Summary: Another new set of examples where the USPTO hijacks other countries’ policies and threatens businesses overseas using the ITC
EARLIER THIS YEAR we showed how lobbyists from 'NZ'ICTet al. were taking over the patent system in New Zealand. Similar tricks are being used in Europe (“device” as means of legalising software patents) and there is also UPLS [1, 2, 3], which has the potential to export the USPTO guidelines (permitting software patents) to the European Union. It’s a sort of US imperialism, in the sense that laws which empower the United States are forced upon other countries. The UPLS recently faced some “legal setback”, confirms IDG. They will probably just dress that up as something else, maybe just rename it once again.
The European Court of Justice looks set to derail plans for a common patent system across the European Union. The court’s Advocate General believes that a centralized patent is “incompatible with the treaties” that created the E.U., according to a leaked document.
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and its equivalent in Russia are launching a one-year pilot program on Sept. 1 to fast-track each other’s approved patent applications.
Such “Patent Prosecution Highway Programs” allow patent offices to use each other’s work to help process applications more quickly.
That would potentially facilitate some mergers in the future. Might the EPO implement something similar? East Asia, notably Japan and Korea, has already been hit by the disease which is software patents, with victims or accomplices such as LG, which pays Microsoft for Linux. LG has just been hit by a patent infringement investigation and possible embargo by the US:
NOT EVEN A HAIR’S BREADTH away from being embroiled in a price fixing investigation, LG is being investigated for alleged patent infringement.
It’s the US International Trade Commission (ITC) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], imposing US rules on Asian companies (the ITC is like the USPTO’s ‘enforcement agency’, imposing sanctions such as embargoes). Don’t nations get tired of being bossed around by a nation overseas, whose patent office has gone out of control and now nurtures patent trolls in industrial quantities? █
Summary: Oracle is promoting Apple’s products and Mister Java himself creates t-shirt designs to protest against Ellison’s decision to sue Google with his own patents
WHEN Oracle announced that it was suing Google over Android we immediately (on the first day) pointed out that Ellison and Jobs are close friends [1, 2], which may give motivation for Oracle to sue and thus help hypePhone. Other people pointed this out later on and now there’s evidence showing that Oracle is actively promoting Apple products:
Create an Oracle online account today and we’ll give you a Free $10 iTunes Gift Card or Iron Man 2 Poster
Dear Brandon,
A lot of great things will be coming from the combination of Oracle and Sun and you’ll want to stay informed! Keep up to date by creating an Oracle online account today and receive a free iTunes gift card or Iron Man 2 poster if you’re one of the first 12,000 to respond.
Simply follow the link below and tell us a little more about yourself. You can opt-in to receive news and information about products and events from Oracle, and if you’re one of the first 12,000 to reply you’ll receive a free gift card or Iron Man 2 poster.
Real classy, Larry. For those who don’t know, Larry Ellison appears in the film Iron Man 2. He is a real charlatan. Meanwhile we get to realise that Google gets proactively expelled (it withdrew for obvious reasons) from Oracle’s Java events. We put citations in daily links. There are alternatives planned though and Java’s founder has a stunt coming:
Media company Software & Support Media (S&S) plans to offer a U.S.-based version of its JAX (Java Apache XML) conference, which the company has been conducting in Germany for several years.
“A lot of the Java community has been a little upset about how the JavaOne conference is being [run] by Oracle,” said a source familiar with S&S plans.
I whipped up a couple of t-shirt designs on the topic of Oracle’s commitment to releasing Java. If you’re attending JavaOne or OpenWorld, I’d appreciate it if you’d wear one, just to let Larry know that you care. Or if you just happen to be wandering the neighborhood (I know that there are lots of Java hackers who work within just a few blocks of Moscone).
James clearly points out the fact that JavaME fragmentation was a substantial hurdle for developers, and believes that in a lesser way this may be true for Android as well. While it is true that fragmentation was a problem for Java on mobile, this was a common aspect of mobile development at the time (go ask a Windows Mobile developer about fragmentation. And see a grown man cry, as the song says). The problem of JavaME was not fragmentation, but lack of movement – the basic toolkits, the UI components, most of the libraries for one reason or the other remained largely unchanged apart a few bug fixes. JavaFX should have been promoted much, much earlier, and would have had a great impact on software development, like (I believe) the more recent Qt releases from Nokia and their idea of declarative user interfaces.
If we compare with the rest of Java, we see a much stronger push towards adding libraries, components, functionalities: all things that made Java one of the best choices for software developers in the enterprise space, because the developers can trust Sun to update and extend their platform, making their job easier and faster. It was the same approach that made Microsoft the king of software: create lots of tools and libraries for developers, sometimes even trying to push more than one approach at a time to see what sticks (like Fahrenheit) , or trying very experimental and skunkworks approach, that later are turned into more mature projects (like WinG). JavaEE and JavaSE followed the same model, with a consistent stream of additions and updates that created a confidence in developers – and, despite all the naysayers, for enterprise software Java was portable with very little effort, even for very large applications.
Steve Lohr over at the New York Timescontinues to watch this case, which is only a few weeks old [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. █
Isn’t it nerve-wracking that Microsoft has the nerve to lift FreeType (which it threatens) and use it in Microsoft Office?
There’s more of this “open” Microsoft PR busting in Slashdot (with discussion). The summary says: “Now Microsoft must love free software. Indeed, Office 2011 for Mac (beta 5 at least) uses Freetype! Somehow they figured out the free software ‘clean room implementation’ of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs.”
“People ought to remember that Microsoft was created by parasites who took other people’s “free labour” (hard work) and used that to create copies, often illegally.”So here we have another lesson in what “Open Source” means to Microsoft. It means “free labour” to harvest, to exploit, and to then use for PR purposes (as in “we love open source”). Microsoft has a long history like that, dating back even to early versions of Windows which took a BSD-licensed TCP/IP stack.
People ought to remember that Microsoft was created by parasites who took other people’s “free labour” (hard work) and used that to create copies, often illegally. Bill Gates famously said: “I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
Bill Gates is still a parasite, but he has money to employ PR agents who spin it all as “charity”. Even while he makes money investing in Monsanto (which will earn money at the expense of impoverished African people) Gates pretends to help poor Africans. We are very pleased that Gates has received the blinding lights of truth shining into his eyes, revealing to the world his true agenda in Africa [1, 2] (along with Rockefeller). This PR disaster keeps spreading.
This is unfortunate. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has certainly been hard at work trying to improve healthcare around the world, but the latest news is that the Foundation has decided to invest in Monsanto, a company famous for widely abusing intellectual property laws to make people a lot less healthy, to increase the cost of some key foods important to feeding the hungry and to generally scare researchers from sharing important information with one another, for fear that it will be patented and locked up.
Glyn Moody’s response to this (“Gates Foundation Invests in Monsanto”) was: “intellectual monopolists made for each other”
It’s all about artificial scarcity (patents) and exploitation even when it’s called “philanthropy”. The latest Gates PR (Khan Academy) apparently comes from author of “The Silicon Boys”, a book that covers Bill Gates. Watch how the publicists try to spin Gates as a lover of sharing. Gates is just the queen of bees, laying all the eggs and enjoying the labour of “workers”. █
Summary: Microsoft is being crushed by software freedom, so in order to survive it can only invent bogus standards and a bogus definition of the very same paradigm it’s competing against and trying to coopt
MICROSOFT is kind neither to “Open Source” nor to standards. The former subject was covered here a lot recently, after dishonest remarks from “OOXML Paoli” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and OOXML itself is proof that Microsoft does not care about standards, either. Rather than go along with everybody towards ODF it just created its own bogus proprietary format and tried to call that “a standard”. It even put its proprietary VML in it, thus harming SVG, the industry standard. This is still going on, even after Mirosoft pretended to have befriended SVG [1, 2]. Penguin Pete has this new cartoon called “The eternal curse” [of Microsoft's violation of Web standards] and it’s a good summary of Microsoft’s ill effects on the Internet. Internet Explorer still lacks SVG support, for example.
Brian Proffitt has an interesting and more creative interpretation of Microsoft’s latest spin on “Open Source”. He says Microsoft has no choice but to assimilate simply because “Open Source” is the winning team.
Why Microsoft is Being Nicer to Open Source
If there was any take-away I got from LinuxCon a couple of weeks ago, it was this: open source has finally become mainstream.
I mean, there was really little doubt. Companies and independent developers have been using open source for years now, with little regard to the old FUD that said “if you use this software, little Stallman-like demons will eat your soul!”
Or somesuch.
But the thing that really drove this home was when Evan Moglen, lawyer to the Free Software stars, described the subtle shift in how developers approach open source.
When open source first started, Moglen said, it was the developers and engineers who truly understood open source, and they were the personnel that would educate and teach others about the notions of free and open source software. This is certainly true, because it goes a long way to also explaining why this training and education took a while for business to understand, since business-types and engineering-types don’t often communicate to each other very well.
That post ought to say Eben, not Evan. Either way, isn’t it fascinating to see Moglen and Stallman mentioned in the context of business? Microsoft — with the help of minions such as Microsoft Florian — has been attempting to paint Stallman as a radical and Moglen as a communist, interchangeably (they try this even in this Web site). The reality is, there is nothing more communistic than a software monopoly where control and special privileges belong to just a few. “Open Source” is free market, it’s capitalism; proprietary monopoly on the other hand is tyranny, it’s more like communism. Any real proponent of capitalism and a truly democratic society should strive to advance software freedom, which much like today’s Western systems possibly embodies few elements of socialism. █
Summary: SJVN adds his weight to speculators who reckon that Novell may negotiate a sale to VMware, which is run by Microsoft executives who left Microsoft
VMware and Novell have already partnered to bring SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) to VMware vSphere virtual machines. During Novell’s earnings call, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said that VMware sales staff has incentives to sell SUSE support and services to their customers. Hovsepian added that VMware and Novell would expand on what’s going on with their partnership at this coming week’s VMworld trade show.
Could the two companies announce a merger? There have been rumors for some time that VMware might buy Novell. I don’t know much about those rumors, but I do know that it’s a deal that makes a lot of sense for both companies.
The title of the above post is “VMware should buy Novell” and I asked the author: “should? You want lots of Microsoft execs to own Novell and UNIX??”
“…VMware has been no friend to MSFT, or vice-versa, for the last year or so.” –Steven J. Vaughan-NicholsHe replies by saying “”Should” as in it makes biz sense. Also VMware has been no friend to MSFT, or vice-versa, for the last year or so. Check it out”
There has been some chatter in blogs recently about VMware as Novell’s escape route from Microsoft dependency, but it ought to be known that VMware is now run by former Microsoft executives, so the relationship with Microsoft would not evaporate completely.
Novell and Microsoft are more than happy to help you bridge the gap between Linux and Windows.
Once upon a time, bridging the gap between Windows and Linux in the server room or the office was… difficult. Today, while no one’s going to call it easy, Novell and Microsoft have worked hard on ensuring interoperability doesn’t require either a Linux wizard or a Windows expert.
The two technology giants have been at this since they formed their unlikely partnership in November, 2006. Almost five years later, besides the business benefits the two companies have found in working together, Novell and Microsoft have made considerable progress in getting Linux and Windows to get along both on the server and the desktop level.
It’s all just intended to sell more Windows and less GNU/Linux. We covered this before. █
Update: As raised as a possible explanation by myself in the IRC channel (I was deceived by others), Mono just moved to Git. Nonetheless, news about Mono and Moonlight has been extremely scarce for months, so the project clearly lost a lot of momentum.
Summary: Mono development is nearly non-existent over the past month or so
MONO AND MOONLIGHT begin to show early signs of death. Both Mono and Moonlight are hardly heard from anymore and lack of endorsement from the FSF (the FSF discourages use of C#) could not do much to help, could it? Based on SVN branches [1, 2], either the entire development team at Novell takes a massively long summer vacation or the project is radically de-emphasised. So the question is, what happens to those who depend on Mono in the long term? Novell is up for sale and Miguel de Icaza is busy cleaning their toilets instead of coding or even blogging. The Mono problem was discussed in IRC a short while ago (partial logs below). █
-TRT/#techrights-[schestowitz] Comment in the #neckbeard troll http://ur1.ca/1e5jb “It would be better if you would make the wallpaper if you don’t like the default.”
-TRT/#techrights-[glynmoody] Diaspora Clarifies: Open Source On September 15, Consumer Alpha In October – http://tcrn.ch/baGXEu good news #diaspora #socialnws
-TRT/#techrights-[linuxtoday] How to make a Cosmic Wallpaper in GIMP: Scott Photographics: “This tutorial will hopefully help inspire you to cre… http://bit.ly/bKomuu
-TRT/#techrights-[glynmoody] In Defense of Links, Part One: Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification – http://bit.ly/asKV1i debunking of Mr Carr’s crypto-transclusionism
justin__: I had no problem with them writting Mono. I am pissed at Mono because MonoDudes don’t know their place. It is only so we can say every language can run on Linux. It is stupid to write software with it. It is stupid to try and make it default language for GNU / Linux
Originaly, GNU project tried twice to write LISP GUI. And both times they were distracted by some fork. First XEmacs, then EGGC. Then GNOME was third attempt when non-free KDE took off.
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[diablod3/@diablod3] Christian Church lends building to Muslims while construction of Mosque continues; Jesus clearly approves of this http://u.nu/2h62f
Summary: SJVN adds his weight to speculators who reckon that Novell may negotiate a sale to VMware, which is run by Microsoft executives who left Microsoft
Content is available under CC-BY-SA
![“The eternal curse” [of Microsoft's violation of Web standards]](http://www.penguinpetes.com/Doomed_to_Obscurity/index.php?strip=0000309.jpg){kind=link}