12.15.11
Posted in Patents at 7:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patent news of relevance with emphasis on the USPTO
EARLIER this month we wrote about CarrierIQ, noting that it provides an example of why proprietary software is often malicious. We now read that the FBI made use of this malicious software. We now realise that software patents too were part of this bundle. Excellent example of everything going wrong under the same package, eh?
The patent industry is posting a load of rubbish about these malicious things and contests are being set up to help make things worse for everyone (except patent lawyers). Here is more of this theme:
Glastonbury software developer TopCoder Inc. has opened a $50,000 contest for code writers to create by mid-January new algorithms that will help the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office conduct patent review.
We mentioned this before. While patents boosters are hiring hostile pro-patent people [1, 2] we cannot help feeling cynical about where the USPTO is headed. Here is the story of one real company (or a set of them) which feel the pinch:
The developers behind the next evolution of the Internet — linked, immersive, 3D environments — are trying to think of ways to minimize the adverse impact of software patents on their industry.
Software patents are for a meta-industry, not the real industry which makes stuff. There is no good faith in patent monopolies. We’ll provide more evidence in the coming days. █
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Posted in Novell at 7:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The scraps of Novell make small moves
Summary: The latest news from Xamarin and from Novell, which have totally lost their way by now
THE company known as Xamarin is a proprietary software powerhouse with emphasis on .NET. Its CTO does not use GNU/Linux at work. See the comments here and mind the headline which says the opposite of the real news (that Miguel de Icaza moved away from Linux).
Xamarin has a new proprietary (open ‘core’) product which is based on “an open-source version of Microsoft’s .Net technology for programming in Microsoft’s C# language.” The article continues: “With the newest version of Mono for Android, C# programmers can produce software that will run natively on both Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, and on Android tablets including Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, Xamarin said yesterday.”
As we explained in the past, this is a sort of embrace-and-extend of Android. From Java/Dalvik to Microsoft’s turf? Does anyone really need that? A few sites gave that coverage, but all in all, things were quiet. One article says:
“The big component is that we’ve caught up for Google,” Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Xamarin, told InternetNews.com.
Google does not need .NET on its phones, so once again Mono is a solution in search of a problem (which does not exist). Novell in general offers a distribution that addresses a need nobody really has. The whole “IP peace of mind” line is just pure FUD and amid security issues and some blurbs about OpenSUSE we find this announcement of a product that arrives very late given the age of SLE* 11. To quote:
Novell and SUSE Linux may technically be separate companies, but they are owned by the same Attachmate conglomerate and they still have to work together on specific products, such as Open Enterprise Server, which bolts NetWare print and file services to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
“OES is Novell’s operating system product that helps to provide a bridge to its legacy NetWare customers. The OES product line first debuted in 2005. With the new OES 11 release, Novell is basing the server on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 release, that debuted back in May 2010,” as this article put it. What took it so long? The official word does not provide an answer and new material about SLE* is equally out of date. It is quite possible that turmoil inside Novell led to this procrastination. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 7:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple’s aggressive moves against Linux-powered phones/tablets end up putting Apple’s business at risk and Apple is seen paying trolls, possibly with ill intent
THE behaviour of Apple has become increasingly relevant to us because Apple attacks Free/Open Source software.
The patent hoarding of Apple is further exacerbated with additions that are later being used to block sales of Android devices. There is reactionary motion to ban Apple devices as means of deterrence and the outcome can be serious for Apple’s business.
Ironically, the fight which was started by Apple does not turn out too well, at least not in the conventional way.
As we showed a couple of days ago, it is now Apple that risks embargo. In an article from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols he labels this “revenge” and notes that:
A German court has just issued a preliminary injunction on Motorola’s behalf that blocks European sales of all Apple’s 3G-enabled devices.
A Microsoft booster helps show that Apple is additionally hurting open standards with its software patents. To quote:
Opera developer Haavard Moen has accused Apple of repeatedly using patents to undermine the development of Web standards and block their finalization.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that governs and oversees the development of Web standards, requires that every specification it approves be implementable on a royalty-free basis, barring extraordinary circumstances that justify an exception to this rule. The specifications can contain patented technology, as long as royalty-free patent licenses are available.
Nilay Patel, who previously (as in this case) spread anti-Android (and thus Apple-sympathetic) messages through boosters who had helped Microsoft lobbyists, seeds this story, which goes along the lines of “Samsung did not play nice with Apple”. Meanwhile, “Apple appears to have entered an unusual deal with a company commonly referred to as a patent troll.” Ars Technica writes:
Apple may be using patent troll to do its legal dirty work
It appears that Apple has made a deal with patent troll Digitude Innnovations to help the company’s efforts to sue nearly every major mobile device maker. Digitude earlier this month launched one of its first legal attacks against Nokia, RIM, Motorola, HTC, LG, Samsung, Sony, and even Amazon, filing a patent infringement claim with the International Trade Commission. Conspicuously absent from that list is iPhone maker Apple, which until late November owned two of the patents being used to target “certain mobile devices” from its competitors.
We have already seen Microsoft using patent trolls as proxies in attacks on Android, so let’s keep an eye on this. Apple is desperate to block Android because its core business may depend on it. Apple previously paid the world’s biggest patent troll. █
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 6:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Europe’s transition to Free/Open Source software is stifled by the existence of Microsoft’s fake ‘open’ format
THE SUBJECT of OOXML/ODF was covered here thoroughly in 2007 and 2008. We showed a great deal of lies, corruption, and cover-up.
Putting aside the corruption behind OOXML, the anticompetitive aspect of it returns to haunt Europe. Ryan says that “they should get rid of it and use ODF” and notes that the “Open Source Business Alliance” has created a new working group – “Office Interoperability.”
“Business Alliance,” notes Ryan, is similar to the BSA and many times before we explained that interoperability is just a weasel word used to marginalise open standards. “I smell Ballmer,” Ryan says, but the report is not so amusing. To quote:
IT authorities from Germany and Switzerland have announced that they are working together, under the auspices of the Open Source Business Alliance, to improve the way that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org display and process OOXML-formatted documents. The authorities involved include the IT groups from the cities of Munich, Jena and Freiburg im Breisgau, the Swiss canton of Waadt, the Swiss Federal Court and the Schweizer Informatikstrategie Bund (Swiss IT Federation) whose representatives met at a workshop in Zurich in October to launch the “Precise reproduction of OOXML documents in Open Source Office applications” project. Slides for the workshop provide more details of what was discussed.
This was the purpose of OOXML all along — throwing users back into the same loop and the same lock-in/trap. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Changes to the memory subsystem promise improved response times and performance. From Linux 3.2, device-mapper supports thin provisioning and is able to use this ability for improved snapshot functionality.
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Linus Torvalds and Greg KH announced a few hours ago, December 9th, that another Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.2 and the stable Linux kernel 3.1.5 are both available for download.
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Applications
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The world of application and server load testing has traditionally been limited by the availability of on-premise resources. With a new service from startup Blazemeter, that changes as load testing can now be done via a self-service cloud model.
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I’ve compiled 25 performance monitoring and debugging tools that will be helpful when you are working on Linux environment. This list is not comprehensive or authoritative by any means.
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Once you use the open source Network Security Toolkit distribution, Jack Wallen predicts you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.
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The tools that you will be using, surprisingly, come from Lacie. Here are the three tools that you will need to download first. All of them are prepackaged .debs.
LightScribe System Software Package
LightScribe Simple Application
LaCie 4L Labeler Utility
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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With Plasma Active, KDE project has shown how you can take customize the DE for different class of devices — while traditional desktop users can use the ‘future’ perfect and advanced Plasma Desktop, space restricted netbooks can take full advantage of Plasma Netbook, the Plasma Active emerges as a great solution for touch based devices.
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GNOME Desktop
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As mentioned when announcing the survey, several months ago I was contacted about hosting the 2011 GNOME User Survey after the GNOME Foundation itself wasn’t interested in collecting the feedback from their users. The survey ran for October and November on Phoronix, and now I have finally had time to dump the results and look.
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Reboots tend to be rare with Linux. Usually, they’re due to a kernel update or an environmental issue. But regardless of the reason, it’s crucial it come back to life quickly. One issue surrounding Linux of late is boot time. Some distributions have made it a key feature to attract users. Some have even succeeded in reaching that magic 10-second number. But which distributions boot fastest? Let’s take a look.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Some vendors move faster than others when it comes to integrating products from an acquisition.
Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) acquired storage vendor startup Gluster in October for $136 million. Now Red Hat is already out with its first Gluster-based product, The Red Hat Storage Appliance. The new appliance integrates components from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Gluster.
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Fedora
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Fedora 16 is the first version of Fedora where the installer creates GPT partitions by default – in standalone installations. So if you are going to install Fedora 16 KDE or any version of Fedora 16, GPT is a new feature that you will encounter during installation. GPT, or GUID Partition Table, makes it possible to create more than four primary partitions, and partitions that are more than 2 TB in size. If you are interested in this subject, you might want to read Fedora 16 GPT disk partitioning guide.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Starting with today we will introduce new plugins for the Unity interface of the Ubuntu operating system, called Lens and Scopes, that will make your Unity experience much better.
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It’s been a long time in development, but we’re finally drawing close to releasing Paypal support in Ubuntu Pay, the payment service behind Ubuntu Software Centre. Here are a couple of screenshots to whet your appetite…
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Flavours and Variants
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The Pear OS linux is from France and it is purely based on Ubuntu and Debian. It design and look is mixture of Ubuntu and MAC OS X. The login screen, top panel and window are look like Ubuntu and the Dock at bottom gives you the taste of MAC OS X.
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Pandaboard.org has unveiled a new and small mainboard that is called the Pandaboard ES. This little board is one of the open source parts that is designed to be a development tool for running Android 4.0 ICS when it lands. The board is intended to support the Android Open Source Project. The little board is price very well.
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Adlink announced it will release a range of ARM-powered COMs (computer-on-modules) next year that sell for “far below $100,” supporting operating systems including Android, Linux, and Windows 8. The devices, which will consume less than three Watts, will employ a still-unnamed, ARM-oriented format recently announced by Kontron.
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Phones
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Android
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Meizu announced a high-end Android 2.3.5 phone equipped with an eight-megapixel, f/2.2 backside-illuminated camera with 1080p video recording. Aimed at the Chinese market for now, the Meizu MX features a 1.4GHz, dual-core Samsung Exynos 4210 system on chip (SoC), 16GB of storage, a four-inch, 960 x 640 pixel display, and a micro-SIM slot supporting pentaband 3G with HSPA+ support, says the company.
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Renault announced an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system that will arrive in its Renault Clio 4 and Zoe cars in 2012. R-Link is built around a seven-inch touchscreen tablet — reportedly running Android on a Texas Instruments ARM processor — and will feature TomTom navigation, telematics controls, multimedia, speech recognition, and an open SDK for third-party app developers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Before launching into this review, which pits Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 against Apple’s iPad 2, I took a few days to familiarize myself with the Galaxy Tab’s Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”) OS. The thing is, I’d already used iOS on an iPod Touch for two years, but was a rank newbie when it came to Android.
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I don’t know if you are a TouchWiz fan or not. If you don’t know what TouchWiz it then you probably wont care. TouchWiz is Samsung’s skin for Android devices. It offers some cool features and has its own share of fans and hater. Irrespective of that Samsung is determined to put TouchWiz on top of Ice Cream Sandwich on its Android 4.0 phones.
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Events
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The dates have been announced for our next conference — March 24th and 25th 2012, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A call for papers has also been announced. The conference will include talks from the FSF staff and board, GNU project contributors, and other members of the global free software community. I hope you will join us!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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For Mozilla, sandboxing isn’t everything. A precision made following the release of Accuvant Labs study.
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SaaS
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The Apache Hadoop project has generated a lot of hype as being the poster child for the phenomenon known as Big Data. The practical reality though is that Hadoop works best with a distribution of complementary tools and applications that fully enables an effective Big Data deployment.
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Databases
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This week we have for you an interview with Simon Tokumine and Javier de la Torre from CartoDB, an open source geospatial cloud database with a business model. Enjoy the interview!
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Java platform-as-a-service cloud provider CloudBees has launched a commercial version of the Jenkins CI (continuous integration) platform, the company announced Wednesday.
An increasing number of enterprises that use Jenkins for their application development are using the software in production settings, said Steve Harris, who is CloudBees’ senior vice president of products. The company had surveyed Jenkins users and found that 80 percent deploy Jenkins in “mission critical” duties.
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Business
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JetBrains, developers of the IntelliJ IDEA polyglot IDE, have announced the release of version 11 of IDEA with enhanced performance, improved version control support, an updated UI, and platform improvements on Mac OS X and Linux. Since October 2009, when the open source version was announced, IntelliJ IDEA has been available in two editions: an open source community edition for Java, Groovy and Scala development, and a commercially supported, more fully featured “Ultimate” edition with support from frameworks like Java EE and Spring, and tools to assist deployment and debugging.
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Semi-Open Source
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Open source business intelligence vendor takes a different approach to analyzing Hadoop.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The White House’s Open Government Partnership inched closer to maturity last week, with the release of a new open data platform, designed to help other governments set up their own Data.gov portals. On Wednesday, Data.gov developer Chris Musialek posted the first pieces of early test code for the unfortunately named “Data.gov-in-a-box” — an open source version of the US and Indian governments’ respective data portals. Both countries, in fact, have been working on the platform since August, with the Obama administration pledging some $1 million to the effort.
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Among organizations that favor closed technology development, DARPA would have to qualify as one of the most traditionally closed outfits of all. The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency routinely pops up with new inventions, many of which would impress James Bond, but the inventions are typically shrouded in secrecy and mystery until they arrive. After all, lots of them are intended for battlefields, where the element of surprise can matter a lot. But Ars Technica reports that DARPA is exploring some new technology development models, including embracing open source principles. This makes a lot of sense.
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Openness/Sharing
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Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the most important open source project of them all?
* Are you asking about economic impact? Then it’s probably Linux, or maybe the Apache Web server.
* Are you asking about user base? In that case I’m thinking Google’s Android, or Mozilla.
* But if you’re talking about active participation, getting people’s hands on the guts of the thing, having them donate that back to the commons, and fulfilling the idea behind open source, there can be only one answer. Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has over 100,000 active volunteers working in 270 languages. You’re probably most familiar with the English language version, with its 3.8 million articles. But that’s less than 20% of the total, which now comes to over 20 million.
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Data
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Which is essentially where the data market is today. Everybody understands that data has value; there is little consensus on how, where and via what mechanisms it should be distributed, licensed and sold.
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Open Hardware
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The Arduino is a fantastic example of multiple things–a platform for rapid prototyping (a crucial component of the open source way), a hacker ‘scratching his own itch’ (I need a platform for my students) in public where other people could adapt his creation for their own wildly different uses, a way to lower the barriers to access of technology creation.
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Security
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Finance
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The reason several hundred protesters have congregated on West Street is that Goldman Sachs can be found there. And, today, Occupy Wall Street has gone squidding just outside. The idea comes from Matt Taibbi’s “nailed-it” description of the banking giant as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Many umbrellas sporting makeshift tentacles and ad hoc hats with angry squid eyes cap the march, which leaves simultaneously from two locations: City Hall and Zuccotti Park.
The march is timed to coincide with an effort in West Coast cities to shut down ports, with New York occupiers showing solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and elsewhere – all of whose occupations were evicted just like the de facto flagship one in New York. According to Boots Riley of the Oakland hip-hop outfit The Coup, “Occupy Oakland called for this massive coordinated blockade as a way to strike back at the 1% after their attacks on the Occupy movement and their continued assault on working and poor people.” New York couldn’t have picked a more apt 1 percent target than Goldman, as Taibbi’s depiction hints.
“Everybody pays their tax,” chant the marchers. “Everyone but Goldman Sachs.” The reference is to Goldman’s shady accounting, which allows the corporation to grossly underpay its federal taxes.
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More than two years into the five-year program, which planned to reach and nurture 10,000 small businesses, just 5 percent of that goal has been met, and Goldman is reassessing the amount of time it will need. And what of Buffett, who has maintained an active role (though not a financial one) in the plan? The often chatty co-sponsor declined to comment.
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Civil Rights
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It’s quite funny watching aghast at the news that the FBI was using Carrier IQ to spy on citizens.
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