Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Legal failure
Summary: A look at several new items of interest and what they can teach us
TECHRIGHTS does not expect to be read by many patent lawyers. It would seem too insulting to them, not because of strong language but because patent lawyers have a different reality in their minds — one where they are necessary and even guardians of innovation.
We always see patent lawyers pretending to be part of the industry rather than parasites to those who drive the industry (the producing industry, not meta-industries). To monopolists, those patent lawyers do serve an important role. They are a guardian against competition. Their role is to narrow down the industry, removing choice, increasing fear, and contributing mostly to stress and waste of time. The assumption that if something is profitable then it must be good to society is very misguided. Almost equally misguided is the supposition that rich people always know better than the rest and that ruthlessness plays no part in one’s wealth (this aspect of the problem was explored in the previous post). In fact, the legal occupation is more about who argues better and has deeper pockets for better arguers/manipulators/dirt diggers; it’s not really about justice (case of point: O. J. Simpson). It’s biased towards money and in favour of one who already exploits others. So getting to the point though, the software industry does not need patent lawyers. Developers already have copyrights by default and disputes over copyrights are easier to resolve (even out of court) because the matter is not so blurry.
“The assumption that if something is profitable then it must be good to society is very misguided.”There is this one blog/magazine which is very shameless about its boosting of software patents. It’s called IAM and we pointed out its weaknesses in prior years. Here it is right now cheering the patent extortion business which works well for patent troll Acacia. And according to this patent maximalists’ blog, we should also belittle Bessen’s research [1, 2, 3] because, according to its stance, there are flaws. To quote: “On the Gametime IP blog Patrick Anderson takes Bessen, Ford and Meurer to task over their working paper, entitled The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls. Sadly, however, although Anderson does a very effective job, out there in the real world nobody is listening. Reports on the CNN Money, Washington Post, Business Insider and Ars Technica websites, among others, all report the findings uncritically. Now I think Anderson’s blog is among the best there is on patents, but how many people read it in comparison to those sites that I have mentioned? The fact is that, whether you like it or not, this paper is going to be very influential – just as Patent Failure, written by Bessen and Meurer in 2008 continues to be cited approvingly in countless reports and policy papers to this day; even though it too is deeply flawed.”
How are these “deeply flawed”? No details given, bot even a link/reference.
According to another patent lawyers’ blog, this one from Axel H. Horns, software patents are no longer up for debate in Europe. The German Pirate Party (sponsored in part by patents-loving company) is once again cited for support. Quoting the post:
After that the debate on software patents died down. A conference organised by the European Patent Office and held in Brussels on July 05, 2007, under the title “Computer-implemented inventions: where do we stand in the debate on ‘software patents’?” made perfectly clear that nowhere any intentions were living to re-start the legislative process to have a sectoral Directive on patentability of CIIs.
What the EPO has been doing in recent years is rather shameful. Its head left not too long ago, after she had opened a door to interpreting software patents as valid in Europe. Then again, the EPO is once of those establishments biased to serve patent supporters and be run by them, too.
Mike Masnick et al. are meanwhile “Petitioning The[ir] Government Against Software Patents,” according to this blog post which comes 2 weeks after the laughable ‘reform’:
Apparently I had missed that the White House set up a platform for people to petition it directly. A few folks have sent over a petition that was set up asking the administration to reject software patents, noting that they are hindering the software industry, one of the few “strong” industries in the US. The specific petition asks the government to stop issuing software patents… and to void all existing software patents.
Given the declining quality of patents, the USPTO should clearly address scope and not the nonsense about “first to file”. Getting rid of software patents would be a good start. █
Posted in Bill Gates at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Übermensch Incorporated
Summary: The Gates Foundation still wants to run the US schools system and decide which patents taxpayers should pay for
Over the past year we have mentioned TFA on numerous occasions because it is a front group to the Gates Foundation.
This group is said to have been nixed based on this teacher who writes: “Shortly after this approval by our school board, Bill Gates provided TFA, Inc. with $1M to open an office in the Puget Sound area.”
From the same blog we learn about a new front group though. According to this later blog post (titled “Stand for Children Stands for the Rich and the Powerful…”): “This video was taken at the Aspen Ideas Festival which is heavily funded by Bill Gates. Stand For Children’s Co-Founder Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan’s senior advisor Jo Anderson, out foxed the Chicago teachers’ union. [...] SFC received $4.5M last year from Bill Gates and $3M from wealthy donors for destroying the teachers’ union in Chicago. Substance News did an article in January about the wealthy who financed the big push to bust the unions in Chicago, see: Emanuel’s Billionaire donors also bankrolling Stand for Children, pushing union busting organizations in Illinois. Oregon, also, has been infected by the virus by way of Stand for Children as well as Texas.”
Not so long ago the New York Times tried to keep track of Bill Gates' AstroTurf in the education 'market'. It is troubling that a $500 billion per year market is becoming just a tool for super-rich people to indoctrinate (or “program”) many tens of millions of children at taxpayers’ own expense. They already control a lot of the corporate press, but in this case they make the programming obligatory (like the school system), so dodging that media won’t be enough. According to a Gates critic who is also an excellent journalist, “Media bashed at Pacific Health Summit; journalist told not to talk”. Here is the context:
So I stood up, jokingly introduced myself as “the media” and tried to ask the attendees to consider the possibility — based on a particular episode in India involving the HPV vaccine, Seattle-based PATH and the Gates Foundation, which I will write about later today — that maybe it isn’t just about educating or “guiding” journalists toward the light of truth.
Doesn’t anyone wonder why politicians, or celebrities for that matter, seldom rally much around the cause of vaccination? Why are vaccines a hard sell?
Why do we keep having these expert panel discussions with public health officials or medical researchers wringing their hands and complaining about being misunderstood? Is it really just because journalists are only interested in being sensational?
We are not at all with the anti-vaccination camp, but we are in the camp of those who allege that companies try to use their patent monopolies on particular vaccinations and then pressure the public — often using fear — to buy their merchandise in great and often excessive quantities. The benefits of many vaccinations are well understood, but what is wrong is a competition where so-called ‘charitable’ foundations that invest in particular companies (for profit) lobby politicians to buy the product of those very same companies. And guess who pays for these patents at the end? The public of course, via state tax or over the counter. Bill Gates usually just ‘seeds’ the ‘donations’ pot, which is basically not a monetary donation but just a licence to produce something which can be manufactured en masse anyway, very cheaply too. More people need to raise awareness about these issues. █
Summary: Banshee and Pinta rear their head again; no considerable changes in OpenSUSE
THE WORLD of Novell is a misty mixture of Microsoft and SUSE, .NET and Linux, even Microsoft tax on Free/libre software. The patent trap which is Banshee has a rather belated (and bloated) release (Banshee is a Novell project) and Pinta, a project conceived by a Novell developer, still helps spread Mono. After reports that it had died there was a call for volunteers to help save it and the program is said to have been resurrected. So there is still work to be done making Mono and Xamarin go away (back where they came from, Microsoft culture).
At the openSUSE conference last week, Lydia Pintscher from the KDE Community Working Group led a BoF on “women in openSUSE”. This is what we (Stella, Bruno, Lydia, Pascal, Susanne, Greg) worked out…
This seems more like PR. OpenSUSE is most predominantly a male group and it is run almost exclusively by people who are employed by SUSE/Attachmate (formerly Novell) and partly funded by Microsoft. The community was not even part of the decision to bond with Microsoft. █
Elizabeth Krumbach is the kind of Linux person I find fascinating. She’s very strong on the technical side, with lots of Debian contributions to her name, but she’s also very active socially, in all kinds of Linux-related outreach. But even more impressively, Elizabeth seems to be using her ideal Linux desktop setup, which is always a cool thing to read.
Fab loses his hair, the Pirate Party scores big time in Germany, Google+ gets an API, identi.ca gets upgraded and Microsoft goes completely insane with Windows 8.
As you know, we’ve been working very hard on building a new kernel.org infrastructure from the ground up. This new infrastructure will no longer have shell access to the git repositories; instead we will be running git using the gitolite web glue.
Jeremy Huddleston released xorg-server 1.11.1 a few hours ago. This release was done since two “brown-bag” issues were found in X.Org Server 1.11.0, which was released just one month ago.
Back in January I heard from VIA that their open-source Linux strategy / support was basically dead. They don’t have the resources or justification to do the work any longer, and their Linux TODO list was basically shot. In the years since they announced they were trying to become open-source friendly (and follow the steps of ATI/AMD), they only managed to push out some partially open-source code and some chipset documentation. But could they be playing around with open-source graphics drivers again?
After more than seven months of development, the OpenShot project has announced the arrival of version 1.4 of its open source video editor for Linux. According to the developers, the latest release of the non-linear, timeline-based video editor “represents a huge investment by our small and dedicated team”. In addition to “tons of bug fixes and speed improvements”, a number of new features have been added.
It’s time for another bi-weekly development release of Wine… This new release, Wine 1.3.29, has noteworthy changes when it comes to Visual Basic Script (VBScript) and X Render support.
After releasing couple of tech demos and final version for Linux, indie game studio Swing Swing Submarine has released a new demo of their game Blocks That Matter for users to get their hands on.
Remember a year back when those Linux Steam builds leaked, everyone went crazy, and then nothing happened? Yeah. Well, it’s happening again, except this time with Desura, and the Linux client actually exists…
I gave Gnome themes a whirl, but ultimately decided that I like the default Gnome 3 desktop. Except for one thing: all windows are grey. The active window is grey with black text as the title, and inactive windows are a slightly different shade of grey with dark grey text as the title.
A new maintenance release of Linux Portable Security LPS has been released, this release added more support for RealTek wireless drivers; added additional broadband cellular drivers; added additional SmartCard drivers; revised About Box to show licensing info; removed GMail S/MIME add-on, which no longer works with GMail; updated Flash to 10.3.183.7; updated Firefox to 3.6.22; updated DOD Configuration add-on to 1.3.3; updated Java to 6u27; updated OpenSSH to 5.9p1; updated DOD Root CAs. Find more info in the chagelog
Summary:
· Announced Distro: GeeXboX 2.0
· Announced Distro: Pardus Linux 2011.2
· Announced Distro: Kororaa Linux 15
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2
I am an active member of the German Mandriva community MandrivaUser.de, I was a Mandriva translator since about 2007 and I was one of the packagers creating the mud third party packages.
If Canonical had its way, OEMs would make sure Ubuntu ran well on their hardware before shipping it. But most OEMs don’t, so Ubuntu developers have resorted to the next best thing: crowd-sourcing hardware validation to users via the Ubuntu Friendly program, which is almost ready for prime time. Here’s the scoop.
This fantastic distribution is not merely another Ubuntu derivative. Bodhi delivers a smooth installation process, and an utterly perfected desktop environment that surely left developers locked in dark basements for weeks on end. Enlightenment may be exactly what all the other distributions are missing. The Enlightenment desktop is lightweight and highly customizable making this distribution a top choice for new or old systems. Bodhi comes with a minimal list of pre-installed applications as well, perfect if you are picky about what you like. So if you are ready to try something new Bodhi will leave you breathless.
The new Ubuntu release (Oneiric Ocelot) comes out in about three weeks. Since the Linux news feeds I peruse have been filled with all the great improvements being made to the Unity interface in Ubuntu, I thought I’d download the new Ubuntu 11.10 beta 2 and check it out. It comes with new Linux Kernel version 3.0.4 and Gnome 3.1.92 along with an upgraded Unity.
An almost-overlooked addition to the upcoming Kubuntu 11.10 is the new Kubuntu Low-Fat Settings package. With this set of new default settings for various KDE bits, it is quite possible to reduce memory usage by as much as 32% and reduce KDE’s start up time by 33%, according to our intrepid apachelogger. This is a boon to those of us with older and slower hardware.
In the vast world of GNU/Linux distributions it can be difficult to choose one that suites all of your needs and still remains true to the core values of the Free Software Foundation. Although there are several distributions that have been branded 100% Libre, many of them seem to have lost steam and support.
I am pleased to report that Trisquel 5.0 was released this month. Trisquel is based on Ubuntu so users who are familiar with that distribution will feel right at home. Originally released in 2005 with the support of Richard Stallman and FSF, this installment of the 100% Libre distribution is well polished and a pleasure to use.
Stallman summarised by saying that Android devices are a major step towards free smartphones that are fully controlled by their users, but that there is a long way to go yet: “Even though the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones, they cannot be said to respect your freedom.”
In late August, Marcin Jakubowski, Open Source Ecology founder and director, posted the GVCS Rollout Plan for 2011-2012 on the project wiki. In his post, Jakubowski explained that the project’s 2010 budget was US $1,500 per month, and the current budget is $10,000 per month. He projects the project budget will be up to $100,000 per month within six months, with financing coming from True Fans (financial supporters) and production earnings.
Google’s rapid development pace shows no signs of slowing as it rolls out a new stable version of Chrome, this time version 14.
Unlike Firefox, which also has an accelerated release process, Chrome appears to be benefiting from the high turnover, while Firefox seems to be suffering because of it.
The accelerated Firefox release cycle may be great for many users, but enterprise IT folks were not thrilled. To their credit, the folks at Mozilla eventually took the complaints seriously and founded a working group to address enterprise desktop needs. However, it seems clear that the Extended Support Releases (ESRs) will be second-class citizens.
The judge can order Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Google’s Larry Page to talk in closed court all he wants, they’re not going to settle Oracle’s lawsuit over Android and its alleged infringement on Java.
The Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development used ‘Subversion’, an open source version control system, to publish online the first part of the source code for the government’s eVoting system.
Third, benefits for science. Because research in genomics, pharmacology or the fight against cancer increasingly depends on the availability and sophisticated analysis of large data sets. Sharing such data means researchers can collaborate, compare, and creatively explore whole new realms. We cannot afford for access to scientific knowledge to become a luxury, and the results of publicly funded research in particular should be spread as widely as possible.
Of all the priorities Meg Whitman now must face as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO — and HP has many priorities — deep and long commitment to open-source technology must be near the top of the list.
HP’s software business is simply not a strength for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company — whether it’s on the desktop, the server, the data center or in the cloud. Perhaps the best piece of software that comes from HP is its Universal Print Driver, which is actually a powerful piece of software but not exactly positioned in the IT industry’s growth areas.
Growing concerns about the weakness of economic growth around the world are increasingly dimming prospects for American financial institutions, amplifying risks of spiraling troubles.
Even Goldman Sachs, the well-known investment bank, now could be headed toward recording its second quarterly loss in a dozen years — its first quarterly loss since the financial crisis — according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The bank’s lower earnings prospects have been taken by experts as a sign that Goldman is pulling back from taking risks. In the immediate term, a cutback in financial activity by Goldman and other banks is likely to drag on the struggling American economy, as more businesses and consumers find it harder to secure credit needed to make purchases.
Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place.
Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced ‘light touch regulation’ – giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.
There has been plenty of concern recently about companies sneaking their own marketing material or one-sided corporate propaganda into schools. And while some may differ on how big a problem this is, I think most people would agree that a local government shouldn’t be aiding the process — especially without revealing the corporate sponsor. And yet, that appears to be exactly what New York City is doing. And, to make it even more ridiculous, they’re doing so by putting forth a corporate-sponsored contest about the importance of copyright… and hiding in the fine print that by entering the contest, you may be giving up your own copyrights.
Summary: Techrights’ Sebastian and Roy talk about GNU/Linux distributions, Identi.ca, and Mageia’s 1-year anniversary
LAST night’s show covers GNU/Linux on the desktop with focus on Mageia. Sebastian joins us from the IRC channels, where he is a regular contributor.
We talk about what Mageia is, its relationship to Mandriva, Sebastian’s experiment moving from Ubuntu to Mageia, and then we play “Klezmer” by La Santa Cecilia. We talk about moving to/from GNOME 3 and Unity, noting Roy’s prior experience with Mandriva. “The Way It Is” by Kristyna Myles is then played and later begins a discussion about Mageia’s GUI and installer, the 1-year anniversary, and Identi.ca group (including something about polls). “Impossibly Beautiful” by Julie Feeney is played and then comes a long discussion about PCLinuxOS, Mandrake, Gaël Duval (and Ulteo), UnityLinux, etc. “I am” by Jones Family Singers closes this long show.
He added that if Ultrabooks suffer from weak sales, while Apple continues to enjoy strong profit, the Wintel alliance will need to do something or else all the related IT player may be gone together.
Ultrabooks are a last attempt to sell high margin systems the Windows way, after having been bullied out of gnu/linux netbooks. Ultrabooks are projected to cost more than $1,000, prices not enjoyed by Microsoft hardware since XP. If these computers come with “secure” Windows 8, the makers will have a hard time giving them away.
“We’re going to go out and make it clear to the Arabs who the home owners are,” settler Itamar Ben-Gvir told Yedioth Ahronot. “We’re going to take the initiative and march [with arms] towards Palestinian towns.”
Since the Supreme Court lifted a ban on death sentences in 1976, 1,264 people have been executed in the U.S. And 921 of those executions — or 73 percent of the total — took place in 13 Southern states. [the Texas death machine skews alone had 38 and is special] … As you might suspect, executions have their roots in the history of slavery.
The cultural legacy of slavery is violence and other lawless behavior.
Flexibility might bring price reductions as long as speculation is regulated back out of the market and half of a chicken and egg problem will be solved. Hopefully, alcohol fuels won’t come from food crops.
Microsoft will work with state, city, nonprofit and private organizations — including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) and One Economy — to develop and accelerate reduced-cost programs and policies that will include the following: Windows-based PCs optimized for students; Broadband Internet access; Microsoft education software; Job skills training.
As usual, this is dumping to reinforce the Microsoft monopoly. The net city and state cash flow is overwhelmingly in Microsoft’s direction.
The Zimbabwe Minister of Media, Information and Publicity, Webster Shamu, warned media organisations may have their licences revoked for misusing their licenses to ‘vilify’ Zimbabwe and its leadership.
Internet service providers must comply to the blacklisting of citizens who are *suspected* of copyright or trademark or patent infringements (“proscription lists” to ban citizens from any access to the Net);
Not using Facebook to share with your friends this way does not keep Facebook from sharing with others behind your back.
An intentionally unlinked NYT article claims the Obama administration is again pushing the “trusted identity” NSTIC
The reason given is to shore up “ecommerce confidence”. That confidence problem is really a Windows insecurity problem that won’t be fixed by any government database. Techrights pointed to this excellent NSTIC write up back in January.
“Interesting” site, run by Equifax. It’s a service used by most large employers to deal with requests for verification of employment and salary and such. But … it has much more information, and it’s not exactly clear why.
Chairman Leahy’s Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2011 (S.1151) – presumably the most likely to see action on the Senate floor – also contains amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, including welcome language to focus the statute more narrowly on hackers and identity thieves.
Meet Linux, Linux the harlequin. Linux wears a coat of many colours, is depicted as a bumbling fool and people love to laugh at it. This harlequin is called a clown, a fool, an idiot and looked upon with derision by people of “class”. This harlequin is ignored and just treated and thought of as simply background entertainment. In other words Linux the harlequin is not thought of as important at all and is generally underestimated.
I wrote recently about how Microsoft is now among the broadest supporters of enterprise Linux server, but when it comes to desktop PCs and laptops, mobile and converged devices and end users, Microsoft’s Linux support is a time warp back to 1998 when computers and their software were fused by proprietary sodder.
Though probably not intended as one of the new Windows 8 features to be highlighted, recent reports indicate a boot requirement in Microsoft’s latest Windows 8 OS prevents booting of Linux.
As a Linux user who has installed several different distributions on several different failed Windows machines, I’m concerned for a few reasons. One, it can be difficult to impossible to avoid the so-called ‘Microsoft tax,’ whereby Windows machines are purchased with the intention of installing Linux. Two, this is a serious limitation to the growing segment of users that like a dual-boot option with Linux. Three, what will happen to all of those PCs, laptops, netbooks and other devices after the Microsoft software becomes buggy, broken or outdated?
An obvious question is why Linux doesn’t support UEFI secure booting. Let’s ignore the issues of key distribution and the GPL and all of those things, and instead just focus on what would be required. There’s two components – the signed binary and the authenticated variables.
Microsoft have responded to suggestions that Windows 8 may make it difficult to boot alternative operating systems. What’s interesting is that at no point do they contradict anything I’ve said. As things stand, Windows 8 certified systems will make it either more difficult or impossible to install alternative operating systems. But let’s have some more background.
The same will happen with tablets. A small, number about 60million will be shipped in 2011 but in 2012, the number could increase dramatically, about 300%. That means when “8″ is released, the installed base of GNU/Linux or Android/Linux or iPad tablets could be about 200 million. OEMs are not going to shift to the “tight margin” model that M$ imposes on PCs in the smart thingies. The newcomers will be making more than M$’s partners on small cheap computers than on “PCs”. By the end of 2012, consumers and businesses will know and love the small cheap computer and will turn up their noses at M$ offering small expensive computers.
My laptop is just a plain old Thinkpad W510 with a 15” screen running 1920×1080. I don’t have another monitor, I don’t have a desktop or a second laptop, this is it.
Apple has its self-explanatory fruity logo, Microsoft has its stained-glass banner, and Linux has its floppy, friendly, ever-cheerful penguin Tux as its team mascot. But after 20 years of existence, does Linux benefit from the Tux logo? Some say Tux is a perfectly fine way to represent Linux as a whole; others call it “cartoon-y” and prevents people from taking Linux seriously.
If you have ever wondered what the creator of Linux does in-between working through the thousands of changes, corrections and new features for the next Linux release, the answer is simple: he writes software. Linus Torvalds has just released subsurface, a dive-tracking program designed after he found that “none of the dive log software worked for me”. The subsurface application runs on Linux and uses gtk2 for the GUI. It can process xml dive files or work directly with any dive computer supported by libdivecomputer.
In my talk (or rather: structured discussion) “Methods of Attraction: How to bring in new contributors” on this year’s X.org Developer’s Conference I brought up reasons why open source projects often fail to attract new contributors, and some changes to help this.
One of the mailing list threads I’ve been trying to catch up on this week while at Oktoberfest is the heated discussion about merging video/input drivers back into the X.Org Servers. This discussion was started at the XDC2011 conference, but there’s many e-mails being exchanged from more parties not in favor of merging the drivers into the xorg-server tree or wishing to see other developmental process changes.
Originally this annual survey was set to end on 20 September, but due to being busy with Oktoberfest, that deadline was forgotten about. As a result, there’s still time to participate.
Did you learn all your Linux console skills from books or from forums? Or, did you peek over someone’s shoulder to see the real action? Once in a while, we stumble upon new projects that deserve some attention, like Playterm. What’s the reason for this command-line “peep show”? To spread GNU Linux command-line knowledge.
Josh (Cheese) Bush from Twolofbees.com let me know that has made an interview with rotektor (Tim Jung) who has recently been appointed GNU/Linux Games Lead for Desura , it comes with 3 parts – so here is the first part (the others will be published on his website in the next few weeks).
The Plasma Active OS has been on Desktop and Netbook interfaces for quite awhile now. The exploration into a much wider range of devices that can utilize the Plasma interface is the goal of the current beta testing. By displaying the possibilities of Plasma OS to other devices through a beta run, the developers at KDE are targeting the largest pool of users possible.
C++11, the new C++ ISO standard that was approved last month and formerly was known as C++0x, has been called to be employed by Qt and KDE as quickly as possible.
A free software project such as the many projects under the KDE umbrella do not need users, they only need more developers. A user which is not able to develop is useless. Because of that it is totally acceptable that you demand that user’s should start learning programming to fix the bugs they report.
The last couple of weeks have been ridiculously busy. Or, if you prefer (and I do): ridicubusy. On the personal side of life, I managed to squeeze in a two day paddle-and-camping trip the other weekend, played dinner host to Lawrence Krauss (made some of my favourite dishes, and one new one (for me, anyways): egg yolk ravioli), co-hosted a “Ready, Steady, Cook!” evening at the house along with S. All of that was enjoyable, and great breaks between the long hours of working on Plasma and general KDE “stuff”.
GNOME 3.2 is almost here, the team has made available the release candidate version for testing and the final build is expected to land in a week.
If you can’t wait for that long or want to help some of the remaining bugs, if any, you can grab the sources and see what the second update to the third major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment looks like.
I have long been an advocate for listening to the users (see this old thread in in GNOME’s ml), and through the years I have discussed over and over with GNOME developers why it’s important to listen to your users, and why they are barely doing it.
The chief executive of the GNOME Foundation, Karen Sandler, will be the first keynote speaker at the 13th Australian national Linux conference scheduled to be held in Ballarat from January 16 to 20 next year.
That was the takeaway from my exclusive phone interview with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT ) CEO Jim Whitehurst after the company reported second-quarter earnings last night.
Revenue for the quarter tallied up to $281.3 million, up 28% year over year, while non-GAAP net income was $56.5 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, rising 53% from last year. Non-GAAP operating income jumped 41% to $76.4 million, resulting in an 18.7% operating margin. The company’s total deferred revenue balance, an important precursor to sales, rose 25% to $813.2 million and billings grew 30%.
[...]
Even Samsung is considering taking its mobile OS, Bada, open source next year.
In yesterday’s ugly market, only a few stocks were able to eke out gains. One of the standouts: Red Hat (NYSE:RHT). Its price was up 3% to $41.49.
[...]
So might the tough macroeconomic environment hurt Red Hat? Perhaps so. Yet the company has the advantage that its software is free. Consider that some of the hardest-hit sectors — such as financial services and the government — have shown continued demand for Red Hat’s services.
Next, I’d like to remind you that in Fedora 16 we again have supplemental wallpapers and what’s more: since Fedora 16 all the supplemental wallpapers appear not only in GNOME’s and KDE’s wallpaper choosers but also in XFCE’s.
This post is exactly what it prommised. I have decided to take the plunge and install Fedora 16 Beta RC1 on my Desktop. (Before anyone starts on me I have the experience to run a beta on a production machine and have a backup O/S RHEL 6)
To what extent does Android respect the freedom of its users? For a computer user that values freedom, that is the most important question to ask about any software system.
In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users’ freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn’t. By contrast, the idea of “open source” focuses on how to develop code; it is a different current of thought whose principal value is code quality rather than freedom. Thus, the concern here is not whether Android is “open”, but whether it allows users to be free.
Android is an operating system primarily for mobile phones, which consists of Linux (Torvalds’ kernel), some libraries, a Java platform and some applications. Linux aside, the software of Android versions 1 and 2 was mostly developed by Google; Google released it under the Apache 2.0 license, which is a lax free software license without copyleft.
The recently launched Adobe’s Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 have become an attraction for the developers. Although this version of the development tool is recently launched with an updater for multiscreen mobile support, the rave reviews of the product bear testimony to the fact that developers are willing to make the most of it. With Adobe Flash Builder, developers now have a single platform for developing highly expressive mobile applications that can be distributed via Android Market, Apple App Store and BlackBerry App World. Flash Builder 4.5 enables the creation of applications that work seamlessly across leading mobile devices platforms. These products provide developers with an opportunity to reach more than 80 million Android devices, BlackBerry Playbooks, iPads and iPhones.
Open source software advocate Jon “Maddog” Hall will kick off a series of discussions about the potential open source software holds for economic development at a Sept. 22 lecture in Fairmont.
Mozilla has published a proposal for an extended support release (ESR) version for Firefox versions that are deployed in business environments. The extended release cycle is designed to alleviate the burden of the 6-week rapid releases and respective support cycles by replacing them with 42-week versions.
There’s a lot of talk about Firefox’s ever-increasing version number, and it made me wonder: what piece of software has the biggest version number of all? A brief scan of my Xubuntu 11.04 box suggests than XTerm, at version 268, has the lead, although I’m sure there’s something bigger out there. And in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter – how good the software is, and for how long it is supported, is a bigger issue.
Businesses now offer computing users tempting opportunities to let others keep their data and do their computing. In other words, to toss caution and responsibility to the winds.
These businesses, and their boosters, like to call these computing practices “cloud computing”. They apply the same term to other quite different scenarios as well, such as renting a remote server, making the term so broad and nebulous that nothing meaningful can be said with it. If it has any meaning, it can only be a certain attitude towards computing: an attitude of not thinking carefully about what a proposed scenario entails or what risks it implies. Perhaps the cloud they speak of is intended to form inside the customer’s mind.
For those that could be interested in my shameless self-promotion, there is some news about the LibreOffice Visio import filter at libregraphicsworld.org web site, accompanied by a fine interview with two fine hackers.
What disturbs me is not the fact of the criticism, but how it is made. For one thing, it seems unrealistic. It’s all very well for Proffitt to say, as he did on Google+, that “I would hope that they would advocate the benefits of free software (of which there are many) without feeling the need to tear down everything else. Again.”
But how, in practice, is the FSF supposed to approach subjects like Android in a positive light? While Stallman concedes that “the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones,” Android obviously isn’t free software, although many people I talk to have the vague belief that it is.
Obviously, a debunking is in order, but by definition a debunking is negative. In fact, how is the FSF supposed to discuss the matter at all, especially when any free software alternative to Android is so small and so unknown that any attempt to advocate it would automatically discredit itself?
In his “Off The Beat” blog at LinuxPro Magazine, Bruce Byfield wrote about what he called a “disturbing trend”, namely to criticize and otherwise bad-mouth everything that comes out of the Free Software Foundation. He mentioned other pundits and journalists like Brian Proffitt and Joe Brockmeier.
For the record, I know and like everyone of these guys (Bruce, Brian, and Joe) and I really hate to see them fighting.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the Free Software Foundation. The FSF has, as its founder and figurehead, the legendary Richard M. Stallman. Richard is a very smart guy with some strong feelings about what constitutes Free Software. He’s also the guy behind the GPL, the license under which the Linux kernel was released. That document, the GPL, deserves to be called ‘visionary’, helping to shape the world of FOSS as we know it.
After over two months of work since 0.5.0 by a handful of developers, there’s finally a new release of Lightspark, the (other) open source Flash player. Unlike Gnash, Lightspark supports the AVM2 virtual machine and the newest versions of SWF files, while falling back to Gnash when it encounters SWF8 or earlier content.
To realize this, the car company announced a partnership with Bug Labs to develop a new in-car research platform named OpenXC, earlier this week. [1] Ford also plans to introduce a socially-networked in-car fuel economy monitor connected to the Internet via Bug Labs’ cloud-based service, BUGswarm.
It has come up many times, that the users of software products have the most influence over how these greedy and gigantic companies operate. Why? Because if users do not use and/or buy products, these companies could not and would not exist.
Microsoft is probably one of the worst abusers of its consumers. Complex licensing programs are designed purposely to make customers overpay for licenses. Little to no discounts have been offered for upgrades, even for users that had already purchased Windows Vista for example, despite Microsoft’s declaration that Vista was a “mistake”. Secretly undermining the competition, using legal devices like software patents, so that users must go to Microsoft and pay royalties to Microsoft if they use non-Microsoft software. Vendor lock-in, where current customers are unable to use non-Microsoft software because their Microsoft products are incompatible and too expensive to migrate away from. Closely monitoring the software that its customers use, in order to keep them from installing the software on too many computers without paying more. And the list goes on.
A few years ago, an amendment making sure that parallel importation was not criminalised in the EU disappeared after it was adopted in the European Parliament. This summer, the Chairman of the International Trade committee (INTA), Mr Vital Moreira, rewrote a question the INTA committee asked the Parliament’s Legal Services regarding ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The INTA Chairman among others things left out a reference regarding parallel importation. Up until now, no member of the INTA committee questioned the behavior of the INTA Chairman. (See update below.)
