02.06.12
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
White-collar robbery in Vietnam
Summary: The Gates Foundation goes lobbying for Microsoft again, this time in Vietnam
TECHRIGHTS has covered hundreds of examples where the Gates Foundation can be seen hacking the system and making profit while making it look like charity — a travesty to be described positively by the bribed press (that Gates is paying to do this). When the world’s biggest thief is speaking on behalf of poor people we just know something is totally wrong and journalists occasionally speak out about it (those whose publisher has not yet been bribed by Gates). The foundation is again exploiting and piggybacking farmers to spread lock-in, this time in Vietnam. Gates had already stepped into Vietnam under the "Foundation" gown in order to derail Free software adoption over there. But it’s merely a drop in the bucket. See our past posts about this country, notably:
As we explained before, software costs no money to copy, so portrayal of software as “donation” is just a trick to make Vietnamese taxpayers pay Microsoft. The Communist Party paper says this:
Bill Gates fund helps Vietnam farmers go online
[...]
The fund includes nearly $30 million of free support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and $3.64 million worth of Microsoft software. The remaining investment will be raised by the Vietnamese government.
This Windows-powered Web site fails to mention the problems with this, as mentioned at the time by Gates Keepers among several others. It’s all just a story of sentimental blackmail (an old favourite of Microsoft) and yet more Microsoft promotion. We have seen this before. Gates uses this so-called ‘charity’ quite a lot to sell or impose the sale of Microsoft lock-in, especially in places where Free software gains traction. In this case, the government (i.e. taxpayers) bear some of the costs. And then they wonder why there are problems and critics, blaming "communication" problems for the criticism. As one critic of the foundation put it, there is a brute-force charm offence going on:
Basically, I was noting that the Gates Foundation is widely viewed by many outsiders, including grant recipients, as somewhat inscrutable. It has been saying for years it wants to improve on its ability to communicate with perhaps little evidence of improvement (and even as its annual report has dramatically shrunk in size, a good thing but symbolically irresistable to me):
Remember that Bill Gates is still getting richer. The press which he bribes keep telling us that he gives his fortune away, giving people at the bottom the wrong impression and sympathy for a robber baron. By all means be sceptical of any report which sells the story of Gates taking care of the poor; he often just uses the poor for PR and for profit. One just needs to grasp the common spin techniques being crafted. Then the reality becomes very shallow. █
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02.05.12
Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Microsoft, Mono, Oracle, Patents at 10:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Building an “open” stack with proprietary Microsoft?
Summary: Another look at the OpenStack situation, why Microsoft should not be allowed to enter, and more about patent and copyright complications
SOME days ago we wrote about OpenStack's situation when it comes to Microsoft. Later we showed what Microsoft boosters were doing to spin it as good news. Well, according to this new article:
OpenStack is supposed to be a vendor agnostic open community for building an open source cloud stack. And it is, unless you don’t pull your own weight- or if you’re Microsoft.
I know there is plenty of vitriol in the open source world towards Microsoft and certainly some of that has now surfaced in the OpenStack community.
OpenStack is now removing the Hyper-V capabilities from its stack, after Microsoft didn’t maintain the code. That happens in projects all the time, just think about the Linux kernel where Microsoft has had similar challenges and hey for that matter so has Google.
The hostility towards Microsoft has a lot to do with this monopolist’s continued attacks on Open Source projects. We need not whitewash Microsoft here or claim the above to be an irrational move of irrational hatred. Never mind the fact that Hyper-V is proprietary and not open. Microsoft continues to attack Linux with all sorts of proxies like SCO as well as patent trolls. There are those who wish to just abolish it all, especially patents. Realising the idiocy of many patents, there are some who speak about the harms of patents as a whole, not just software patents. To quote:
“Is this Patent full of crap?”
[...]
The ideas are those of patent lawyer Andrew Schulman, but the story is full of insight on a patent lawyer’s thinking and offers real clues into why the patent system is such a mess–complexity compounded, full of precedents that ordinary humans will find puzzling at best.
Earlier we wrote about many patents becoming just junk. Even Oracle seems to be moving further away from patents and is now trying to use copyrights against Android. Quoting Groklaw:
Today is the due date for Dr. Cockburn’s third attempt at a damages report on behalf of Oracle, and just to make sure Oracle knows what needs to be submitted, Judge Alsup has issue a reminder order. (709 [PDF; Text]) The judge wants to see not only the report but also all of the related reports and studies that support it.
Let’s remember that Microsoft has put code with its copyrights inside Linux and the same goes for Mono. They try to make those things more adaptable to Microsoft’s proprietary software. In the case of Mono, there is lawsuit risk too. Anything with Microsoft in it tends to be tainted. Just see what happened with FAT. █
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Patents at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The rise of the junk patents and what we are taught about them by the news, including some news about the unitary patent in Europe
THE UNITARY patent [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] drew opposition in several countries and also among some British MPs. Despite all that we know about the harms of patent maximalism, patent lawyers in Europe keep promoting it and argue for the inevitability of this looting of public knowledge:
It certainly is a sign of progress (although some would say in the wrong direction) that the Secretariat of the EU Council is about to finalise the Regulation for implementing the Unitary Patent (see Document CM 1068/12). Apparently, the dice is cast with respect to the Unitary Patent and, thus, with respect to the highly controversial question as to whether or not Articles 6 to 8 (effects of patents) should remain in the proposed Regulation so that substantive patent law will be subject to review by the Court of Justice of the European Union in future.
We have not heard about the unitary patent in a while, which either means that the public is left out or that no significant progress is being made. Lawyers have their own interests here and therefore a bias too. Over in Australia we see a similar type of crowd doing something similar. Patent boosters in Australia argue in favour of software patenting. It’s from a pro-patents blog that says:
The US Supreme Court has established three exceptions to the broad principle that all machines, processes, manufactures and compositions of matter are patentable under 35 USC §101 – laws of nature, physical phenomena and abstract ideas.
In Australia, it is settled law that the ‘manner of manufacture’ test for patent-eligibility excludes laws of nature, mere discoveries, ideas, scientific theories, schemes and plans. Mathematical formulae and algorithms are also excluded, to the extent that claims are not meaningfully limited to their use as part of a patentable practical application.
It can therefore be seen that, while the precise terms used differ in the two countries, there is a broad similarity between the fields of excluded subject matter in Australia and the US.
As we showed last year, there was some lobbying in Australia and a perpetual attempt to spread the venom of the US patent system to another continent (just like in Europe). It’s not about innovation, it is about greed. When multinationals are calling out the alligators with some more litigators (new hirings) they do nothing to promote innovation. Usually they merely impede it. Here is an example of another software patent being granted. Some of them are so embarrassingly trivial and CNET catches up with old news about Microsoft withdrawing one such embarrassing patents among several that it uses to extort Linux/Android (this one in the B&N case). To quote:
Microsoft withdrew a patent from the list of ones that it claims Barnes & Noble violates with its Nook e-readers in the software giant’s case against the bookseller before the U.S. International Trade Commission.
The ITC is not done looking at the anti-competitive patent misuses by Microsoft. Microsoft lobbyists, however, try to change the story. █
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02.03.12
Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Novell, Windows at 6:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Back to being an addons company
Summary: PR spin from Novell and money-grabbing moves that promote proprietary software rather than Free/Open Source software
OVER in YouTube, Novell keeps advertising Vibe [1, 2, 3], but how long might it take to see the Windows bias of this product? Well, here we have it right from Novell’s own mouth:
Novell Vibe Add-in for Microsoft Office lets you create or update a document in Vibe directly from MS Office. The new Vibe Add-in feature is integrated into the MS Office environment so users can seamlessly edit and save files directly into Vibe in near real time without leaving the comfort of their MS Office environment.
We previously showed how other Novell communication products got integrated with Microsoft Skype, a reminder of which is here.
Novell’s other products now target Macs, but still, not a word about GNU/Linux. To quote a press release about GroupWise 2012 and something else about Mac support, GroupWise now boasts “iPad support”. More of that Mac hype can be found here, in one among few Novell announcements that we can find. The point we are trying to make is, Novell does nothing to advance GNU/Linux or even Open/LibreOffice in the enterprise. This was very different before the deal with Microsoft. In fact, Novell gave its patents to Microsoft and Apple.
As we find in the news, more GroupWise customers are ditching the platform. Here is one new example:
Utah will be moving off Novell GroupWise, which currently is being used by the state’s executive branch. Novell is based in Provo, Utah.
Even Utah rejects Novell. What a blow. Considering the roots of Novell, this is symbolic too. This other new article states that:
When Macomb County officials a year ago began researching the best method to replace its existing Novell GroupWise technology, the Sheriff’s Office expressed concerns over security.
“I’m all for saving money and doing what’s right on the taxpayer side, but until we have assurances that information is going to be sent securely, we’re going to stay on the GroupWise platform,” said Sheriff Anthony Wickersham, who is concerned about emailing criminal information, driver’s license records and addresses.
GroupWise is not secure either. It’s all very perceptual and Novell used FUD in this case.
Here we have another company that tells us about Novell getting quite rusty in the enterprise:
Much interest in Resara Server has come from Netware users, who are under pressure to modernize their networks. With Novell’s future uncertain, and the prospect of a costly investment in Suse Linux Enterprise or Microsoft Active Directory, Resara Server offers an attractive and cost-effective exit strategy. “The direction of Novell’s products in recent years required us to look at other options”, says Daniel Hedblom, System Administrator for the Sollefteå school district in Sweden. “We moved to Suse from Netware, but the resource needs for mono and .net made Zenworks unusable for us. Resara Server and Samba4 is a much cleaner solution, and we are glad to have found it”.
Novell’s future is indeed “uncertain”; the company itself was sold and the buyer is grappling with debt while GroupWise, for instance, keeps losing customers and the spin department says that there is momentum even where there is none (GroupWise is being ditched in large deployments). To quote:
It’s a new day for Novell and GroupWise, and the future is bright.
It’s nonsense. It’s Novell’s “PR blog” and it shows. Over at YouTube too it’s just a lot of promotional/marketing videos for GroupWise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] spread artificially by marketers rather than users. A look at Novell news summaries [1, 2] reveals more of a rotting company which is now clinging onto proprietary software (even Microsoft and Mac promotion) for cash. Novell deserves no sympathy from the FOSS world. It had its good days but in 2006 it defected. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image credited to Groklaw.net
Summary: A few updates of greater importance where the Linux situation is discussed in the context of Android and Novell
THE patent assault on Android is one that we cover here several times per week because Android is perhaps the best example of Linux in the mainstream (criticisms aside) and it helps show the lengths to which Microsoft and Apple would go to derail Linux, even with software patents as we predicted for more than half a decade.
Professor Webbink from Groklaw is perhaps the best source of news about the Oracle vs. Google case, which he claims to be moving along as follows:
Just because the Oracle v. Google case has not been set for trial (and won’t be until at least the time at which Oracle provides its third attempt at a damages report) does not mean the court can’t move the case along, and that is what Judge Alsup has done with his latest order. In an attempt to narrow the issues to be argued at trial, Judge Alsup’s latest order (708 [PDF; Text]) focuses on the copyright issues and directs the parties to provide opening briefs in which they identify each remaining claim of copyright liability and the affirmative defenses to each such claim. In addition, the parties are to identify those issues that should be resolved by the court and those underlying facts that first need to be decided by the jury.
Groklaw continues to face a barrage of FUD from Microsoft boosters who continue to spin/modify the news (in this case about OpenStack wanting to toss Microsoft out) and Microsoft lobbyists who are distorting the story about the ITC and then seeding disinformation in the corporate press along with pro-Microsoft blogs. Pamela Jones from Groklaw debunks the nonsense and explains:
I’m seeing a couple of articles about an initial determination by the ITC against Barnes & Noble on its patent misuse defense, and there’s quite a lot of spin on the ball, thanks to the usual suspects. They are reading a lot into a title of a sealed document. I see many misstatements.
So I’ll explain a little about the process, so you can understand it. For one thing, the title of the sealed ITC initial determination is called an *initial* determination for a reason. It means it isn’t final. The final one comes later. Initial determinations can be reviewed by the full ITC if the defendant petitions for review and even one Commissioner says yes.
Litigation isn’t like football. It is rarely suddenly over.
Most importantly, the materials and depositions Barnes & Noble is seeking in discovery from Nokia and MOSAID have not yet arrived, although the ITC did grant Barnes & Noble’s motion to ask Finland and Canada to provide them, and that’s still ongoing, so there is likely more to go, even at the ITC. So with those materials not yet in hand, Microsoft’s statement today that this means the defense is meritless is… well… to put it kindly premature. I mean, if a determination is made without the complete record being available, what does it mean?
The case is important because it’s about Microsoft’s patent abuses against Android, as well as some of the patent trolls Microsoft is using. Last year we wrote a great deal about Novell’s patents, which went to CPTN, i.e. to Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC (3 of these are Android foes). Here is a new article about the Department of Justice. Part of it says:
Another example of international cooperation was the Antitrust Division’s close cooperation “with the German Federal Cartel Office on the acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell Inc. by CPTN Holdings (a holding company owned by Microsoft Inc., Oracle Corp., Apple Inc. and EMC Corp.). This was the first merger enforcement cooperation the Division had had with Germany in 20 years.”
Novell became just a pile of patents, which gave Microsoft ammunition with which to threaten UNIX/Linux. The authorities needed to step in after the OSI and FSF had filed a formal complaint. Here is the story of another company which rapidly becomes just a pile of patents. It says: “Remember, back in August, shortly after Google’s purchase of Motorola, Kodak looked like the next company in line for an IP-driven payday. Analysts looking at the high valuations of the Novell, Nortel and Motorola portfolios estimated Kodak had $3 billion in IP assets alone: with a market capitalization of just $700 million, it seemed like easy money. Kodak’s stock rose accordingly in anticipation of a white knight around the corner.”
This is of course not innovation. It’s a case of virtual “goods” being used to make lawyers richer and interfere with fair competition.
Novell, by the way, has just been assigned another patent, according to this roundup from January 22nd. Any new patents in Novell’s hands might eventually be passed to Linux foes, not the OIN. █
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02.01.12
Posted in Apple, Bill Gates, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Patents at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Response to reputation laundering from Wired Magazine, the latest nonsense from Microsoft’s lobbyist Florian Müller, an update on Microsoft’s trolling against Android, and a little more of Apple’s
WE are quite cynical about the corporate press. It has become abundantly clear that journalism is dying and instead it gets accommodated/replaced by the PR industry, working at the behest of rich people with an agenda and a nickel for any press still willing to bend over (independent press is likely to perish in the process). Like a husband who tells the policeman or the judge that he deeply loves the woman whom he beats up daily, Bill Gates/Gates Foundation would love for us to believe that he is a master of Open Source. Yes, and Cade Metz trying to portray these racketeers as friends of Open Source (whitewashing Gates at the same time). Why would anyone with integrity do reputation laundering for a criminal and his company that commits acts of extortion? Even Gutierrez gets characterised positively:
But that afternoon was different. At the invitation of the company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez — Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible. But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.
Then Bill Gates stood up.
No, Bill Gates has been attacking Open Source for a very long time. Remember that Letter to Hobbyists? And all those court exhibits we showed? We oughn’t allow history to be rewritten like this. Over at Free Software Daily, the modified headline of this article states “Meet Mobster Bill Gates, the Man Who Charges Open Source Software even if is free Android Linux” (the original is troll article that attracted many comments, for being more inflammatory than sane).
Microsoft is currently feeding patent trolls in order to attack Linux. Microsoft does not have enough ammunition to attack Linux, so it uses help from the outside.
Pamela Jones, over at Groklaw, writes more about the case that seeks to expose MOSAID, a patent troll that Microsoft is feeding. To quote part of the analysis:
B&N and Microsoft have come to an agreement about Steve Ballmer’s participation in the Microsoft v. Barnes & Noble action at the ITC. They were arguing about it, and they’ve now agreed that Ballmer will not have to testify live at the ITC hearing, currently scheduled for February. Instead, B&N will present designated portions of his deposition, and Microsoft’s lawyers have sent a letter [PDF] to the ITC stating officially that it withdraws its motion for a protective order, attaching to the letter a proposed schedule on the parties’ next steps in figuring out exactly what each side wants in the way of details. This means there will be no further motion practice on the live testimony issue.
[...]
Microsoft is also opposing Barnes & Noble’s request that the record be held open to include Nokia and MOSAID’s evidence, if Barnes & Noble is finally able to get it. And they parties continue to try to whittle into shape what each may use as evidence.
Lots of sealed filings, once again. But don’t worry. By hook or by crook, we usually find out in due time what the filings were about.
I had a chance to talk to Andy Updegrove, of Standards Blog, who as you probably know is a lawyer who does patent work in the standards area. I wanted to pick his brain, because the 2000 patents Nokia sold to MOSAID relate to standards, according to their statements. Just how many patents could possibly be required for a phone to be built? Surely not 1,200 out of the 2,000, I was thinking. Yet, that is the claim.
[...]
He suggested that we read some Department of Justice ‘business review letters’ on patent pools, because a patent pool is an example of multiple patent owners getting together to agree on a price for technology required to implement a standard. That’s not exactly what Microsoft, Nokia and MOSAID say they are doing, but we’re getting warm. You get to read in the letters the way the pool participants set the pool up, what safeguards they took (in the request letter), and the way the DoJ analyzed the request and either approved, qualified, or rejected the request. The controls traditionally include hiring a third party expert to review each supposedly essential claim and determine whether it’s valid, whether it’s essential, and what it’s worth relative to the other essential claims. So he thought we might find it interesting to look at what a legal pool looks like, and then we can contrast that to the actual conduct that is being alleged here.
This case has not been decided yet, but it does help shed a lot of light on Microsoft’s racketeering.
The known Microsoft boosters and even lobbyists (whom they cite) try to make us believe that it’s all over and Microsoft is innocent. Some people fall for it. They also push this tripe into Slashdot with all the bias and misdirection. As Homer put it in USENET, we should just ignore the Microsoft lobbyist. To quote: “Note this is only the conclusion drawn by Microsoft’s pet shill, Florian Müller (who’s now openly on Microsoft’s payroll), and he drew this stunning conclusion from just the /title/ of a docket he doesn’t even have access to, because it’s still under seal.
“It’s also, as the title suggests, just an “Initial Determination”, and may yet be disputed by the DOJ – a fact Müller chose to ignore. He also chose to ignore several of B&N’s valid complaints that might yet cause
the DOJ to overturn this conclusion, even if it turns out to be true and “final”, such as Microsoft deliberately withholding prior art in its various patent applications, and using NDAs to cover up extortion, under
the pretext of “secrets” that are in fact a matter of public record (as all patents are required to be by law). But instead he portrayed B&N’s complaint as futile, because:
“For example, Barnes & Noble claimed that Microsoft asked for excessively high patent license fees, but the OUII quoted passages from U.S. law (statutory as well as case law) that clearly said that patent law doesn’t require a patent holder to grant a license on any terms.”
“Then he completely ignores all the other key points (above). This seems to be the entire basis for his pessimism (or I should say “optimism”, since it’s clear whose side he’s on).”
Microsoft is feeding lobbyists and trolls and it’s easy to see this. Apple is said to have been sued by trolls again, but since Apple itself acts like a patent troll we have no sympathy for it. To quote:
A patent troll is going after Apple for patent infringement of an “electronic alignment system”.
Apple’s spiritual leader’s friend, Larry Ellison, is still attacking Android with patents that he got from Sun. Google gets another opportunity.
Mr. Pogson summarises: “Google argues that Oracle’s experts are not expert as they had no intimate knowledge during deposition.”
Basically, it seems like Oracle’s patent case against Android will be coming to an end. Maybe a copyright allegation alone will be left, so think along the lines of SCO.
OIN is meanwhile growing strong:
OIN today announced a remarkable increase in the size of its community of licensees during 2011 as licensees seized the opportunity to benefit from the value of the growing OIN community and the freedom of action enabled by OIN’s royalty free licensing program. During 2011, OIN’s community grew to over 400 corporate licensees, a more than 60% year over year increase. OIN licensees, which include founding members and associate members, benefit from the leverage provided by a patent portfolio dedicated to the protection of Linux and access to enabling technologies through OIN and shared intellectual property resources.
What’s baffling is that Oracle is in the OIN. It never ought to have attacked in the first place, but maybe it was a favour to the thermonuclear CEO, Larry Ellison’s “best friend” (by his own words). It is not a far fetched hypothesis. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Why was it let in in the first place?
Summary: OpenStack does not tolerate the proprietary Hyper-V anymore
LAST year we wrote about OpenStack putting proprietary inside open (with help from Novell). According to a Microsoft booster’s update on this, Microsoft might be taken out of the stack as one of the men responsible for it leaves SUSE (more on that in an earlier post). To quote:
Code for Microsoft’s Hyper-V should be removed from the up-coming Essex release of OpenStack because it’s essentially been forgotten about, according to OpenStack release manager Thierry Carrez.
Microsoft does not belong in “Open” anything. Microsoft engages in extortion against Open Source. We’ll show the latest examples of this later. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Patents, Windows at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Luca Sartoni
Summary: The cost of Nokia’s virtual handover to Microsoft and the failure to do anything except feed Android enemies
WHEN ELOP left Microsoft we predicted that he would be trouble and when he signed a deal with Microsoft we said it would be about patents. We were right. It was the same with Novell, which had its patents end up in Microsoft’s belt. Here are the posts we wrote about CPTN before Nokia signed a deal with Microsoft:
According to this one report among many, Nokia is doomed (more layoffs of course) because Windows doesn’t sell:
When Microsoft launched Windows Phone a year ago, Microsoft proudly told the world that they shipped 2 million Windows Phone smartphones by HTC, Samsung and others. They soon were spooked, however, when the sales dwindled and dried up and stopped giving the sales breakdown. By the Spring, Microsoft insisted all Windows Mobile smartphones be counted together with Windows Phone – even as these two platforms are incompatible. And still the sales of ‘the third ecosystem’ kept falling, down to about 500,000 units by Q3. And early numbers from Q4 from Microsoft’s best market, the USA, reveal that even more than a year after its launch, Windows Phone sales are still severely lagging its older and obsolete cousin, achieving only 1.4% or about 520,000 units. Windows Mobile meanwhile refuses to die, and in the USA achieved 2.4% market share of new sales according to Nielsen or about 890,000 unit sales.
Thus if you remember seeing a ‘Microsoft’ market share in smartphones somewhere near 2% for Q3, that includes the better-selling Windows Mobile, and the newer and supposedly better so-called ‘third ecosystem; Windows Phone has far less than 1% market share globally.
We now need to keep track of where Nokia’s patents are going. Nokia has a big mountain of patents and it is feeding trolls with Microsoft’s guidance (MOSAID for example, but we will write about it separately). In order to sign the deal with Nokia Microsoft reportedly paid just a quarter of a billion dollars, which is ridiculous. It’s nothing like the rumoured billions. Nokia’s filings reveal that Elop merely passes the keys of Nokia to Steve Ballmer and the company that Elop himself was still a top shareholder of. He should have been sued, maybe even jailed, but the law doesn’t work this way; it sympathises with white-collar crime like collusion, bribes, and obstruction of justice. But that just leads to a different sort of debates that would suit another type of Web site. █
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