Summary: Under the leadership of AttachMSFT, Novell products still fail to maintain their userbase
AttachMSFT would love to make it seem like it should be trusted. Oracle did the same thing when it acquired Sun. It makes business sense to always make everything appear healthy, even when it is not. Just watch the latest news headlines for very recent examples of that [1, 2]. There is a diversion from discussion about the layoffs.
On the ground, things do not appear so promising. Novell dumped at Racine Unified cannot be good news and according to this other new report, a “school system is planning on switching computer operating systems from Novell Netware to Microsoft Server 2008.”
This whole Microsoft-Novell deal and AttachMSFT acquisition is turning out pretty well for Microsoft. It is not a good time for those who developed for Novell platforms. Yes, Novell is mentioned in this press release too. Condrey Corporation seems to be targeting a dying platform. What have we seen from AttachMSFT so far (except layoffs)?
The SD Times publishes the results of some survey which compares Novell to Microsoft:
Zeichick’s Take: Novell is (was) super-stodgy; Microsoft, not so much
That’s the result of a highly nonscientific survey, conducted over the past couple of months, by yours truly. As you may recall from my Feb. 7 column, “Stodgy old Microsoft,” a radio analyst referred to the folks in Redmond that way during a story about their quarterly returns.
It’s time to share the complete results. Several hundred people filled out the survey, which was linked in my column, tweeted out and put on Facebook. Although there was no statistical rigor, the rankings are revealing.
At Novell’s peak in the ’90s, 70 percent of the world’s computer networks were run with its system management software. More recently, the company’s fortunes have faded under pressure from Microsoft and other Web-based competitors — prompting Novell to try to reinvent itself as a distributor of the free Linux operating system.
Novell chose to be crushed in Microsoft’s hands rather than liaise with Microsoft’s rivals. It was foolish judgment. What Novell then descended to is the selling of Novell’s acquired proprietary software which sometimes targeted SUSE or only Windows [1, 2, 3]. It hardly promotes the use of GNU/Linux. Later on Novell also pushed Fog Computing (it is still doing this), which is no better than proprietary, even if it is offered gratis (initially). We may never really know just how those leaderless products perform under AttachMSFT’s wing because it’s a private and fairly secretive company.█
Summary: Clarifications about our goals, which never really changed at all
“BOYCOTT NOVELL” is the most significant part of the Techrights Web site. It is also the genesis of the site. Now that Novell is dead we are going to follow parts of Novell that are impacted by the patent deal with Microsoft. Needless to say, since Microsoft and Novell signed their patent deal the plague of patents has spread further, largely thanks to Novell’s approach. But this means that we merely continue to track the very same problem. It just takes a different corporate identity (or several). The problem was all along software patents, since the very first day this was site was erected and then advocated. It is not enough to have good software which is free/libre if companies design the law such that this software becomes non-free or illegal. █
Posted in Novell at 6:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at some of the latest confirmed departures, which appear in the press just weeks after the acquisition of Novell
Novell is pretty much collapsing, as expected. Some acquisitions are smooth and unshaky, but this one is not. Top managers are leaving in droves based on this one summary which says: “Several of Novell‘s top executives — including Ronald W. Hovsepian, Dana C. Russell, John K. Dragoon, Colleen A. O’Keefe, Scott N. Semel and James P. Ebzery — have exited the company following Attachmate‘s recent buyout of Novell. Sources say Novell has made additional staff cuts”
We wrote about Dragoon when he himself announced that he was leaving (here too). His Novell blog, just like many of the rest, has been silent since then. Novell.com became somewhat of a ghost town as even the PR staff says nothing (on average it used to have output once in a couple of days). Let us remember that Dragoon was CMO, where “M” stands for marketing. We wrote about his departure before and he was not alone among those who left just before the deal with AttachMSFT got finalised. It does not seem as though many or any of Novell’s managers are going to stay as even SUSE got shaken up. All of them will probably get a compensation package that others will not. They don’t need sympathy and those below them will probably just envy. People who sell out to Microsoft receive millions in bonuses while those who do all the real work receive nearly nothing.
Further down the management chain there are departures of significance. Alan Murray has also left, based on an article which says: “Murray was most recently vice president of product marketing at Novell Inc., where he oversaw the company’s Systems and Resource Management and Identity Security and Management units. Before joining Apperian, Welch was senior vice president for worldwide sales at Aveksa. He also held sales management and business development positions at Netegrity.”
Another departure of potentially high impact is the departure of Naresh Shah, who becomes a vice president of engineering at one of Novell’s old partners. To quote the Indian press, “Shah joins HP from Novell, where he served as Managing Director of Novell’s India Development Centre (IDC) and Vice President of Global Engineering Strategy, responsible for overall product development activities.”
“People who sell out to Microsoft receive millions in bonuses while those who do all the real work receive nearly nothing.”Steve Hale is another one who is making his move. “Hale came on board U.K.-based Sophos from Novell, where he held the position of vice president of global channel sales in the security, systems management and operating platform group, specializing in driving Novell’s “Workload IQ” partner sales and delivery approach to the Intelligent Workload Management marketplace, according to Hale’s LinkedIn page.” This is further verified here.
Kavanagh has left too and to quote The Australian, “James Kavanagh joins RSA’s Brisbane sales team, responsible for accounts including Queensland government customers and leading financial services companies. He has toiled for Directory Concepts and Novell.”
These people may not have left very recently, but they are in fact out. It is news to us. There are several more examples and this new article mentions Colleen O’Keefe. Novell’s Vice President (one of them) is seen here or here:
Scott Lewis, Novell’s Vice President of Partner Marketing, commented on this merger of two leading Novell (NOVL) services partners. “Novacoast’s acquisition of Data Technique, Inc. is a significant channel development for Novell customers,” said Lewis. “This merger combines the reach and service levels of two strong Novell Partners for our shared customers. Both companies have services capabilities that combine with Novell and other products to meet customers’ needs for Intelligent Workload Management from physical to virtual to cloud computing environments.”
But Mono never truly flowered under Novell, de Icaza said, especially in the mobile space. In fact, one of the reasons he is sanguine about the layoffs is that he and his Mono mates have been trying to spinoff the technology from Novell for more than a year.
This probably just says that Novell too was not particularly interested in Mono. Microsoft was. It still is. █
Some issues may still live on concerning Microsoft’s past competition practices. An appeals court this month cleared the way for Novell (newly acquired by Attachmate Corp.) to sue Microsoft over antitrust claims associated with WordPerfect, which Novell owned in 1994. Novell’s complaints are associated with the use of the operating system market control to exclude applications, as well as allegations that exclusionary agreements were in place with original equipment manufacturers, hurting WordPerfect distribution and helping Microsoft Word.
We hope that AttachMSFT will carry on with this case. There is fishy stuff going on and the acquisition of Novell turns out to be even more bizarre. As John Cook from Seattle put it and reminded us, the secretive companies behind the acquisition (run by a bison slayer, who was previously arrested] had to take a loan and spoke to Elliot even before Elliot made the bid for Novell and put it on sale. We wrote some more about Elliot in posts such as:
Here is what seems too strange about the deal, in addition to the involvement of that vulture, Paul Singer.
Attachmate is one of Seattle’s oldest software companies, with a history stretching back to the early 1980s. But did you know that it operates under the name of Wizard Parent LLC? We didn’t, and now that entity has appeared in a recent SEC filing as having raised $377 million.
Why? A spokeswoman for the company confirmed that Wizard Parent owns The Attachmate Group, but she declined to offer details about the financing.
It appears that the money is tied to Attachmate’s acquisition of Novell, a deal which was first announced last November and closed late last month. On April 27th, Attachmate published a short two paragraph press release about its acquisition of Novell.
The company which put Novell on sale is a group of thugs who use financial instruments to coerce others. There is a lot of history there. Maureen O’Gara, the SCO fan, says that Elliot has a new victim to prey on:
The acquisition should close in 45-60 days. Iron Mountain is under pressure from Elliott Associates, one of its shareholders famous these days for its role in putting Novell in play, to get out of the information storage business and into real estate. The assets being sold were at best breaking even.
It is sad that such companies are allowed to operate. They offer nothing to society and they monetise destruction. We might never know just what really happened to make Novell a goner. There has been too much secrecy and back-room negotiations. One might say that Elliot conspired with someone to sell Novell cheaply while making a big profit, dissolving some of Novell’s efforts in the process. Will the legal cases against SCO and Microsoft still be pursued? We foresaw such a problem 4 years ago. █
There are yet more investors who want Ballmer out and one of them publishes “Microsoft Needs a New CEO to Unlock Shareholder Value”. To quote:
I believe if a new CEO took these simple steps, MSFT could easily achieve a much higher stock price in the short and medium term.
Matt Rosoff, a Microsoft booster arriving from a Microsoft-oriented firm [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], notes that “IBM Is Now Worth More Than Microsoft”. As we noted in yesterday's audiocast, Microsoft in not far from falling to 5th position now. What a reversal, eh? As the Microsoft booster puts it:
That’s a stunner for anybody who remembers the tech landscape in the early 1990s, when Microsoft’s embrace of the PC revolution sent IBM into a tailspin.
What we are seeing here is a company so inherently unable to evolve, a company whose core business becomes outdated as the cash cows are suffocating (profits decline). All it can do now is rely on dubious testimonies from so-called ‘analysts’ who are paid by Microsoft. Yes, Office is once again being defended by friends of Microsoft, who conveniently ignore people’s increased use of the Web for collaboration and productivity. As Groklaw correctly points out, “Business *Productivity* Online Services? Methinks a name change is in order to something a little less hyperbolic.”
A week after being hit hard by serious cloud e-mail problems, a number of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) users are reporting on May 19 that they’re experiencing e-mail delays of up to an hour or more.
Microsoft’s poor software reduces productivity and that sure has a toll/cost. The world of IT will be a better place when bad technology is rejected and not selected based on anti-competitive conduct, lock-in, and dangerous proprietary zealotry. █
Summary: Tim and Roy speak about Unity, Fedora 15, Microsoft’s decline, and notebooks with Linux for Web-based services
TODAY’S afternoon show was shorter than usual and it covered few topics, mostly those that matter a bit more than others. Tim will post the accompanying show notes in the morning. Update: the show notes are out.
Today’s tracks are “We Should Give” by Amity, “Blackout City” by Anamanaguchi, and “She’s Got You” by Cosmo Jarvis. The latter two are part of SXSW 2010 Showcasing Artists (get the torrents legally here). We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date. █
Over at ZDNet, in fact, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols went so far as to suggest that Google’s new devices are “a Windows killer,” and his sentiment has been widely echoed throughout the blogosphere.
Depending on who you talk to, 40 to 75 per cent of the world’s web servers are Linux-based. That is some serious market penetration. But even in organisations running Linux on their servers the operating system is on just 20 per cent of desktops.
Despite its success in the back office, Linux has not yet made such an impact on the desktop. Does it matter?
Unsurprisingly, Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s vice-president of OEM services, thinks it does. And, he argues, in the form of Ubuntu at least Linux is making it on the desktop – “just in different locales and at different speeds”.
Wyse Technology announced a Linux thin client based on Marvell’s new 1GHz PXA510 system-on-chip (SoC), with support for Citrix Receiver, VMware View Open Client, Wyse TCX and VDA, and Microsoft’s RDP (remote desktop protocol) 7. The Wyse T50 offers 1GB RAM, 1GB flash, DVI-I with a dual-display option, gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, and support for 720p video within a browser.
inutop have provided for several years now some very attractive and ultra compact linux Nettops, and last week the company introduced its fourth generation devices the Linutop4 which fits in just 18.2×20.1×3.6cm and just 936g!
The Linutop4 is powered by an Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz CPU comes with 1GB of RAM expandable up to 2GB, 2GB of internal flash memory, Gigabit Ethernet VGA, DVI and five USB 2.0 ports.
The Linutop runs on Linuop OS 4.0, an optimized version of Ubuntu made to work flawlessly on such device.
GL Communications announced Linux support in the form of drivers and APIs for its universal T1 E1 and OC-3/12 STM-1/4 cards. All functions of the hardware are accessible through the API, and many software-based functions are available to ease complex application development. The Linux toolkit consists of C and C++ header files, a 32 bit shared library, and examples of custom applications. The API supports gcc/g++ 4.4.1 and openSUSE Linux 11.2 kernel 2.6.31.
NVIDIA has put out two new proprietary Linux driver updates. One of the drivers is a pre-release in the 270.xx series that largely is after bug-fixing, but the second driver is more interesting as it’s the first (development) NVIDIA Linux driver release in the 275.xx series. The NVIDIA 275.09 beta driver brings new features.
We finally have a free software tool to extract RARv3 archives on Linux. The news comes from a post on the Free Software Foundation (thanks to Peter Slavek who sent us the tip!) blog which presents a new tool that can extract archives in many different formats, including RARv3.
Personally, I think this is the best bundle so far, but my taste does lean toward combat, so this is definitely biased. In fact, I fully understand why this bundle earned less than the other two; it offers a very singular type of games. The fighting genre may simply not appeal to everyone.
That said, the Frozenbyte bundle offers the most complete games of them all. This is partially evident by huge downloads, approx. 1GB per game. But the binary filesize is just an indication. You truly get complete, fully featured, in-depth games you can play for hours and hours on end. The gameplay is meticulously crafted, with a careful attention to little details. There’s a professional feel to the products, especially the Shadowgrounds family and Trine, the shining star of this bundle. Jack Claw and Splot are just prototypes, so it’s too early to tell, but judging from other games, they are going to be a blast.
Now, let’s scrutinize the 6 games at hand. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, providing screenshots of the game in action, a full description of the game, with an in-depth analysis of the features of the game, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. boards have published the programme for this year’s Desktop Summit. Following the opening keynote, attendees can visit one of four different rooms, each with a variety of tracks including community, applications, platforms, tablets, development and accessibility & help.
The 2011 event will take place over the course of a week from 6 to 12 August at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany; it is open to developers, community members and users alike. The joint conference is supported locally by the Berlin Senate and the TSB Innovation Agency Berlin GmbH, and is expected to bring together more than one thousand core contributors, open source leaders and representatives from government, education and corporate environments.
The Gnome project is making a lot of noise in the Internet these days, because it seems like they are planning to become a whole new Linux distribution, or maybe we are just not fully understanding things.
Last week marked the end of the feature proposal for GNOME 3.2, for the first major update to the GNOME3 desktop. The GNOME 3.2 release schedule has the final release set for the end of September. In this article is a list of some of the features that were brought up for GNOME 3.2.
Between the launch of a new Linux kernel update and the news that open source has achieved mainstream business use at last, it’s been an exciting week in the world of open source software.
Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its enterprise Linux offering: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 (RHEL 6.1), with many new features focused on businesses and organizations. RHEL 6.1 offers improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, in addition to support for upcoming system hardware. It also delivers patches and security updates, while maintaining application compatibility and OEM/ISV certifications. In Red Hat’s quarterly and annual reports one fact that often goes unnoticed is that the company’s barnstorming success is largely based on renewal of support and service subscriptions at every increasing prices, and that is largely due to the loyalty that many organizations have toward RHEL. The new release stands to continue that trend, and could win some brand new customers.
I asked if, as disgruntled as I am, I still go and talk about Fedora at a local FOSS conference and the feedback convinced me to go. As the local Fedora community is extremely weak these days, I wasn’t able to summon a team (we were on hostile grounds, with Microsoft as the main sponsor of the event), so I joined Ceata.
As the starting point for many IT perimeter defense architectures, the firewall is a critical piece of security technology. In the upcoming, Fedora 15 Linux distribution release, a new dynamic firewall technology will help to improve the critical cornerstone technology for server and desktop users.
As I mentioned in my previous post about Debian GNU/Linux 6.0, with this release they now have Live CD ISO images. This is a very convenient way to try out Debian and see if it is going to work on your hardware; if it does, there is also an installer on the Live CD desktop. Very convenient.
In recent years, Ubuntu Linux has become increasingly popular as a replacement for Windows. Ubuntu is an operating system which features a number of advantages that make it an appealing alternative for everyday users. Here are 10 reasons why Ubuntu beats Windows hands down.
He does make it clear that it’s not replicating the Control Center model which is targeted at end-users. Jono is targeting at power users and his idea of Kitchen Sink is something similar to GConf.
The world is a big place, and it seems of no coincidence that Canonical’s offices sit 27 floors up in the Millbank Tower with a 360 degree view of it right in the middle of London. Canonical is the parent company of the most popular distribution of the free, open-source computer operating system known as Linux and if there’s one thing between them and their broad horizons, it’s Windows.
Since 2004 Ubuntu has offered users another way when it comes to their PCs but with that way one of unfamiliar applications, no hotline support and less compatability then one might get with Mircosoft, it’s been a way largely ignored by the mainstream computer owner. According to Canonical, however, with the launch of the latest version, Ubuntu 11.04, all of that is about to change.
Matthew East is a name which often appears in my inbox every few days, I thought it a good idea to learn more about this Ubuntu Community Council member and his role in the community.
The following article will present to Ubuntu fans all over the world, a few interesting features and facts for the next version of Ubuntu OS, the Ubuntu 11.10, dubbed Oneiric Ocelot.
Last week, I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, Hungary. These semi-annual events are open to everyone, and hundreds of people participate both in person and remotely. Budapest’s was called UDS-O, where the ‘O’ stands for Oneiric Ocelot, the code name for Ubuntu 11.10, which will be released in October 2011. This is where we did the majority of planning for what changes, new features, and other developments you’ll find in the next version of Ubuntu. UDS-P will be held at the end of the year in Orlando, Florida and will cover the as yet unnamed 12.04 release, which will be a Long Term Support release.
I have long been a firm believer that the Ubuntu LoCo Community is one of the strongest elements of Ubuntu. The LoCo community are our eyes, ears, mouths, and hearts in taking Ubuntu to the masses. If we are going to reach out to 200million users, we are absolutely going to need to have the LoCo Community on-board as a well oiled machine. Fortunately, some great work is going on to achieve this.
Hey guys, you might remember that a few days ago I was asked to build the lucid netbook launcher functionality for maverick; enough people asked me for a natty version that I wanted to make sure you guys got access to the clutter based netbook-launcher too. So here you go!
I’ve been following the open source OpenStack cloud effort since it was first announced in June of 2010. I mean come on, how many times does a tech journalist like me get to interview NASA about enterprise open source tech?
Over the course of the last year, I’ve seen OpenStack grow from its NASA/Rackspace base, into becoming the most influential open source cloud project on Earth. I’ve seen IT vendors big and small including Cisco, Dell, Brocade, Citrix and Canonical all align behind the OpenStack vision.
Linux Mint 201104 Xfce is a great fit for users on slower or older hardware that craves Debian with all of the Linux Mint tools and goodies. It’s also an excellent choice for those who are minimalists and prefer a lightweight but fully functional desktop environment. Both kinds of users should get many hours of enjoyment and productivity from this distribution.
But what about Ubuntu users who dislike Unity? I’m sure there are some out there who are still searching for an alternative distribution. I’m happy to say that Linux Mint 201104 Xfce is great for you guys too. In fact, once you get used to Xfce you may find that going back to GNOME or KDE is simply unnecessary unless you crave eye-candy and a bit of bloat in your desktop environment.
As mentioned in the general sneak peak, Kubuntu 11.10 will have a strong focus on mobile devices. Since I did not go into details yet, let me make up for this by presenting all the more interesting changes in the area of mobile device support.
The current battle-ground is the tablet PC but, being mobile, ARM and Android/Linux are doing well. No one is being fired for choosing ARM+Android/Linux. Retailers are delivering them to consumers. Businesses are rapidly taking them up. No one really cares that they are not Wintel in large part. OEMs are making smart phones that dock and become a new computing platform capable of most of the tasks which any PC can do. This permits ARM+Android/Linux to invade the Wintel stronghold through the open gates of portability, low-power, tons of applications available on-line, simple/easy user interfaces and more than enough power and performance for most users.
If you have looked at any of the previous MeeGo/Moblin releases, you’ll recognize this as being pretty much the same home screen. I haven’t compared them side-by-side, but this one actually does look a little nicer to me, or perhaps I should say a little less objectionable. It still has the same symbols across the top, several of which I still don’t get the visual association with their content. Maybe they have just improved the color scheme a bit, or touched up the overall graphics. Anyway, I have looked at each of the pages in the MeeGo desktop previously, so I’ll just hit a couple of the better ones this time.
This is one of the reasons Google is holding the Honeycomb code to discourage vendors from putting it on smartphones and create a bad experience for users.
Google’s already indicated that tablets and smartphones won’t be sharing the same Android build until Ice Cream Sandwich in Q4, though interestingly enough, it turns out that the tablet-friendly Honeycomb actually has Gingerbread’s interface quietly tucked underneath. According to modder Graffix0214, all you need for making the jump is one simple tweak in a system file: assuming you already have root access, use your preferred method –
Stantum, a leading developer of multi-touch technology, announced today that its patented Interpolated Voltage Sensing Matrix (IVSM) technology now supports Google’s Android operating system. IVSM technology’s native compatibility with Android’s multi-touch framework is being showcased on a demonstration kit in Stantum’s booth (#1354) at the SID Display Week exhibition in Los Angeles.
It’s got an estimated 500,000 users. Many Android programmers use it as a starting point for their own coding projects. And according to the project’s founder, a number of Google employees have it installed on their Android devices.
A few years ago , your smart phone was running a proprietary OS, your TV was nothing more than a crap box to recieve local channels and only your computer came with your choice of software. There was no common thread connecting these three worlds. But the situation has altogether changed with the arrival of Android.
It seems like an age ago since Google first announced ChromeOS and certainly there’s been a lot written about it, including a fair bit in this magazine. Now that the launch of Chromebook models from two manufacturers is imminent, it might be worth reminding ourselves of some of the issues around a “Cloud-based OS” generally, and this one in particular.
The story in today’s Boston Business Journal about One Laptop per Child requires certain clarification:
1. OLPC will continue as a non-profit organization in order to carry out its traditional role advocating for 1:1 computing in developing countries as a means to provide a modern education to children.
2. OLPC will continue as a non-profit organization in its activities to arrange and manage laptop deployments around the world.
3. OLPC continues to believe that non-profit status enables it to more effectively communicate on the issues of children and education without the possible taint of commercial self-interest.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is creating a process for wider participation through working groups and new affiliate programmes which will influence its thinking on its future mission. The programme was unveiled at last week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco by OSI board member Simon Phipps. The plans are the result of the OSI’s planning for reformation announced in March.
On returning to the UK, Phipps talked to The H about the plan. He explained that previous efforts to set a future mission for the organisation had not been effective. “Agreeing a mission in advance is too hard” said Phipps, as he explained how the OSI was now planning how to evolve the organisation. Historically the OSI, a non-profit corporation with a small board, set out to educate the world about open source. It has also managed a definition of what open source is, and given its blessing to licences which comply with that definition. Now, says Phipps, it is time to take on the second part of the OSI’s 1999 mission statement: “to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community”.
I’ve always been an advocate for using the packages supplied by the distribution/project you happen to be running as an OS. Rarely do I go outside the “official” repositories for something shinier and newer. That’s changing, and swapping the Chromium browser in Debian Squeeze for the Google Chrome browser directly from Google is my latest shift in this direction.
Why did I do it? Well, I’ve had more than a few incompatibility problems with the Version 6.0.472.63 of Chromium that is in the Debian Squeeze repositories, which won’t be updated for anything but bug fixes for the life of Debian’s stable release.
IBM said Friday that it will invest $100 million on research for analytics and big data projects and expanded its portfolio accordingly. The company also launched Hadoop-based services.
Hadoop is open source technology that’s used to analyze unstructured data. Both Yahoo and Google are heavy Hadoop proponents.
Yesterday I read LWN’s (paywalled but accessible from here) interview with Mark Shuttleworth, where he is quoted as saying that the formation of The Document Foundation (TDF) and its launch of LibreOffice “led Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off 100 employees.” Mark says this in the context of his new campaign as an apologist for Contribution Licensing Agreements, about which I have written extensively.
The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is an advanced virtual campus with various course modules, which can be followed entirely on-line and seeks to educate and promote the adoption of Free Software and other Free Technologies. I explained in detail what the FTA is last year. This week the Association of Greek Users and Friends of Free/Open Source Software has joined the FTA’s International Associate Partner Network.
New attention is being paid to a class action lawsuit against AT&T. The suit claims that the company’s billing system records data use up to three times the actual use, including “phantom” charges that occur when the phone is not in use. AT&T says the issue is just a misunderstanding about how data is used and billed.
In their infinite wisdom, the European Union risked further alienating people in Britain last night by calling for a ban on plastic shopping bags. The move, designed to benefit the environment, will mean imposing an expensive tax on shopping bags or banning them altogether.
The world is scheduled to end on May 21, 2011. At least that’s the hysteria being spread by Harold Camping, the 89 year-old fundamentalist Christian radio preacher and president of Family Radio, Inc., based in Oakland, California.
Many copyright system defenders insist that the two situations are entirely different. In their minds, intermediary liability concerning copyright infringement is “good” because it’s stopping illegal behavior. But that’s the exact same argument made by the Chinese government. It’s stopping people from speaking out, because that form of speaking out is illegal and can cause great harm. The similarities between the EU proposal and the China proposal at the very least suggest that China is learning that mimicking Western claims concerning copyright law will always give it good cover for censoring at home.
The residents of Middleton have been apoplectic this week after Milton Keynes Council accidently published the results of a residents’ survey on its website, including the addresses and phone numbers of 50 of the respondents. The data breach occurred last week and lasted for 18 hours before the error was noticed and removed.
Zuckerberg said he wants younger kids to be allowed on social networking sites like Facebook. Currently, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) mandates that websites that collect information about users (like Facebook does) aren’t allowed to sign on anyone under the age of 13. But Zuckerberg is determined to change this.
Today the Supreme Court gave a long-awaited ruling on the subject of DNA databases and the ability of the police to store DNA samples of innocent people indefinitely. In a majority judgment (with two of the seven judges disagreeing) the Court ruled that the police practices were unlawful. Due to changes in the law being discussed by Parliament the judges did not go as far as ordering the police to change their practices within a certain time-frame or awarding compensation. It was, however, suggested that if changes were not made soon, further cases could be brought which were likely to succeed.
Unfortunately the review has not presented the kinds of radical shifts and reforms that we hoped for. It deals with some of the peripheral issues — albeit fairly well, and in a way that we support — but it still leaves the core, vitally important and urgent problems we face unaddressed.
Though Apple originally filed for ownership of the “Thunderbolt” trademark associated with its new high-speed data port, the rights will be transferred to Intel, the company with which it cooperatively developed the new standard.
“Apple denies that the mark APP STORE is generic and, on that basis, denies that the Amazon Appstore for Android service is an ‘app store,’” the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant said in a document filed Thursday in an Oakland federal court. “Apple further denies that defendants [Amazon] have the right to use APP STORE as a trademark in connection with Amazon’s mobile software download service for Android devices.”
Smart, strategic, and frequently inscrutable, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s comments must often be closely analyzed. Sometimes they’re discounted as regrettable, off-the-cuff remarks. Other times, his statements are a window into what is really going on inside his company.
On Wednesday, Schmidt shocked big media conglomerates, federal lawmakers, and apparently even executives within his own company when he told reporters in London that Google would defy U.S. government attempts to remove sites from the Web that are accused of trafficking in pirated goods. Schmidt, who was at Google’s helm during an unprecedented decade-long run of online-advertising success, was referring to a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last week called Protect IP.
