Unlike Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS, Linux isn’t merely an operating system that can power your computer. Linux is also an approach to developing software: out in the open and freely available to all. But considering how much time and effort goes into developing Linux, a question has come up time and again for various organizations. How do we pay for all of this?
This question then gets asked of you. Should you pay for Linux, and what ways would you be willing to consider?
I finally got off Windows again.
It seems like every time I buy a new laptop, Windows is all that really works right on it for a while, and then I find a place to hop off.
Well, Debian 11 is that place for my Lenovo Thinkbook 15 ITL Gen2 (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This laptop is a monster, and Lenovo got a lot of hardware into it cheaply, but they do cut corners in a lot of scary places.
Like that BIOS update that killed Windows 10 a few months ago.
While Lenovo says this laptop has Ubuntu “Certification”, they don’t support it. In fact, they apparently tell people on Lenovo Forums looking for help to “reinstall Windows”. Hard pass.
I managed to figure out why Ubuntu can apparently see the NVME SSD on this laptop and most other Linux distributions (including Debian 11) can’t.
It turns out that Lenovo is still putting Intel’s “VMD” on laptops. I looked for what in the hell this actually is, and Intel goes on and on about how it’s a “feature” to hide the hardware from the OS which would seem to indicate that it is mostly useful on servers, so when I evaluated Debian and came to the conclusion that everything worked okay, I did a few last steps, including installing one more BIOS update from within Windows. Hoping that it would clean up the mess of warnings that are in seemingly everyone’s system logs if they boot Linux, and which spew a nice bunch of crap about failing to reserve ACPI devices and bogus ACPI AML tables. Alas, it did not.
FWIW, according to at least one Ubuntu developer, they’re an eyesore, but apparently harmless.
Turning off VMD (server article, but after using the NOVO button to get into the BIOS, same deal) managed to make the system log complaints about having access denied go away, which is nice since many people complained that they couldn’t actually boot their computer into Linux until disabling this, even though the installer ran okay.
I also disabled Secure Boot, which has never secured any Linux computer. In fact, about all it ever has done for us is put Microsoft at the “root of trust” and I’d rather trust a hungry bear with a steak in my back pocket than Microsoft.
Oh, and if anyone from the FSF is reading this, feel free to tell Stallman that they can give a Free Software Award to me next time. I haven’t written any Free Software programs, sure, but I also haven’t done anything to sabotage your movement in ways you might never recover from, like Microsoft employee Miguel de Icaza and uEFI “Secure Boot” troll and overall pervert Matthew Garrett have. While you were pinning a medal on Garrett, you also had a page blasting this Security Theater as “Restricted Boots”.
Welcome back to LearnLinuxTV's full course on Proxmox Virtual Environment! In class #9, we'll look at how user management is structured, and we'll walk through the process of creating several accounts.
This is the Slimbook One, and it's a small form factor desktop. It looks really good, and it packs a surprising punch for its size. Let's see what that thing can do.
Manjaro Linux is a fast, user-friendly, desktop-oriented operating system based on Arch Linux. Key features include intuitive installation process, automatic hardware detection, stable rolling-release model, ability to install multiple kernels, special Bash scripts for managing graphics drivers and extensive desktop configurability. Manjaro Linux offers Xfce as the core desktop options, as well as KDE, GNOME and a minimalist Net edition for more advanced users. Community-supported desktop flavours are also available.
Hello and welcome to Episode 431 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts take an in-depth look at the SDR++ client program for SDR receivers and transceivers. Topics include where to find the software, it's origins, code base and license and more. Further discussion includes installing from the package repos or building the software, running the code, configuring the basic features as well as navigating the interface and controlling your SDR. We hope you enjoy this content and tune in for the next episodes as well. Have a great week.
Fly-Pie is a GNOME extension that let's you create your own custom menus. You can use it to launch applications, simulate hotkeys, open URLs and much more. The coolest feature, in my opinion, is how easy it is to navigate the menus either by clicking or by simply dragging the mouse.
Managing your navigation aliases under Linux can be a bit of a hassle and today we're looking at a tool called goto that aims to simplify that process, by separating those out from the rest of your shell aliases and providing some useful extra functionality like tab completion
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu MATE 21.10 Beta. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at Ubuntu MATE 21.10 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.13, MATE Desktop 1.26, and uses about 900MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss what’s needed to take Linux desktop over the finish line. Then we’re going to pay our respects to Sir Clive Sinclair with a very special Treasure Hunt. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Google has been looking for ways to make it easier to maintain Android , the operating system that governs the vast majority of active smartphones. To do this, the search giant has been working for years to adjust the Android kernel to the official Linux branch , causing third-party drivers to be installed through a mechanism called Project Treble, which was presented in 2017.
In other words, Google wants to tune the Android kernel to the Linux kernel in order to offer a generic kernel for all devices. The company has long been working towards that goal, and indeed it appears that the Android 12 release will see significant progress in that regard, as Google software engineer Todd Kjos has presented a report at the Linux Plumbers Conference. in which it is said that the aforementioned version of the system will be close to the main Linux branch by supplying end users with a Generic Kernel Image (GKI) .
Android’s relationship with Linux has had notable disappointments and disagreements. The disappointment has been mainly because what promised to be a “white knight” of free software has ended up eaten by Google services and the proprietary implementations allowed by the Apache license. The disagreements come because some of the parts of Android present in Linux left and came back from the original project, without this being much less the end of the Linux bifuration by Google.
There has been talk of Intel moving to offer more license-able/opt-in features for hardware capabilities found within a given processor as an upgrade and now we are seeing the Linux signs of that support coming with a driver for "Intel Software Defined Silicon" to allow for the secure activation of such features baked into the processor's silicon but only available as an up-charge option.
Without purchasing new processors, Intel Software Defined Silicon will allow for activating additional hardware capabilities if purchasing a license/upgrade. The exact details don't appear to be public yet for what "upgrades" they will have, but Intel is currently preparing the Linux kernel driver support.
Back in the year 1993, Linus Torvalds walked into a bar.
He saw a lonesome cowboy about to mercilessly dig into a bowl of kernels.
A batch of feature updates was submitted today for DRM-Next of early feature work slated to come to the next version of the Linux kernel.
AMDGPU driver feature work continues accumulating for what will become Linux 5.16 and debut as stable around the start of the new year. Most notable with today's pull request is initial enablement in this open-source AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver around DisplayPort 2.0. Since August we've been reporting on AMDGPU patches for DisplayPort 2.0, particularly around the Ultra High Bit Rate 10 (UHBR 10) support.
The Inkscape development team has been hard at work fixing bugs and making Inkscape more stable. We're happy to announce the release of Inkscape 1.1.1 and are grateful for each contribution that makes Inkscape better and available to more people. Thank you to those who donate to the project and those who made this release possible. See what changes have been made in this maintenance release and download it now by visiting: Inkscape 1.1.1 Download Page
Inkscape 1.1.1 is the first point release to the Inkscape 1.1 series and comes about four months after it to address lots of bugs, crashes, and whatnot. But it also adds a new feature to make it easier for users to donate to the project, namely a link to Inkscape’s donation page in the Help menu.
As for the bugs fixed, this release improves the Stroke to Path action to work again on text and to no longer lose an object’s ID when undoing it, improves the Object to Path action to work on an object with a Live Path effect when undoing it without also undoing the preceding action, and improves the Canvas to no longer be blurred when moving the window from a HiDPI display to a non-HiDPI display.
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' - QT Mod on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Sourcing a file in Linux is a very important concept, but it might not be one you'll use early on in your Linux career. Even so, I'm going to try to explain this challenging concept in a way you can understand it.
Sourcing a file makes it possible for an executable to "source" information from a script as though the script had printed its output to the terminal. It's not an easy concept to grasp, so I'm going to show you by way of an example.
Slack is a group collaboration tool designed for teams that work in different locations. Primarily used for communication in teams, as the service can be perfectly integrated into the workflow. Users can link Slack with many other services, for example with cloud services such as Dropbox or with social networks. So Slack becomes the focal point of the action. At its core, Slack is instant messaging software. In addition to direct messaging, Slack enables communication “channels” that can be organized by project, customer, team, or any other way your company deems appropriate for separate conversations. Channels are structured according to the concept of a chat room: All channel participants can take part in the conversation and the messages appear in real-time.
Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.
Ruby is seen as a flexible language, since it allows its users to freely alter its parts. Essential parts of Ruby can be removed or redefined, at will. Existing parts can added upon. Ruby tries not to restrict the coder.
Ruby can_be used in diverse applications such as data analysis and prototyping.
In this installation guide, you will learn how to install Ruby on CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 Linux.
As you might know, Linux-based operating systems are heavily focused on the command line for performing operations. A minimal distro like Arch Linux will present you with a dark terminal post-installation. What makes Linux distros interactive and user-friendly often goes unnoticed—the desktop environment.
Most beginner Linux users are unaware of desktop environments and don't even know which one they're using. Here's how you can check which desktop environment is currently installed on your Linux system.
In this article I will show you how to install the webmin control panel in FreeBSD. Sometimes one doesn’t have the time or didn’t want to deal with configuration files.
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix from where you can configure almost everything. For Linux users we already have a tutorial for installing on Centos.
It is available both as a system call for compiled programs, and an administrator command for interactive use and scripting. Linux additionally exposes sysctl as a virtual file system.
This article shows how to use the sysctl command to view and modify kernel parameters at runtime.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Glances on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Glances is a cross-platform curses-based system monitoring tool written in Python. With Glance, we can monitor CPU usage, Memory usage, Swap usage, Process list, Network interface, Disk I/O, Raid, Sensors (CPU temperature), Batter, Docker, Monitor, Alert, and File System spaces utilization.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Glances system monitoring on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
Munin is a comprehensive software for monitoring computers, especially servers. It helps the system administrators to collect various system information that can be viewed via a web interface such as processor load, hard disk usage, network traffic, access to server services on one or more computers, and more…
It is suitable for monitoring a single server or a large number of servers. Munin itself is set up as a master/client application. If there are several machines to be monitored then the server with Munin main instance act as a Master, the information from all machines is collected and evaluated on this; whereas other servers or machine will be known as nodes, that only collect data on the local machine and make it available to the master.
HTTPS is the secure version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTPS uses the SSL/TLS protocol for encryption and authentication, and for securing the communication between the browser and the web server. It encrypts HTTP requests and responses to prevent someone from sniffing the information that is shared between your browser and the web server. Without HTTPS, someone would be able to sniff and collect your website visitors’ sensitive information such as login credentials and credit card details.
Need more games to start your week? Humble recently put up the Dream Teams Bundle and all the games should work reasonably well on Linux too. Most of them you will need Steam Play Proton to play on Linux though, as only one actually has a Linux version.
A deck-builder with a difference, as you're not just going through dungeons collecting cards to use during battles, you're also rolling dice to activate these various cards. Some only work with even numbers, some odd numbers and some need specific numbers - there's a lot of varied combinations to play through thanks to this system.
I just pushed MiTubo 0.3 to the Ubuntu Touch app store, added a link to the AppImage package in the Releases page and later during the night the Launchpad builders should import it and build it for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04.
This release adds basic support for RSS feeds. One just needs to type the address of an RSS (or Atom) feed in the search bar and the "Search" button will transform itself into a "Subscribe" one. Unfortunately no discovery mechanism is implemented yet, so one cannot just enter the address of a webpage and expect MiTubo to find the feed URL(s); I plan to bring that in a future release, but for the time being you'll have to enter the exact address of the RSS feed.
Friday 1 October is the testing day for Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition.
Please show up on our Plasma Matrix room (accessible on Libera IRC as #plasma) and download one or more rolling distros with the beta on. Distros with Plasma beta.
I wrote a post some time ago titled Developers shouldn’t distribute their own software, and after a discussion on the sr.ht IRC channel today, the topic seems worthy of renewed mention. Let’s start with this: what exactly is a software distribution, anyway?
I use “software distribution” here, rather than “Linux distribution”, because it generalizes better. For example, all of the major BSD systems, plus Illumos and others besides, are software distributions, but don’t involve Linux. Some differ further still, sitting on top of another operating system, such as Nix or pkgsrc. What these systems all have in common is that they concern themselves with the distribution of software, and thus are a software distribution.
An important trait of these systems is that they function independently of the development of the software they distribute, and are overseen by a third party. For the purpose of this discussion, I will rule out package repositories which are not curated by the third-party in question, such as npm or PyPI. It is no coincidence that such repositories often end up distributing malware.
Software distributions are often volunteer-run and represent the interests of the users; in a sense they are a kind of union of users. They handle building your software for their system, and come to the table with domain-specific knowledge about the concerns of the platform that they’re working with. There are hundreds of Linux distros and each does things differently — the package maintainers are the experts who save you the burden of learning how all of them work. Instead of cramming all of your files into /opt, they will carefully sort it into the right place, make sure all of your dependencies are sorted upon installation, and make the installation of your software a single command (or click) away.
Q4OS is a lightweight, Debian-based distribution featuring the KDE Plasma and Trinity desktops. The project’s latest version is Q4OS 4.6 which is based on Debian 11 “Bullseye”. One of the project’s aims is to allow both desktops to be installed alongside each other, a rare feature given the shared history of the two desktops.
“Q4OS Gemini is based on Debian Bullseye 11 and Plasma 5.20, optionally Trinity 14.0.10 desktop environment, and it’s available for 64bit/x64 and 32bit/i686pae computers, as well as for older i386 systems without PAE extension. We are working hard to bring it for ARM devices as well. Desktop profiler, an exclusive Q4OS tool, has custom profiles support now, so a user can export the current desktop status snapshot, modify it and even create customized profiles on his own. Any profile is importable, so a user can import and apply it later on another hardware, getting a unique possibility of easy installation and configuration of the pre-defined set of applications and packages at once. In other words, a user easily gets a fresh operating system installation configured and ready to work with a minimal post installation effort. In addition, each desktop environment may keep its own applications profiles.” Additional information can be found in the project’s release announcement.
A brand new stable Q4OS 4.6 version, codenamed 'Gemini' is immediately available for download and use in productive environments. This is a long-term support LTS release, to be supported for at least five years with security patches and software updates. Apart from numerous significant improvements and fixes, Q4OS Gemini enhances hardware support, making the operating system more stable and reliable.
Q4OS Gemini is based on Debian Bullseye 11 and Plasma 5.20, optionally Trinity 14.0.10 desktop environment, and it's available for 64bit/x64 and 32bit/i686pae computers, as well as for older i386 systems without PAE extension. We are working hard to bring it for ARM devices as well.
Desktop profiler, an exclusive Q4OS tool, has custom profiles support now, so a user can export the current desktop status snapshot, modify it and even create customized profiles on his own. Any profile is importable, so a user can import and apply it later on another hardware, getting a unique possibility of easy installation and configuration of the pre-defined set of applications and packages at once. In other words, a user easily gets a fresh operating system installation configured and ready to work with a minimal post installation effort. In addition, each desktop environment may keep its own applications profiles.
This is a minor (point) release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel, which comes with the Linux kernel 5.10.63. The 4MLinux Server now includes Apache 2.4.49, MariaDB 10.6.4, and PHP 7.4.23 (see this post for more details).
Fedora 35 is the next iteration coming from the developers and although it might not include the same level of game-changing, workflow-enhancing features found in 34 (thanks to GNOME 40), there’s plenty to be excited about.
One of the more notable changes comes by way of improvements to the NVIDIA proprietary driver. Red Hat has been working diligently to help improve the NVIDIA/Wayland stack support and the changes in 35 should go a long way to improve desktop performance across the board.
Fedora 35 also brings high-resolution mouse wheel support that will provide a much smoother wheeling scrolling experience. This change comes by way of the work done on libinput. The distribution also recently shifted from PulseAudio to PipeWire and the system will see much maturation in this upcoming release.
Automation is an increasingly strategic necessity as organizations of all sizes strive to deliver value faster while solving IT and business workflow challenges.
Here we offer a quick glossary of automation terms, including links where you can dive in deeper to learn more.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comes in handy when organizations start to implement Infrastructure as Code and GitOps concepts. But what about the automation of the platform itself?
Before we get started it’s good to clarify some product component naming. Ansible Tower is being renamed to Automation Controller in the upcoming Ansible Automation Platform 2 release. While things are being changed, you can see both words "tower" and "controller" used interchangeably in various contexts including roles and collections. For more information on Ansible Automation Platform please refer to this Knowledge Base Article.
Almost all of the assets in Ansible Tower can be backed with SCM-based repositories. Yet, there's a little gap in how this content (Job Templates, Projects, Inventories, etc.) is initially created and subsequently managed. This becomes especially visible on large deployments. For example, a Project in Ansible Tower can be backed by a Git repository with the automation code.
Some of us love using the latest and greatest Linux distributions. For example, I’m writing this on a Linux Mint 20.2 desktop. But, others, especially on the servers and clouds prefer to stick with what they know. No one wants to be the first user to discover a show-stopper bug in a new Linux release when it’s running your mission-critical application. So, many people stick with old and tried operating systems. Canonical, Ubuntu Linux‘s parent company, knows this, so they’re extending the lifecycles of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr” and 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus.”
This gives each of them an operational life of ten years. So, Ubuntu 14.04 will now be supported until April 2024 and 16.04 will receive support all the way until April 2026. With this change, all long-term support (LTS) versions of Ubuntu now have ten-year support lifespans.
Anavi’s open-spec, $28 to $46 “Gardening uHAT” for the Raspberry Pi ships with soil moisture sensors and optional light, temperature/humidity, and waterproof temperature sensors.
Anavi Technology, which has released Raspberry Pi HATs such as the Anavi Infrared pHAT, has gone to Crowd Supply to crowdfund a Gardening uHAT for monitoring plant growth. Other entries in this category include SwitchDoc Labs’ Smart Garden System and Upsilon’s aquaponics and hydroponics focused BioControle, among others.
Diamond’s “Saturn” PCIe/104 SBC for data acquisition runs Ubuntu or Win 10 on Apollo Lake with up to 8GB soldered RAM, 2x GbE, 2x HDMI, 4x USB, 3x COM, analog and digital I/Os, and M.2, mini-PCIe, and OneBank expansion.
Diamond Systems has announced a rugged, PCIe/104 form factor SBC aimed at digital acquisition tasks. Like Diamond’s Zeta boardset, the Saturn SBC runs Linux or Windows on Intel’s Apollo Lake. Like its AMD G-Series or i.MX6 based Quantum SBC, it adopts the legacy PCIe/104 form factor, and more specifically uses the stackable PCIe/104 OneBank expansion interface.
Google hasn’t released Android 12 yet, but it’s coming very soon. So what’s next? According to a report from xda-developers, Android 12.1.
As the name suggests, this likely won’t be a major update, and Google probably won’t wait a full year to release it. Instead, it seems to be a smaller update with a number of features designed for foldables, and it could be designed to launch alongside Google’s first phone with a foldable display, the long-rumored “Pixel Fold.”
Below are updates, news and event information from some of our Affiliate Members.
An exciting update to the Gallery Block gives you more ways to show off images in your posts and pages. While this change won’t be available for most folks until WordPress 5.9’s launch in December, we wanted to share some of what’s to come to get you excited about the future.
Designed and written from scratch, GNU Wget2 wraps around libwget, that provides the basic functions needed by a web client.
You probably find yourself needing to download a tarball, or an ISO image, to a server from a web page. Or within a script you need to know that you can query both local and remote web servers over HTTP(S) to check uptime or the presense of certain content.
One of the most popular feature-filled tools is Wget. Wget is a command line utility for downloading files from the internet. It descends from an earlier program named Geturl written by the same author. Wget boasts several supported protocols, namely HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, and also has the ability to look past and query a site beyond HTTP proxies – a powerful feature-set indeed.
Wim Vanderbauwhede introduces Haku, a Japanese programming language. It shows a very interesting example of how you can use grammars of the Raku Programming Language to create your own programming language (see introduction). This caused quite a discussion on Hacker News and some on /r/rakulang.
In this tutorial, we are going to see how we can insert an element at the front of the list in Python. In addition, we will only use the integer concepts to be easy to understand, and other data types will be similar, as shown in this article.
The Rust Core team is excited to announce the first of a series of changes to its structure we’ve been planning for 2021, starting today by adding several new members.
Originally, the Core team was composed of the leads from each Rust team. However, as Rust has grown, this has long stopped being true; most members of the Core team are not team leads in the project. In part, this is because Core’s duties have evolved significantly away from the original technical focus. Today, we see the Core team’s purpose as enabling, amplifying, and supporting the excellent work of every Rust team. Notably, this included setting up and launching the Rust Foundation.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libxml-security-java, and openssl), Fedora (fetchmail and python-rsa), openSUSE (grafana-piechart-panel and opera), and Red Hat (nodejs:14).
With the modern ways of storing and sharing information, businesses face multiple challenges in protecting their online assets. An institution's sensitive information is at risk; thus it becomes important for them to conduct a thorough IT security audit.
On September 30, at 17:01 Moscow time , the lifetime of the IdenTrust root certificate (DST Root CA X3) expires , which was used to cross-sign the root certificate of the Let’s Encrypt certification authority ( ISRG Root X1 ), controlled by the community and providing certificates for free to everyone. Cross-signing has ensured the trust of Let’s Encrypt certificates on a wide range of devices, operating systems and browsers while integrating Let’s Encrypt’s own root certificate into root certificate stores.
It was originally planned that after the DST Root CA X3 is out of date, the Let’s Encrypt project will switch to generating signatures using only its root certificate, but such a step would lead to a loss of compatibility with a large number of old systems that did not add the Let’s Encrypt root certificate to their repositories. In particular, approximately 30% of Android devices in use do not have data on the Let’s Encrypt root certificate, support for which appeared only starting from the Android 7.1.1 platform, released at the end of 2016.
Responding to an escalating crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain reversed course this weekend and offered thousands of visas to foreign truckers to combat a driver shortage that has left some supermarket shelves empty and caused long lines at gas stations.
The decision, announced late Saturday, reflects the growing alarm within the government over a disruption to supplies that has prompted panic buying and, in some places, caused fuel to run out and gas stations to close.
So great is the concern that there has been speculation that the military could be called up to drive trucks. That has not yet happened, but Defense Ministry staff members will be asked to help speed up the process for truck licensing applications.
Late Sunday night, in a move underscoring the growing anxiety over the fuel shortage, the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, said he was temporarily exempting fuel companies from the law regulating competition, so that they could share information and optimize supply at stations that need it most.
The USPTO has sanctioned attorneys that were operating mass filing schemes for foreign trademark applicants, prompting calls for the EUIPO to follow suit
Historically, the United States’ preparedness for a pandemic is like Charles Dudley Warner’s aphorism on the weather: everybody talks about it but no one ever does anything. Before COVID-19 struck, it was clear that the threat of a pandemic was real and that the world was not ready. As one of many examples, a September 2019 report from the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB)—an expert group convened by the World Bank and WHO—concluded that “there is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people and wiping out nearly 5% of the world’s economy.” Perhaps the tragedy of the current crisis will provide sufficient motivation to better prepare for next time.
As a step in this direction, earlier this month the Biden administration released a twenty-seven page American Pandemic Preparedness Plan—with a $65 billion price tag—to provide the United States with “broad and deep protection against biological threats, ranging from the ongoing and increasing risk of pandemic disease, to the possibility of laboratory accidents and the deliberate use of bioweapons.” These include, of course, several innovation policy commitments to encourage the development of pandemic-related tools for COVID-19 and beyond. What are those commitments? How do they work—or would have worked—for COVID-19? And what does this say about innovation policy more generally?
Two recent decisions in South Africa and Australia have accepted the fanciful thesis that an AI could be an inventor. I have no intention of commenting these decisions here, I simply want to try to understand how such a farfetched (and useless) idea, could have gained such ground in such a short time.
Let’s say it right away: although this thesis has always seemed fanciful to me, even to the point of smiling, I thought that we should perhaps (more) question why it could be charming, instead of just criticizing it wholesale. Try to listen to it, not only to hear it, to understand it, and thus understand its success (above all media success, after all).
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However, any Patent Law practitioner knows the reality: the applicant is the owner of the property right while the inventor is, ab initio, excluded, being presumed that his right has been assigned to the applicant from the beginning. This is the famous distinction between the first-to-invent and first-to-file systems. In such a first-to-file system, now adopted by countries all over the world, the inventor has only two (marginal) rights: to claim ownership of the invention if he proves that it has been stolen from him. As a consequence, at the end of the day, it does not follow that any of the arguments of the “defenders” of the AI inventor hold water, if one remembers that: an AI never invents alone and that the applicant (its owner) will necessarily be the owner of the invention in which its IA has participated. In other words, recognizing an AI as an inventor requires twisting the legal system (especially on the issue of legal personality), creating unnecessary confusion and insecurity, for no result, since the AI will be protected in any case[6].
Litigation finance businesses have been working in patents for a while, but now bigger IP owners are getting interested in using their services
The Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) case dates back to August 2019, when a team of academics from the University of Surrey in the UK filed two patent applications in the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), the European Property Office (EPO) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), for inventions developed by artificial intelligence (AI).
According to the applications of these patents, no human being was responsible for the development of the inventions they intended to protect, which instead were formulated by DABUS, created by AI expert Stephen Thaler. It was the world’s first AI to invent viable products without human intervention.
In our blog of 27 August 2021, we explained that the Barcelona Appeal Court (Section 15), in a very interesting Ruling of 16 October 2020, decided that the claims as amended before the EPO Boards of Appeal should become the subject of the national proceedings in lieu of the claims asserted in the initial infringement action (i.e., the claims as granted) filed before the Barcelona Commercial Courts. We also explained that, to ensure that the parties had the opportunity to make allegations and file additional evidence on whether or not the claims as amended were infringed, the Court gave both parties a round of allegations. In addition, it called the parties to a “case management” hearing which took place on 9 February 2021, to establish which facts were disputed and decide on the admissibility of new evidence. The Court then called the parties to a second hearing, which took place on 19 April 2021, where the additional evidence admitted was heard and the parties set out their closing arguments.
he Court of Appeal has issued a decision in an appeal against the High Court's decision to uphold the refusal of the Dabus patent application in the UK. Agreeing with the both the UK IPO and the High Court, the Court of Appeal has ruled that an AI cannot be the inventor for the purposes of a patent application.
Dr Thaler invented the Dabus AI system to autonomously produce inventions and filed applications for its output in a number of jurisdictions. These applications listed Dabus itself as an inventor (as opposed to, or in addition to, a human inventor). In a fascinating divergence of practice across the world, Dr Thaler has had some success, with a patent granted in South Africa and a decision (now under appeal) in Australia that an AI system can be an inventor for an Australian patent, whereas in the UK, the US and before the EPO, the applications have been refused.
The present case related to two patent applications submitted to the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) by Dr Stephen Thaler. Both applications listed the inventor as ‘DABUS’, an AI machine built for the purpose of inventing, which had successfully come up with two patentable inventions. The UK IPO had refused to process either application (considering them withdrawn) as they failed to comply with the requirement to list an inventor and Dr Thaler was not entitled to apply for the patents. According to the Patents Act 1977, an inventor must be a ‘person’.
On May 20th, Junior Party the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") filed its Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 1 in Interference No. 106,127 (which names ToolGen as Senior Party), asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board for benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/652,086, filed May 25, 2012 ("P1"), U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/716,256, filed October 19, 2012, ("P2"), and U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/757,640, filed January 28, 2013 ("Provisional 3"), pursuant to 37 C.F.R. ۤۤ 41.121(a)(1)(ii) and 41.208(a)(3) and Standing Order ۦ 208.4.1. On July 15th, ToolGen filed its Opposition. On August 27th, CVC filed its Reply.
The English Court of Appeal has upheld a decision of the UK Intellectual Property Office to reject two patent applications designating an artificial intelligence designed to create patentable inventions as the inventor.
Dr Stephen Thaler, who filed the applications in 2018, argued that his AI, the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS), ought to be capable of being considered an inventor. The respondent, the Comptroller General of Patents, Trade Marks and Designs, originally rejected the applications on the grounds that the provided statements of inventorship did not satisfy section 13(2) of the Patents Act 1977.
The appeal was heard by Lord Justice Arnold, Lady Justice Elisabeth Laing, and Lord Justice Birss. Robert Jehan and Ryan Abbott appeared for the appellant and Stuart Baran for the respondent. Dr Thaler’s application was one of a number submitted to jurisdictions around the world seeking to establish that AI systems are capable of making inventions.
The hearing between Intellectual Ventures and various telecommunications companies, heard at the Judicial Court of Paris, involved the most parties of any case at the Paris first-instance court so far this year. This week, the chamber around Nathalie Sabotier followed the main arguments of the defendants regarding validity. Now, the patent is fully revoked.
Intellectual Ventures accuses various telecommunications companies of infringing patent EP 16 94 020, which protects a multicarrier modulation system and method. Intellectual Ventures first approached Orange with a licence offer in 2015. However, after Orange failed to respond, in October 2017 Intellectual Ventures filed suits against it and Bouygues Télecom.
The defendant brought in DSL equipment manufacturers ECI Télécom, Infineon and Lantiq as third-party defendants. Furthermore, Huawei, Sagemcom, ZTE and Sercomm, equipment suppliers to Orange, also joined the suit as voluntary co-litigants (case IDs: 17/13837, 17/13838 and 17/13839).
By decision of the President of the European Patent Office dated 22 August 2017 concerning the payment of fees by credit card (hereinafter "the decision"), the EPO introduced an additional method of fee payment.
The present notice defines the requirements and arrangements for this method of fee payment. With respect to the Notice from the European Patent Office dated 13 May 2020 concerning the payment of fees by credit card,[ 1 ] the present notice introduces a daily limit for credit card payments.
