard will measure the industry’s progress.
“I intend to publish a yearly progress report on the Digital Agenda with a scoreboard on how we are doing in terms of implementation. This scoreboard will chart progress towards the key targets outlined in the Digital Agenda,” Kroes told EurActiv.
In Washington, the project is being called “Digital Vote by Mail” and will be open source, which means that the public will be able to examine how the software works. That’s important because it ensures transparency, officials said. District officials are working with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, a California group, to develop the process and ensure it is secure.
It is sometimes suggested that there isn’t a real difference in terms of “openness” between share-alike (SA) and non-commercial (NC) clauses — both being some restriction on what the user of that material can do, and, as such, a step away from openness.
This is not true. A meaningful distinction can be drawn between share-alike and non-commercial clauses (or any other clause that discriminates against a particular type of person or field of endeavour), with the former being “open” and the latter being not “open”.
We at Shareable.net harbor the belief that the growth of the Internet and mobile technology has made sharing more practical–and that this trend has the potential to minimize consumption, by redefining wealth as access to stuff instead of the accumulation of stuff. We’re working on testing this hypothesis, by launching a series of studies with the research consultancy Latitude.
The OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project has announced that this year’s State of the Map conference will take place from the 9th to the 11th of July in Girona, Spain. OpenStreetMap is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. Founded by Steve Coast in August of 2004 and run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, to date the project has nearly 270,000 users worldwide that make more than 7,000 edits every hour.
The Eclipse project has announced the Helios release train, a major update of the open source Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and many of its key components.
The Eclipse Foundation’s annual release train, this year dubbed Helios, as planned, includes version 3.6 of Eclipse, the free development environment. Helios includes 39 projects with more than 33 million lines of code – the work of approximately 490 committers. Discussing the release, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said, “The Helios release is another fantastic effort by the Eclipse committer community”, noting that,”Besides the feat of coordinating such a large development effort, Helios introduces important innovations”.
The way the ocean is fished is less predictable than we thought, according to a paper published in PNAS this week. Researchers thought that commercial interests usually fished “down the food web,” targeting species high in the food chain and moving downwards. But the new study shows that price indexes of fish play a large role and don’t always correlate with food chain position, which will make the ecosystem impact of fishing difficult to predict.
On the morning of Saturday 18 March 1967, the Torrey Canyon ran aground on Pollard’s Rock between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. Over the following days, every drop of the 119,328 tonnes of crude oil borne by this 300m-long supertanker seeped into the Atlantic. Thousands of tonnes despoiled the beaches of Cornwall – and thousands more were propelled by winds and currents across the channel towards France.
A rare and endangered species of sea turtle is being burned alive in BP’s controlled burns of the oil swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, and a boat captain tasked with saving them says the company has blocked rescue efforts.
Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in a three-week effort to rescue as many sea turtles from unfolding disaster as possible, says BP effectively shut down the operation by preventing boats from coming out to rescue the turtles.
I was interviewed on British radio today and was asked about this idea. Seemed hard to believe: Blair has become a climate activist (see “Tony Blair, Climate Group, and CAP call for strong technology deployment policy driven by a carbon price, innovative financing, and serious technology standards“) — and this is a no-win, resume-destroying job.
But some British pundits are actually proposing this radical solution to BP’s PR woes (see “Tony Blair is the right man to be BP chairman” and “Tony Blair’s Hiring Is Step One in a BP Comeback: Matthew Lynn.”
The Obama administration’s six-month moratorium has put a freeze on new offshore drilling permits, but three miles off the coast of Alaska, there’s one unprecedented drilling project by BP that’s still moving forward regardless.
That’s according to two investigations this week—one in today’s New York Times and the other published online by Rolling Stone on Tuesday.
A jailed Tibetan environmentalist used the opening of his trial today to accuse Chinese captors of beatings, sleep deprivation and other maltreatment, his wife told reporters.
Karma Samdrup – a prominent businessman and award-winning conservationist – issued a statement in court detailing the brutal interrogation methods, including drugs that made his ears bleed, used on him since his detention on 3 January.
“If not for his voice, I would not have recognised him,” his wife Zhenga Cuomao told the Associated Press.
She said Samdrup appeared gaunt when he appeared at the Yangqi county courthouse in Xinjiang, the mountainous province neighbouring Tibet.
Financial reform enters a crucial phase on Thursday as House and Senate negotiators begin public debate on the regulation of derivatives, the complex instruments at the heart of the financial crisis.
The House weakens the Senate legislation in a variety of ways that would lead to fewer trades being cleared and lower capital requirements. In many ways, said Greenberger, the House offer is even weaker than the version passed in December by the lower chamber.
When he bought a home last week with a 40 percent down payment, lawyer Kevin Fritz didn’t see the transaction as particularly relevant to the debate over global financial stability.
The Obama administration has approved five state-designed plans to help homeowners as part of a $1.5 billion effort to assist areas slammed by the housing bust.
A Republican filibuster appears increasingly likely to kill long-sought legislation extending jobless benefits and a host of other spending and tax measures, despite a new round of cuts to the measure Wednesday that reduced its deficit impact even further.
Big banks are objecting strongly to a last-minute House proposal to add ailing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the type of firms that would be subject to liquidation at financial industry expense.
Ofcom today published a discussion paper on the practice of internet traffic management – a technique used by network operators and internet service providers (ISPs) to stem or accelerate the flow of traffic over the web.
This practice may allow network operators and ISPs to handle traffic more efficiently, to prioritise traffic by type, to guarantee bandwidth or to block or degrade the quality of certain content.
Memehacker, and composer Mike Rugnetta just received a note from the collecting society ASCAP soliciting funds to fight Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the EFF. According to ASCAP, these organizations are mobilizing to undermine ASCAP members’ copyrights because they want all music to be free. Which, if you know anything about the kind of nuanced reform work these organizations do, is a pretty gross exaggeration. The letter reads like a McCarty-era scaremongering pitch to solicit funds from composers and musicians bewildered by the current pace of music industry evolution. Read part 1 of the letter here, and part 2 here.
Blogger Molly Sheridan wrote a post asking ASCAP members how it sits with them, so if you’re a current ASCAP member, chime in. Or better yet, take a minute to donate to Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the EFF.
We’ve been following the rather bizarre and dangerous lawsuit filed by Facebook against Power.com, an online service that tries to let users aggregate various social networking activity into a single service. All Power.com does is let a willing user have Power.com’s tools log into Facebook and reuse/reformat the data within its own framework. From a user’s perspective, this could be quite useful. From Facebook’s perspective this is both a violation of copyright law and a violation of computer hacking laws. Why? Because Facebook says so.
Today a UN body is trying to reach an agreement on work on copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is aggressively trying to block adoption of a work program that would include the possibility of a treaty. Officially, the USPTO is proposing an alternative approach that could be a step toward a treaty. Privately, the USPTO and other federal agencies are putting enormous pressure on countries to abandon a binding treaty in favor of a very weak and even harmful resolution.
Doctoral research into media education and media literacy at the University of Leicester has highlighted how increased legislative control on use of digital content could stifle future creativity.
The Digital Economy Act 2010 alongside further domestic and global legislation, not least the ongoing ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)’, combines to constitute a very hard line against any form of perceived copyright infringement.
There is certainly no lack of debate about copyright, and whether it promotes or hinders creativity. But in one important respect, that debate has been badly skewed, since it has largely discussed creativity in terms of pre-digital technologies. And even when digital methods are mentioned, there is precious little independent research to draw upon.
A document leaked from the Presidency of the EU reveals that Member States are pushing for new criminal sanctions into the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a few days ahead of the next negotiation round. The proposal stated in this document reveals how illegitimate and dangerous the whole ACTA process is, while exposing the scary position of the EU calling for more repression of non-for-profit usages… and their incitation.
…content owners have to specify precisely which files they claim are infringing. They can’t just say: “everyone can see there’s infringement on your site, find it and deal with it.” If upheld, that’s very good news, because it means that anyone that sets up a mechanism for carrying out DMCA requests doesn’t need to go through their entire holdings looking for possibly infringing materials (obviously impossible for a site like YouTube.)
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) will support legal challenges to the recently passed Digital Economy Act, according to a new national policy.
The new policy, which was signed off by the NUJ’s National Executive Council in May, raises concern from other industry groups that the Act’s measures could be used against sites that publish material of public interest without permission, such as the whistleblowing site Wikileaks.
The union policy calls for the Act to be implemented in a way that “fully protects freedom of information and expression”.
Originally, NUJ members focused their campaigning on the controversial clause 43 on orphan works. This was later dropped before the Bill was passed into law in the “wash-up” at the end of the last government.
Summary: New Zealand is the latest island to be colonised by the USPTO (headed by an IBM veteran), using lobbyists for multinationals who impose their will upon a vastly-outnumbered local population
WHO is responsible for the latest travesty in New Zealand? Let’s begin this from the top. People in New Zealand are not just outnumbered by sheep; they are also outweighed by drones from the United States based on the latest news. Here we have a video which was recently uploaded to YouTube. It hopefully sheds light on the situation which we covered many times this year.
The bad news from New Zealand was probably first covered by IDG, which cited NZICT — a lobbying group whose agenda and funding we exposed in previous posts [1, 2, 3, 4]. The “NZ” in “NZICT” easily gives the illusion that it’s actually about New Zealand, as opposed to multinationals (mostly from the United States).
Software patents, apparently on the way to being ruled out for New Zealand after a Select Committee decision on the Patents Bill, might not be completely excluded after all.
The committee earlier this year inserted a clause in the second-reading copy of the Bill [Section 15(3A)] reading simply “a computer program is not a patentable invention.”
On June 9 there was a meeting between Ministry of Economic Development (MED) officials and a delegation of local and international software companies led by Brett O’Riley of industry lobby NZICT Group.
Glyn Moody described this as “scandalous backroom dealing (note presence of Microsoft and IBM)” and NZICT must be just one of the culprits he referred to. Law firms in New Zealand said “yes” to software patents, whereas software developers (not just Free software developers) said “no”, as usual. It’s a battle between monopolies (and their lawyers) and actual developers everywhere we look, even in Europe.
Regarding this latest development, the president of the FFII wrote: “New Zealand to copy EPO, and pass a law that does not exclude software patents, for decoration only”
“Many would welcome a comment on IBM’s role in advocating for software patents in New Zealand.” –Simon PhippsLater on he pointed out that “Big Multinationals will write software patent law in NZ” based on the quote which says: “our group will be working on developing this for submission”
Amazing.
So software patents are voted on not by people of New Zealand, who have no control over their laws, either. Simon Phipps has written to IBM’s Bob Sutor, asking: “Many would welcome a comment on IBM’s role in advocating for software patents in New Zealand. Can you help?”
Red Hat’s Wildeboer, who used to lobby against software patents along with other software Freedom proponents, writes: “Somehow I already expect a giant rant from Florian Mueller on this”
Wildeboer is right. Müller already uses his Slashdot account (which he resumed using some months ago) to say: “Simon Phipps, former chief open source executive of Sun Microsystems, has just asked IBM’s open source VP Bob Sutor via Twitter (with a reference to this very slashdot story) to clarify IBM’s role in lobbying for software patents in New Zealand. It will be interesting to see Bob Sutor’s response, should there ever be one.
“When it comes to patents, IBM stands for International Bullying Machines”
ciaran_o_riordan writes “Due to lobbying by a group called NZICT, New Zealand’s parliament is now set to let go of its proposal to ban software patents. Patent attorney Steven Lundberg announced the details in a blog entry. This was quickly deleted, but not before it got stored in Google’s cache. Here we can read that ‘Hon Simon Power has asked MED [Ministry of Economic Development] to work with the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office to redraft the section along the lines of the European Patent Convention.’ Which is exactly the opposite of March’s announcement that ‘computer software should be excluded from patent protection as software patents can stifle innovation and competition, and can be granted for trivial or existing techniques.’ The background to this case gives every reason to be hopeful, if computer users in New Zealand get active again.”
New Zealand looks like its reversing course on software patent protection. On June 9, there was a meeting between representatives of NZ Ministry of Economic Development (MED) and representatives of NZICT Group. It appears that New Zealand is likely to ultimately adopt an approach to software patents that is consistent with the EPO’s position. My thanks to Jim Hallenbeck (Schwegman) and Paik Saber (IBM) for relaying this information.
Here is the summary of the meeting provided by Brett O’Riley CEO of NZICT:
Our representative delegation met with MED in Wellington yesterday. This was to discuss the formal submission we had made to Hon Simon Power last week covering our concerns about the proposed draft legislation.
Over a Twitter, the president of the FFII states: “NZ patent lawyer mentions that software patents are legal in Germany, thanks to the Microsoft FAT decision”
“American lawyers are free to mess with their own domestic laws,” states the FFII’s own account. Yes, it comes from the US, interfering with other people’s laws in other countries. It’s almost as though the law of New Zealand is being written by Americans. TechDirt too calls them lobbyists:
There was widespread happiness among software developers a few months back, when it was announced that New Zealand had decided to explicitly ban software patents. Of course, it didn’t take long for a lobbying campaign to kick off from those opposed to this provision, and it appears the lobbying was effective, such that software patents will now be allowed — though, they will still be somewhat limited (as they are in Europe). So, it’s not quite as bad as the situation in the US. A New Zealand patent attorney posted a letter from the head of the lobbying group discussing this shift. While that blog post has since been deleted, as of this posting Google still has the cache.
Citizens of New Zealand should protest. Their patent laws have just been hijacked by foreign interests which will hurt local software developers, including Free software developers. It’s bad for the population as a whole. █
Summary: Timely reminder of the fact that software patents opposition is not the same of Free software advocacy
THE MOST effective lobbyists are sometimes those who pretend to be the very opposite of what they are. There are many example of that, extending well beyond the realms of IT. We wrote about “controlled opposition” in April [1, 2] and in June when we gave Association of Competitive Technologies (ACT) as an example.
Yesterday we wrote about OIN — the body which endorses Linux and software patents at the same time. It’s bizarre, no doubt about it, but that’s how companies like IBM seem to perceive Linux (more on that in the next post). Others join this same bandwagon for practical reasons [1, 2] that are simple to explain.
Here is what someone wrote to Bradley Kuhn (FSF/SFLC) a short while ago: “Wouldn’t OIN being proactive against [software patents] nullify some of their own member’s patent claims? That would explain their approach.”
The CEO of OIN (Bergelt, the successor of Rosenthal from IBM) says that he is in favour of “good” software patents — whatever that actually means.
“My guess is that he [Florian Müller] is being paid handsomely to act the way he does.” –Stefan GustavsonGroklaw wrote about OIN the other day (not explicitly referring to IBM’s role), defending it unquestionably, as usual. The president of the FFII quoted Groklaw as saying that “Bergelt is highly respected in the FOSS community, as is OIN”; What did he label it? “When Groklaw get it wrong” — that’s right, the FFII was never a big fan of the OIN, either. Certain things which the OIN does are commendable [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], but there might be better ways to defend the freedom of GNU/Linux. On the other hand, there are those who consider OIN’s foes to be foes of GNU/Linux.
Over at Groklaw, Stefan Gustavson writes: “You may be confusing the Florian Müller from 2005 with the person we see blogging now in 2010. He might have been honest then. At least he did some good when the EU patent “reform” was shot down. He certainly isn’t honest any longer. He spreads lies about free software and its proponents, and throws mud in any general direction where Linux is being discussed in public, with a clear intent of spreading FUD. He is not stupid, so he can’t be excused for not knowing better. My guess is that he is being paid handsomely to act the way he does.”
Müller does not seem to have responded to that yet. When we had our suspicions about him and people started to turn up the heat he ended closing comments on his blog. It makes a more controlled platform for him, but he can’t control Groklaw, which continues to accuse him sometimes. Other former colleagues of Müller are equally suspicious.
One thing is for sure; Müller is nothing like the lobbyists from ACT and especially Jonathan Zuck (see video below) who denied wrongdoing in his E-mail to me.
It is astonishing that the European authorities even give this man a seat after he produced fake letters 'on behalf' of dead people, as always in support of Microsoft which funds him. It’s people like these who tear down Europe’s software sovereignty, just as Hollywood’s lobbyists are subverting copyright law in Europe and in Canada (the latter is hot in the news at the moment).
Going back to Müller, he seems to have a fixation targeted at IBM (a bit like Jeff Gould with his anti-IBM rants that he pushed into GNU/Linux Web sites in the form of submissions from “AlexGr”). Müller may be against software patents, but he is not a proponent of GNU/Linux or software freedom. We also know that Müller is close to Monty, who is in Microsoft’s CodePlex. Glyn Moody has just written this detailed article which explains why CodePlex is still an embodiment of Microsoft, even the CTO. [via]
Not surprisingly, CodePlex has been subject to much suspicion – and derision. It was a pretty blatant attempt to jump on the open source bandwagon, in a form that was strictly controlled by Microsoft, which allowed it to place its own interpretation on what open source meant (by including licences that weren’t on the OSI list, for example). And so no surprise, either, that the open source world has pretty much ignored CodePlex as a result. I must confess that I am guilty of this sin too, and that is unfortunate, because something is happening there that is potentially very interesting.
CodePlex is based around .NET, Microsoft licences, and other parts of Microsoft’s proprietary stack. Open Source projects for .NET developers are no better than Mono and Moonlight. They are actually worse because many of them are Windows-only, SQL Server-only, and SharePoint-only. That’s not Open Source, it’s a farce. But Windows sites happily defend this.
Speaking of suspicious ‘friends’, somebody from Finland has told us about the latest giveaway from Tuxera:
Directly related to this is the European case of looming software patents.
Today Mikko Välimäki from Tuxera wrote several blog entries on their law firm’s page, main one is this:
Title in english: “Final ok for patenting software in europe?”
He even goes to say that decision to allow/approve software patents in Europe would be JURIDICALLY correct. What a nice bat called FUD that is.
And “oikeusvarmuus” is translatable to “assurance of juridical rights”, the same once again.. pay us or be sued.
In conclusion, some who protest against software patents are not in favour of Free software, some who develop for Linux are in favour of software patents, and in the next post we’ll put our sceptical eye on IBM (yet again). █
