04.22.10

IBM Might Pay Microsoft Even More for Imaginary Software Patents (in Linux) Through SUSE/Novell

Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Servers at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: More evidence that IBM is indifferent if not somewhat complicit when it comes to Microsoft’s patent racket

IBM is said to be part of what Pieter Hintjens (former president of the FFII) rightly or at least appropriately called “the conspiracy of silence”. IBM makes around a billion dollars per year from patents alone. The shareholders love it.

IBM is a very discreet company that rarely speaks to the outside world, especially regarding issues like its patent policy^*. This feeling is shared amongst other people whom we’ve been in touch with. To question IBM about software patents is somewhat of a taboo and blind faithful followers of IBM would tell off anyone who tries.

“IBM is a very discreet company that rarely speaks to the outside world, especially regarding issues like its patent policy.”IBM was right there when Novell and Microsoft signed their patent deal which explicitly involved GNU/Linux. IBM was also there to help Novell acquire S.u.S.E., which was strongly against software patents. As a reminder, Novell brags about having the most software patents per employee, as though it’s somewhat of a merit (Microsoft too is emphasising patents now, with somewhere around 85% of them being patents on software).

IBM’s relationship with SLES is nothing news. Most IBM mainframes already use it, but IBM takes this relationship further with this announcement which brings with it a dose of discomfort.

Novell’s SUSE Linux has beaten Red Hat to an IBM alliance in the area of software appliances.

The two companies announced today that IBM is delivering a portfolio of “software appliances” under a variety of IBM brands, powered by Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

This has been brewing for a while. Bob Sutor has just posted this link about his appearance in BrainShare 2010.

While I was at Novell’s BrainShare conference last month in Salt Lake City, I sat down with Tom Crabb, Novell’s Enablement Manager and recorded a video. The topic was IT appliances, specifically virtual software appliances. You can see it here on Novell’s website.

These appliances are based at least in part on OpenSUSE; and yet, that too is made liable and comes with burden from Microsoft (which IBM cross-licenses with, so it’s OK as long as you are IBM).

It’s time for IBM to come clean. It’s nothing to do with TurboHercules. It’s about that old “conspiracy of silence”. IBM should be as transparent as it claims its code to be. But it’s not. And it doesn’t seem to mind Microsoft’s abuse of software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], unless it can twist it in some way to support IBM’s position (i.e. making more money). IBM’s patent pool has just grown a little bigger with the addition of NHN Corporation.

Open Invention Network (OIN), the company formed to enable and protect Linux, today extended the Linux ecosystem with the signing of NHN Corporation as a licensee. By becoming a licensee, NHN has joined the growing list of companies that recognize the importance of participating in a substantial community of Linux supporters and leveraging the Open Invention Network to further spur open source innovation.

What better things can IBM do? It can help abolish software patents along with the rest of the software industry (most developers reject software patents), rather than help them be for its own selfish benefit. █

“The day that the software sector forms a clear front against software patents, as pharma does for a unitary patent system… will be the day our cause comes close to winning.” —Pieter Hintjens, Fosdem07 Interview

___
^* Google and Apple are rather secretive too, more so than Microsoft.

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04.21.10

OpenDocument Format (ODF) Shows That It Would Have Been Better If IBM Bought Sun

Posted in Free/Libre Software, IBM, ISO, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Oracle’s attitude toward (or dedication to) ODF compares badly to that of Sun, IBM, and probably even Red Hat

LAST year was a fascinating year for Sun Microsystems. It was almost acquired by IBM, but the negotiations fell through at some stage. IBM’s hardware business, office suite, and many other software products (Eclipse comes to mind) nicely complement Sun’s portfolio and even IBM’s commitment to MySQL would have been better and more natural than Oracle’s.

“OpenOffice.org and many other office suites support ODF free of charge.”IBM is not perfect. Heck, IBM is far from perfect and the word “perfect” is rather silly to bring up. As the TurboHercules vs IBM case reminds us, IBM is not a friend when it comes to software patents^* (malice from TurboHercules withstanding), but IBM is a big proponent of ODF, for example. It’s one of those areas where an IBM-Sun merger would be suitable. The FSF is strongly in favour of ODF as it probably should be.

Oracle has rightly come under some fire for putting a price tag on an important enabler of ODF. This is bad move in general (not prioritising ODF), but maybe it would give reasons to just abandon Microsoft Office altogether. OpenOffice.org and many other office suites support ODF free of charge. Microsoft does not support real ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] or even OOXML, it only pretends.

Oracle start charging for Sun’s Office ODF plug-in

[...]

According to Oracle, the support cost is in line with Oracle’s support policy of approximately 22% of the license fee and is not mandatory. But the $90 per user license fee is required. As the plug-in was never open source, Oracle has not gone back on any open source assurances it gave. Oracle would not comment on the fact that the plug-in is almost as expensive as the cheapest edition of Microsoft’s MS Office suite.

Maybe if Oracle bought Novell (which is up for sale), then it would also charge $90 to download Mono. That would be nice.

Walt Hucks says: “I saw that coming back when Sun itself started requiring an account and mktg info to download the plugin.”

In better news regarding ODF, IBM’s Rob Weir points to ODF Fuzzer, which seems like a new tool that’s all about ODF.

ODF Fuzzer is a file format fuzzer developed to test star writer of Open Office.org. This will attempt to find security vulnerabilities, bugs and code flaw errors of the star writer. It uses byte mutation and insertion methods to create fuzzed files. ODF Fuzzer have a simple built in module to execute the star writer with the fuzzed files and monitor it’s behaviour.

There are also signs that Documents To Go will implement ODF support. The Product Manager says: [via Rob Weir]

Rest assured that many of the features you’ve mentioned (PDF, Google Docs integration, swirl zoom, localization, ODF support, etc) are being evaluated by our developers as we speak.

Here is what IBM’s Arnaud Le Hors wrote about Alex Brown’s [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21] attempt to pretend that he did not expect Microsoft to disobey ISO [1, 2, 3, 4].

Well, let me give you a link to a prediction I made! In my post What Microsoft’s track record tells us about OOXML’s future of March 25, 2008 I wrote:

They can, and I predict will, ignore all these additions which are optional and stick to what they have. The only reason they were added was to remove reasons for National Bodies to vote against OOXML.

So, here we are. Two years later, Microsoft has done exactly that and Alex Brown is finally seeing the light.

One can only hope that the standards community will have at least learned a lesson from this sad story: you simply cannot take control away from a vendor who has a monopoly and isn’t willing to give it up through a mere standardization process.

One area where IBM has been helpful is ODF. It’s a shame that Oracle is not so serious about it, not based on its actions anyway. OpenSolaris comes to mind in relation to this strategy. █
_____
^* Here is another new analysis of the TurboHercules vs IBM case and more lobbying from Florian Müller, who criticises multimedia codecs with patents in them (he does not seem fond even of Ogg) and has harsh words for the film “Patent Absurdity” [1, 2]. From Müller’s new blog (for which he has just created a Twitter account):

I regret having had to say all of the above and I can only hope that someone else will do something better at some time, maybe with a more realistic goal, maybe with a bigger budget. But realistically, software patents won’t go away until the call for abolition is supported by some of the major players in the industry. Theoretically it could also work with small and medium-sized businesses but in my experience that just doesn’t work because those SMEs who oppose software patents don’t want to spend any significant amount of time and money on it. As long as it looks to politicians like mostly a cause for the FOSS community without major economic interests behind it, it’s hard to see how change could be brought about. Watching “Patent Absurdity” just reaffirms that view. Unfortunately.

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04.19.10

“Patent Absurdity” Looks for Translations Amid Lobbying from Florian Müller and Microsoft

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, Patents at 8:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Other sizes/formats

Summary: The short movie “Patent Absurdity” (as can be viewed above) is looking to expand its reach; Groklaw says more about the TurboHercules vs IBM case

A few days ago, within minutes of the release of “Patent Absurdity”, we posted this embedded pointer to it for maximal exposure/audience. For those who did not see the film, it is a video lasting about half an hour and containing fragments from conversations with James Bessen, Dan Bricklin, Peter Brown, Mishi Choudhary, Ben Klemens, Timothy B. Lee, Eben Moglen, Ciarán O’Riordan, Dan Ravicher, Karen Sandler, Richard Stallman, Rob Tiller, Jesse Vincent, and Mark Webbink. The goal is not to preach to the choir but to get it out there for people who do not understand these issues.

Many Web sites such as The Source, Groklaw, and swpat.org wrote about it. That last one has also asked for subtitles in more languages.

UPDATE: Yes, we’d love to make versions with subtitles, in as many languages as possible. You can help via:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patently_Absurd/Subtitles.

In addition to Rob Tiller and Mark Webbink (with roots in Red Hat), there’s also this recommendation from Richard Fontana (Red Hat). We really need translations so that the message gets across to as many people as possible. As Simon Phipps put it: “I was lucky enough to be sent an early copy of this documentary. It’s well worth watching, both for the opportunity to see so many of the people who are influential in software freedom philosophy and law and for the great explanations of the issues around the Bilski case and the mission creep which has led to software patents. Share it with friends as this issue is only going to get more important as ACTA promotes criminalisation of patent infringement.”

“I don’t view Florian Mueller as a FOSS person. He’s a lobbyist.”
–Pamela Jones, GroklawSince we’ve mentioned Groklaw, it’s worth mentioning its latest updates on the TurboHercules case. Regarding this article, Pamela Jones wrote that “the new Florian FUD is as bad as the old FUD. He writes: “Considering that IBM has already used them in a threat letter to TurboHercules, those patents must be considered particularly dangerous. I just explained why IBM’s attack on Hercules is an attack on interoperability and FOSS innovation in general.” Let me point out, again, that it was not a threat letter, and it was sent to TurboHercules, not Hercules. There is a difference. And asking to license IBM’s code for an emulator is hardly innovation. It certainly isn’t FOSS innovation, in that TurboHercules’s turnkey offering is Microsoft based.” Regarding another article she wrote: “This is the best summary of the story so far that I’ve seen. I would add one detail, now update 11 on my article: Bowler has written that he did receive the letter from IBM listing the patents prior to filing the complaint with the EU Commission, which contrasts with their press release. So that raises the question, which is the truth? Perhaps we could rewrite Brian’s headline to “Mostly Smoke and Mirrors, Little Fire”? Also, I don’t view Florian Mueller as a FOSS person. He’s a lobbyist. Then there is the Microsoft and OpenMainframe.org part of the story.”

Regarding the recent lobbying for software patents in New Zealand, Jones points out that: “Members of NZICT include Cisco, Dell, ExpressData, Gen-i, Hewlett Packard, Kordia, IBM, Ingram Micro, Microsoft, Unisys, and Vodafone.” We pointed this out twice before and in the next post we’ll explain why Microsoft et al are pushing so hard for software patents in other countries/continents. █

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04.17.10

Apple is Part of the Proprietary Thought Police

Posted in Apple, DRM, IBM at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Apple demonstrates one of the biggest dangers of proprietary software which tells the user what to do, rather than the other way around

DISSENT is vital to democracy. It is the means by which opposition can express itself, ideally without being intimidated, silenced, or even punished. Freedom of expression is necessary to ensure that people defend their basic rights and maintain their freedoms. This is why proprietary software vendors — those which act as gatekeepers on our own computer hardware — are often a barrier to democracy. They are enemies of free thought.

Last year we learned from Amazon's remote deletion of books that proprietary software can control people’s reading lists and also the sharing of ideas. Amazon in general is hostile towards desktop GNU/Linux and as Greg Laden has just put it:

There is a Kindle reader application for the PC (and the Mac and the iPod touch). But not Linux. Which makes us sad because without Linux, your Kindle wouldn’t even turn on.

But despite this deeply insulting unforgivable slight by Steve Bozo or whatever his name is, diligent supergeeks have solved this problem temporarily. The problem is, as usual, the Intertubes are full of people who know diddley squat but don’t seem to understand that, so you will find ample instructions to make the Kindle for PC work on your Linux computer, and you will have very little success.

Amazon does several other things to discriminate against GNU/Linux, especially after it hired many executives from Microsoft. And for what it’s worth, IBM is no angel either. As Justin Ryan from Linux Journal puts it:

Fueling the fire was the inclusion in said letter of a list of patents — including two covered by IBM’s 2005 Non-Assertion Pledge. The increasingly common fury was not slow in arriving.

So what’s really going on? Very little. If one looks at the supposed “threat” letter — the full text — the real story becomes clear. The letter in question is actually one of four, part of an exchange between TurboHercules SAS (the company) and IBM, initiated by TurboHercules last fall.

The suits at the newly-formed TurboHercules SAS wrote to IBM last July, setting out what they planned to offer, and requesting IBM’s blessing for their venture. That wasn’t all they asked for, however — the letter also requested that IBM develop a special commercial license to allow TurboHercules’ customers to run legal copies of z/OS. (IBM does not license z/OS for use on non-IBM hardware, similar to Apple’s licensing of OS X.)

The similarity between IBM’s licence and Apple’s licence is worth noticing. Both are hardware companies and they limit what can run on the hardware or what hardware their software can run on. This is an attack on people’s freedom even as buyers, IBM's bad attitude towards software patents aside. But Apple’s attack on people’s computer freedom is still expanding to an attack on free speech, which in turn is like an attack on democracy.

According to this article from Wired Magazine, Apple is doing it again.

Editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore may be good enough to win this year’s Pulitzer Prize, but he’s evidently too biting to get past the auditors who run Apple’s iPhone app store, who ruled that lampooning public figures violated its terms of service.

This received a huge deal of unwanted attention [1, 2, 3] even though Apple has been behaving like this for years. Slashdot says that only backlash from the public led to a reversal from Apple. But still, Apple should be ashamed of itself. Groklaw tried to defend Apple on previous occasions when it did this (arguing that Apple tried to shield itself from lawsuits), but Apple is walking on a thin rope if it takes this role of censor who determines what content is “acceptable” and what content is “forbidden” and thus blocked altogether. The solution is for Apple not to be the middleman and to just let people install whatever they want on the device they paid for. Then, there’s no liability to worry about. █

“What really worries me is that the courts might choose a muddled half-measure—by approving an interpretation of “indecent” that permits the doctor program or a statement of the decency rules, but prohibits some of the books that any child can browse through in the public library. Over the years, as the Internet replaces the public library, some of our freedom of speech will be lost.”

–Richard Stallman, 1996

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Novell News Summary – Part III: Forrester Talks About Novell’s “Imminent Sale”; GroupWise’s Retreat and Business Partners

Posted in Hardware, IBM, Mail, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, Security, Servers, Windows at 9:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A relatively quiet couple of weeks summarised densely in a single post

Read the rest of this entry »

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Novell News Summary – Part II: SUSE Reliant on IBM and Verizon, Hosts Proprietary Software or SaaS

Posted in IBM, Linspire, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Servers, SLES/SLED, Xandros at 8:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A survey of the past two week’s news shows where SLES is gaining and where it is losing

NOVELL’S SLES is occasionally being listed as a supported platform on a variety of servers, but there are barriers to it. Red Hat is still way ahead of SLES when it comes to deployment:

Today’s data centers are moving toward only two important non-mainframe server operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows — dominating the commercial operating system market. Proprietary Unix is on the downswing, with many Unix systems (AIX, HP-UX and Solaris), and the SCO operating systems being migrated to Linux or Windows. NetWare has been on a very steep decline for several years and Novell recently ended general support for Netware. IBM’s z/OS and z/VM are still holding their own as mainframe operating systems.

[...]

The questions are: Why is Novell, the second-largest commercial Linux server operating system vendor, being discounted as a serious Linux operating system vendor over the next few years?And what does this mean to you, the IT director?

Nat Friedman was promoting SLED (see these two videos which have just been uploaded [1, 2]), but he left Novell some months ago and Novell keeps talking about Vista 7 rather than SLED.

There are some new videos about SUSE Moblin and SLED, but Novell is not doing enough.

On the server side, Timothy Prickett Morgan mentions SLES as supported here, here, here, and here (along with RHEL).

IBM’s i 7.1 and AIX 5.3 and 6.1, and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5.5, and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3 are supported on the blades. SLES 11 will be supported later this quarter when SP1 for that OS comes out.

Another one from Timothy Prickett Morgan shows the relation to IBM:

Big Blue juices OS formerly known as 400

[...]

This can be done quickly, and a partition can be trashed when the testing is over. i 7.1 logical partitions can create guest partitions based on i 7.1 or i 6.1. Guest partitions can also be spun up for AIX 5.2, 5.3, and 6.1 as well as the Linux distros from Red Hat and Novell.

Novell’s tag-team act with IBM (intended to sell its proprietary products) will lead to even more promotion of SaaS rather than Free software on one’s own desktop. Novell’s special relationship with IBM mainframes can also be seen here. SaaS at Verizon will involve SLES but not RHEL, which is not entirely odd but Verizon used to work a lot with Red Hat. Did half a billion dollars from Microsoft change Verizon’s mind?

Verizon also expanded the applications and operating systems supported by SaaS, adding SUSE Linux, which is commonly used in ERP packages; and Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) SQL Server 2008, which has been added as a click-to-provision server option. The addition of SUSE Linux and SQL Server 2008 augments the support for Windows, Red Hat, Apache and SQL Server 2005 that CaaS already supports.

More about Verizon here:

Enhancements to the CaaS offering include support for server cloning and the SUSE Linux operating system.

Here is the corresponding press release:

The SUSE Linux operating system is now supported on the Verizon CaaS platform as a standard service offering. Linux software is used with commonly deployed enterprise resource planning packages. In addition, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has been added as a “click-to-provision” database server option.

Here is Microsoft piggybacking SUSE into HPC yet again. How does IBM feel about it? The Microsoft boosters sure seem happy about the whole thing.

The Linux and Windows interoperability efforts from Microsoft and partners such as Novell have evolved to the HPC market.

Ingres got closer to SLES recently. It’s because of Studio appliances, which the company covered in three new videos [1, 2, 3] and also mentioned in a press release.

The SpagoBI Analytical Appliance integrates SpagoBI, the only entirely open source suite covering all the analytical areas of business intelligence projects, Ingres Database, the leading open source database that helps organizations develop and manage business critical applications at an affordable cost, and SUSE® Linux Enterprise 11 from Novell®.

SGI still supports both RHEL and SLES, based on its new press release which says:

At the system software level, Cyclone offers a flexible computing environment with choice of Novell(R) SUSE(R) or Red Hat(R) Linux(R) operating systems, further performance-optimized through the addition of SGI(R) ProPack(TM).

Novell is the last distributor of GNU/Linux which poses a real problem because it pays Microsoft for each copy of SLES. Xandros is mostly unheard of at this stage and the only mention of it that we have found this month (in English) was to do with Linspire, which it had acquired only to bury. Michael Robertson still deals with litigation:

Robertson, the controversy-courting founder of MP3.com and Linspire, is preparing to roll out a new online music service called BYO.fm. He said that BYO taps into Web radio’s potential to enable users to act as their own program directors.

Michael Robertson’s lawsuit against Carmony (and vice versa) seems to have ended rather quietly. Maybe it’s better that way. █

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04.16.10

TurboHercules’ Attack on IBM Gains Support From Microsoft Investor/Booster and More

Posted in Free/Libre Software, IBM, Microsoft at 6:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A stone statue of Hercules on the way to the Hercules tower

Summary: The ‘mini-SCO’ from Seattle continues with the same talking points and gains new lobbyists, found in the form of Microsoft enthusiasts with financial interests in Microsoft’s welfare

WE HAVE created a new page about TurboHercules vs IBM. This is where we’ll keep track of the case. LWN has great new coverage (as usual), whereas IDG, in its pro-Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] tabloid-esque fashion is letting Microsoft investor and Microsoft booster Bill Snyder write about the case as though he is an independent observer.

“IDG has published his musings under at least two separate and somewhat inflammatory headlines (with a question mark of course).”Suffice to say, Snyder takes Microsoft’s side by accusing IBM of “giving up” on Open Source. How far fetched. We saw that statement before. IDG has published his musings under at least two separate and somewhat inflammatory headlines (with a question mark of course) [1, 2]. Rather than give attention to his misinformed piece, we wish to quote the commenter, who writes: “You got a few things wrong. (1)Groklaw was created by Pamela Jones, not “Penny Jackson”. (2)Florian Mueller is not an open source activist. He is a lobbyist who will say whatever someone pays him to say. (3)IBM’s letter was part of an exchange with TurboHercules. That particular letter was in response to a claim by Bowler that IBM had no IP rights in the area covered by the emulator. IBM was just saying “yes we do.” While I don’t particularly agree with IBM’s refusal to license z/os this way, they have every right to do so. If anyone can force someone to license something in a way they don’t want to we might as well not have any licenses or copyrights. The right to license things the way the creator wants is one of the pillars of open source and free software. If you don’t like my license you are free to create your own work, but you are not free to steal mine.”

It appears as though TurboHercules has sent (or has had) one of its PR bunnies to also leave a comment and promote Jay Maynard’s blog, which takes the form of ibmvshercules.com, constantly rants about Groklaw, links to Eric Raymond’s blog, and is very much reminiscent of Florian Müller’s new attack blog against IBM. What a bunch. █

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04.14.10

Patents Roundup: IBM, TurboHercules, Microsoft, New Zealand, Palm, and CompTIA

Posted in Free/Libre Software, IBM, Microsoft, OIN, Patents, Red Hat at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft continues to harass competition (notably GNU/Linux) through small companies and lobbyists in Europe; US patent law on shaky ground

TODAY’S post catches up with patents news from the past 3 days. We will start with the issues that affect Free software the most.

IBM, TurboHercules, and Microsoft

For background on the subject and perhaps a bit of context, here are previous posts on the matter.

SJVN responds to Müller over at his blog in IDG. Müller keeps slamming IBM 24/7.

I just really can’t see why IBM should be singled out as patent public enemy number one for open source because of this one business dust-up. I also can’t help notice, as Pamela Jones of Groklaw recently pointed out, that there’s reason to believe that TurboHercules isn’t so much an open-source company as it is a proxy, along with OpenMainframe, in a battle between IBM and Microsoft over cloud-computing.

Again, I find myself asking, “Who’s really the open-source enemy here?” It’s not IBM.

At ITWire, IBM’s actions are defended by stating that IBM is a business, just like many others.

Both sides are wrong for one simple reason: the people who run companies like IBM or Microsoft or Novell or HP, do not have friends or enemies. What they have is strategic interests. That’s all.

Telic corrects the author in the comments, calling a part of the article “unprofessional misinformation.” To quote Telic:

The GPL triggers upon public distribution of licenced code: “if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.”

Your “only money speaks” ditty is an anthem for outlaw corruption a la Microsoft.

Indeed. One ought to concentrate on the fact that Microsoft is still using “dummy” companies to sue competitors. Microsoft should be taken to court over this.

The patent armament of GNU/Linux grows a little bigger and stronger with many additions to the OIN and the Linux Foundation recently (they are both related to each other and to IBM). Ulteo becomes a member of OIN, based on this new press release (also in Market Wire).

Open Invention Network (OIN), the company formed to enable and protect Linux, today extended the Linux ecosystem with the signing of Ulteo as a licensee. By becoming a licensee, Ulteo has joined the growing list of companies that recognize the importance of participating in a substantial community of Linux supporters and leveraging the Open Invention Network to further spur open source innovation.

Ulteo is a small company from the super-talented Gaël Duval, creator of Mandrake. He blogged about it too.

“The opinion pieces of IBM partners/apologists sometimes assume that IBM is untouchable when it comes to criticism from the Free software community.”The IBM-created/led OIN has actually been helpful in the past [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It’s one of those cases where IBM’s involvement actually defends GNU/Linux from hostile patents (although a permanent solution would just eliminate software patents). The opinion pieces of IBM partners/apologists sometimes assume that IBM is untouchable when it comes to criticism from the Free software community. This oughtn't be the case.

Dana Blankenhorn says that “the IBM open source pledge [has been] amended.”

The real news is that Eric Raymond agrees with Mueller. The author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which did so much to define open source as distinct from Richard Stallman’s free software ideal, says IBM is digging itself into an ever-deeper rhetorical hole.

Blankenhorn also brings Jay Maynard into it. Groklaw accused Maynard of playing for Microsoft, but some of our readers deny this strongly.

Jones got into this with a long Groklaw post that has 11 updates (so far) acting as exhibits. It’s the fiercest debate there since the end of the Novell case, which is to say in about two weeks.

A summary is that TurboHercules started this mess, that IBM has not even filed a case, and that it looks like a shakedown by Hercules’ Roger Bowler and Jay Maynard. (Raymond credits Maynard with bringing him into the case.)

There are accumulations of opinions out there, including some thoughts from Brian Proffitt, who works/worked for the Linux Foundation (the IBM conflict of interests creeps in again).

The thing is, Mueller may have jumped the gun on his accusations that Big Blue was giving the finger to the open source community.

Müller is more or less a lobbyist now. He even issues a ‘press release’:

Florian Mueller, Open Source Patent Activist, just released the following information. He believes that patents already used by IBM against TurboHercules are also a threat to other major FOSS projects. He now calls on the community for action.

Calling him “Open Source Patent Activist” is rather odd given that he attempted to derail Munich’s migration to Open Source. Corpwatch.org calls Müller “Open-source Advocate” in this new article and someone from Red Hat says that Müller “plays a strange role. Comes out of the blue. I smell more.”

Steve Stites writes about abolishing software patents in response to an article about IBM and TurboHercules:

I think that the best way to defend open source against software patent attacks is to abolish software patents. The U.S. Supreme Court might abolish software patents this month in the U.S.A. New Zealand is close to passing a law abolishing software patents in New Zealand. We are making progress from the days when people considered abolishing software patents just a flaky idea.

This brings us to the next subject.

New Zealand

Thanks to software developers, New Zealand is rejecting software patents — a move which drives some lawyers mad [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Here is a new report on the same subject, along with legal analysis.

Commerce Minister Simon Power says the Government will back changes proposed by a select committee that will mean computer software can no longer be patented.

Parliament’s commerce select committee proposed amending the Patents Bill, which passed its first reading in May last year, after receiving many submissions on the controversial issue.

The recommendation has attracted considerable attention outside New Zealand, particularly from the open source software community, which claims large software makers have gamed the patent system and stifled innovation.

The local solicitors (“lawyers industry”) actively protest against this (no derivatives on software? Think about the children!). This whole situation is very revealing; lawyers consistently insist on more patents, whereas developers reject them. Who again is actually producing software? Should the insurance cartel also get to define policies on medication?

Europe

As proof that the European patent system (primarily the EPO, as opposed to the UK IPO) is still relatively sane, here is the news about Amazon’s mind-blowing one-click patent getting rejected on the grounds of obviousness.

From the IPKat’s friend Kristof Neefs (Altius) comes this link to Decision T 1616/08, in which the European Patent Office’s Technical Board of Appeal ruled that the subject matter of Amazon’s controversial One-click patent is obvious. In the decision of 11 November 2009, the application to patent a “Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network” was opposed by the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V., Fleurop-Interflora European Business Company AG and the Förderverein für eine Freie Informationelle Infrastruktur e.V.(FFII e.V.).

This bring us to the European Interoperability Framework.

Microsoft and Front Groups

Microsoft’s pressure groups such as CompTIA are still lobbying for software patents inside European standards. Microsoft does not want to be seen doing this directly, so it has been using moles and lobbyists. Here is the latest warning bell:

Commenting on previous efforts to introduce a European Interoperability Framework (EIF), CompTIA, a global ICT industry group with member companies such as Microsoft among its members, said it was ”concerned about the proposal’s promotion of ICT standards and development models that reject valid intellectual property’.’

For more information about Microsoft’s lobbying against real standards in EIFv2, see:

Palm

Palm is up for sale (pretty much like Novell) and after receiving patent threats from Apple, numerous reporters ponder the value of Palm’s patents [1, 2].

Indeed, Palm has a range of intellectual property assets, from hardware to software patents and its well-regarded webOS operating system.

We have already seen that Microsoft's patent troll is collecting patents on mobile devices.

United States

The brilliant Feld explains why patents are bad news for small companies:

I’m sure you can already see the problem. What software startup has $5 million to burn on defending a case with no value-add? Even $500k? I’d say it takes $1-2 million or thereabouts just to get through claim construction, which will give the parties a better sense of the overall merits of the case. One patent suit with a slightly determined plaintiff could very easily end a software startup just in legal fees, let alone the impact of the suit on gathering customers in the future.

So, software startups have to settle patent cases very early, and at high settlement amounts, because they have absolutely no leverage. Invalidity takes years to litigate, so you can’t threaten to invalidate the patent; same with inequitable conduct. Non-infringement arguments are great in theory, but the plaintiff won’t have a judgment day until the middle of the case at the earliest, after claim construction, when summary judgment motions are allowed (on most schedules), and that’s several years of litigation and several million dollars away. The defendant could file for a re-exam, but once it’s filed, the defendant has no control over it, and it takes a few years to get through the PTO.

In a new article from Forbes, Reihan Salam recalls the dawn of software patents in the United States:

In the 1981 Diamond decision, the majority effectively reversed 1978′s Parker v. Flook decision to disallow software patents. As Lee has persuasively argued, software patents have proven an overwhelmingly destructive force that inhibits economic growth by crippling small, innovative software developers. In both of these decisions Justice Stevens worked to limit the power of the government to reward entrenched interests. Yet this is a kind of jurisprudence that many, on the right and on the left, object to on grounds of judicial restraint.

GT Software has just issued this press release that repeatedly alludes to software patents as though they are something worth boasting and Against Monopoly carries on wondering what the retirement of Justice Stevens will mean to the Bilski case.

There are growing predictions from many authorities that Stevens might be the primary author of the Bilski patent case which has yet to be handed down.

The leeches of software patenting (an ill system) are happy about it. They have been wishing that Stevens would retire. Here is the opinion of Simon Phipps, who names “Seven Patent Reforms”.

The Source has an optimistic bit of foresight on what Google can do to the MPEG cartel.

There are patent concerns, but Google has a very good record on patents, so I am optimistic there.

Lastly, on another more positive note, the president of the FFII says that “Abolishing the U.S. Patent System Is Coming Soon”; he points to this:

Patent Resources Group (PRG), the nation’s leading patent educator, will be hosting a panel discussion on “The Future of U.S. Patent Law” on June 11, 2010 in Washington, DC. This in-depth, one-day event, offered in partnership with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, will bring together some of the best minds in intellectual property to inform, discuss, and debate the future of U.S. patent law. The one-of-a-kind program will include brief lectures, lively panel discussions, and audience participation.

Major topics will include:

* U.S. patent reform
* Latest developments at, and tensions between, the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
* Approaches to improve pendency and efficiency at the USPTO

Meanwhile, looking at Obama’s office, their document on the subject [PDF] (which they wrote in Microsoft Word) states: “Protect intellectual property rights. Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. We must ensure that intellectual property is protected in foreign markets and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere. The Administration is committed to ensuring that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has the resources, authority, and flexibility to administer the patent system effectively and issue high-quality patents on innovative intellectual property, while rejecting claims that do not merit patent protection.”

This love for patents does not surprise us given that Obama’s team is in the pockets of the intellectual monopolists. █

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