08.24.10
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Summary: The latest spin from “OOXML Paoli” is an attempt to portray Microsoft as a friend of the very same phenomenon it has been attacking
MICROSOFT’S Jean Paoli is one son of a gun. The FFII calls him “OOXML Paoli” (the full message says “OOXML Paoli loves open source and interoperability [...] Interoperability via patent tax?”) because this man is largely responsible for the sham which is OOXML, Microsoft’s proprietary binary formats ‘dressed up’ so as to look open with the help of bribery and other forms of corruption all around the world. After the shameful display of brute power, Paoli does not shy away from the cameras, so to speak. A few weeks ago we showed how Paoli was still scamming and subverting the term “open” [1, 2, 3, 4], making the notion easier for Microsoft to digest and more confusing for many people to understand in the process (by redefining “openness” to mean just about anything, even when it’s proprietary and Windows-only). IDG is running some sort of Microsoft whitewash piece which quotes Paoli as saying (for Microsoft) “we love open source”. This nonsense has been pushed into the front page of Slashdot, so it’s worth rebutting rather than ignoring. Here is the punchline:
“We love open source,” says Jean Paoli of Microsoft in a recent interview with Network World.
Bradley Kuhn from the FSF and SFLC wrote in identi.ca: ‘Microsoft says “We love Open Source”,but not “software freedom”. MSFT still thinks sw freedom’s an unAmerican,cancerous virus.’ Nothing ever changed; Microsoft merely divided a once-more-adhesive community and corrupted the meaning of “Open Source”, as we showed many times before. Here is a very recent debunking. The video below hopefully helps explain why Microsoft pretends to be a friend of “open source”. █
“There’s free software [gratis, dumpware] and then there’s open source… there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”
–Bill Gates, April 2008
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Posted in America, Patents at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The USPTO is shooting itself in the face and the new head of the USPTO does not seem to care, instead claiming that patents at the USPTO are “put[ting] Americans to work” (maybe American lawyers)
WE really did have some high hopes when we heard about David Kappos’ appointment. As an IBM veteran we did not expect him to abolish software patents, but we initially hoped he would help improve patent quality or at least tackle the patent trolls. He appears to have done neither so far.
The USPTO has failed many small businesses, especially when it comes to software companies. As Simon Phipps put it a short while ago (a works for a software startup now):
Software patents are broken and the only possible justification for having them is self-defence (which is itself a risky accumulation of armaments that could fall into hostile hands in the future). It seems plenty of important members of both the Linux Foundation and the Open Invention Network make public assertions claiming they believe that assertion, so there should surely be no objection to equipping both of these trade associations with firm, meaningful sanctions.
The question is, what form should those sanctions take? It’s very hard for a trade association to take a position in cases like the Oracle-Google lawsuit. But both organisations have membership rules, and membership in both is a valuable asset. Perhaps OIN and the Linux Foundation need to make membership conditional on members taking no first action against each other with software patents?
According to the pro-patents Patently-O patent filings increase rather than decrease at the USPTO. This is not indicative of success, not from an economical and scientific point of view. To a lawyer this is fine news and also to the USPTO, which makes money out of granting and gardening patents. The people at the USPTO are lowering their standards and broadening their scope in order to make more money, so the patent trolling ‘industry’ is thriving and David Kappos thinks that patents create jobs (for lawyers maybe, as well as USPTO staff). He is clearly confused about patents based on this new Kappos interview, which turns into a debate about software patents only in the comments. Let’s take just one paragraph from Kappos and break it down.
Kappos says: “Well, that’s exactly right. The reason is because patents create jobs.”
That’s a thoughtless statement because it does not take into account businesses which are ruined or made poorer due to patents.
“Businesses needn’t have monopolies and needn’t exclude rivals from the market in order for the market as a whole to offer jobs.”Kappos continues: “Patents enable innovators to put products and services in the marketplace and to hire people.”
They could do that without patents. That’s just the fairy tale we keep hearing from lawyers. Kappos is one of them. Businesses needn’t have monopolies and needn’t exclude rivals from the market in order for the market as a whole to offer jobs.
Kappos then says: “They create opportunity and they put Americans to work.”
“Americans,” eh? Does that confirm that, as Glyn Moody put it last year, patents are “a neo-colonialist plot to ensure the continuing dominance of Western nations” or is that something else?
Kappos finished this paragraph with: “And so every patent application that’s sitting here in our agency is potentially American jobs that aren’t being created.”
“Not in FOSS, they don’t. This is old-think,” said Pamela Jones in Groklaw. Kappos must get his facts straight. He seems to have been immersed in the same old propaganda we always see in lawyers’ blogs. The USPTO is supposed to represent and to serve the interests of science and technology, not the meta-industry created artificially by the patent system this accompanies. Based on this new blog post, even some lawyers would publicly admit that patents have gone the wrong way in the United States. Software patents need to go.
Based on my 40 years of experience in the computer system development, much of it before software patents were introduced, I believe that the alleged connection between such patents and the stimulation of innovation is tenuous at best and probably negative.
How about gene patents? There is another article about these too:
Back in March, we headlined our discussion of the district court judgment in the Myriad case “Pigs Fly.” Guess what?—they’re still aloft. On August 4, in a highly technical patent case that, appropriately enough, involved “porcine virus DNA,” one Federal Circuit judge—dissenting Judge Timothy B. Dyk—suggested that he might agree with the basic principle of the Myriad holding: that isolated DNA sequences are not necessarily patentable.
When even nature (human life) becomes a patent, then it’s rather clear that the USPTO needs to be rebuilt from scratch or abolished. It’s doing almost nothing to promote progress in society anymore. As gnufreex shrewdly put it the other day, “Patents are an alien conspiracy to stop technological progress on Earth”
Most great ideas come from small companies. A lot of people would agree with this. Hurting those companies is the worst one can do and software patents do exactly that. Hulu, which is relatively small, was left to do the squashing of software patents in the courts, not the USPTO, which leaves the expensive process to the outside lawyers:
A federal court in California has invalidated a patent by plaintiff Ultramercial, LLC as not covering patentable subject matter. Specifically, the court applies a test the Supreme Court recently drew up in its landmark decision, Bilski v. Kappos, over business method patents. The test is whether a patent covers a “machine-or-transformation.” In invalidating the patent, the California district court rules that the patent in question is not aimed at a computer-specific application, that the Internet is not a machine, and that the mere act of storing media on computer memory doesn’t tie the invention to a machine.
There are always those looking for short-sighted excuses to file software patents and this new example shows a misconception. The author complains about Facebook, conveniently not thinking about the other side of software patents — that one which affects small companies in particular (being attacked by others’ patents, especially those with a comprehensive portfolio, as Richard Stallman explained elegantly).
We are pretty good at providing patents for specific engineering methods or sophisticated inventions. We even do allow a software patent to stand from time to time. However, there are many ideas that are simply embraced, and extended by the gorillas.
Facebook has just bought a load of patents [1, 2]. Any company with a real product (i.e. not a patent troll) cannot easily sue Facebook without getting attacked in exchange/return. The problem with Facebook is that it can sue back. This whole thing works well for nobody except trolls and lawyers. To Facebook it is also a form of shield — a shield from real competition (with actual products), that is.
Speaking of patent trolls, Soverain looks like a software patent troll in the making. We’ll keep an eye on it. More patent trolls and agitators are named in this new list:
3 Stocks that Could See a Windfall of Cash from Patents
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Note: All three of these companies appear to be racking up impressive licensing deals that will, over the long-haul, generate compelling free cash flow growth
Investors — like lawyers — don’t care about science. They view patents merely as some mechanism with which to enrich themselves. Acacia has just gotten more money to harvest patents and attack companies with them. Even Patent WatchTroll (Gene Quinn) calls Acacia a patent troll, ironically not realising what a troll he himself really is. Patent WatchTroll says that “[p]atent Trolls are just a cost of doing business for big tech; a nuisance that isn’t worth engineering around.” Pamela Jones responds to it in Groklaw by writing: “Translation: just pay up. So what if it’s an unproductive drain on the economy and on innovation. The worst part is, he’s not even kidding.”
It’s people like Patent WatchTroll who make the USPTO the utter mess it has become. It serves greedy solicitors and it harms scientific progress whilst relying on reality distortion fields to hide this. █
“People naively say to me, “If your program is innovative, then won’t you get the patent?” This question assumes that one product goes with one patent.” —Richard Stallman
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Posted in Google, Java, Microsoft, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 3:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google’s greed for patents may harm its Java/Dalvik/Linux cause and questions ought to be asked about unwise hires that seemingly subverted Google’s policy
GOOGLE was once a fine company created by software developers/scientists, but about 3 years ago we showed a video where Google hires are seen who are lawyers that loves software patents and insist on having them. This is sad. We have already posted a little memo to Google regarding software patents, but unless masses of people do something similar, Google (the ‘God’ of the Internet) will continue to ignore such pleas.
Oracle’s patent attack on Google/Dalvik [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] ought to have taught Google that the world would be a better place if it was without software patents. Why can Google not do more to end software patents? At the moment, Google reinforces patents using its USPTO search facility with improved features which are added over time. There are even patents on providing access to patents and there is a patent on patent trolling, too. Are tools like this one infringing on Google’s patents? Are patent trolls infringing on IBM’s patent? “Google Patents Indexing, Retrieval of Blogs,” says this item of news.
This week, Google Inc. was assigned a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office USPTO for the invention of a system and method for indexing and retrieval of blogs.
You can find details of this new patent 7765209 in IP.com’s Intellectual Property Library, which includes detailed information for this patent, first applied for in 2005 and granted in 2010 for what appears to be the core patent for Google’s system and method of indexing blogs, which are now included in the results of a Google search.
Has Google lost its head? There are other new patents from Google. Why are patent lawyers running this company now? And how can Google appeal for sympathy when it falls under patent attacks (the same goes for net neutrality)? To Google’s credit, so far it has used patents only defensively, but these policies don’t last forever. Microsoft and Apple are both patent predators and Sun’s patents, for example, became offensive when put in the hands of another company. “Clearly, Oracle is a strong believer in software patents. And if they can use patents as a lever for revenue generation, they will,” said RedMonk analyst Michael Cote to IDG. With Microsoft as a major barrier and Oracle as a true obstacle, Google’s smarter strategy ahead would be elimination of software patents. Here is a new article of interest:
If that weren’t about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. “There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. “The first opponent will be Microsoft.”
Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.
We have a lot of the documents from this trial in Comes vs Microsoft. We also know that Microsoft threatened Sun with software patents. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer did it personally like Joe Pesci and Al Pacino playing mafia. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Apple, Microsoft, Patents at 2:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft punishes Datel for competing and Apple keeps patenting customer-hostile antifeatures for iOS
Microsoft and Apple both enjoy a monopoly in particular areas. The main difference between them is perhaps the fact that Microsoft broke the law to attain a monopoly position (compare to Google for contrast), not just to sustain it.
Recently, Microsoft needed to compete against Datel, which had more than one dispute with Microsoft. We wrote about their story in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Datel seems to have just given up, thus settling with Microsoft according to Microsoft’s boosters in Seattle [1, 2]. Given the items’ similarities, Microsoft had a strong case and Datel seemed like a provocateur. According to the another Microsoft booster from Seattle, the antitrust case carries on. It’s just that Microsoft managed to tame a controllers competitor.
Apple is increasingly using patents in an aggressive fashion, just like Microsoft. Apple even sued over the use of Linux/Android. Here is Apple patenting spyware right about now. From the EFF:
It looks like Apple, Inc., is exploring a new business opportunity: spyware and what we’re calling “traitorware.” While users were celebrating the new jailbreaking and unlocking exemptions, Apple was quietly preparing to apply for a patent on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple to identify and punish users who take advantage of those exemptions or otherwise tinker with their devices. This patent application does nothing short of providing a roadmap for how Apple can — and presumably will — spy on its customers and control the way its customers use Apple products. As Sony-BMG learned, spying on your customers is bad for business. And the kind of spying enabled here is especially creepy — it’s not just spyware, it’s “traitorware,” since it is designed to allow Apple to retaliate against you if you do something Apple doesn’t like.
The FSF foresaw such malicious features. Also see news articles like:
i. Will Prior Art Doom Apple’s Anti-Theft iPhone Patent?
ii. Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stock Rumors – Will Your Next iPhone Know Your Face?
iii. Apple May Use Behaviour Analysis To Detect Unauthorised Users
iv. “Apple Envisions Tech to Photograph, Record IPhone Thieves
v. Apple may be looking to lock out unauthorized iOS users
This can also be used against the customer under particular circumstances, e.g. after a phone is believed to have been “jailbroken”:
i. Apple eyes kill switch for jailbroken iPhones
The application, which was filed in February and published Thursday, specifically describes the identification of “hacking, jailbreaking, unlocking, or removal of a SIM card” so that measures can be taken to counter the user. Possible responses include surreptitiously activating the iPhone’s camera, geotagging the image and uploading it to a server and transmitting sensitive data to a server and then wiping it from the device.
ii. Patent it and patent all: Apple’s closed-wall garden approach
Apple applied for a new patent to block jailbreaking of its iPhone and iPad series of products, in its bid to maintain a closed-wall garden.
A customer enters the new Apple store, which is the world’s largest, on its opening day at Covent Garden in London August 7, 2010.
A customer enters the new Apple store, which is the world’s largest, on its opening day at Covent Garden in London August 7, 2010.
Although jailbreaking of Apple devices was legalized, Apple intends to patent its mechanism which allows it to detect a jailbroken iphone, iPad or iPod and restore it to factory settings.
Who would choose to become a customer of such a company? A reader of ours who bought a Mac several years ago put GNU/Linux on it some years ago, especially because he realised that Apple had gone rogue. A couple of days ago he explained: “I wonder about the time line here:
Can I use Apple’s Runtime APIs?
“On up to and including 10.4, Apple was really doing well by FOSS.
A Brief History of Mac OS X
“Version 10.5 was developed during the worst of Jobs’ illness, before major treatment. Version 10.6 was developed during his convalescence.
How Steve Jobs Got Sick, Got Better, And Decided To Save Some Lives
“That leads to questions of what kind of staffing problems arose then during the obligatory absence that now need to be cleaned up to get back into the groove.” █
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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That is the question these days. Which, the most obvious answer to this question is yes. Whether this is a emphatic yes or a ho hum yes is, however, up to you. In any case, Linux is ready for prime time and here are three reasons why.
The first reason is that Linux can perform almost any computing task that either a Windows or OS-X machine is capable of. More importantly, Linux is also compatible with both Windows and OS-X environments. For instance, a document written in the OpenOffice Linux version can be opened in Windows Word. Likewise, a person using Evolution as an Linux email client can sync with Microsoft Exchange. Indeed, when it comes to tasks that the can’t be performed on Linux the list is now very short. As time goes along, that short list will disappear completely.
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May be that I have very little imagination or I’m very close minded about Windows (or perhaps both). May be that the real strength of Linux is that once you start using it, after the initial difficulties, you aren’t willing to go back fro no reason.
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Like Munich TFA describes a very gradual approach which requires much more work than is necessary. Lots of migrations are done very rapidly, say over a weekend, for projects that size. Extremadura did 80K PCs over a weekend. Things did not break because they had very little before and whatever they got was far superior. That’s an “easy” migration/leap. Having to treat every PC as unique in a system is much more likely in a small system because there is not a lot of redundancy whereas in a larger organization there may be groups of 50 or more users who can be migrated together.
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Kernel Space
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Kernel mode-setting (KMS) is useful for faster VT/X switching, VTs being always at the panel’s native resolution, the ability to thwart some security bugs in the X.Org Server (as shown earlier this week), presenting a cleaner and more flexible architecture, and allowing new and interesting projects to emerge (such as Plymouth and Wayland), but the benefits do not end there. When kernel mode-setting is combined with KDB, a Linux kernel debugger shell, you now have one powerful combination.
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Graphics Stack
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Yesterday was an exciting day for those Linux users interested in AMD’s open-source ATI driver work with the release of the Radeon HD 5000 series 2D/3D driver, Radeon HD 6000 series support getting underway, and many ATI R600 Gallium3D driver improvements over the past few days. If though you are a NVIDIA customer interested in open-source support, there’s great news for you today with the Nouveau driver that greatly improves the Gallium3D support.
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While X.Org Servger 1.9 was released less than a week ago (heck, it’s only been four days since releasing om time), the first interesting patch for X.Org Server 1.10 is already queued up and on the X.Org development mailing list for discussion. This patch, which was written by Tiago Vignatti and Fernando Carrijo, provides the “thread-ification” of the X Server input event generation code. Rather than being bound to the same thread as the X Server, the input event code with this patch is now running in its own thread, but this may only be the start of things to come with finally multi-threading the X.Org Server.
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Applications
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A customer service trouble ticketing (or help desk) is an information and assistance resource that helps the resolution of computer related problems. Companies seeking to offer better customer service often provide help desk support via the telephone, website, and or by email. Help desks may also be established simply for internal use, to provide help to a firm’s employees. The importance of the help desk cannot be overrated, and it represents a core part of a successful business.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.8 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.8 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have updated firefox to 3.6.8, Updated to the latest winetricks release and fixed desktop shortcuts.
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Reviews
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Greenie Linux is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that provides a very user-friendly desktop, and is optimised for home users in Slovakia and Czech Republic. Because English is also supported, Greenie Linux is included in our coverage of new distros. This specific release, Geenie 7.1L, is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and features several imporvements such as the GreenieTree theme which is supported by new icons and wallpapers. A few new applications have been added as well including Ufraw, Fotoxx and Wine.
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Today we hit up our lightest of lightweight distros. It fits in 20MB less than Damn Small Linux, when installed uses 65MB of RAM, and boots in less than ten seconds (depending on hardware).
Yes. Today we try out Slitaz Cooking.
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Personally I think it is a brilliant execution of the super minimal distro. Yes it is lacking in some areas, and it is possibly one of the most limited-in-growth-potential distros out there, but let me say this – like any Linux, you can make this work for you.
If I read as overly generous I probably am, if you take the limitations into account that the builders of Slitaz had to work with you will realize that I feel very impressed. It is easy to come over as unfairly favoring Slitaz when compared to our writeup of Dreamlinux yesterday. They are two different beasts though – if you compare them directly Dreamlinux will win every time. Install them both on an old P11 with 64MB of RAM and Slitaz is the hands down winner.
For our application of finding something for Grandma and Mommy and their ancient computers we still like Linux Mint LXDE the best out of the six we tested so far.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A live CD version of Mandriva 2010.1 XfceLive was released over the weekend. Please enjoy these screenshots of this live lightweight Mandriva release.
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Red Hat Family
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Brian Stevens, chief technology officer of Red Hat Inc., discusses the outlook for cloud computing.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) rallied more than 1% on Monday on renewed speculation that the software company may be acquired by SAP.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A new video featuring footage of Canonical’s Ubuntu Unity interface has just been released to advertise the new netbook interface’s impressive new features.
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If you use or follow Ubuntu, a great way to see what’s happening somewhat behind the scenes is the Canonical Design Team site/blog.
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The compact, Linux-powered Pogoplug device has just gained a $29 WiFi adapter companion, which enables it to work wirelessly. The new Pogoplug Wireless Adapter appears to be a standard USB 802.11 b/g/n WiFi adapter of undisclosed origin and chipset, and works with all current Pogoplugs.
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Phones
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Android
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The XT720 is the highly anticipated follow-up to Motorola’s Milestone, the first Android 2.0+ device the firm released. Although we were relatively impressed with many of its key features in our review back in issue 87, it was let down by its excessive weight and bulk, which was largely attributed to its otherwise effective slide-out Qwerty keyboard. Other problems included a rather short battery life and a 5MP camera that ticked all the boxes on paper, but often left shots either blurred or washed out.
Motorola wouldn’t be one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers on the planet without being able to take on board user feedback, so we’re not that surprised to see that the XT720 addresses almost all of these problems in one way or another.
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Just desserts? Motorola has posted a timeline for when users of its Android-running smartphones can expect an OS upgrade. While all eyes are on “Froyo,” or Android version 2.2, some users will have to be happy with 2.0 and 2.1 — also known as “Éclair.”
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Tablets
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Google Chrome OS powered tablet may hit the market as soon as late November, says the blog Downloadsquad.
HTC, one of the major users of Google’s Android OS, is developing this tablet. Accoridng to reports another of Google’s close partner Verizon Wireless will be the carrier for the tablet.
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Google has started inviting developers to prepare their apps for the Chrome Web Store. The web store is rumored to go live with the arrival of first Chrome OS running tablet.
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A CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW in Berlin will see Viewsonic show its whole range of wares, including an Android tablet.
Better known as a display manufacturer and not as a dabbler in any other consumer electronics hardware, Viewsonic is branching out to join the Android tablet brigade.
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ViewSonic says it will introduce two new tablet computers next week at a Berlin tradeshow. An unnamed ten-inch model will boot into either Android or Windows, while the seven-inch ViewPad 7 will offer Android, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS, plus front- and rear-facing cameras, the company says.
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One of the new tablets will almost certainly be the much-rumoured Archos 32 internet tablet.
“The company will showcase five brand new Internet Tablets ranging touch screen from 2.8 to 10 inches featuring computing, communications and apps with the power of Android plus Archos’ legendary video quality will be shown for the first time,” stated the company.
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Last week we reported about a rumor that Toshiba will unleash a 10-inch Android Tablet. Today photos leaked of the Toshiba Smartpad on NotebookItalia. Toshiba has apparently planned to unveil the new SmartPad at the IFA 2010 next week.
The Toshiba Smartpad looks pretty sleek with its black surface and metal frame with rounded edges. The Toshiba Tablet has four buttons on one side of the touchscreen and features a webcam. HDMI and USB ports are also available on the Smartpad. No new information is available on the specifications. The rumors talk about Tegra 2 chipset.
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Borders is now taking pre-orders for two seven-inch Android tablets, the $200 Cruz Reader and the $300 Cruz Tablet, and says the first of the devices will ship by the end of this month. Both tablets offer conventional backlit color touchscreens, but the Reader is resistive while the Tablet is capacitive, the reseller says.
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According to Fortune, Open Source is slowly gaining acceptance in the corporate world. More and more corporates are beginning to see the merits of Open Source and have started embracing it. But all these changes didn’t happened overnight. It was rather a painful journey. ‘Sharing’ was never a good thing for Corporates until recently. These changes were largely brought about by a string of Open Source success stories that happened over the years.
GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux is probably the biggest thing ever happened with Open Source. Richard Stallman, founder of Open Source movement, spearheaded a project to build a “complete Unix-compatible software system” based entirely of free software(free as in freedom).
Project was called GNU(GNU is Not Unix). During the same time Linus Torvalds built a Kernel(which is otherwise known as the heart of an opearting system) and made it Open Source. He named it Linux. The Linux kernel and GNU tools(libraries, compilers, text editors etc) combined to become GNU/Linux operating system(popularly known as ‘Linux’).
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Oracle
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However, the time between updates make increase by a large margin.
That’s what I take from the current problems that are causing fear and loathing in the open source camp. Many are afraid that Oracle is going to become as big a problem for OpenOffice as it has for OpenSolaris.
The difference is that OpenOffice has safety in numbers, being estimated at garnering a full 10% of the office productivity market. OpenSolaris is a miniscule part of the overall small operating systems market, usually categorized as “Other”.
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I do use alternatives of OpenOffice.org from time to time. KDE Office and some components of GNOME work (GNOME also depends on OpenOffice.org). I use LyX for some writing projects. KWord includes the database-merge capability so useful for writing students’ reports. Everything else in OpenOffice.org, I have good substitutes like GNUmeric, phpMyAdmin, Scribus, Inkscap, Dia, etc. but they are not so well integrated. Could we survive a catastrophe with OpenOffice.org? Yes, but it would be a major disruption. In order to minimize disruption it is important to explore options long before a crisis emerges. I have frequent opportunities in my teaching but others will have to make a determined effort to explore GNU/Linux for functionality outside of OpenOffice.org.
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How much of the Linux penetration was affected when Microsoft came out with ‘baseless’ accusations that Linux infringes on its patents (I did a long story back then for LINUX For You magazine). Microsoft never showed the numbers. All they got was to ‘force’ some Linux companies to sign cross licensing deal with them and extort some money from Linux.
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Even if Oracle is technically right (which Google disagrees with), this move has damaged the Open Source community. Even if Oracle has emerged as a bad-boy for the Open Source community, Android will continue to thrive.
The FUD failed to work with Linux’ patent infringement accusation. After Linux, Microsoft accused Android of infringing on their patents – it did not work either. I don’t see this FUD to be working either.
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As many have seen, Oracle has elected to stop contributing to OpenSolaris. This decision is, to put it bluntly, stupid. Indeed, I would (and did) liken it to L. Paul Bremer‘s decision to disband the Iraqi military after the fall of Saddam Hussein: beyond merely a foolish decision borne out of a distorted worldview, it has created combatants unnecessarily. As with Bremer’s infamous decision, the bitter irony is that the new combatants were formerly the strongest potential allies — and in Oracle’s case, it is the community itself.
As it apparently needs to be said, one cannot close an open source project — one can only fork it. So contrary to some reports, Oracle has not decided to close OpenSolaris, they have actually decided to fork it. That is, they have (apparently) decided that it is more in their interest to compete with the community that to cooperate with it — that they can in fact out-innovate the community. This confidence is surprising (and ironic) given that it comes exactly at the moment that the historic monopoly on Solaris talent has been indisputably and irrevocably broken — as most recently demonstrated by the departure of my former colleague, Adam Leventhal.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, we all know Eben Moglen as the legal voice of free software. He is that and more.
A professor of Law and legal history at the Columbia University, Moglen preaches what he practices — free software and the role it plays in improving education. As part of Bangalore’s Christ University’s conference on distributed education, Moglen delivered a (recorded) talk on how he uses Wikis to teach his Law courses.
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This collaboration extends beyond the physical confines of the classroom. Moglen illustrates this with an example of how his students in New York collaborated with a student in Lodz, Poland, who was working on a 13th century jury question. Moglen’s American students located and scanned documents and made them available to the Polish student on the Wiki, who then with his fellow classmates, translated the documents from medieval Latin into English. “Without Wiki technology [this collaboration] would have taken months to arrange, and would in fact never come to be all”, he remarks.
Moglen finds a natural link between Wikis and his third course, on Law of the New Society Connected by the Internet. Students in this course use the Wiki as a kind of blog to exchange opinions and conduct academic disputation, by adding links and pointers to existing material, fill in additional examples, and references, and comment on the lectures and on their own work.
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Government
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What was interesting was a shift from the attitude at last years meeting of: “We can use open source software in the military?” to this years vibe of “How can we use, modify, sustain, and create more open source software around the military?” In the last year, since the update of DoD Open Source policy (see the 2009 DoD Open Source Memo), there has been an important shift in understanding that the benefits of being open vastly outweigh the hassles and foibles of closed and gated source code development–especially when the U.S. taxpayer is picking up the tab. Roadblock issues were brought up, such as:
- What are the best practices for how to run unclassified code communities for a classified client?
- How do we create, fund, and sustain development of open source?
- How do we generate more ideas on how to fix and deal with the government’s acquisition system?
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In the United States, the White House has led the march towards open source and free software by switching the http://www.whitehouse.gov/ website to the Drupal content management system. The government of the United Kingdom has decided to follow their lead. http://data.gov.uk/ acts as a central information repository for many of the UK’s government agencies. The government recently converted the site to a very clean and very polished Drupal website. The main effort of the site is to provide the British constituency with transparent access to data on the actions and statistics of various government bodies. For example, I visited the site and navigated to the Department of Energy section. There was a plentiful store of data on energy consumption, energy prices, C02 emissions, and energy trends. Overall, the site is very well done and it could be a model for information dissemination in smaller communities and other national governments.
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Openness/Sharing
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The open source way is going mainstream. If you have been involved in open source over the years, you have a very valuable skill set to offer your employer. You might need to use the word “co-creation” instead of “community” and talk about networked organizations, but this report shows that you have learned things that are greatly valued in the marketplace. Individuals who know how to create communities based on collaboration and meritocracy are in high demand.
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Almost all over the world, students are either back to school or preparing to do so. With this comes the headache of getting text books for the semester and its attendant costs. For a myriad of reasons, costs of school text books, especially those of higher learning have skyrocketed. If you are looking to cut costs (and who doesn’t anyway?), then the following 2 sites should come in handy.
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In a rare victory for Google and Yahoo Argentina, an appeals court has cleared the companies of defamation for including sex-related Web sites in their search results for an Argentine entertainer.
The appeals court overturned a lower-court ruling that had found the companies liable for defaming the entertainer, Virginia Da Cunha.
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Science
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A U.S. district court issued a preliminary injunction Monday stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in a slap to the Obama administration’s new guidelines on the sensitive issue.
The court ruled in favor of a suit filed in June by researchers who said human embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of human embryos.
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It’s a mystery that presented itself unexpectedly: The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles away.
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Security/Aggression
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“It is an ongoing project that we started about 18 months ago,” Grugq told eWEEK. “Originally it started when Fyodor investigated some service offerings from Russian hacker forums for a specific project that I was working on. It turned out to be extremely interesting and amusing, so we discussed doing more long-term monitoring on the forums. It grew from there into what is now a continuous monitoring program.”
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The arrest warrant issued for Wikileaks’ editor-in-chief Julian Assange has been quashed by Stockholm Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné, who said in a press release “I am of the opinion that there is no reason to suspect that he has committed a rape.” The press officer of the Swedish Prosecution Authority says that he is still suspected of molestation, and that neither police nor prosecutors have yet been able to contact Assange. Assange had this morning said that he was going to hand himself in to police but also said that the accusations against him were false.
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Reliable sources tell us that the Election Commission of India had pressurized the Maharashtra police to press for Hari Prasad’s arrest on charges of stealing the EVM used for exposing the vulnerability of EVMs. The ECI’s intent becomes evident from the fact that they had instructed the police not to share a copy of the FIR with Hari Prasad to deny him an opportunity to move an anticipatory bail application. Hari Prasad did mange to get a copy of the FIR later but decided to court arrest if necessary rather than seek anticipatory bail.
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Finance
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Goldman’s first round of questioning began in the wake of the $85 billion federal bailout of the American International Group, the insurance giant, in 2008. Goldman owned insurance policies from A.I.G. on some of its mortgage investments. Analysts, journalists and federal authorities all raised questions about whether Goldman unfairly benefited from taxpayer funds used to bail out A.I.G.
Such questions were fueled by the résumé of a prime architect of the bailout, the Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who had formerly led Goldman. (Mr. Paulson has said that he never took action to specifically benefit Goldman, seeking only to buttress the financial system as a whole.)
Like Toyota, Goldman has had internal debates about how forthcoming to be in confronting sharp questioning, with some insiders advocating a swift, unabashed disclosure of its dealings with A.I.G. to avoid inflaming public anger, according to people familiar with the deliberations who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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ONLINE HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has warned that a bill working its way through the California legislature will make it a crime to impersonate someone online in order to “harm” that person.
The law will make it illegal to create a Facebook or Twitter account with someone else’s name, and then use that account to embarrass that person.
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Unless a ring of terrorists is embedded entirely within some MNC, and is using its email and messaging system to plan terrorist attacks or other crimes using corporate BlackBerries, such a service cut would not be likely to prevent the planning or execution of any attacks. What it would do, however, is effectively cut off India from the global financial system. The ability of banks, insurance companies, law firms, consultancies and other professional service enterprises to operate around the globe depends entirely on the flow of confidential intra-firm communications. People cannot do business anywhere unless they can be sure that their firm’s business communications are not being overheard by competitors or other parties using breaches in communications networks. So every such enterprise relies upon mechanisms that ensure complete confidentiality on which the movement of trillions of crores every day in the world economy depend. BlackBerry provides one portion of that network to a large subset of that market. Any country which shuts off encrypted BlackBerry communications has shut down its place in the global economy.
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The facial recognition software that will put a name to every photograph in the internet
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Actel Corporation announced the addition of Red Hat Linux and Windows 7 support to its Libero IDE (integrated design environment) for FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). The SmartFusion FPGAs are also being treated to a tiny “Unison” Linux, capable of running in as little as 1KB of RAM, the company says.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This Wednesday a security blog reported that several rogue sites are in operation which aim to pull in people who were aiming to reach The Pirate Bay, but accidentally entered the URL with typos. While this kind of activity is nothing new, there is a more interesting detail being overlooked. One of the companies behind the scheme is trying to register the Pirate Bay trademark in the United States.
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Intellectual property has become such a hot topic that it needs to be doused with some history. Strange as it may sound, this is an argument developed convincingly in Lewis Hyde’s “Common as Air,” an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests.
[...]
The same attitude lay behind Jefferson’s description of knowledge as “common property.” It pervaded the entire Enlightenment, when men discussed experiments and ideas in correspondence networks and a chain of academies that extended from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia. Above all, they communicated their thoughts through print. Letters, learned societies and the printed word came together in the creation of a Republic of Letters, an egalitarian world of knowledge open to everyone — at least in principle, although in practice it was restricted to a literate elite.
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Copyrights
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As such, it often feels like copyright has become a crutch. Because content creators use it to earn some part of their living, they start relying on it for all of their earnings, and fail to flex their “creative business models” muscle and let those atrophy, as they increasingly rely on the gov’t granted monopoly privilege of copyright to act as a de facto business model.
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The Times solution is an amendment to the law which would make it possible after a good faith search and undertaking to pay should the performer surface.
Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As she is 37 weeks pregnant and cannot move much, I found the box and checked it, but the camera driver was missing. For a split second, a flash of an ancient fear traveled through my body. My wife saw my face and calmly said to me: “Maybe I lost it…” I immediately understood my wife’s peace. SHE NEVER USES WINDOWS ANYWAY. If ALL the drivers are lost, what is the problem? No worry whatsoever. A Mandriva install gave her everything she needs to use her computer.
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2007 was a different world. Linux was taking a harsh beating on all sides. While its smartphone OS market share was growing, that growth was far from rapid. Symbian held a commanding lead and, while iOS was still comparatively tiny, the astounding success of the first iPhone had everyone anticipating Apple dominance in the near future.
In the realm of servers, a traditional Linux strongpoint, the open-source OS was starting to see a reversal of fortunes. Windows Server was ascendant, and over in the desktop market Linux barely even counted as a player. Open source failed in the world of big gray and black boxes, and for a time it seemed as if it might die out as a viable OS choice altogether. Articles fretting over the limited future of the open source movement feared that it was doomed to be marginalized at best.
Then along came Android.
Netbooks started to gain traction. Then they started to give way to something even more convenient (and sexy); the iPad.
Now Linux is ascendent, while pundits fret over the death of the desktop. Consumers want to be mobile now. Apple addicted the whole damn world with that first hit of iPhone, and now we’re jonesin’ for any sexy, slim piece of tech with a touchscreen and decent wireless connectivity.
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Desktop
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Remember 3ddesktop? Before Compiz was adopted as the messiah of the Linux desktop experience, 3ddesktop was the way cool kids spun their work environments and dazzled their Windows-using friends.
And it was pretty cool — it never was nearly the catalog of intricate bells and whistles that Compiz is, but it did a decent job in the eye candy department.
Of course, it did require a little video muscle to use. But considering its last update was in 2005, you could — and still can — get away with running it on a single-core machine with a ground-level video card that has a little acceleration to it. Even something as underpowered as this should do it.
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As a matter of fact, what IS the right market for Linux?
The mythical Average User? No way. The average user wants a computer that performs the tasks set for it. Those people are in the market for a computer, a real, physical machine, a tangible object with a keyboard (real or imaged), a mouse (or trackpad/trackball/touchscreen), and a display screen. The Average User scarcely notices, and certainly cares less, what sequence of binary commands course through the CPU to translate input into action.
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These guys easily have 35,000 square inches of LCD monitors running Ubuntu desktops, displaying in real time thousands of graphs, metrics, monitors, and statuses. Hundreds of multi-head desktops running 8.04 to 10.04, attached to 17″ to 42″ Samsung LCDs, Ubuntu logos everywhere I turned!
There is no doubt that across both Server and Desktop, Ubuntu is proving itself in enterprise environments. Linux is here, there, everywhere, and Ubuntu is a very important player, helping make that happen. I take great pride in what we’re achieving together!
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I chose Fedora 13 and I am extremely happy that I did. Not only has it breathed new life into these PCs which were at crawling speeds with XP, but everything is working much cleaner and now I can rest assured that they will be virus and spyware free for quite some time. I’m not going to forget that Linux does have viruses and spyware, but it’s so uncommon that there’s no sense in worrying around the clock about it.
In my cases, the various software that was required was already being used in Windows, with the exception of MS Office, which I have them using OpenOffice 3.2 as a replacement. There have been some minor formatting issues at first, with documents that were imported from MS Office. These will be corrected along the way as the documents are used. But other programs such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. are equivalent across multiple platforms, making the transition easier.
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Server
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Big Blue has wanted you to run Linux and AIX on your OS/400 and i platforms for the better part of a decade now, and maybe you have and maybe you haven’t. Maybe Linux is now commercial enough that you feel like ditching Windows for certainly infrastructure and application serving jobs. If you do, and you have some latent capacity sitting around in your Power6, Power6+, and selected Power7 machines, then IBM has a deal for you.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week on the show: OpenSolaris is dead, Oracle sues Google over Android, Canonical unveils multitouch for Ubuntu, an Android game review and much more…
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Kernel Space
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Another week, another -rc. I didn’t really ever get around to announcing -rc1 when I released it, and we had enough niggling small problems (like a memory corruptor in the HID layer that ended up
causing some random problems etc) there that I never got around to fixing that lack of announcement. And hopefully -rc2 is a good point to correct the lack of earlier commentary.
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It has been a while since my original announcement of systemd. Here’s a little status update, on what happened since then.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I still have a very big collection of DOS games that I keep dearly and safely stored and backed up in several locations, including the original game saves. See you around.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Klipper is the KDE 4.5 clipboard and it is not your average clipboard tool. Unlike most operating system clipboards, Klippy gives the user quick and easy access to not just the last object copied, but multiple objects copied. Klipper is so powerful a clipboard tool, you will wonder why other operating systems don’t mimic the features and functionality. Klipper is also so powerful that most users won’t take advantage of it’s full range of features.
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GNOME Desktop
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Linux: W7 Theme is a free script that skins your Linux desktop with a familiar Windows 7 look and feel.
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The Debian desktop is pretty much Gnome with some Debian wallpaper. The default Main Menu icon is the Gnome foot.
To replace the Gnome foot with the Debian Swirl, replace the start-here.svg or start-here.png image with an appropriate Debian Swirl image.
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As everyone who ever tried it knows that trying to count how many people use a particular Linux distribution is almost impossible. Now, Rick Lehrbaum, founder of LinuxDevices and a friend and former editor of mine, has tried a new and interesting way to count Linux users on his new site, LinuxTrends: look at Google search results for the various Linux distributions.
Some of the results aren’t surprising. Ubuntu has become far more popular than the other mainstream distributions of 2004/2005: SUSE Linux, Fedora, Debian and Mandrake/Mandriva.
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Reviews
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Obviously, this is not a distro that most people should use. It’s a curiosity created by an oppressive government, and it’s a travesty that the open nature of Linux was used in this rather perverse manner. It’s a good example of how even the best things in life can be taken and distorted.
I don’t recommend it to anyone, beyond simply being a curiosity. Distrohoppers might have a bit of fun installing it to play with, but it will also creep them out. It certainly creeped me out while writing this review. So perhaps it’s best if nobody else installs it.
One thing puzzles me though; the North Koreans are usually heavy on the propaganda stuff (see the Vice Guide to North Korea videos at the beginning of the review). And yet, they appear to have blown a major propaganda opportunity. They could have released this distro around the world in different languages, with lots of propaganda built into it for each language. Instead, they released it only in Korean. Odd.
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Day Five. If you are wondering, yes we have had other things going on this weekend. Among the things I did was try and get Dreamlinux 3.5 working for Elzje, and I spent my Friday evening with my friend Renier Meyer painting a wall in his new house and eating epic pizza.
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The Salix OS developers do meet their stated goals: making a distribution for “lazy Slackers” rather than one that is generally easy to use for everyone. Some other Slackware derivatives, such as VectorLinux and Zenwalk, have done more to make their distributions friendly to Linux newcomers at the cost of straying further away from their Slackware roots. Salix OS developers made a conscious choice to go in a different direction. In some ways Salix OS reminds me of VectorLinux four or five years ago: it definitely takes me more time to install, configure and tweak it to suit my needs than a typical Linux distro does but, much like VectorLinux back then, the end results are definitely worth the effort. How much effort depends very much on the hardware used, as the very different results with my two systems illustrate.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Some people will tell you fragmentation is one of the main things that is holding back Linux from desktop adoption. Not having a unified name, packaging system, or heck even desktop environment often confuses new users and puts them into overload – Too much choice can be a bad thing.
Android is currently the only real player in the Linux mobile market. Now don’t get me wrong, I am glad Android jumped in record time to right near the top of the smart phone market. I’m also glad that through this success it has put the power of Linux into the hands of millions of people (many of whom are none the wiser about their penguin powered device).
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Android
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Manufacturing upstart PocketBook is clearly still gung ho about e-readers, judging by the five new models it has announced will be released at IFA in September, which include a pair of entry-level ProBook 602 and 902 units, as well as the ProBook 603 and 903 premium units. The 60x designated models sport 6-inch screens, while the 90x models have a bigger 9.7-inch. All models will feature 2GB of internal storage, a Linux-based OS, and include WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.
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Sub-notebooks
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In one of my previous articles I talked about the use of Linux as a free alternative to Windows. Now most people choose to use Windows on computers mainly because of compliance, as some software/games run only on Windows. We wouldn’t even argue that some software are better functionally than their Linux-based alternative. No contests for guessing the superior office suite between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.
Since the last two years, the inception of Netbooks has brought in a new wave of affordable computers that can be easily carried around anywhere. Netbooks were not designed to replace laptops and are meant to be used for basic tasks. Tasks such as browsing the net, working with office productivity suites, watching a movie or playing a few songs etc. You really don’t want to try and run 3D MAX or encode HD videos on it.
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Last week SimpleGeo and their partner Stamen Design jointly released a project they have been working on together called Polymaps. It’s absolutely beautiful and a stunning example of what you can do with the SimpleGeo API. They’ve released the Polymaps source code on GitHub so any developer can quickly see how the API is used, play around with real production code, and modify the base examples for their own use.
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What do you think? Are proprietary companies taking over the open source world? Are they, bit by bit, applying the divide and conquer strategy with a future outcome that open source as yet cannot see? Are open source defences crumbling because they only think about the here and now while proprietary companies look far beyond the horizon? So many questions and I have no answers.
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After more than a year of research and development, the Opencast project under the patronage of the University of California Berkeley has presented the Matterhorn 1.0 lecture recording system. The German (virtUOS) Centre for Information Management and Virtual Teaching at the University of Osnabrück was a major contributor to this undertaking.
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Events
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Seven open source experts will form the judging panel of the 2010 Open Source Awards, due to be held in Wellington on November 9th.
The panel includes two New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) Presidents, current President Rachel Hamilton-Williams and past-President Don Christie; Foo Camp founder Nat Torkington; WebFund Chairman, Dave Moskovitz; Richard Wyles, Director of Flexible Learning Network/Mahara; and Telecom Mobile Engineer Amber Craig.
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The staff behind the Free Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) have just announced that the 2011 conference will take place on the 5th and 6th of February. This is the first weekend of February, which is right around the time that the other FOSDEMs have taken place. Like always, this event will be taking place in Brussels, Belgium.
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Oracle
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As it had previously threatened, the OpenSolaris Governance Board (OGB) has now resigned. The dissolution motion was proposed and passed unopposed in a fourteen minute long meeting of the OGB.
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BSD
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Gnash
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We just released an improved GNU Flash player, Gnash 0.8.8. Gnash plays SWF (Shockwave Flash) files compatible with the Adobe Flash player. Gnash is portable software released under the GNU GPLv3. It runs on GNU/Linux, embedded GNU + Linux systems, and BSD, including x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and 64-bit systems. It comes with a standalone player as well as a browser plugin compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Konqueror, and all Gecko-based browsers.
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So is it worth using Gnash over the proprietary Adobe Flash Player? I would say: not yet, but Gnash is taking huge steps forward and soon we should have a viable open source Flash Player alternative that can do everything Adobe’s Flash does, and with some actual Linux support, specially now that Adobe discontinued its Flash Player 10.1 64bit for Linux.
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Government
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The Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software, was revised in June 2010. The latest version includes references to recent procurement policies developed by Spain and Malta and to this year’s approval by Italy’s constitutional court on the country’s Piedmont regional administration procurement law.
Both Spain and Malta this year adopted policies that specify that when their public organisations distribute open source applications, they will by default use the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).
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In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
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Security/Aggression
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A few months back, a research report came out noting that e-voting machines in India were not secure. I had seen it at the time, but considering how many stories we’ve seen of e-voting machines with security problems, I let it pass and didn’t write it up. However, the story has just taken a distressing turn. One of the researchers, Hari Prasad, who had obtained the e-voting machine from an anonymous source in the first place, has been arrested and taken into custody because he will not reveal who gave him the machine…
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If mine were truly a free country, US police wouldn’t wield such immense power or employ such aggressive tactics against their own citizenry – a militarisation of our police forces that started with the war on drugs and intensified after 9/11.
Consider: can you invent a realistic scenario wherein you shoot a man dead; justify it with a story witnesses contradict; confiscate any surveillance video; claim a “glitch” makes it impossible to show the video to anyone else – all while enjoying the support of state legal apparatus?
Police in Las Vegas did that last month, after they shot Erik Scott seven times as he exited a Costco. Cops say Scott pointed a gun at them; witnesses say Scott’s licensed weapon was in a concealed holster, and five of those seven shots hit him in the back. The confiscated surveillance video might settle the question; too bad about that glitch.
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The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was himself the subject of a rapidly spreading online story when news cascaded across the internet for several hours at the weekend mistakenly saying he was being sought in Sweden on rape charges.
Before Stockholm’s chief prosecutor made clear on Saturday afternoon that Assange was in fact neither charged with rape nor due to be arrested, the story had spread, generating more than 1,200 articles, available through internet news search, that received more than 1m hits.
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Thirty minutes after the police became involved, they decided to let her collect her belongings and board her plane.
“I was shaking,” she says. “I was almost in tears.”
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This isn’t a book for armchair war junkies. It’s about what Wilfred Owen called “the pity of war”. The centre and the pity of Jim Frederick’s account is the murder of the Janabis, an Iraqi family, and the rape of their 14-year-old daughter by four US soldiers. The most chilling aspect of the crime was the casual manner in which it was carried out. It was almost a jape – something to break the boredom of endless hours at a checkpoint. The soldiers did it because they had the power to do it; they didn’t need a reason why – almost the invasion of Iraq in microcosm.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Speculation that government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Australia faces days of uncertainty and political horse-trading after prime minister Julia Gillard acknowledged that neither the ruling Labor party nor the opposition conservative coalition had won an outright majority in the weekend’s election.
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The coalition government is plunged into a major row today over its commitment to human rights amid claims that it will scrap the Foreign Office’s landmark annual assessment of abuses across the world.
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While everyone is concerned about privacy violations from Facebook Places, government agencies may be using powerful new technology to violate 4th-Ammendment protection against unreasonable searches.
Here’s what the 4th Amendment says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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We’re used to the logic of copyright. Movies, music, and pharmaceuticals all use some form of patent or copyright protection. The idea is simple: if people can’t profit from innovation, they won’t innovate. So to encourage the development of stuff we want, we give the innovators something very valuable—exclusive access to the profit from their innovations. We’ve so bought into the logic that we allow companies to patent human genes.
And companies love copyright. They love it so much they persuaded Congress to pass the Sonny Bono Act, which extended individual copyright protections to the life of the author, plus another 70 years; and corporate copyrights to 120 years from creation, or 95 years from publication, whichever is earlier. That’s an absurdly long time, and it belies the original point of patents: does anyone seriously believe that a 40-year-old with a money-making idea is going to hold back because someone can mimic it 20 years after he dies?
At a certain point, copyrights stop protecting innovation and begin protecting profits. They scare off future inventors who want to take a 60-year-old idea and use it as the foundation to build something new and interesting. That’s the difficulty of copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual protection. Too little, and the first innovation won’t happen. Too much, and the second innovation—the one relying on the first—will be stanched.
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ACTA
Sorting Algorithms
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Posted in GNU/Linux, OIN, Patents at 5:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Response to the noise made by a “campaigner” for hire, who tries to characterise the pro-Linux OIN — not Microsoft/Apple/SCO — as an ‘evil empire’
TECHRIGHTS is an OIN sceptic, but the apparent Microsoft lobbyist mentioned in the previous post (Florian Müller) went too far by discounting OIN success stories [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and piggybacking ZDNet to label OIN “a scam”. Over at Groklaw, Pamela Jones responded to Müller’s FUD without naming him. She linked to this recent talk last week.
Recently significant capital has been invested in patent speculation and for the last eighteen months, Congress has been discussing patent reform. Hedge funds in need of generating quick returns in this challenging market are seeking investments in patent trolls. At the same time, corporate entities have built large patent portfolios. The resulting patent arms race is fueled by the existence of poor quality patents. This is partially due to the fact that insufficient prior art was identified to enable rejection of poor quality patents by the USPTO. Any changes made to the current laws are likely to be suboptimal without participation from the open source community in reforming the patent system. Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN, will share his insights into the build-up and ramifications of the patent arms race for open source and discuss market-based patent reform solutions, to help ensure that we will keep open source open.
“Keith Bergelt of Open Invention Network also spoke at LinuxCon 2010,” wrote Jones. “His slides are downloadable as a PDF from the linked page. Notice slides 12-15, because it will show you what you can do to help, particularly with regard to codifying prior art and regarding defensive publication. As he points out, we have to deal with the past, regardless of the future of software patents, and of course the present. [...] If you have *any* doubts about why Open Invention Network matters, and the kinds of things the organization has done to protect Linux, I suggest you listen the introduction to his speech last year at LinuxCon, and then listen to his speech. The theme is the attempt that year by Microsoft to auction off patents it believed relate on Linux to patent trolls.”
Separately Jones advised: “don’t let anyone persuade you that there is no purpose to OIN. If you have any patentable ideas, and you wish to help build up OIN’s muscle, contact them.” In relation to another article about patents, Jones concluded: “This is the place Keith Bergelt of OIN referenced in his talk last year at LinuxCon, and this is where defensive publications can be collected. This isn’t a patent; it’s a way to ensure no one else can patent something you’ve written about, because it’s now prior art. This is one of the things that OIN will do with you, if you have a useful idea that could be patented but you hate patents and prefer not to do that.”
“…don’t let anyone persuade you that there is no purpose to OIN.”
–Pamela Jones, GroklawTo summarise Techrights’ position, we are adamant about ending software patents. OIN does not do this, but it provides a temporary fix, like some kind of plaster. Most of our posts about OIN are supportive of OIN, with some reservations. The same goes for Peer-to-Patent.
In the mean time, Red Hat’s Wildeboer identifies three more patents [1, 2, 3] which he claims to be a threat to the World Wide Web. It’s an important issue we mentioned some hours ago. “Is this a patent on cookies,” he asks. “If yes, it might become a royal PITA for the web [...] And in that same case we have very broad e-commerce patents” (Wildeboer speaks for himself here, not for Red Hat, which is an OIN member).
In conclusion, let’s not attack OIN. Scepticism is healthy, but what Müller has been doing is destructive. Even the FFII disagrees with him, both the decisions and the methods (after inheriting his campaign!). It’s not the same person from 2005. Something apparently changed. █
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