11.21.10
Posted in Asia, Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 11:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
(ODF | PDF | English (original))
Resumen: La India hace lo correcto cuando se trata de RAND (“Razonable y No-Discriminatorias” licencias) y el mundo entero debe prestar atención y de imitar este modelo de la India en materia de normas y estándares.
Hay algunas buenas noticias sobre las patentes de software en la India[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Software_Patents_in_India] y también una admisión de que las patentes de Microsoft dentro de las normas no son una buena idea después de todo. Vamos a pasar por algunos de los enlaces de noticias que se encuentran y explicar lo que significan.
Glyn Moody, una de las voces más notables en los últimos tiempos contra los términos RAND (‘kryponite GPL’), dice que” Microsoft demuestra por qué sus “razonables y no discriminatorias” licencias son una farsa[http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2010/11/microsoft-demonstrates-why-frand-licensing-is-a-sham/index.htm]“, “en este nuevo cargo con respecto a la demanda de Microsoft contra Motorola [http://techrights.org/2010/11/10/motorola-and-xbox/](en los que Microsoft es el patente agresor). Como el Dr. Moody dice:
“La parte clave aquí es que Microsoft acusa a Motorola de no cumplir con su compromiso “con licencia de patentes identificadas relacionadas con las tecnologías de codificación de vídeo inalámbrico en condiciones razonables y no discriminatorias .” Es decir, aun cuando razonables y no discriminatorias (llamado RAND aquí) ha ha acordado que los términos bajo los cuales la tecnología se licencia, no hay garantía de esos términos en realidad ser “razonables” (o “justo”) en los ojos de todos.
Esto es exactamente lo que sugierí en mi pieza anterior – pero lo que es peor aquí, porque este no es ni siquiera por la falta de disponibilidad de las “especiales” condiciones para el software libre, pero por las disputas entre los proveedores tradicionales de software propietario sobre lo que FRAND significa. Básicamente, demuestra muy bien que FRAND significa, precisa y exactamente nada: altisonante a traves de “justo” y “razonable” puedan ser, en el rojo mundo del diente y garra de licencia de patentes, que son PALABRAS HUECAS que ofrecen absolutamente CERO GARANTIAS para los que tontamente confían en su valor nominal.
En efecto, esta acción de Microsoft demuestra que la única manera de obtener “justos y razonables” en FRAND es luchar por ella en los tribunales – que a su vez son completamente imposibles para los proyectos individuales y coléctivos de software libre que no son financiados por grandes empresas. Esta es otra forma en la que razonables y no discriminatorias esta sesgada en contra de tales pequeños, los jugadores que componen la mayor parte del mundo del software libre.
La última acción de Microsoft proporciona una razón más convincente por qué la Comisión Europea no debe utilizar FRAND para el EIF v2 (Marco Europeo de Interoperabilidad Segunda Version) si se quiere crear condiciones de competencia equitativas para el software en Europa a través de apoyo para estándares abiertos. Si lo hace, los únicos que se beneficiarán serán los grandes monopolios y conglomerados, la intimidación empresas de software que simplemente pasar por encima de cualquier sentido de “equidad” o “razonable” – y los abogados.”
Simon Phipps también ha escrito acerca de RAND[http://webmink.com/2010/11/14/links-for-2010-11-14/] las siguientes observaciones (el contexto es un poco diferente de los anteriores):
“Una de las amenazas invisibles a la libertad del software es bilateral (privada) que sustituirá a los acuerdos de libertades aparentes. Eso es la gran razón para oponerse a RAND como una forma de concesión de licencias de patentes en las normas estándares, por cierto – RAND asegura que el mercado no es transparente y abierto, ya que obliga a los participantes a comprometerse (léase: someterse) en acuerdos bilaterales que sustituirá a la libertad del software.”
Afortunadamente, al menos en la India, la cordura se impone y se espera que expanda hacia el Oeste. Los términos de tipo RAND se abolieron como cuestión de derecho (aunque es un poco exagerado decirlo). Como Prakash Pranesh dice lo siguiente[http://twitter.com/pranesh_prakash/status/3056039414988800]:
“Muy emocionante! nueva política de la India del Abierto de Normas de finalización: http://goo.gl/4YfeD [pdf] #openstds
Así es como un empleado de Red Hat de la India dijo[http://osindia.blogspot.com/2010/11/indian-open-standards-policy-finalized.html]:
“Después de tres años de continuas batallas en marcha, Departamento de la India de Tecnología de la Información ha concluido la Política Nacional de Estándares Abiertos para el e-Gobierno. Este incorpora muchos de los puntos clave que fueron presentaron por Red Hat. En los últimos tres años, hemos trabajado con nuestros amigos en el gobierno, la sociedad académica, civil y los medios de comunicación para impulsar el gobierno de la India a favor de una política que impone una NORMA UNICA, LIBRE DE REGALIAS. La política final y las observaciones que Red Hat presento se adjuntan.”
Michael Tiemann, la superestrella de la OSI y colega de la persona de arriba, no escribe en nombre de Red Hat[http://www.opensource.org/node/551]:
“Esta cláusula garantiza que los estándares abiertos no discriminen en contra del código abierto, es una gran noticia para el software libre y comunidades de código abierto. Más importante aún, como la estrella de India continúa ascendiendo, esto demuestra que una nación líder en el mundo puede discutir, debatir y decidir una política que equilibre y, de hecho refuerza el interés de las empresas y los DERECHOS DE LAS PERSONAS. La sabiduría y el coraje de la India están en exhibición completa hoy!”
Esto no se quedará sin una lucha de parte de aquellos que se oponen a la libertad del software, o que monetizan en litigios innecesarios . Nuestro lector Satipera advierte de “promoviendo #swpats (patentes de software) en la India” en este nuevo artículo[http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2010/11/15/stories/2010111550080300.htm]; una fuente llena de prejuicios, obviamente de una persona con intereses creados. Dr. Anu Vaidyanathan, quien se describe como “fundador de PatNMarks, una firma de consultoría de la propiedad intelectual”, acaba de recibir una plataforma por El Hindú, como si fuera la intención de proporcionar o facilitar la publicidad y las necesidades de grupos de presión (lobbysts). Para citar partes de este “publicidad”:
“La ley de patentes en la India afirma explícitamente que el programa de un método matemático o de negocios o una computadora por sí o algoritmos constituyen materia no patentable. En la USPTO (Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos), existen varias “pruebas” para comprobar si una cierta patente es un método de negocio o una patente de software. Estos se aplican después de las pruebas de novedad y actividad inventiva, que son las pruebas de primer nivel que se aplicará a cualquier patente, en todo el mundo.”
“En la India, sin duda, los precedentes que existen para la aplicación sucesiva de estas pruebas son muy escasas, simplemente porque no tenemos una gran historia de litigios en esta materia – ya sea en negocios o en los métodos de software. Para futuras referencias y objeto de la discusión, estos son importantes por dos razones (a) Litigios rodean las empresas de tecnología en la India, sobre todo de Google, está en aumento en el dominio de la propiedad intelectual y (b) las empresas indias están mejor preparadas sabiendo que la posibilidad de sus patentes tengan de ser aceptadas sobre una base de datos históricos que ser contribuyentes en primer lugar a prepararlos en una gran forma para litigios y otros precedentes inesperados.”
“Para una empresa de software, este es probablemente el mejor camino a seguir porque al solicitar una patente, estas compañías no están tratando de limitar el acceso a su tecnología, y no hacer caso de la protección de su esfuerzos para evitar la molestia de trolls u objeciones de terceros a su código de bases, las interfaces de programación de aplicaciones o plataformas.”
Esta es la clase de personas que prefieren ver las normas y estándares estar “contaminadas” con patentes de software, en cuyo caso el software libre se excluyen. Los ciudadanos de la India no debe permitir que los proponentes RAND salirse con la suya, sino que perjudicaría a todas las empresas pequeñas y medianas empresas PYMES, ya sean de privadas o libres. Esperamos que La Unión Europea se inspire en la India ahora que el debate está en marcha (con los lobbysts de Microsoft al frente para promover RAND este otoño [1[http://techrights.org/2010/10/14/swpats-drama-in-europe/], 2[http://techrights.org/2010/10/12/quickenborne-and-bsa-help-promote-swpats/], 3[http://techrights.org/2010/10/16/swpats-canada-amazon/], 4[http://techrights.org/2010/10/15/raising-the-bar-of-patents/], 5[http://techrights.org/2010/10/19/bsa-attacks-on-standards/], 6[http://techrights.org/2010/10/20/lobby-for-rand-with-gpl-lies/], 7[http://techrights.org/2010/10/21/mobbyists-and-frand-fail/], 8[http://techrights.org/2010/10/22/karsten-gerloff-translation/], 9[http://techrights.org/2010/10/23/sco-and-software-patents-phase/], 10[http://techrights.org/2010/10/26/microsofts-pressure-for-software-patents-in-europe-carries-on/]]), “vamos a Esperamos que la Unión Europea lo entienda mientras todavía este caliente “, afirma Glyn Moody[http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2010/11/a-great-indian-takeaway/index.htm]:
“Como te habrás dado cuenta, he estado escribiendo mucho recientemente acerca del inminente Marco Europeo de Interoperabilidad (EIF), y la medida en que se apoye verdadera estándares abiertos que pueden ser aplicadas por TODOS. Por supuesto, eso no es sólo una cuestión europea: los gobiernos de todo el mundo se enfrentan exactamente con el mismo problema. Aquí tenemos un resultado fascinante de la India que tiene lecciones importantes para la Comisión Europea- y los gobiernos de todo el mundo-, al finalizar el EIF v2 (Marco Europeo de Interoperabilidad).”
“Como es de esperar, la comunidad del software libre en la India ha estado luchando batallas similares a los que aún se libran en Europa.”
La FFII (Fundación para una Infraestructura de Información Libre) ha encontrado mientras tanto que Kira Alvarez[http://keionline.org/blogs/2009/06/25/kira-alvarez], Representante Comercial Adjunto de Derechos de Propiedad Intelectual, y el Jefe Negociador de EE.UU. para el ACTA dijo: “Yo personalmente no creo que haya problemas con el sistema de patentes” Sí, mirando las cifras y viniendo de una ex-lobbyist de Time Warner y Lilly, compañía farmacéutica opuesta desde tiempo atrás a medicinas genericas y conocido promotor de patentes farmacéuticas. He allí es donde muchos de los problemas vienen de RAND.
On a personal note from the translator, Eduardo Landaveri:
I owed it to the people of India whose courage have take them to shackle off the heavy chains of colonialism.
The Spanish version should be read in Spain & all the Latin American countries due to the fact that ACTA wants to be pushed on the back of the people.
Everybody should be involved on how their respective governments handle this issue. Kira Alvarez Deputy Assistant USTR for Intellectual Property Enforcement, and the chief US negotiator for ACTA says she doesn’t believe there are any problems with the patent system. This is ludicrous but understandable coming from a person who was before Time Warner Vice President for Global Public Policy, and before that, she was a lobbyist for Ely Lilly a pharmaceutical company long time supporter of pharmaceutical patents an strong opponent of generic medicines.
Whatever is decide on Europe will affect the Thirld World Countries where authorities are easier to corrupt and deals can be made on the back of the people. Sadly but the US already fell on their hands. It will take years to overturn this.
India, Europe the eyes of people all over the World are on you: Do not give up!
“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” –Winston Churchill
Or in Spanish:
Se lo debía al pueblo de la India, cuyo valor los llevan a sacudirse el grillete de las pesadas cadenas del colonialismo.
La versión en español debe ser leído en España & & todos los países de América Latina debido al hecho de que el ACTA quiere ser pasado a espaldas de los pueblos.
Todo el mundo debe participar en la forma en que sus respectivos gobiernos manejar este tema. Kira Alvarez Representante Comercial Adjunto de Derechos de Propiedad Intelectual, y el jefe negociador de EE.UU. para ACTA dice que no cree que hay algún problema con el sistema de patentes. Esto es ridículo, pero comprensible viniendo de una persona que trabajo antes en Time Warner, como vicepresidente de Global Public Policy, y antes de eso, fue un lobbyst de Ely Lilly, una compañía farmacéutica que apoya desde hace mucho tiempo de las patentes farmacéuticas un fuerte opositor de los medicamentos genéricos.
Todo lo que se decida en Europa afecta a la Thirld Países del mundo donde las autoridades son más fáciles de corromper y ofertas se pueden hacer en la parte posterior de la gente. Por desgracia, pero los EE.UU. ya cayó en sus manos. Se necesitarán años para revertir esto.
India, Europa de los ojos de la gente de todo el mundo están puestos en ti: No te rindas!
“Si no va a luchar por lo justo cuando se puede ganar sin derramamiento de sangre, si no se lucha cuando su victoria será segura y no demasiado costosa, usted puede venir al momento en el que tendrá que luchar con todas las probabilidades en su contra . usted y sólo una pequeña probabilidad de supervivencia Incluso puede haber un caso peor: puede que tenga que luchar cuando no hay esperanza de victoria, porque es mejor morir que vivir como esclavos.” – Winston Churchil
Many thanks to Eduardo for his translations which make it into the hands of teachers. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Site News at 8:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An era of Flash barriers is coming to an end, but Techrights is looking for free/libre VoIP/SIP recording software
Adobe Trash (Flash) is dirt on the World Wide Web. It hinders access to data not just by humans but also by bots. Nevertheless, there are few Web sites that still depend on Flash and require the user/visitor to install it. One site that used to require it for most data (video) was YouTube, but this major site is moving to WebM, which may make Flash and its substitutes a lot less necessary (along with codecs that are not simple to obtain, at least in Fedora). Google can be expected to transcode all of its videos and make them available as WebM within weeks or just a few months. For other Web sites, Gnash, the free/libre alternative, seems to be sufficient and it is simple to install either from the package manager (e.g. KPackageKit) or the universal environment, which is the command line. The package managers vary, but the package names are usually the same (just replace yum with apt-get for example). In Fedora 14, the following commands do the job for Gnash support in Konqueror.
[roy@blueberry ~]$ su
Password:
[root@blueberry roy]# yum install gnash-klash
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Adding en_US to language list
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package gnash-klash.i686 1:0.8.8-4.fc14 set to be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Dependencies Resolved
=======================================================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
=======================================================================================================
Installing:
gnash-klash i686 1:0.8.8-4.fc14 fedora 177 k
Transaction Summary
=======================================================================================================
Install 1 Package(s)
Total download size: 177 k
Installed size: 541 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Setting up and reading Presto delta metadata
Processing delta metadata
Package(s) data still to download: 177 k
gnash-klash-0.8.8-4.fc14.i686.rpm | 177 kB 00:00
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing : 1:gnash-klash-0.8.8-4.fc14.i686 1/1
Installed:
gnash-klash.i686 1:0.8.8-4.fc14
Complete!
[root@blueberry roy]# yum install gnash
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Adding en_US to language list
Existing lock /var/run/yum.pid: another copy is running as pid 31528.
Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...
The other application is: PackageKit
Memory : 47 M RSS ( 63 MB VSZ)
Started: Sun Nov 21 12:28:38 2010 - 00:06 ago
State : Sleeping, pid: 31528
Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...
The other application is: PackageKit
Memory : 47 M RSS ( 63 MB VSZ)
Started: Sun Nov 21 12:28:38 2010 - 00:08 ago
State : Sleeping, pid: 31528
Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...
The other application is: PackageKit
Memory : 47 M RSS ( 63 MB VSZ)
Started: Sun Nov 21 12:28:38 2010 - 00:10 ago
State : Sleeping, pid: 31528
Setting up Install Process
Package 1:gnash-0.8.8-4.fc14.i686 already installed and latest version
Nothing to do
Or the short story:
yum install gnash-plugin
yum install gnash-klash
yum install gnash
In Ubuntu I’ve had less luck with Gnash, which was harder to successfully install and register with the Web browser. On the other hand, Fedora has some other drawbacks that are not its fault (e.g., from today [1, 2]). The bottom line though, as far as Flash content is concerned, things have improved greatly over the years. Not only is there a free substitute for Flash but Flash content itself is dying due to HTML5 (yes, some sites dump Flash in favour of HTML) and free codecs/formats such as Ogg and WebM. This opening up of the Web is further supported by the death of Silverlight and the realisation that mobile devices require access too.
As people who hang out in IRC may already know, Techrights depends on proprietary software only as far as recording is concerned because a VoIP recorder for 2 or more people simultaneously is something that we are still unable to achieve in Ekiga. Any suggestions regarding a free/libre replacement would be appreciated. Having got rid of all dependencies on proprietary software at my job (MATLAB has been the only such dependency for many years), it would be nice to make Techrights not dependent on Skype (for TechBytes) and the FSF too recognises that replacements in VoIP are a “high priority” issue. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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An Australian aquarium has welcomed the birth of the first baby Gentoo penguin chick born in the country.
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Let me put my voice on the biggest hurdle in FOSS adaptation.
This hurdle is “Proprietary Hardware Drivers”
In India we recently established a “Open Standard Policy”.It is the great success of FOSS communities and our leaders.
In the same way we need to have a policy on Hardware selling. This policy must specify that “Anything which Govt is buying must have a Open Specification of their Driver.”
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Unity Linux 2010_02 has been released two days ago, on November 17th, and it includes a new kernel, the latest Enlightenment 17 environment, and many fixes or enhancements. Unity Linux 2010_02 is dubbed Unite17.
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The majority of them showed various degrees of surprise or disbelief until I actually re-themed their Linux boxes on the fly.
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Desktop
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With the many choices and factors to consider, choosing a laptop of any kind can be a considerable challenge. Choosing one for use with Linux, however, brings its own special set of considerations, since it’s not yet always a plug-and-play world for the open source operating system.
Linux is typically not fussy about hardware–that, indeed, is one of its most endearing advantages. Some hardware, however, still doesn’t work well with Linux, due primarily to a persistent lack of the right drivers.
Still, there are more laptop choices today than ever before for the Linux user. Here are some guidelines for choosing the one that’s right for you.
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Server
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While China can take pride in topping the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, IBM has been given another recognition: building the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer.
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NASA’s biggest supercomputer seems to have gotten a little smaller. Ranked the sixth-most powerful HPC cluster in the world by the June 2010 Top 500 supercomputers list, NASA’s Pleiades fell to 11th place in the most recent rankingreleased this week.
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ClearOS is the new name for Point Clark Network’s ClarkConnect, which was a commercial server distro, released in 2000, with a limited free version. Now, though, Point Clark has restructured and the distro is managed by ClearConnect, which has made it free and open source. The result is that what was the top-of-the-range Enterprise edition is now free for everyone – with some small caveats, which we’ll cover later.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Fedora 14 was set to be the first major distribution shipping SystemD to replace SysVinit, but that ended up getting pushed back to the Fedora 15 release that will now come in May of 2011. Fortunately, for the developers behind Fedora and SystemD, this means the init replacement daemon will be in much better shape for its premiere. Lennart Poettering, the original developer of SystemD, has written about some of the recent improvements.
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It has been a while since my last status update on systemd. Here’s another short, incomprehensive status update on what we worked on for systemd since then.
* Fedora F15 (Rawhide) now includes a split up /etc/init.d/rc.sysinit (Bill Nottingham). This allows us to keep only a minimal compatibility set of shell scripts around, and boot otherwise a system without any shell scripts at all. In fact, shell scripts during early boot are only used in exceptional cases, i.e. when you enabled autoswapping (bad idea anyway), when a full SELinux relabel is necessary, during the first boot after initialization, if you have static kernel modules to load (which are not configured via the systemd-native way to do that), if you boot from a read-only NFS server, or when you rely on LVM/RAID/Multipath. If nothing of this applies to you can easily disable these parts of early boot and save several seconds on boot. How to do this I will describe in a later blog story.
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this month NVIDIA rolled out the GeForce GTX 580 graphics card as their fastest GPU to date with 512 CUDA cores, a 772MHz core clock, 1544MHz processor clock, 1536MB of 2GHz GDDR5 memory, and support for three-way SLI. The GeForce GTX 580 with its GF110 core is based upon a refined version of the Fermi architecture and is certainly a step-up from the GeForce GTX 480 that launched just earlier this year. For those curious how this NVIDIA graphics card performs under Linux, here’s the first benchmark and it’s compared to the Windows driver performance too.
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Linus is known for an occasional colorful email and in the past has had a number of issues with code in the DRM sub-system, such as calling the initial Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) push by Intel as being untested crap. It was also via Linus that Nouveau unexpectedly got merged into the mainline kernel. With this 2.6.37 DRM bug-fix pull (mailing list thread), Linus has become once again frustrated. This time it’s over the DRM code being messy, useless re-basing of Git trees, large amounts of DRM code always being changed later in the release cycles, and pulling “random crap” into tree.
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Since yesterday I’ve been running with the sched: automated per tty task groups patch and the 2.6.37-rc2 kernel and it has really breathed new life into my old and trusty IBM X61s. The difference is really very significant almost like magic as everybody else noted too:) Yay!
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Earlier this month NVIDIA rolled out the GeForce GTX 580 graphics card as their fastest GPU to date with 512 CUDA cores, a 772MHz core clock, 1544MHz processor clock, 1536MB of 2GHz GDDR5 memory, and support for three-way SLI. The GeForce GTX 580 with its GF110 core is based upon a refined version of the Fermi architecture and is certainly a step-up from the GeForce GTX 480 that launched just earlier this year. For those curious how this NVIDIA graphics card performs under Linux, here’s the first benchmark and it’s compared to the Windows driver performance too.
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Not for any dislike of Ubuntu, or distrust for the direction it is moving. You might call me old-fashioned, if only because the clicky buttony thingy doesn’t really turn me on. I’ll take a traditional desktop, any day.
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Applications
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DockBarX 0.40 has been released last night, bringing the following changes:
* The default theme has changed. The new default theme DBX is made by BigRZA. It’s made to look good with Radiance and Ambiance. (The old default theme is still included under the name Old.)
* Another theme by BigRZA, Sunny Colors is also included by default
* The theme Human bar is removed since it was pretty much an older version of the new default theme.
* Number of entries in recent and most used menus are increased to eight (for real this time).
* A few new languages and updates to translations.
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A good media player will save you literally minutes of frustration when you next go to watch a video on your PC. There’s also an abundance of add-ons and useful features bundled in with many of today’s media players, and here we’ve got a selection of the best Linux video players.
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It was a long awaited release, and we’ve a huge changelog too! The most visible thing we worked on is the complete maverick support but there are a lot of changes under the hood to give a better user experience to every user.
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In this post I will investigate a commandline graphical browser(run without X) which I was unaware of till two days back.I am pretty much well versed with lynx and elinks. . The new found(mentioned the source in the resource section at the bottom of the post) one called netsurf .I have tried to install it from the source available on Fedora 12 ,but failed to do so due to lack of patience.
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Linux is resplendent with administration tools. No matter what you need to monitor, Linux has a tool to suit your needs. You can monitor everything from file I/O, to network processes, and everything in between. You can test systems, check systems, start and stop systems…you name it. There are so many tools it’s hard to know where to start. And some of those tools are not very well known. Of those lesser known tools, some of them are incredibly helpful.
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A common complaint I hear about Gwenview is that sharing an image on Facebook, Flickr or other services is difficult because the feature is buried too deeply in the menu hierarchy. So, hot on the heels of KSnapshot, I made the export plugins easier to reach.
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Desktop search is one of those techs that keeps coming back and never really sticking. At least that’s how it seems to me. Look at how giddy I was about Beagle back in 2006. And I tried it and it was, generally, pretty awesome. It really worked well. It was like the speed of locate without having to wait until the database was updated at midnight. And it could see into IMs, MP3 metadata, emails and office documents. Now? According the the official website it’s no longer under active development. Perhaps that’s because they met all their goals. And that’s fine, but pretty much everyone switched over to tracker around 2008. I’m not quite sure why – perhaps all the anti-Mono hatred that went on. Fedora doesn’t even ship with Tomboy or F-Spot anymore. They’re there in the repos, but they aren’t the defaults.
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Hit space, see a quick preview of almost any file. Gloobus Preview bills itself as “the holy grail of preview” which may be an overstatement – but not by much. Being able to, in one keystroke, quickly open documents, movies, pictures and music makes it easy to figure out if you’ve found the file you’re looking for.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Want better flash performance in Ubuntu? Reader Eduardo got in touch to share a nifty hack to get just that.
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Here is yet another way that you can obtain weather information quickly: display the weather condition as a wallpaper in your desktop.
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Sometimes, you may have to issue commands with multiple arguments, as well as with multiple options.
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Games
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Shark attack is a free games. You can download it here. This games is about a scuba diver on his quest for precious family treasure in this deep sea adventure. This games is “2D Jump & Run” mode.
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We often hear that there are no games on Linux, or that are much worse than their counterparts for windows, so today I want to show some unusual games that run perfectly on our favorite operating system.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Multihead, where there is more than one physical screen and one X server per physical screen (not to be confused with xinerama, xrandr, mergefb, etc.), and Plasma Desktop is getting into a rather usable state thanks to testing and feedback from users with those systems that goes beyond “it doesn’t work”. Thanks to the digging and debugging work of several individuals, my “coding in the blind” has produced finally produced useful results as of the 4.5.3 release. There are still some KWin issues, apparently, but plasma-desktop is pretty well there.
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There was a time when I thought Amarok was the best music player on Linux. I even used to run it in Gnome as you can see from this 2005 screenshot. In that first link you can read me gushing over Amarok 1.4. I loved all the integrated technologies, especially the metadata juggling Amarok did. The first few Amarok 2.x releases with the KDE 4 libraries were complete crap. They were ugly and were missing nearly all of Amarok’s features. (Mirroring the complaints people were having about KDE 4 at the time) When I took a look at Amarok and KDE 4.4 in October I said I would take another look at Amarok.
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If you look at the various changes from KDE 3 to KDE 4, two major trends emerge: unification and abstraction. Plasma, for example, unifies the various parts of the desktop and panel. Solid provides an abstraction layer that hides the details of device management from applications, while Phonon does the same for multimedia. Akonadi does both, providing a unified system for handling PIM data and creating an abstraction layer so PIM front-ends don’t need to be concerned with the source or nature of the data they display. And of course the success of KDE 4 is not due solely to these trends, it is also due to developers sitting down and ironing out the current state of the tools in KDE, where they fail, where they work, where they should be, and how we can get them there.
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Everybody knows that effective design is very important to any succesful interface – be it an application, a website, a product, or a physical structure. There are lots of reasons behind this, but the one I’m going to talk about today is how design combats the most dreaded wall of text, of which KDE.org is a victim.
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Early next year, KDE will release new versions of the Plasma workspaces, many of our applications and the KDE Platform that makes the rest possible. You may remember that for our 4.4 releases we had a feature guide that gave a nice visual description of the new features. This helps existing and potential users of KDE software see what is cool in the new releases and gets picked up by other news outlets. Getting your app or feature into this guide is a Good Thing.
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As usual after the KDE feature freeze, I’d like to give an overview which improvements have been done in Dolphin for the next KDE SC.
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GNOME Desktop
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The well known Faenza Icon theme was updated today (version 0.8), bringing icons for some applications which were missing such as: adobe air, deadbeef, devede, devhelp, dia, facebook, flickr, frostwire, glade, gnucash, gnumeric, homebank, jdownloader, kupfer, netbeans, openbravo, openerp, openshot, phatch, picasa, qtcreator, radiotray, soundconverter, terminator, vim, wordpress, wxbanker, xbmc and xournal.
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Zentyal 2 is something a little bit different, although it too has changed its name recently: version 1 was called e-Box. A decade younger than its rivals, it is based on Ubuntu, but its developers skip the normal semi-annual releases, and only use the Long Term Support ones that Canonical releases every other year. E-Box version 1 was based on Ubuntu 8.04 and version 2, now called Zentyal, uses Ubuntu 10.04.1.
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Gentoo Family
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It looks like we’re the first providing these responsiveness patches for production usage. To know how to use the sabayon-limbo repository please read our wiki.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The staff of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is proud to announce the release of the Gtk Lightweight Desktops: Xfce & LXDE Special Edition. This issue of the magazine is a compilation of all of the Xfce and LXDE articles that the magazine has ran over the past eight months, and will help serve as a reference source for any users wanting to use these lightweight, but mighty, desktop environments.
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Reynolds said that he has finished building the first 1000 packages. First he “upgraded gcc to 4.5.1, glibc 2.12.1, xorg 1.9.x then started rebuilding the libraries.” Once those are complete he’ll begin on the desktop packages. Unfortunately, there is no estimated time for release because there are still about 12,600 more packages to go before making ISOs and testing.
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Things are starting to look really nice now, cooker activity seems to have gotten back to previous levels and even then some and interest from new contributors seems to have increased as well, really nice to see!
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Red Hat Family
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Myself being an Ubuntu Core Developer on the Ubuntu Server, I thought it prudent to take an honest look at RHEL6, and capture a few new notes here, complimenting Red Hat on their new release, noting some differences between Ubuntu and RHEL, and perhaps inspiring a few lessons we could learn in Ubuntu.
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Speeding up Linux, doesn’t necessarily have to be a gargantuan task and it doesn’t have to be done by Linus Torvalds either.
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Open-source software provider Red Hat is expanding its outreach efforts at universities and colleges. The company is a member of the Teaching Open Source community, and via its sponsorship of POSSE (Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience) workshops, it has facilitated the education of professors in how to best launch and incorporate open source into degree programs.
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Fedora
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For F15 then, we’ve got some nice polish on the pre-install experience in place. So it’s time to go back to the install experience and try to get some solid polish there.
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Fedora, the controversial distro. On one hand, it’s alpha-beta-zeta-jones quality, with the latest technologies that make you bleed, hence the term, the bleeding edge of technology. On the other, it’s a distro that revolves around the concept of free software. Ubuntu is like that too, only more pragmatic, so much in fact that the latest edition actually gives you the choice of sullying your distribution with evil proprietary software during the installation. Fedora remains the bastion of stubbornness and reduced usability.
[...]
Several hours after running autoten against the slow repositories and fixing the nerdy default settings, Fedora was ready for work, with codecs, office suite, music players, and other common programs. So yes, to sum it up, Fedora is the open-source Windows 7. And that’s not a compliment of the highest order. Worst of all, Fedora 14 Laughlin dashes any hopes for Ubuntu refugees come the spring, due to Unity nonsense.
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Debian Family
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The Mike Galbraith latency patch, which is said to improve desktop performance by an order of magnitude, has been backported by Warren to the 2.6.36 kernel, and released for the SimplyMEPIS 11.0 alpha test cycle.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I am trying to get used to Vala and Unity.
So I am hacking up a little Unity Place for People…
Right now it doesn’t do much but get the contacts from your Zeitgeist history and sort them. Over the weekend I will try to get it to play nicely with libfolks. Once that is done I will be working even closer with DX, Zeitgeist, Telepathy, John Lea and Jorge Castro to make things rock and more usable for everyone.
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If you use Ubuntu in your company, you’re already familiar with its many advantages for businesses. But guess what? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, as they say.
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During the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida, we discussed how we wanted to continue the project this cycle. This session resulted in some changes to the requirements of what constitutes a valid paper cut.
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The effort to clarify the Ubuntu brand, then, even if it appears to be only a semi-official endeavor undertaken by a Canonical employee, is an important step in convincing observers that Ubuntu’s assorted products are to be taken seriously. Whether the observers will be convinced, of course, remains to be seen.
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When someone is new to Ubuntu and they want to get started helping to package bug fixes and software, they engage in the Sponsorship Process. In a nutshell, you get the source code for the package, apply the fix (or create the fix yourself), and then because you don’t have upload access, you ask another Ubuntu developer to review your work. This act of reviewing work is known as sponsoring, and it is something we have sometimes struggled as a project to keep up with – there are often many contributions that need sponsoring, but not enough volunteers in the existing developer community to review these contributions.
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Flavours and Variants
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Jeff Hoogland, professed Linux Geek, has grown frustrated at the lack of inclusion of his favorite window environment in modern distributions. He said only Austrumi and PCLinuxOS offer a recent release with E17. So, instead of waiting for someone else to do it, he just developed one with E17 Beta himself. But is this just another “ho hum” moment or should you give this new effort a shot?
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Though less well-known, Pinguy is also another very nice Ubuntu-based distribution for Linux beginners. It features numerous user-friendly enhancements, out-of-the-box support for multimedia codecs and browser plugins, a heavily tweaked GNOME user interface and a careful selection of popular desktop applications for many common computing tasks.
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Phones
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An unlocked version of Hewlett-Packard’s Palm Pre 2 smartphone is now available in the U.S. via Palm.com and HP’s SMB channels for $449. The upgraded 1GHz Pre 2 runs the new version 2.0 of the Linux-based WebOS operating system.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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This week in MeeGo Conference all attendees received Lenovo S10-3t IdeaPad convertible netbook/tablet computers from Intel and Nokia. For many of us this was the first time we’re actually using MeeGo on a device, and so I thought to post some notes on how it feels.
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Sub-notebooks
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litl is now donating two webbooks, one for each GNOME event box. We’ve already shipped one for the North American box. I’m still waiting for the European box to be found before sending the other one. The litl OS is fully based on the GNOME platform using GObject, GLib, Clutter, GTK+, Gjs, GStreamer, and others. The webbook is a good example of the strength of GNOME’s platform. We hope this is a useful addition to the event boxes. Enjoy!
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Jolicloud, the self-proclaimed “perfect OS for netbooks,” has been making headlines for a while with their consumer-focused, and frankly very cute Jolibook netbook. Word all around the web is that it is available today in the UK
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- PCLinuxOS 2010.10: Everything works! Hooray, La-la-la-la, it just works, everything from top to bottom, right out of the box!
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It’s been less than two months since the Document Foundation announced that it was launching its own “fork” of the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, but already its new LibreOffice alternative is beginning to take shape.
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One of the most uncomfortable items in the timelines is the most recent. Summarized simply as “Sexual assault at ApacheCon,” it refers to what allegedly happened to Noirin Shirley, an Apache board member, a couple of weeks ago.
What is unusual about the incident is not — unfortunately — that it simply happened. Shirley undoubtedly speaks for many women when she writes, “It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me at a tech conference.”
However, what is unusual is that this time Shirley not only reported the incident to the police, but also blogged about it and named names. “I’m tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it. I’m tired of the fear. I’m tired of people who think I should wear something different. I’m tired of people who think I should avoid having a beer in case my vigilance lapses for a moment. I’m tired of people who say that guys can’t read me right and I have to read them, and avoid giving the wrong impression.”
Shirley showed exemplary courage in her actions, and many people said as much. Yet an alarming number of people attacked her instead, suggesting that the assault was her fault, because of how she dressed or acted.
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Web Browsers
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I decided to fire up four popular browsers and snag some screenshots of how each of them present a site’s URL to you. In my tests I used pre-release versions of each browser because, for the most part, these heavily represent what we should see released over the coming months. Of course the appearance can always change before the final version makes it out-the-door, but this is a better representation of how each company is attacking the address bar appearance today… and not a year ago. This particularly applies to Opera who just revamped their address bar in their latest Beta release.
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Mozilla
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…finally won me over.
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Anyway, this version of Lightning works like a champ. I did have to modify the install.rdf to allow for a minimum version of TB 3.0, because that’s the version in my Slackware repos right now. I’m happy now! I use Lightning to plan my life. I would have been seriously disappointed if I couldn’t have gotten it to work eventually. I pretty much got T-bird 3 to behave the way I wanted it to, also. I think I’ll be able to get used to it. It’s a bit different from T-bird 2, but not that much. Check out figure 1 for a screenie of my T-bird 3 on Slackware.
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Following the publication of Mozilla’s audited financial statements for 2009, Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, has taken the opportunity to re-examine Mozilla’s mission, its successes, opportunities and challenges.
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Lest you think blogger Long Zheng is all about Microsoft apps, our Australian friend has a keen eye on all kinds of bleeding-edge software. — including Firefox 4. Today he noticed a change in the Firefox 4 nightly build — sexier, semi-translucent alert dialogs, complete with a blur effect to obscure the webpage content in the background.
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The Mozilla Foundation has released a sort of non-profit’s annual report, “The State of Mozilla,” which provides a glimpse under the covers of the popular browser and e-mail provider.
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Oracle
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The majority of customers believe that Oracle’s support charges are too costly, and many think it is only to get more expensive
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CMS
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Drupal, at the most basic level is an open-source content management system. But this belies just how expansive it has become, with thousands of add-on modules and millions of developers. Drupal is not a product. It’s a community. A massive, ever-growing community.
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Education
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Some highlights from Anna’s talk:
* Younger students often have nowhere to turn if they want to learn web design or development. Serious training often isn’t available until the post-secondary level — despite the fact that the most talented developers (like Anna herself) start early. Matt Mullenweg, for example, created WordPress.com before he could legally drink. And Anna’s colleagues launched their own online business (UploadRobots.com) while still in the fifth grade.
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Project Releases
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Claws Mail is a GTK+ based, user-friendly, lightweight, and fast email client.
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Again, this work includes graphing improvements, system tables, HTTPS connection support, statistics reporting, and mobile / ARM-based benchmarking support for the Nokia N900 smart-phone and other ARM tablets running Linux operating systems.
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Licensing
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The flood of generic Chinese Android devices with no source code makes it very easy to think that GPL adherence is something that’s only problematic with devices sourced from countries with poor records in IP enforcement. In reality, it’s a problem everywhere. Barnes and Noble are a US company and the contractors for the Nook were based in Canada. They’re aware enough to include the GPL notice in their documentation, but not concerned enough to make sure that they actually posses the source code that they’re legally obliged to provide.
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The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) is perhaps one of the easiest software licenses to both understand and use. Yet, in part due to corporate astroturfing campaigns of deliberate disinformation, it and the concept of software freedom is often also misunderstood.
The GNU GPL as a license says nothing about how you use GNU GPL software that you receive. There are no terms or conditions that say how many copies of such software you can have, how many computers (seats) you may run it on, or how you modify it and combine it with other software. This is because the GNU GPL is neither a contract nor a “use” license, but rather a pure copyright license, and hence does not in any way interfere with how you may use software that you receive. It’s only condition is that if you do redistribute the software to others, that you do so under the same terms you received, nothing more.
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Openness/Sharing
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The University of Michigan Library now offers content on its website under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This announcement is significant because the Library had been using the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. By switching to the Attribution license, the Library has granted more permissions to use, share, and repurpose its research and technology guides, video tutorials, toolkits, copyright education materials, bibliographies, and other resources.
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The digital humanities can be broadly understood as embracing all those scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology, and being engaged in processes of digital media production, practice and analysis. For example, developing new media theory, creating interactive electronic archives and literature, building online databases and wikis, producing virtual art galleries and museums, or exploring how various technologies reshape teaching and research. Yet this field – or, better, constellation of fields – is neither unified nor self-identical. If anything, the digital humanities are comprised of a wide range of often conflicting attitudes, approaches and practices that are being negotiated and employed in a variety of different contexts.
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I strongly believe in not re-inventing the wheel, not only in the technical parts but also in licensing, this is why I use and promote Creative Commons licenses (despite their flaws) and this is why I supported using the Creative Commons definition of Public Domain for projects like the Open Clip Art Library. And it worked well for a while.Until Creative Commons was unhappy with the Public Domain dedication, probably not branded enough for their taste and for their need for attention, and “invented” a replacement, CC0, which was received not as warmly as they hoped.
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Greetings. ICANN is preparing to inflict hundreds, and then thousands, of new top-level domains (TLDs) onto the global community of Internet users, which will serve mainly to sow confusion among consumers, and award vast monetary treasures to the tiny set of entities poised to rake in the dough as the masters of the existing domain name system (see: It’s Time to Stop ICANN’s Top-Level Domain (TLD) Lunacy!).
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Science
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Astronomers claim to have discovered the first planet originating from outside our galaxy.
The Jupiter-like planet, they say, is part of a solar system which once belonged to a dwarf galaxy.
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[An aurora borealis, as seen from the International Space Station. The wicker-looking thing floating in the middle is a solar array from the space station. Image via astronaut Douglas Wheelock/AP]
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Health/Nutrition
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Biowatch South Africa, an NGO involved in promoting biodiversity and sustainable livelihoods, raised serious concerns about consolidation and emerging monopolies in the South African seed industry with the Competition Commission of South Africa in Pretoria today.
The hearings were initiated by the Competition Commission to investigate concerns raised about a proposed merger between Pannar Seeds, the largest remaining South African seed company, and Pioneer Hi-Bred, a US-held seed company, part of DuPont Incorporated.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A Charlotte-area flight attendant and cancer survivor contacted WBTV after she says she was forced to show her prosthetic breast during a pat-down.
Cathy Bossi lives in south Charlotte and has been a flight attendant for the past 32 years, working the past 28 for U.S. Airways.
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The NY Times notes that Speaker of the House John Boehner (who does regularly fly commercial) got to walk right by security and go directly to the gate.
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Representative John A. Boehner, soon to be the Speaker of the House, has pledged to fly commercial airlines back to his home district in Ohio. But that does not mean that he will be subjected to the hassles of ordinary passengers, including the controversial security pat-downs.
As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. But there was no waiting in line for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.
Mr. Boehner, who was wearing a casual yellow sweater and tan slacks, carried his own bags and smiled pleasantly at passengers who were leaving the security checkpoint inside the airport terminal. It was unclear whether any passengers waiting in the security line, including Representative Allen Boyd, a Florida Democrat who lost his re-election bid, saw Mr. Boehner.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Research shows that the benefits of environmental regulations consistently exceed costs, in part because they end up costing far less than both industry and the EPA predict.
When EPA promulgates regulations, industry often expresses concern that the regulations will cause extreme economic hardship. Now this argument is being made regarding EPA regulation of carbon pollution using existing legal authorities like the Clean Air Act.
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Finance
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A group of corporate pranksters called The Yes Men is pranking again: This time, one of their targets is hedge fund manager John Paulson. The group is calling for a citizen’s arrest of Paulson, based on his large holdings of AngloAshnati Gold stock—as pointed out by Lawrence Delevingne in his article today for Absolute Return + Alpha.
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The scale of the country’s reliance on private companies to power the state is revealed today as the government takes the historic step of publishing its accounts for the first time.
The disclosure of the majority of payments made by government departments over the first five months after the election reveals Whitehall’s struggle to wean itself off high-cost contracts – and a burgeoning industry emerging around the coalition’s reforms.
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The Ministry of Finance published today the operation results of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for the first ten months of the year. Robust growth was recorded in profits, revenues and taxes.
SOEs (excluding state-owned financial institutions) made 1.63 trillion yuan of profits this year by October, marking a remarkable growth of 44.8 percent year on year. Their business revenue went up by 34 percent to 24.5 trillion yuan. The tax payable reached 2 trillion yuan, 27 percent higher than the same period of last year.
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Recently, I have been studying the mobile internet sector in China closely, and I have talked to most of the major players. Many people told me Alibaba is a player I should watch out for.
Although currently Alibaba Group has no substantial mobile business, it has huge ambition in the mobile internet sector, and has been quietly acquiring assets.
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That said, I think it would be a good trend if Brazil started trying to compete with China on low end manufacturing. They probably aren’t going to get anywhere near China’s economies of scale, but they could quite quickly move up the technical latter, and provide knock-on benefits for several regional economies. It’s also always good to diversify out of finance and commodities as much as possible.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But other interests were at work; the railway companies lobbied for large-scale settlement and agricultural development. Counter-expertise for Powell’s point of view was provided by professor Cyrus Thomas, who claimed that ‘rain follows the plough’. That theory was thoroughly disproved by the Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 1930s, which caused tremendous hardship among the pioneers attracted to farm the arid regions, and led many of them to migrate even further West.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The bill, with 17 Senate co-sponsors, is unlikely to pass through the House of Representatives this year, with only a few working days left in the congressional session. After the newly elected Congress meets in January, Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and Judiciary Committee chairman, would have to reintroduce it in the Senate.
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* Patrick J. Leahy — Vermont
* Herb Kohl — Wisconsin
* Jeff Sessions — Alabama
* Dianne Feinstein — California
* Orrin G. Hatch — Utah
* Russ Feingold — Wisconsin
* Chuck Grassley — Iowa
* Arlen Specter — Pennsylvania
* Jon Kyl — Arizona
* Chuck Schumer — New York
* Lindsey Graham — South Carolina
* Dick Durbin — Illinois
* John Cornyn — Texas
* Benjamin L. Cardin — Maryland
* Tom Coburn — Oklahoma
* Sheldon Whitehouse — Rhode Island
* Amy Klobuchar — Minnesota
* Al Franken — Minnesota
* Chris Coons — Delaware
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Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said late Thursday that he would seek to block the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, or COICA, from passing through the full Senate, unless the legislation is changed. Earlier Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 19-0 to approve the bill and send it to the full Senate.
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The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA, S.3804) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. It passed the Senate Judiciary Committee 19-0 this week, but it’s never going to pass the Senate before the end of the current Congress.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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With the global hunger for communications constantly growing, problems of traffic management and possible data congestion are inevitably surfacing, inducing some internet providers to impose restrictions on data traffic and online services provided. Does this signal the end of the open, neutral internet? Industry players, consumer associations and regulators met MEPs for a “net neutrality” to discuss quality of service, transparency of terms and conditions and anticompetitive behaviour.
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With net neutrality being an ongoing debate, another angle has just hit me as being open to abuse. The fear people have is about the well known, rich corporate sites being able to pay the ISPs for extra bandwidth, making those sites load quicker for their visitors. Those who can’t afford to pay are left quite literally on the slow lane. Start ups doing anything bandwidth intensive don’t stand a chance. What happens if Company A pays extra to restrict the bandwidth of Company B?
Imagine if Google paid extra to ensure that all visitors on AT&T who went to Yahoo got served at dial up speeds. That would affect people’s perception of Yahoo negatively and they wouldn’t know why, therefore it’d help Yahoo’s competitors, including Google. Yahoo would then need to cough up money to AT&T to counter the effect, that’s assuming they track it down to the fact that they’re being hobbled by a deal between Google and AT&T. If they do pay up, what are Google paying extra for?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A workshop on “Intellectual Property and Geographic Data in the Internet Era” sponsored by Creative Commons and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in conjunction with the annual meeting of AAG, April 11, 2011, Seattle, Washington. The workshop will be held at the campus of Microsoft Research, and will be streamed live on the Internet.
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Copyrights
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SELF-REGULATION of UK lawyers seems to be a very slow affair that is often overtaken by events.
Before ACS:Law made a name for itself by suing alleged file-swappers in the UK, another legal outfit, Davenport Lyons tried it.
Two partners from Davenport Lyons, David Gore and Brian Miller were accused of “proceeding recklessly” by demanding cash from thousands of people based upon only an IP address.
In March the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) decided to look into the case and now has finally decided to have a hearing on 31 May, 2011.
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So, here’s the question that some people asked: if you only make the work available, but there is no evidence that a copy was made, then was the copyright infringed? After all, no reproduction was made. No copy was distributed. So, where’s the infringement? Supporters of saying that merely “making available” is infringing claimed that it was the equivalent of distributing because you had effectively offered it up for distribution or reproduction.
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ACTA
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onfusingly similar trade mark goods. This is bad for access to essential medicines.
In an answer to a parliamentary question, the EU Commission wrote: “b) on the inappropriate seizures of medicines on the strength of mere allegations that trademarks are similar – the introduction of the concept of “confusingly similar trademark is proposed by one of the ACTA partners but not supported by any of the other;”
But ACTA lacks a clear footnote like footnote 27 in the EU – Korea free trade agreement, limiting “goods infringing an intellectual property right” to “(a) counterfeit goods (…)”.
ACTA’s criminal measures are limited to counterfeit goods (as far as trademarks are concerned). Some of the civil trademark measures are limited to counterfeit goods. But ACTA’s Chapter 2 section 3 on border measures is not limited to counterfeit goods. ACTA’s border measures regard suspect goods (art 2.X.1, page 10), and the test is whether the suspect goods infringe an intellectual property right (article 2.10, page 11).
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11.20.10
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Status of OpenSUSE as seen from the past two weeks’ news
FEDORA 14 was a successful release that I’ve installed on several PCs. Ubuntu is still very widely deployed, but Fedora has just passed Ubuntu in DistroWatch.
Back in 2006 it was a different story. Almost every PC I set up would have SUSE on it. That was before Novell’s deal with Microsoft. Many people can tell (and do sometimes tell) a similar story. Going back to 2006, OpenSUSE was in a good position to be what Ubuntu is today. It was ahead with Compiz, it was polished, it had YaST, and it enjoyed advertising from Novell, which Novell almost stopped entirely over the years, especially after it became Microsoft’s friend and abstained from saying anything negative about Windows. Novell even took down its Web pages that were critical of Windows/Microsoft, as we showed back in late 2006.
So, where does that leave OpenSUSE? Even members of OpenSUSE do not appear to be sure. They just keep chatting about strategy, hoping to figure out how to revive the project. They tried to set up a “boosters” team, but that too is failing because Löffler is one among many who leave and journalists do notice. One of the best GNU/Linux-oriented journalists, Richard Hillesley, has just given his famous “Health Check” to OpenSUSE and he too — like us — suggests seeking independence from Novell. From his concluding words:
Much more intriguing is the prospective establishment of an openSUSE foundation during 2011, and the much rumoured sale of Novell, which may result in a new era of independence and freedom for SuSE, and new horizons for openSUSE and its developers.
OpenSUSE is a Novell trademark, so the project would have to choose a new name, which can harm brand recognition.
Going further back to the beginning of the month, this one person asked in the headline: “Is it me or is there a lack of interest in openSUSE?”
Is it me or is there a lack of interest in openSUSE?
Whether its browsing the internet and looking for information about openSUSE or talking to the general public, openSUSE just seems to not get the attention I believe it deserves.
It isn’t a bad operating system but struggles to gain popularity, is that still because of the Microsoft deal a few years ago?
SUSE has never been the same since that deal. Last year OpenSUSE decided to release less often and even at decreased pace there are delays that Will Stephenson addresses with this very recent announcement. There seems to be nothing that can give OpenSUSE its old momentum back. Even its community leader left, only to be replaced by Jos Poortvliet who hangs out in south America at the moment [1, 2, 3] (he’s probably back by now).
It would not be fair to say that OpenSUSE is just history because HP still offers SUSE as an option on this netbook. From the news:
HP has released a budget-priced netbook for business users, offered with mobile broadband and GPS options. The $300 Mini 1103 runs SuSE Linux or Windows 7 on a 1.66GHz Atom N455 processor or 1.83GHz N475, comes with 160GB or 320GB hard disk drives, and has the usual 10.1-inch screen with 1024 x 768 pixels, the company says.
There are still new releases of OBS (in addition to other parts [1, 2] and HOWTO activity [1, 2]) and a person who is usually quite hostile towards GNU/Linux intends to give OpenSUSE a go:
I think I’ll swap in a different hard drive this weekend and try a clean install of Kubuntu or openSUSE. But if I can’t get better performance, I’m going to have to conclude that this laptop is just not up to KDE’s resource requirements. I could go the other direction and install a really lightweight desktop like LXDE, but I like the desktop effects. I know, it’s shallow, but I do.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a longtime SUSE fan, reviewed the latest stable release and a British site has just made a copy of his review, which is mostly positive.
While Novell sells its commercial SUSE Linux to business users, the free open-source software version of openSUSE is still freely available, with openSUSE 11.3 majoring on its KDE 4.4 desktop interface
We’ve been using SUSE Linux since its start in 1994 and then, as now, we like this strong desktop Linux distribution. Of course the latest version, openSUSE 11.3, doesn’t look a lot like that vintage Slackware variant, but one thing has remained the same. Today’s OpenSUSE is a Linux for users, not developers or Linux technicians.
[...]
All in all, we’ve found that openSUSE 11.3 is, once more, a great Linux distribution. While we know free-software purists won’t care for its use of Mono and parent company Novell’s friendly relations with Microsoft, if you can past that, you’ll find a truly excellent Linux desktop.
Sascha Manns, who still has those weekly news coming, speaks about OpenSUSE Medical [via] and says: “Some month our team was busy, and so you hasn’t heard about us. But we are alive. We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Distribution who still medical needs.”
OpenSUSE is far from dead, but still, overall, OpenSUSE will never be a top distribution unless it disconnects from Novell and does something amazing. Microsoft crushed Novell, which is now waiting for good buyers. More on that in a later post. █
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux at 1:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
What Microsoft says
Summary: Figures suggest that GNU/Linux users are more common than suggested by flawed statistics (gathered by flawed methods with clear data bias)
THE FORMER EDITOR of Microsoft Watch does not want to believe it, but the poll speaks for itself (not providing an accurate measure but a mere data point):
Twenty five percent. Well, 25.82 percent to be exact, so closer to 26. That’s the number of respondents claiming to be Linux PC users in my poll: “How would you identify yourself as a computer user?” The number is seemingly credible: 2,014 votes from 94 countries — 988 from the United States. There are 1,858 unique IP addresses, which along with cookies blocking repeat votes suggests the results are largely clean of Linux enthusiasts stuffing the ballot box, so to speak. Something else: After the poll reached the 25 percent Linux PC threshold, it stayed there even as votes accumulated — that’s another indicator the results are good. But I don’t believe them, certainly not that only 60 percent of respondents are Windows PC users.
The word “belief” or “believe” often implies faith over science (he also uses this word in the headline). Over at Microsoft Watch, back when he was its sole editor there were more comments from GNU/Linux users than from Windows users, says Tim from OpenBytes. It became somewhat of an embarrassment for a site called Microsoft Watch and we talked about it last week in an episode of TechBytes. Here is our Wiki page about market share. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Patents, Red Hat at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A grouping of patent news regarding software
OVER THE past couple of years we have given several examples of well-known venture capitalists who openly oppose software patents. Now there is a new article titled “tech investors call for patent reform” and it says:
A number of heavyweight venture capitalists in the tech hubs of Silicon Valley and New York are calling for serious patent reform in Washington.
Though patents were created to encourage innovation, a growing number of investors say the patent system actually stifles it. In the fast-moving software market, where online applications are constantly changing, investors say software patents are often targets for lawsuits rather than protection from them.
We keep hearing a bunch of propaganda stories from the software patents lobbyists. One line of propaganda is that any small company may need to earn a monopoly from the USPTO before it can attract investments. Richard Stallman did a good job explaining why it's a fallacy. Unless the small company is a patent troll, it cannot really win patent cases against large companies, which can retaliate against the small company’s product/s using a massive portfolio of patents (it can also buy more patents to do so).
Red Hat is an example of how a medium-sized company can get injured by a patent troll, Acacia. Patrick Anderson, a pro-patents person who wrote about the case a few times, has just written the post “Smart Red Hat Employees”. In it he explains who in Red Hat successfully gets the message across to patents-oriented people:
Sure, I may have had a little fun with Red Hat here, and joined a little criticism of the company here and here. But at the end of the day, the company does have some pretty sharp guys working for it. Last year, I mentioned one of them: Jan Wildeboer (referring to him as “clearly the most intelligent” participant in an anti-”software patent”* video created by Red Hat). Today, I learned about Travis Kepley. Travis posted a comment that I found far more interesting than the article itself. Speaking on the education of judges and juries about open source software, Travis notes a certain frustration derived from a bias created by large, proprietary software vendors
it can only be hoped that those who profit from patents (commonly lawyers) will come to realise that their propaganda about venture capitalists is bunk and that software patents do not increase progress, they only limit progress. They are an impediment essentially.
Our loyal reader Satipera says that the “ITC invalidates software patents” which is news that the USPTO might not fancy all that much:
The ITC has confirmed in its final determination that MVTec does not infringe the patents asserted by Cognex and that those patents are invalid – meaning MVTec’s machine vision software HALCON will continue to be sold and imported into the USA.
What prevents the ITC from invalidating many more patents? Could the ITC, whose main bureaucratic function is to impose embargo/sanction on imports, turn out to be the opportunity for change? It recently dealt a blow to Apple. The ITC stands for “International Trade Commission”, but it’s not international, it’s created and operated by the United States. Anderson writes another new post in his blog, this time about spam filtering in erotic and pornographic companies too. These companies are accused of infringing software patents:
Indeed, the case involves a patent infringement complaint against 30 companies, including several with more “colorful” histories, including Larry Flynt Publications, Bang Productions, Vivid Entertainment, Playboy Enterprises, Hustler Video and Penthouse Digital. The technology involves organizing video files with tags, so there are a few non-pornographic media companies thrown in for good measure, like Disney, Time Warner,Lions Gate and (of course) 20th Century Fox.
Anderson generally concentrates on gaming software patents and here is news related to that: “IGT files patent infringement lawsuit against Aristocrat”
In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in California, IGT claimed Aristocrat infringed on two gaming software patents.
Even leisure time is badly affected by bad patents. What good might these patents ever bring? Here are a couple of new press releases about software patents in general:
i. EDSA Awarded Five New Patents for Real-Time Power Systems Monitoring and Predictive Analysis Technology; Includes New Foundational Patent
ii. Patent Calls Hosts First Patent Expert Witness Boot Camp
Technology-based patent analysis services and software solutions provider Patent Calls today announced its collaboration with Dr. Tom Rhyne for an exclusive limited enrollment Patent Expert Witness Boot Camp to be held at the Lakeway Resort near Austin, Texas in February 2011.
That’s where a lot of the patent trolls roam. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s ongoing coup against the Linux-based Android and another lawsuit against Microsoft’s competitors in mobile phones
EARLIER this week HTC decided to turn its Android into Ballnux by paying Microsoft for untold patents which Microsoft claims are infringed by Linux. Microsoft already extorted other Android phone makers in more or less the same way, apparently getting a patent deal without even much of a fight with Samsung and LG back in 2007. The mobbyists seem delighted to find Android makers being sued by a company called Vertical Computer Systems, which Microsoft paid in 2008 (for a settlement). The interesting about it can be found in the comments, including one that says: “Odd Microsoft private settlement in a patent infringement lawsuit filed last year by Vertical Computer Systems did not need a judge or a jury. MSFT and VCSY agreed to a private settlement so we will never know but I personally doubt 1.9 billion was the number. Is IBM, Adobe, Yahoo, Google and GE their next legal stop? Or will this Microsoft settlement be enough to bring future nonexclusive licensing without heading to the courthouse? Only time will tell if vertical goes vertical because of their licensing agreements or the legal agreements.”
The settlement was over .NET, which was also sued months ago. The mobbyists are promoting .NET/Mono while also slurring Groklaw, so someone should give a clue to OMG!Ubuntu!, which still promotes Mono [1, 2, 3, 4]. To give examples that are new, there’s Do, Docky, and Banshee. OMG!Ubuntu! is quite foolishly promoting Mono-based software without warning about Mono as an ingredient (it’s a patent problem according to the FSF).
Well, Microsoft also paid Acacia under circumstances which involved no legal challenges. Either way, another new case is St. Clair Intellectual Monopolies Consultants, which sues Apple Inc., HTC Corp., and Research In Motion. Bloomberg says:
Apple Inc., maker of the iPhone and iPad, along with rivals HTC Corp. and Research In Motion Ltd., was sued by patent holder St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants for alleged infringement of six U.S. patents for computer-function management.
[...]
Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, sued St. Clair in April in the same court, seeking a ruling that it doesn’t infringe four patents for computer-power management. That case is continuing.
Due to a deal with Verizon [1, 2, 3, 4], Microsoft not only gets to make money when Android phones are sold (patent extortion deals) but Microsoft also gets to push Microsoft’s Bong [sic] into Android phones and here is the latest example:
There’s yet another new Google Android phone on its way to Verizon Wireless with Microsoft’s Bing search engine pre-installed.
Microsoft cannot get people to choose its services, so it reportedly paid Verizon half a billion dollars to shove its services down customers’ throats (it’s virtually impossible to change, by design). Later on, having extorted companies and removed choice, Microsoft still wonders why there is so-called ‘hatred’ [1, 2, 3] against it. █
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