THE SUBJECT of Microsoft veterans turning to the FUD business was addressed here thrice recently.
I pulled a thread today, and found a little FUD that turned out to be a marketing pitch.
The headline on my newsreader read "Legal Challenges in Android Development," with a byline on Law.com. This sounded like another legal expert taking potshots at Android, so I clicked the link to see what was what.
What I found was an article that, while not as harsh as some I have seen, seemed to single out Android development as more potentially hazardous to a developer's legal health than other open source projects.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I noted that the article's author was Mark F. Radcliffe, who currently acts as the General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative.
The article, in and of itself, wasn't too far afield of any other kind of licensing article a lawyer might put together. Know your license, know what you're getting into, and execute plans accordingly. Open source fans may get jumpy about such advice, because we tend to get defensive, but in truth it's no different than any advice about any license, proprietary or otherwise. "Respect the License" is solid advice no matter the license.
Thousands of Silverlight developers converged on Microsoft’s forum pages to ask why there was no mention of Silverlight or .Net in the vendor’s brief video preview of the upcoming operating system.
Developers expressed fears Microsoft might let their investment in skills “die on the vine” as Redmond finally embraces open standards.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Microsoft Corp. must pay a $290 million judgment awarded to a small Toronto software company for infringing on one of its patents inside its popular Microsoft Word program.
The high court unanimously refused to throw out the judgment against the world's largest software maker.
Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool used in Microsoft Word. The technology in question gave Word 2003 and Word 2007 users an improved way to edit XML, which is computer code that tells the program how to interpret and display a document's contents.
The lower courts say Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft willfully infringed on the patent, and ordered the world's largest software maker to pay i4i $290 million and stop selling versions of Word containing the infringing technology.