“[W]e have no patents and don’t intend to get any.” –Simon Phipps, ForgeRockIt is good news that OIN offers a place to companies without software patents. What’s the catch though? How much do they need to pay to join this pool? Canonical is in a similar situation as it recently joined OIN [1, 2], despite the fact that it’s located in Europe and thus has less trouble with software patents (with one exception as “Microsoft has already approached Canonical pressuring them to sign up to a patent deal,” said a recent report).
The reality of the matter is that Microsoft has managed to extort companies like LG using alleged patent violations in Linux. It still affects Android. An ideal solution to this problem would be elimination of software patents, but LG is located in Korea, where software patents are arguably legal. Over in Europe it’s an entirely different story. The FFII’s president, who is Belgian, has just shared the following audio[Ogg] which he describes as: “FFII France at the RMLL meeting 2010, interview of Rene Mages about software patents” (maybe our French-speaking readers can transcribe and translate parts of it).
FFII’s president has also warned that based on this page, the “IP Summit in Brussels [will have] plenty of pro-software patent companies and proponents of a central patent court” on which he expands by linking to this article (in French) about ACTA. He says that the “Commission is pushing for patents in ACTA in order to create a legal base for the Community Patent [...] ISPs will be responsible of patent infringements of their users if patents are in ACTA, says PCimpact, EU [is] pushing for it” (full or partial translation of the article would again be handy). █
“Now [Novell is] little better than a branch of Microsoft”
–LinuxToday Managing Editor
Summary: Novell is acting as though it is Microsoft’s committer in circles where Microsoft is rightly distrusted and OpenSUSE still ought to escape
THE controversial Mono framework is probably Novell’s main ‘contribution’ to GNU/Linux. It is now being developed with contributions from Microsoft employees, not just Novell employees. We already know the danger of Microsoft’s software patents. LG, for example, pays Microsoft for each device it ships which contains Linux. Apparently this will include Android tablets too. HTC has a similar problem and as a leading distributor of Android (car dock may be coming in September) the Microsoft tax matters, and not just because it feeds Microsoft but also because it makes Linux more expensive.
HTC appears to have put surprising effort into rendering a lifelike torch for its Flashlight app, while app sharing (seen after the break) is a neat addition — and don’t worry, devs, it only works on items that aren’t copy protected.
It would be nice if HTC also shipped phones without an operating system and then let customers download Android for them. This way Microsoft would not be paid for Android.
Anyway, making Android ‘tainted’ by default would be a more convenient thing for Microsoft, wouldn’t it? So Microsoft’s booster Gavin Clarke is now advertising MonoDroid [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14], which he says Novell is still pushing forward along with plugins for Microsoft’s Visual Studio.
he Novell-backed MonoTouch project is about to start beta tests of a version of its open-source implementation of Microsoft’s framework for use on Google’s Linux operating system for devices.
Final product for MonoDroid is expected in the fall, Novell Mono product manager Joseph Hill told The Reg – around the time of the next installment in Microsoft’s Windows phone story: Windows Phone 7, due in October.
[...]
Novell, meanwhile, is today expected to announce availability of an updated version of its Mono Tools plug in to Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE.
It’s becoming harder to know the difference between Microsoft and Novell. They might as well share offices.
Linux Integration Services v2.1 for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 is a set of drivers that enable synthetic device support in supported Linux virtual machines under Hyper-V.
Meanwhile, OpenSUSE is pushing Microsoft patent bait into GNU/Linux through OpenSUSE. I have been communicating with OpenSUSE managers (they contacted me, I didn’t contact them), but since they get a wage from Novell they always defend Novell’s side and refuse to see that Novell sold OpenSUSE down the river when it signed its 2006 patent deal with Microsoft. Novell offered no safety to OpenSUSE, especially if it is used commercially.
At any rate, OpenSUSE continues to be a technically solid distribution. The Linux Format people have always liked OpenSUSE and they still do. So does this person, whose new review says:
After eight months of development, the OpenSUSE 11.3 release in mid July was followed by an avalanche of excitement surrounding the new upgrades and enhancements. The OpenSUSE 11.3 DVD includes the best of the KDE 4.4.4, GNOME 2.30.1 and XFCE 4.6.2 desktop environments. Also included for the first time is an LXDE flavor which could be the first true lightweight version of OpenSUSE plus a preview of the radically different GNOME 3.0 desktop. Also take note of the great new features OpenSUSE has included. Stuff like the Btrfs filesystem available in the installer, improvements to zypper package manager, netbook support, smartphone syncing, and backup/file sharing capabilities in the cloud with Spideroak.
[...]
After over a week of using OpenSUSE 11.3 in KDE, GNOME, and LXDE releases I got a pretty good feel for how the distro met my needs.
Summary: Proposed solutions, impending cases, and another new case where patents go so terribly wrong that even people needlessly die
TODAY we look at 3 types of news from the past 3 days or so. Software patents are being covered too, but everyone is still waiting for In Re Bilski to be concluded.
USPTO and Patent Conundrums
Today (May 26th), the USPTO has this workshop which is intended to “explore the intersection of patent policy and competition policy”. How about tackling the problem of patent pools, which make up thickets and abusive cartels?
Three separate companies are steadily recruiting intellectual property holders into patent pools for LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology, initiatives intended to get more manufacturers building gear for the fast network.
Patent pools are only suitable for large companies — those that exclude new entrants. The only small entities to benefit from this system are the NPEs (trolls). Samsung and LG, the two Korean giants which pay Microsoft for Linux, are complaining about patent trolls right now.
Representatives say South Korean electronics makers are becoming targets from “patent trolls” as increased competition between manufacturers makes room to seek more money in legal suits.
Did Microsoft, which Salesforce’s CEO Benioff compares to a patent troll, sign those Linux patent deals with Samsung and LG only after threats of litigation? We might never know.
Last week, Microsoft sued Salesforce.com claiming infringement of 9 software patents. This comes shortly after Nokia sued Apple who sued Nokia over software patents, and after Apple sued HTC who sued Apple over software patents.
As an example of the ridiculous nature of software patents, Microsoft’s claims cover user interface features, including a “system and method for providing and displaying a Web page having an embedded menu” and a “method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display.”
This explosion of litigation based on the patenting of software cannot be brushed-off as large corporations doing what they do, as almost every start-up software company is at some point being shaken down by software patent holders. It’s a massive tax on and retardant of innovation.
From Pamela Jones:
I have a request from End Software Patents’ Ciarán O’Riordan. He’d like your help.
He says VC good guy Brad Feld is interested in in mailing out copies of the film Patent Absurdity (Full title: Patent Absurdity: How software patents broke the system) to 200 people — politicians, influential people in companies, policy setters at standards groups, and whoever will be influential in the debate the breaks out post-Bilski — and he’d like to have some help from you coming up with a list of who best to send to.
This system in the United States (USPTO) needs a change and it needs it urgently. Glyn Moody writes about the German ruling on software patents [1, 2, 3, 4] and points out that “some argue there were similar ones in early 90s” (so maybe it’s not as bad as some people imagined). It is mostly the USPTO which ‘exports’ those bad laws to the rest of the world. The problem ought to be squashed in the US and in Japan.
Patents on Life
Red Hat’s new Web site writes about how the GPL can inspire a solution to the increasingly-serious injustice which is patenting of living things [1, 2].
The Economist is right on top of the story of the first fully synthetic life-form. For those of you who may have missed the announcement last week, Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have pushed the envelope again, demonstrating the first successful boot-up of a synthetic bacterium. Editors at the Economist argue that the only sensible way to protect ourselves from such creations is to require that the DNA sequences be open source. It is a profound insight.
[...]
But now he’s back, and he’s built the one thing that sits as an exception to the Gene Patent exclusions: a wholly synthetic lifeform. Does Ventner really want to advance science (which he has done), or is he searching, like Charles Muntz, villain of the PIXAR movie UP, for his ultimate, exclusive patent on life?
When a child dies of brain disease at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, Philip H. Schwartz meets with the parents, explains his research and asks them to donate their child’s brain to his quest for a cure.
“These are not easy conversations to have,” he said. “There are expectations by parents that if they allow us to do that to their child, it will serve a useful purpose.”
But for three years, the cells derived from many of those children’s brains have been suspended in limbo, frozen in Thermos bottles. The nonprofit Southern California hospital has shut down the research, intimidated by a patent claim from the Palo Alto biotech company StemCells. The company’s co-founder is esteemed Stanford stem cell scientist Dr. Irving Weissman, one of the world’s most passionate advocates for giving scientists access to a field entangled by politics, ethics — and now money.
Summary: Microsoft — like Novell — is hibernating a little and relies on Novell and LG to promote its products, having jointly signed patent deals that harm GNU/Linux and turn them into slaves/subsidiaries
MICROSOFT and Novell have a lot in common, not just in terms of projects. Both companies are failing to evolve for tomorrow’s world of IT, where mobility and Internet reign supreme; they both rest of their legacy and dread the future. Novell's future is very uncertain because it is up for sale and we find almost no news about this company anymore. It’s so seriously profound that we stopped the weekly summation of links about Novell, instead moving to a different format. There just wasn’t enough news (we call it "Novell news drought").
When we also look at impending doom that Novell is reported to be rushing towards, the future for the “gift to the world” is all rather in doubt.
“[G]ift to the world” is a token for Mono. On goes this post: ‘Except that arguably the leading Linux distro has stated its to remove one of them? Other distro’s are not including Mono either and in fact I think its fair to say there’s a lot of bad feeling around the whole subject. Is this the Mono “enthusiasm” they mean? Again, I’ll let you decide. Where will the “gift to the world” be without Novell sponsorship?”‘
“Microsoft’s ties with Novell are likely to ensure that projects inside Novell which are beneficial to Microsoft will not die any time soon.”Well, Microsoft pays Novell, so Mono sponsorship (in one form or another) can still be funneled into Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza and his fellow Ximian coders (who use a monkey as their mascot, go figure).
Microsoft’s ties with Novell are likely to ensure that projects inside Novell which are beneficial to Microsoft will not die any time soon. They might be relocated, but never abandoned unless all GNU/Linux users shun them, in which case the apologists will give up and do something more useful (to Microsoft).
Does this seem like a company which is said to have embraced Linux? Surely not. It sells Ballnux and it helps Microsoft make money from Android. Those who look for an Android phone should avoid Samsung, LG, Kyocera Mita, and HTC.
“Those who look for an Android phone should avoid Samsung, LG, Kyocera Mita, and HTC.”Looking at Xbox 360 for a while, there has been no other significant news for Xbox 360, except the fact that the consoles/games business is slowing down (and Microsoft has already lost billions in there). Microsoft paid $75,000,000 to break an exclusivity deal, which harms customers anyway and this product in general seems to rely on contributions from the outside (unless it’s Datel, in which case Microsoft is blocking and suing [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).
The real news about Microsoft is that there is hardly any news at all. The past week has been a very, very slow & scarce week, with apparently just one headline — and one headline alone — about “Zune”, no news headlines found this week with the word “Bing” in them, and only one about “Silverlight” (we use Google News for reference here). That’s pretty bad.
On the Web browsers front, we mostly learn that Microsoft is losing and losing every month. The vocation of Explorer and Windowsmight as well be similar despite or because the two are tightly linked to each other. From the Financial Express:
It’s no secret that Internet Explorer’s (IE’s) share of the browser market has been declining steadily for years, but when it dropped by over 10% in the past 10 months to below 60% for the first time in its history, everybody took notice. While IE remains the single most used browser in the world, most experts believe that this is not a lead that it can maintain for long.
[...]
As monopolies often do, this had the unfortunate effect of virtually ensuring that Microsoft didn’t really bother putting out a good product. IE was famously buggy, had numerous security flaws and vulnerabilities, and was a system resource hog. And, when you think about it, Microsoft had to work really hard to push a product that was completely free. It was so bad; they couldn’t even give it away.
Only 4 headlines (or clusters thereof) about Vista 7 were found in one week. That’s just embarrassing as that’s approximately one in two days, only half a year after the launch of this muchly-hyped product. Has Microsoft run out of the huge marketing budget for it? Just 4 items including advertisements from Mary Jo Foley is not much at all. Vista is history and the the biggest news for Windows seems to be the death of XP Service Pack 2. Here is some coverage:
“Is it news or is it just more PR disguised as news (like an estimated 60% of so-called ‘news’)?”The latter article explains that businesses will be better off using another Web browser (not Internet Explorer) or another operating system which is also offering respect and security to the user. Daniel Nations at least has the brains to analyse this properly.
In the previous post we wrote about how Microsoft controls segments of the press, so we were not shocked to find more Microsoft spin from the unofficial ‘Microsoft press’, which is supporting and covering up Microsoft’s position on silent patches, which we last mentioned some days ago. Shame on them. Is it news or is it just more PR disguised as news (like an estimated 60% of so-called ‘news’)? It comes from the network of “Redmond”-labeled sites that are deeper in Microsoft’s pocket than even NBC is (or ever was).
Microsoft’s bad behaviour in Malaysia, where we frequently see the press (the English version of it at least) used as a marketing vehicle for dumping of proprietary software in a country with richer and broader use of Free software, is at it again. Why don’t they properly cover BizSpark [1, 2, 3, 4] and explain that it’s a lock-in trap? Why don’t they ignore mere PR? █
Summary: New case in Ohio state shows Microsoft-connected lawyers pushing for Google antitrust; new details emerge in SCO’s Microsoft-backed push for ‘Linux tax’
Back in February, we highlighted a rather odd antitrust lawsuit brought against Google by a small company. Google had originally brought a lawsuit against the company in the Ohio state court system for failure to pay its advertising bills, and the company suddenly came back with a group of big name (expensive) lawyers (who just happen to have a connection with Microsoft), claiming antitrust violations against Google.
A favourite old case of Microsoft (versus Linux, by proxy) is the SCO case. New evidence surfaces in this case after Caldera.com’s removal of robots.txt (for permission to spiders/indexers). In the words of Groklaw:
In the old days, it seemed every time Groklaw linked to evidence on one of those Caldera pages, it went to the great 404 in the sky within a day or two. Now, it will be possible to fix all those links. I wish they’d sell the sco.com domain name next. Maybe then we could get the complete historical picture.
As we pointed out 3 years ago, Novell too had changed its Web site quite a lot after the Microsoft deal. It essentially removed or modified pages that were hostile towards Microsoft.
LG’s patent infringement lawsuit against Taiwan-based AU Optronics took an unexpected turn, as the final ruling not only found no fault against AU but in fact found AU as the victim, and now LG is the guilty party.
It is worth emphasising that this is to do with LCD (hardware). █
Samsung Electronics, the world’s top TV maker, is considering developing “Google TVs” which run Google’s Android operating system, its executive told The Korea Herald yesterday.
The move came as Samsung’s rival, Sony, is reportedly working with Google and Intel to offer Internet-connected, Android-based TVs, seeking to allow viewers to download and enjoy a wealth of Web content and software as they do on computers and smartphones.
Apple and Google are seeking to take a bite out of the TV market, hoping to expand their influence beyond the mobile arena. Such moves herald a repetition of a race over operating systems and applications, as is currently seen in the smartphone market, analysts said.
The Android TVs being speculated above are not to be confused with Sony’s. Sony too is reported to be on the case and in Sony’s case it’s even confirmed with certainty. [via]
Sony Corp., trying to reverse sales declines in its TV division, will announce home-entertainment devices next month that use Intel Corp. chips and Google Inc. software, said two people familiar with the matter.
The companies plan to discuss the new products at a conference sponsored by Google in San Francisco on May 19 and May 20, said the people, who asked not to be identified because details are still being worked out. Intel is contributing a customized version of its Atom chip that will run a new version of Google’s Android operating system called Dragonpoint.
TechDirtpoints out that Microsoft is being very cheeky by taxing Google products without any details given and without Google’s consent.
Seems a bit strange, right? Why should Microsoft have any say in whether or not HTC can put Google’s Android operating system on its phones. The whole thing seems even odder when you realize that HTC was, for a long time, one of the major makers of smartphones running Windows Mobile operating system. But, the complicating factor here might be Apple. Apple, of course, famously went on the patent offensive and sued HTC over its Android phones a couple months ago. So now, with Microsoft doing this deal, it seems to very publicly be entering the patent fight between Apple and Google, which for bizarre reasons is playing out with HTC as the pawn getting bounced around between them all.
Someone in this comment thread shrewdly points out a “solution: make the software free to download and sell the phones with no operating system installed. would this work?”
Why, hello there, little HTC Android phone with a nice, fat keyboard.
We strongly encourage readers to avoid HTC products. HTC lets Microsoft harm Android and Linux without even putting up a fight. In Apple’s case, HTC expects to at least fight. This will partly be the subject of the next post. █
Summary: Samsung Electronics signs a DRM deal with Microsoft, on top of the Linux patent deal
Samsung’s patent deal with Microsoft has been damaging to Linux and we have a special page about the subject. The latest development teaches us that Samsung not only helps Microsoft by enabling Microsoft ‘tax’ on Linux based on some software patents that were never revealed or proven to be legitimately applicable; Samsung will also exclude Free (as in freedom) platforms from “entertainment” by promoting Microsoft lock-in with DRM.
Here is the press release which says that “Samsung Electronics and Microsoft Announce Plans to Expand Access to Digital Entertainment”
Samsung adopts PlayReady technology in its consumer devices to enable easy access and transfer of content among TVs, mobile phones, set-top boxes and other devices.
The first PlayReady-compatible Samsung devices will ship later in 2010, and Samsung expects to change all of its electronics devices from Windows Media DRM to PlayReady by 2012.
Microsoft and Samsung have been close partners for quite a few years, primarily because Microsoft is claimed to have helped Samsung sell hardware like memory chips. At Techrights we consider companies like Samsung and its Korean neighbour LG to be a danger to Linux, not friends. They change how Linux is treated by the market by making the statement that Microsoft should be paid for each Linux instance sold [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. █
Summary: An analysis of ForgeRock’s inclusion in OIN and irritating news about the potential role of ACTA in pushing software patents into Europe
