10.09.11
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 10:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image by UpstateNYer
Summary: Deadly drones that depend on Windows become victims of intrusion and potentially control from the outside
DESPITE what Bristol might laughably claim, Microsoft is just about as bad as one can do for security and the monthly reminder (those numbers are fake by the way) should not be ignored. Patches aside, many news sites say that a Windows virus has hit the drone fleet of the US army. There’s a comforting thought, eh? With rockets on board, crackers can play war plane simulator with a real miniature (but well armed) plane. People have rightly started asking, why not just use Linux? One blogger writes: “Because the level of skill required to crack a Unix-like OS is much higher than that needed for a Microsoft OS. Further, properly configured Unix-like systems are much more robust than Microsoft systems. Were Military forces using properly configured and properly secured Unix or Linux systems we would not see items like these below being reported.
“”I just had a, “What were they thinking?!”, moment while reading this article at ars technica: Computer virus hits US Predator and Reaper drone fleet. First, it is not a “computer virus”, it is a Microsoft operating system virus. Second, using Microsoft operating systems for any critical Military computer systems is just wrong. I know the US Military has specifications for rugged computer systems that must be made in the USA. That makes sense. What does not make sense is the fact that the US Military will accept Microsoft operating systems on its critical, sensitive hardware at this date in time. That is like specifying a bank vault that can withstand a nearby nuclear blast, but allowing the builder to install a screen door for access to the vault. It is just a Bad Idea!””
Here is another report about it. Wired says that “Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.”
Not so reassuring.
Drone issues such as this are just another reminder amongst other incidents that we mentioned before — incidents where the US military is put at risk because of Windows . To quote Microsoft’s Allchin, “It is no exaggeration to say that the national security is also implicated by the efforts of hackers to break into computing networks. Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
“Microsoft Appears to Have Blacklisted Oxford University” says another report, showing us what Microsoft “security” really is achieving:
Microsoft’s motives for action is unknown, Oxford’s semester is about to start
We received word from Oxford University in the UK today that Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has blacklisted the campus for unknown reasons.
The reasons are actually known. Microsoft is too incompetent or arrogant to implement security properly. █
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Posted in Europe, Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by dkpto @ Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Summary: Bad companies and selfish people are making the patent system worse for everyone; the White House is urged to bring about change, but petition signers are not of the 1% (or less) that influence and sponsor the party
BACK we go to the subject of software patents, which we have not covered quite so thoroughly as of late.
This subject is not about any one particular company. It affects everyone, including proprietary and Free software developers. It also affects non-developing members of the public because hefty tax is being silently passed to them.
It is hard to get over the news about Halliburton expanding the boundaries of software patents, bringing some more of them to Europe (or to the UK, to be more specific). At Computer Weekly, one who was previously accused of helping Microsoft’s agenda (we were not persuaded by the evidence presented to us though) writes that “The High Court has overturned a decision of the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO), explicitly confirming that technical design methods are patentable.”
As one can see in our IRC logs, the president of the FFII was rather disturbed by this. It was also brought up there that Gurry's patent boosting at WIPO (which the FFII previously pointed out) carries on with more outrageous statements:
Last June, the Swiss Press Club held a launch for the Global Innovation Index at which various speakers were invited to talk about innovation. After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object.
In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).
We also mentioned Gurry in [1, 2, 3], including leaked material from Cablegate.
These disturbing ideas from WIPO are not surprising. We have been pointing out this dangerous attitude from WIPO for quite a few years. Then there are patent lawyers and their blogs that spread more propaganda about patents and their supposed ‘benefit’ to society. Consider the post “EU confident over unitary patent plans” (too many contradictions as shown by Axel).
Other patent lawyers’ blog still tilt the balance in favour of software patents. For example:
Ultramercial v. Hulu: Computer Programs and Patentable Subject Matter
[...]
Software is patentable
Layered on top of this finding is the court’s rejection of the argument that software programming amounts to abstract subject matter. “The digital computer may be considered by some the greatest invention of the twentieth century, and both this court and the Patent Office have long acknowledged that “improvements thereof” through interchangeble software or hardware enhancements deserve patent protection. Far from abstract, advances in computer technology—both hardware and software—drive innovation in every area of scientific and technical endeavor.” Slip Op. at 12.
This holding is in tension with the Federal Circuit’s recent opinion in Cyber Source Corp. v. Retail Decisions, Inc., No. 2009-1358 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 16, 2011), in which a panel consisting of Judges Bryson, Dyk and Prost concluded that a method of verifying a credit card transaction over the Internet constituted an unpatentable process. While the panel in Ultramercial recognized this tension, it distinguished Cyber Source as an instance of “purely mental steps.” Ultramercial Slip Op. at 13 (emphasis in original). The line, at least from the point of view of this panel, thus lies somewhere between logical steps that humans can perform without the aid of a computer versus those that require a computer to carry out.
The whole “embedded” trick is completely dishonest. To paint software as “machine” is like painting mathematics as “abacus” or comparing a musical piece to “gramophone” to justify patents on drum beats, vocals, or a short sequence of words. It is truly absurd, but patent lawyers would go as far as they can to justify more and more patents on everything which people think about and do. It is a tax on society and the lawyers take a cut from all these fees.
“To paint software as “machine” is like painting mathematics as “abacus” or comparing a musical piece to “gramophone” to justify patents on drum beats, vocals, or a short sequence of words.”How much should we be willing to remove from our thoughts and actions just to feed a redundant industry that prevents small businesses from threatening the status quo? These are mere gate keepers. Just watch Microsoft as it gets a trademark for retail store plans (no, it is not a joke). The Register says that “Microsoft has been awarded a trademark on its design for a store selling all things high tech.” (trademark registration #4036534).
How many shops are infringing? Should they all be shut down or be forced to pay Microsoft? It is a little reminiscent of the Lindows case.
The Economist, a reputable paper which is neither run by lawyers nor written by engineers, ought to view this whole pyramid/MLM scheme of a system as a bad idea. Not so long ago it posted some rants against the patent system and now it’s airing a piece titled “programmed nonsense”. To quote the relevant parts:
The message is finally getting through. When the White House opened a website earlier this month for people to create and sign petitions they feel passionate about, one immediate favourite asked the president to “direct the [USPTO] to cease issuing software patents”. The petition garnered more than 12,000 signatures in the first few days. The White House has promised to respond to any petition that collects 5,000 signatures during the first month.
Software patents and business-method patents (invariably based on some software algorithm) are unlike any other type. As a rule, mechanical, chemical, material and even biological inventions and discoveries are concerned with some novel feature that can be measured and uniquely defined. But software programs deal almost exclusively with mathematical relationships that are well known and widely used. In writing software, programmers do not have to make novel, serendipitous discoveries, as inventors in other fields do. In many ways, that makes programming a good deal easier, and certainly more predictable, than inventing.
The corporate press can say the truth, unlike all those “IP” people who run blogs for patent lawyers or even “UN”-painted bodies like WIPO, which is also run by the “IP” crowd. Why are those foxes allowed to have so much influence over the hen house, aka White House? The republic needs to be run for the benefit of the people, not parasites. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The Intel “i915″ Gallium3D driver continues to advance thanks to love from Google. A new Intel employee is now even contributing to this unofficial driver too.
Over the summer we have seen a number of changes to the Intel Gallium3D driver that supports the older i915/i945 era hardware. This driver is not officially supported by Intel, but Google’s after it for use in their Chromebooks as their netbooks can do better since this Gallium3D driver has faster CPU-based code generation of vertex shaders than the classic Intel DRI driver. The work has mostly been done by Stéphane Marchesin, the former Nouveau driver project lead who is now part of Google’s Chromium team.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Today I found myself with Picasa for Linux (3.0 beta) not allowing me to login to web albums, even if I could login without problems from the web browser.
After googling a bit, it seems that Picasa 3.0 does not work anymore due to some Google+ related changes. On the other hand it looks like Picasa on Linux is abandoned ie: 3.0 vs 3.8 on Windows.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE project has released the second point update to version 4.7 of its KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). According to the developers, the maintenance update to the Linux and Unix desktop contains a variety of translation updates and bug fixes; as expected, no new features have been added.
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GNOME Desktop
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has acquired Gluster, a company that uses software to tackle storage problems in a new way.
We had the opportunity to talk to Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, about the acquisition, how Gluster’s product works, and what it means to be steering a company into the $1 billion revenue mark.
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Fedora
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I’ve been swamped these past couple weeks. I mean, I’ve been absolutely, completely, and totally bogged down by work. I had 4 problem sets to do, on top of my recently-started UROP and other work-study stuff I’m doing, so I seriously had no room to breathe, until now. I briefly thought about starting work for next week tonight, but then I realized that whatever sanity I had left at this point would go out the window if I worked any more. I needed a break, so what did I do instead of working? I wrote this review! (This is my pre-emptive excuse if some people may feel that this is not thorough enough, or whatever. Yeah, yeah, sue me.)
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s YouTube channel has uploaded a new video introducing the latest version of Ubuntu which is 11.10. The video gives and overview of some of the new features of Ubuntu 11.10 but lacks the quality and professionalism. It doesn’ show all the new features of Dash, which include refined search.
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Flavours and Variants
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Not only for Windows, but also for Linux the hour of truth comes near. October-November are months with new releases and upgrades. Let’s forget about Windows 8 for now; it’s still an early Beta. However Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 will come out soon. So are updated desktops: Gnome and KDE to name but two. It’s no secret that I am still not convinced that the Gnome based Gnome 3 shell and Ubuntu’s Unity desktops are matured enough to compete with either Windows 8 Beta or Apple’s OSX. What’s more, I still don’t like either of the two. So do many more Linux-users. The one UI fails this here, the other is messy there, which isn’t inspiring and inviting me to even test these releases. I am running Mint 11 for now and will continue to do so with its ‘old’, but for me far more productive, more flexible Gnome 2 desktop, better suited to run production software.
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Zorin OS also comes with a Zorin Look Changer which allows easily changing the layout of the desktop to match the look of Windows XP and Linux GNOME in addition to this default Windows 7 look. In a Zorin OS video presentation I’ve also noticed Mac OS X, but it wasn’t present in my install. Perhaps it is available for install from repositories or as part of a Premium version.
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iSign Media Solutions announced a Linux-based device designed to send out marketing messages via either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Including an integral web server and the ability to communicate with digital signage PCs, the “Smart Antenna” is an all-weather device that draws five Watts of power over an Ethernet cable, says the company.
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Phones
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Android
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India is one of the champions of making cheap stuff. Tata’s Nano, the world’s cheapest car, is now dethroned by Aakash, one of the cheapest Android tablets. India created quite a buzz with the launch of $35 Android tablet which had the backing of the Indian government.
The HRD minister of India Kapil Sibal is now aiming at $10 tablet. The minister has reportedly invited companies to make a cheaper Android tablet. With low income a majority of Indians can’t buy expensive $500 tablets, thus being left behind. Given India’s next to chaotic power outage situation where you don’t even get electricity for 24 hours a day, a tablet may keep users well connected.
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Apple is not the only champion of creating hype about its products before they are launched. Unfortunately, iPhone 4S release was a major disaster as hype-mongering sites were calling it the iPhone 5 and some even said it had a bigger screen. Lesson: don’t listen to the hype created by Apple fans, it’s mostly vapor.
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Android apps will now be able to run on Apple’s iPad and a host of other non-Android devices, courtesy of new software from the crew at Myriad Group.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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E-Fun announced the sixth, highest-end member of its Nextbook family of Android tablets. Running Android 2.3 on a Rockchips RK2918 Cortex-A8 processor, the $300 Nextbook Premium 8 offers an eight-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive display, 4GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi, and a front-facing camera, and a Kobo eBook Store app, says the company.
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AMAZON’S Kindle Fire was always going to set the tablet world ablaze. Even before it starts shipping in November, though, it has managed to reignite the debate over the relative merits of open versus closed software. Supporters of openness trumpet it as a way to promote ideas and competition, leading to greater consumer satisfaction and optimal prices. Closed systems, goes the argument, remove choice and ramp up prices. If only it were that simple.
For a start, the distinction between open and closed is fuzzy. The Fire, for example, relies on Google’s Android operating system (not the latest, tablet-spec version 3, but an earlier one designed for smartphones). Android is open—in the sense that anyone may view, modify and employ the source code in free or commercial applications without a license (other than that which comes at no cost with the code). Modifications to the code may have to be distributed publicly, depending on the specific license in question. (Android is a melange of code from many open-source projects and licensing terms for the ingredients vary.)
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While Oracle Solaris has Intel KMS/DRI2 support, the Solaris port of this Intel Linux driver code isn’t yet part of the open-source Solaris distributions.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Java has long been a hit with enterprise developers, with Java EE powering the back ends of enterprise applications in data centers around the world, while Java application servers and servlet containers enable countless Web applications.
For client-side development, however, Java hasn’t fared nearly as well. There have always been Java technologies aimed squarely at the client: Java applets debuted with the first release of the platform, and Java ME was an early hit with cellphone vendors. Various toolkits and frameworks have been released over the years for building rich, GUI-based Java applications for the desktop.
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Programming
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Copyrights
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If you went through a publisher and agent, assuming you could find a publisher and agent willing to talk to you, you’d only earn $1,875.00. Why would you give away $6,875.00 to someone else when you could do it yourself, including hiring a cover artist, an editor, etc. There are places that charge a flat rate of less than $100.00 to do this for you if you can’t do it…
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I have been asked by several people recently, both through here and privately, about the steps involved and the decisions to be made in converting a PC running Windows to Linux. After repeating the whole thing a few times, I decided to put it here for reference. These are based on my own experiences – anyone who has different, better or additional ideas should add them in the comments.
- First, especially if you are starting with a new PC, make sure that you have complete Windows recovery media. This is even more important (and potentially tricky) today than it has been in the past, because a lot of new systems today do not come with Windows installation CD/DVDs included, they only have a “recovery partition” on the hard drive. In this case make sure that you use whatever the manufacturer’s “recovery media creation utility” might be to create yourself a set of disks – it will usually be about 3-5 DVDs. Yes, I know, we all hate Windows and we will be glad to see it getting wiped from the disk, never to return… but you never know what is going to happen to that PC, and perhaps someday you will want to sell or pass it along to some poor schmuck who insists on running Windows…
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Ideally, I’d be able to skip the Windows fee entirely by installing Ubuntu or another user-friendly Linux distro. However, the other family members would probably throw several small objects at me if I tried to foist Linux on them. But other households might be different, so a good Linux distro like Ubuntu could be a good fit.
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Kernel Space
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As most folks know by now, a security breach affecting kernel.org was discovered in September. While that didn’t affect kernel sources, it did get Linux kernel developers to thinking about their personal system security–and it might not be a bad idea for others to do the same.
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We’d like to share our current wish list of plumbing layer features we are hoping to see implemented in the near future in the Linux kernel and associated tools. Some items we can implement on our own, others are not our area of expertise, and we will need help getting them implemented.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Charlies Games has released his shmup Scoregasm today. Scoregasm is available on Windows, Mac and Linux priced at a respectable $10
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Several years ago now I had a minor epiphany while doing field research in the offices of friends and work associates on how people use their computers. The ideas led to the concept of “Activities”, which I originally called “Projects” (we changed the name because it was about more than just things we could call a “project”).
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So it was that the beginnings of Activities were as different widget layouts in Plasma Desktop. You could zoom out and see each collection of icons and widgets and switch between them. It let you, for instance, open different folders in a folderview for different projects you were working on. Some people got it right away and started using Activities. Most people didn’t, and I don’t blame them at all: it was very hard to communicate something that was new to me as well and which we had only the basic sketches of implementation to demonstrate.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (RHT) is a leading provider of open-source and cloud solutions to enterprises around the world, including Europe. It is true that some companies will be less profitable because of Europe. Not Red Hat. On its conference call, CFO Charlie Peters stated that “Europe for us was also strong. And as I said, all geographies were 25-plus percent growth. I would say we had company-specific growth in Europe, which maybe is different than what others are experiencing, but not only the growth, but really the pipeline looks good.” Red Hat’s subscription-based model provides the company with a stable, dependable revenue stream.
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CloudLinux Inc. makers of CloudLinux OS, the only commercially-supported Linux OS (operating system) made specifically for shared hosting, will advise attendees at the upcoming annual Automation Bootcamp cPanel conference in Austin, Texas from October 10-12 how they can become more efficient by switching to CloudLinux. The director of operations at A Small Orange will lead a session on how the company converted to CloudLinux.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said the Linux software company can afford to delay its move into one of Progress Energy’s two downtown Raleigh buildings while the utility overhauls its merger plans with Duke Energy.
In August, Red Hat announced it would shift its headquarters from N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus to downtown Raleigh, where Progress plans to exit one of its buildings in conjunction with its merger with Charlotte-based Duke. But a glitch emerged last week when federal regulators sought assurances that the merged company won’t manipulate electricity rates.
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Fedora
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Unwilling to wait for Fedora 16 final to come out, I went ahead and installed Fedora 16 beta. So much has been fixed in Fedora 16 that was wrong in Fedora 15 I can hardly see why this is called a beta. However, there are a few things I’ve noticed that go awry with Fedora 16 that will hopefully be fixed by the time the final release comes out.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today our CEO Jane Silber announced at the OpenStack Conference in Boston that HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system powering their Public Cloud. HP and Canonical are working closely together during the current private beta to make certain that we provide the most secure, scalable, business-class cloud to companies of all sizes. We are excited to join with HP in recognizing that open and interoperable cloud infrastructure and services are critical in delivering the next generation of cloud-based services to developers, ISVs and businesses. Both companies share a common commitment to open source and both embrace the OpenStack community. With over 117 member companies the momentum behind OpenStack is truly game changing and promises to position it at the center of the next wave of computing.
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Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 is shaping up to be a fantabulous release from the server team! I’m starting early celebrations for Oneiric by pushing out a series of Ubuntu Server from the trenches articles. Get to know all the hot new features landing in Oneiric server, as well as the people behind them! I start by interviewing Robbie the Ubuntu server team manager. Robbie is just great, always fun to be around! Ahmed Kamal (AK) will be asking Robbie to introduce the newest features of 11.10 as well as shed some light on the way forward. Let’s get started
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If you’re a fan of Ubuntu Linux, there’s a good chance you’re among the many who have been wondering in the last day or so what, precisely, a pangolin is.
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While I was away for three weeks, there was an update on LP bug #760131, the infamous bug report on the power consumption being raised significantly higher in Ubuntu Natty. This bug report of high importance now indicates a fix being committed to Natty and a fix being released for Oneiric, but what has changed? Here is an update.
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Indian Supreme Court has given a customized DVD of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to more than 17,000 courts across the country. All the systems in these courts were running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for last 4-5 years and now it will be replaced by Ubuntu.
Many helpful links and materials are being provided to these courts. An SMS channel has also been setup which will provide helpful Ubuntu tricks and information to these courts.
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This week during the OpenStack conference in Boston, Canonical CEO Jane Silber revealed several new features that will be included in the next version of the company’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.10. She also announced that both the desktop and the server editions will be released next Thursday, October 13.
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That, of course, is because Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth just declared Precise Pangolin the nickname for the next Ubuntu. I’m betting there’s been a sudden surge in Google searches on the term since the announcement was made.
Keeping up with the Dr. Seussian name choices for Ubuntu mascots is never easy, so to make matters more clear for all of us, here’s a brief history with pictures of all the mascots Ubuntu has had so far. The only question now is, what will it be for Ubuntu 12.10: Quirky Quail, Quahog, Quarterhorse or Queen Bee?
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The next version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, to be released next week, will be the first to run on the Arm architecture, as well as the first edition to offer a new cloud service orchestration engine, called JuJu.
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Flavours and Variants
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Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: You bought a netbook a couple years back, thinking it would be your go-to travel PC, but quickly became dissatisfied with its sluggish performance–and stuck it in a closet.
Hey, that’s a perfectly good PC you’ve got in there. It just needs a better operating system, one that fares better with less horsepower. Last year I wrote about Joli OS (formerly known as Jolicloud), which accomplished that very goal–but with a somewhat unfamiliar-looking interface that didn’t appeal to everyone.
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Just to remind you: The QNAP TS-1079 Pro is a desktop-style NAS device that runs an embedded version of Linux on a dual core Intel i3-2120 Processor at 3.3 GHz with 2GB of DDR3 RAM. It has 10 drive bays allowing up to 30TB of storage set up as JBOD (that’s “Just a Bunch Of Disks”) or in any of the usual RAID configurations.
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Phones
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Android
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It has been a long wait but the combined version of Android/Linux suitable for tablet or smart phone or any PC, for that matter, will be released on 2011-10-11. Specs on the device are pretty cool:
* 1280×720 screen (curved, too)
* dual core ARM 1.2gHz
* 1080p video capture
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Wow! That’s a diverse target audience, and a very wide ranging list of ways you can help out. But is it really helpful to scope the project so wide, and try to cater to such a wide range of use-cases from the start? And is the project at a stage where it even makes sense to advertise itself to some of these different types of users?
I have talked about the different meanings of “maintainer” before, depending on whether you’re maintaining a code project or are a package maintainer for a distribution. I have also talked about the different types of community that build up around a project, and how each of them needs their own identity – particularly in the context of the MeeGo trademark. I particularly like Simon Phipps’s analysis of the four community types as a way to clarify what you’re talking about.
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If you’ve looked into buying software licenses, you know that they can be expensive. Big Guns from Big Corporations charge a lot for their work – the work of their programmers, the marketing department, and so on.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Is Google’s “web only” OS ready to take on Windows, Mac and Linux? We give it a real-world road test
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Google uses a rather woolly definition of the word “app”: many of the so-called applications that you’ll find in the Chrome Web Store are nothing more than bookmarks to websites that you can use from pretty much any internet browser.
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SaaS
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Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud optimization services, today announced the company has joined the OpenStack™ community. Akamai plans to provide the OpenStack community with advice and guidance on best practices for platform design and architecture to help overcome the availability, delivery, performance, and scale challenges inherently faced by globally distributed cloud infrastructures and applications.
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CloudBees is made up of Open Source veterans. Sacha Labourey was the CTO of JBoss, Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the Founder of Jenkins and Hudson, Michael Neale, Adrian Brock, Ryan Campbell, Paul Sandoz, Harpreet Singh Vivek Pandey, and many others have spent most of their careers developing open source software. On the business side, David Skok and I are two well known advocates for the open source business model.
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OpenStack is set to begin the second stage of its existence as an open standard with the formation of a non-profit-making foundation which will solely be in charge of the intellectual property and the management of development projects.
The OpenStack Foundation was announced at the organisation’s conference in Boston, Massachusetts, today and it is hoped to officially open for business in 2012, though an actual date has yet to be set.
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NASA and Web hosting company Rackspace jointly launched a new cloud computing project last year called OpenStack. The goal is to produce a standardized set of open source software components for building out self-hosted elastic cloud computing environments.
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During the course of the past year, the OpenStack open source cloud project has grown significantly from its origins as a joint effort of Rackspace and NASA.
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Databases
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Oracle is the clear market leader in the commercial database community, and therefore it is critical for any member of the database community to pay close attention to the new product announcements coming out of Oracle’s annual Open World conference. The sheer size of Oracle’s sales force, entrenched customer base, and third-party ecosystem instantly gives any new Oracle product the potential for very high impact. Oracle’s new products require significant attention simply because they’re made by Oracle.
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One of App Engine’s most requested features has been a simple way to develop traditional database-driven applications. In response to your feedback, we’re happy to announce the limited preview of Google Cloud SQL.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Even among Oracle employees, there’s uncertainty about what was announced. Ed Screven gave us just a couple of bullet points in his keynote; Sergio Leunissen, the product manager for OEL, didn’t have further details in his OpenWorld talk beyond it being a beta of limited functionality; and the entire Solaris team seemed completely taken by surprise.
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Oracle put the focus on Java recently with previews of developments yet to come. “I would say that Java is in better strategic shape on several levels,” Al Hilwa, a research director at IDC, told TechNewsWorld. “The most important aspect is unblocking some of the politics and moving forward with the [Java] SE 7 and SE 8.”
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Education
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“Newsosaur” blogger and media consultant Alan Mutter some time ago suggested that journalism has become a lot more like Silicon Valley. Newspapers are too risk-averse, he said, and so they “need some fresh DNA that will make them think and act more like techies and less like, well, newspaper people.”
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Business
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SugarCRM is the world’s largest open source CRM (customer relationship management) software. Founded in 2004, over 7,000 customers and more than half a million users rely on SugarCRM to execute marketing programs, grow sales, retain customers, and create custom business applications. These custom business applications can be used in a multitude of ways, such as to power sales teams, run customer support organizations, and manage customer information databases.
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Public Services/Government
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Bristol City Council has been cleared to build an IT infrastructure using open source software after a visit from CESG, the cyber security arm of the UK intelligence services.
Complaints about CESG’s obstruction of open source software were branded “folk-law” at a meeting the security body held in Bristol yesterday with council leader Barbara Jenke and others including Bristol IT chiefs Paul Arrigoni and Gavin Beckett, and executives from the Cabinet Office.
The security body, an arm of GCHQ, denied its Code of Connection (CoCo) and guidance on information assurance prevented public bodies using open source software.
The meeting heard how CESG rules, by which public bodies determine what systems they should use, were being interpreted incorrectly.
Liam Maxwell and Bill McCluggage, Cabinet Office directors of ICT futures and ICT policy respectively, joined the meeting to tackle what they believed was a misperception that had been thwarting their policy to increase the use of open source software in government.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Have you ever spent time with Arduino? It’s an open source electronics platform based on a microcontroller and microprocessor with I/O capabilities that allow it to drive many kinds of inventions. We’ve covered the platform and the community that creates with it before. The project has come a long way in recent years, and here are some of the highlights as they stand now.
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Health/Nutrition
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The massive undertaking to create a dual-agency EHR that serves both DoD and VA patients with a system woven from existing proprietary and open source components might demand something to which the federal government is largely unaccustomed.
“The government tends to have this view of, ‘We’re the ones in charge here,’” said John Scott, author of the report “Open Technology Development for Military Software,” a member of the Military Open Source Software (Mil-OSS) community and senior systems engineer and open technologies lead at RadiantBlue Technologies.
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Wisconsin dairy farmers are appealing a state judge’s ruling that they do not have the right to own a dairy cow or drink the unprocessed milk from their own cows.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The methane gas industry is snapping up land across the United States, and it’s not only regions with gas reserves its after. Part of the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which has become big business in the nation, requires a fine silica sand. The sand is most easily accessible in the state of Wisconsin, which means the industry is looking to scrape the Midwestern state of it’s rolling hills by extracting its sand. This new scramble for sand mining has local residents concerned about the health and environmental impacts on their communities.
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Finance
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As the “Occupy” protests spread across the country with the slogan “we are the ninety-nine percent,” two reports released this week demonstrate how the top one percent are playing an increasingly outsized role in American elections.
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Copyrights
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If laws about digital locks like Bill C-11 had been in place in 1980, we would have never seen the astonishing evolution of the “Rip, Mix and Burn” zeitgeist that Steve Jobs created. Not only has Apple gone from the brink of bankruptcy two decades ago to become the world’s very most valuable company at various recent times on the stock exchanges. It’s also incontrovertible that Steve Jobs changed the world in the process – and much for the better.
“Rip, Mix & Burn” became an iconic mantra. Laws like Bill C-11 would have made much of what “rip, mix and burn” was all about illegal. Here’s the transcript of a brilliant and prescient 2004 lecture by Princeton’ celebrated Prof. Ed Felten about “Rip, Mix and Burn”, and efforts to stifle the notion through copyright law. He makes a number of references to Apple. And when he talks about the promise of a future with a “universal media machine”, just substitute the term “iPad”. Prof. Felten asks in 2004 whether society should embrace the change that could come from the “universal media machine”, and the spirit of the “Magna Carta” Betamax US Supreme Court decision of 1984, or whether we resist it.
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10.07.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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One Linux site hit by a hack a month ago has come back online, but the main Linux.com remains offline.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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World of Goo is a really popular game, especially among Linux folks, with an awesome physics engine and music. We have been recommending it all along. It was in our list of favorite games for non-gamer folks among Linux users. It is undoubtedly one of my favorite games in Ubuntu.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE team proudly announced last evening, October 5th, the second maintenance release for the KDE Software Compilation 4.7 environment.
KDE Software Compilation 4.7.2 is a version that is focusing on fixing last-minute bugs and finishing the required documentation and translations.
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The IPFire project development team has announced the first beta release of an ARM port of version 2.11 of its open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux server distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s internal drive.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth, father of the popular Ubuntu operating system, proudly announced last evening (October 5th) the name and the goals for the next version of Ubuntu.
Yes dear readers, we are talking about Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, dubbed Precise Pangolin and scheduled for release next year on April 26th.
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Now, the Supreme Court of India has directed all the courts across the nation to switch over to Ubuntu 10.04. The apex court has also given all the courts customised Ubuntu Linux DVD for installation.
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Flavours and Variants
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What if you had a robot that could roll around the office, speak with your coworkers, and act as your eyes and ears when you’re 10,000 miles away? How about if that robot’s control system was simply an Android app you could download for free? We’ve been covering the open source Qbo robot project for quite some time now, and this is without a doubt probably the most awesome advancement the project has made in its relatively short history – if you ask your narrator, that is. You must simply download the app, identify yourself and connect, then control away!
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Phones
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Android
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ACRyan known from its bestseller Linux based mediaplayer, the PlayonHD now introduces an Android based mediaplayer, the Veolo.
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In a sign of the central role smartphones will play in its future consumer-electronics strategy, Sony Corp. is nearing a deal to buy out Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson’s stake in their mobile-phone joint venture, people familiar with the matter said.
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A placeholder video on the official Android developers channel.
Google is expected to serve up Ice Cream Sandwich–the newest version of Android–on Tuesday at the Samsung Unpacked event in San Diego.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Pandigital SuperNova announced an eight-inch Android 2.3 tablet that costs just $229 and offers one-stop access to Barnes & Noble’s eStore. The SuperNova offers a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor, 4GB internal storage, a seven-inch, 800 x 600 screen, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity, says the company.
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I bought my netbook hoping it would be the perfect portable companion for those quick jobs when I’m out and about — like updating one of my posts, or touching base with my boss without using my phone. The problem is, those “quick” jobs seemed to take ages on the netbook. Starting up Firefox in Windows seemed to take forever, and forget about opening multiple tabs. Even on Ubuntu, everything moved a little more sluggish than I’d like. Sure, netbooks are always going to be a little bit slower, but when they move at the speed of molasses, it seems to defeat the entire purpose of having one.
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HP is investigating how several TouchPads reportedly shipped to end users running Android, instead of webOS.
Shortly after HP announced it would stop selling TouchPads and began offering the remaining tablets for US$99, reports surfaced from a few users who say they received TouchPads that run Android instead of HP’s webOS software. At the same time, developers have been working on porting Android to the TouchPad, since it’s uncertain how much support and development HP will dedicate to webOS in the future.
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With the TouchPad’s fire sale, which saw units selling for as little as $88 USD, the short-lived Hewlett-Packard Comp. (HPQ) webOS tablet is chic again. Given that webOS, appears on its last legs in terms of support from HP, developers are rushing to port Google, Inc.’s (GOOG) Android OS to the device to extend its lifetime.
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They are at 100K units per month and they need millions to reach 220million children.
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Volunteers write better code, and maintain it better. At least that’s what Michael Meeks, SUSE’s desktop architect and senior LibreOffice developer says.
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The SOGo developers have released the first beta of version 2 of their open source groupware solution. The most significant new feature is native support for Microsoft Outlook: the developers say that Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 can connect directly to SOGo as if it were an Exchange server, without the need for additional plug-ins; this is achieved through the use of the SOGo OpenChange middleware.
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OpenStorage provider Nexenta Systems is aiming to use its forthcoming appearance at VMworld Europe later in October to showcase VMware’s so-called ‘Hands on Lab’ (HOL) demos. The company will be at pains to convince attendees that its open storage concepts can deliver “enterprise performance for a fraction of the cost of traditional, legacy storage solutions”, so is there substance behind these claims?
Nexenta’s HOL, classified as a true public cloud, will aim to emulate what was achieved at VMworld US where the company ran four out of eight HOL vertical application areas for the duration of the show.
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The link between open innovation and open source has long been documented. That there is a significant correlation is obvious and not arguable, but to what extent is there causation? And in what direction?
Open innovation describes a process, whereas open source — as well as its predecessor, free software — has traditionally described a product or end result. The ultimate determination of whether a software project qualifies as open source is the license under which it is released.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation and CE Linux Forum announced a schedule for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE), set to take place Oct. 26-28 in Prague. Co-located with LinuxCon Europe, ELCE 2011 offers 50 presentations on Linux and Android — including projects such as Genivi, Yocto, Linaro, and possibly Tizen — plus speakers ranging from Linus Torvalds to Intel’s Dirk Hohndel.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has published the first beta of version 8.0 of the open source Thunderbird news and email client. Compared to previous Thunderbird version updates, the development release offers very few changes, some of which focus on add-ons. According to the Releases wiki, it will arrive in a stable production-ready form on 8 November.
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SaaS
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One of the questions that comes up frequently in open source projects is “who’s contributing to this thing?” For single-company efforts like MySQL, it’s usually pretty obvious where the bulk of contribution is coming from. But for projects like the Linux kernel or Hadoop, a little digging is in order. The problem with measuring contributions to projects is it’s not trivial figuring out how to credit contributions from individuals as they move from one company to another. Consider, for instance, the question of who really wrote Hadoop. Hint: It’s not just Yahoo and Hortonworks, as some might have you believe.
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OpenStack will be the open alternative to proprietary cloud players, the open-source cloud initiative’s driving forces said Thursday at the OpenStack Conference in Boston.
And as the Rackspace-led OpenStack open-source cloud initiative moves headlong into its second year and experiences a groundswell of interest and participation within its community, 2012 is the time to “think bigger” and prove itself as the open alternative.
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HP’s cloud strategy will rely heavily on its participation in OpenStack open source cloud community, the tech titan said Thursday at the OpenStack Conference in Boston.
“We are completely committed and on-board with OpenStack,” said John Purrier, HP’s vice president of cloud infrastructure, at the event.
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Opscode Chef Cookbooks is a software tool designed to help deploy core components of the newly released version of the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, codenamed “Diablo.” In collaboration with Dell and Rackspace, Opscode says it developed Chef Cookbooks to address automation and management of OpenStack.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has released JavaFX 2.0, the biggest revamp of the development platform in years, and outlined plans to make it open source.
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Education
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But Belarmino, who retired Oct. 1, pointed to his institution’s commitment to open source as its single most significant move under his leadership. It was just seven years ago when he and his president at the time, Raul Rodriguez, decided that in order for the college to best leverage technology to support the institution’s mission, it should join with other leading institutions in the community source model.
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Semi-Open Source
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Public Services/Government
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Linux IT has revealed it has been called in to help advise Bristol City Council (BCC) on its ambitious open-source strategy.
The open-source integrator attended a meeting today called by the Cabinet Office to discuss the council’s open source adoption strategy, which it said had “allegedly suffered from flawed advice” provided by its previous open-source provider.
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The number of open source applications installed by default on desktop PCs of public administrations in Malta has increased by 47 percent, between December 2009 and May 2011, says Michel Bugeja, enterprise architect at Malta’s Information Technology Agency (MITA). “The biggest increase is on tools to handle PDFs, for creating diagrams, for mind mapping and for project management.”
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Open source is a topic rising in importance for public administrations in the United Kingdom. Very recent examples of public administrations turning to this type of software include city and county councils, hospitals and government departments, and politicians increasingly recognise its importance.
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90 % of public authorities and 75 % of companies in Spain already use free software, according to the latest figures released by the National Statistics Institute.
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s no wonder Open Source Project cafe attracts hipsters, jocks, DJs, graffiti artists, techies, chess savants and coffee connoisseurs. An eclectic clientele is to be expected when a Tempe singer and painter with a penchant for mosh-pit dancing, a former Scottsdale resident with a business degree, and a global-studies student earning a living as a coffee barista decide to go into business together.
Open Source Project is the brainchild of Tempe native and musician/painter Ryan Gentry, 35, and Michael Witham, 26, an Arizona State University W.P. Carey School of Business graduate. After graduating last year, Witham decided to move to Tempe to open his dream business.
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Open Access/Content
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“We all have to bring something extra in this hyperconnected world,” were Tom’s parting words to the THINK Forum audience. In the end, the fundamental question we all need to wrestle with is whether the US is slowly but surely on the way down, or whether it can arrest its decline, recapture its immigrant heritage and bring whatever something extra is needed to lead in our emerging hyperconnected world.
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Security
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A medical data breach exposed the 20,000 private medical records of emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. incorporating detailed information such as names, diagnosis code and discharge dates.
Altogether the leaked information included patient names, diagnosis codes, account numbers, admission and discharge dates and billing information for patents at Stanford Hospital’s emergency room during a six-month period in 2009, according to The New York Times.
The hospital confirmed the breach to CRN, but could not immediately provide details.
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Finance
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Apparently, Obama has a plan for winning re-election that does not involve Ohio… oh, and he is tired of talking about job CREATION.
Yesterday, after months of seeming ambiguity about whether to really take ownership of the three job-killing, Bush-signed, NAFTA-style Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, he sent them to Congress for approval. Keep in mind that even the official U.S. International Trade Commission studies show that the Korea deal, the most economically significant since NAFTA, will increase our trade deficit. It’s projected to cost 160,000 jobs — many in the jobs of the future categories like high-speed trains, solar, computers etc.
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday that he is hopeful the Senate will vote next week on proposed free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea.
“In spite of my not feeling so strong about these — I’m not a big fan of these matters — I’m doing my best to advance this so we can have a vote; hopefully as early as Wednesday of next week,” he said on the Senate floor.
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While the biggest rivals on Wall Street share a common disdain for new constraints on financial risk-taking, they’re fighting over exactly how to tame the sprawling regulatory overhaul.
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Under fire from President Barack Obama, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan defended his company’s new $5 monthly fee on debit cards, arguing that “we have a right to make a profit.”
“I have an inherent duty as a CEO of a publicly owned company to get a return for my shareholders,” Moynihan said in an interview with CNBC’s Larry Kudlow at the Washington Ideas Forum.
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Some officials and former officials are taking the view that a large fund of financial support for troubled eurozone nations could be decisive in stabilizing the situation. The headline numbers discussed are up to 2-4 trillion euros – a large amount of money, given that German GDP is only 2.5 trillion euros and the entire eurozone GDP is around 9 trillion euros.
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Mark Engler, Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right
Micah Sifry, #OccupyWallStreet: There’s Something Happening Here, Mr. Jones.
Mike Konczal, Understanding the Theory Behind Occupy Wall Street’s Approach
Doug Henwood, The Occupy Wall Street non-agenda
Glenn Greenwald, What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?
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A combative President Barack Obama challenged a divided Congress on Thursday to unite behind his jobs bill or get ready to be run “out of town” by angry voters. Hoping to use public frustration and economic worry as leverage, he called his proposal an insurance plan against a painful return to recession.
In a news conference long on restatements of his ideas, Obama laid bare the dynamic that now is Washington: The era of compromise is over.
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Concerns over Wall Street practices and economic inequality that have led to sit-ins and rallies in New York and elsewhere reverberated up to the White House on Thursday, with President Barack Obama saying the protesters are expressing the frustrations of the American public.
Thousands of protesters, including many in union T-shirts, marched the day before in lower Manhattan, joined by labor leaders who say they will continue to support the protests with manpower and donations of goods and services.
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Concerns over Wall Street practices and economic inequality that have led to sit-ins and rallies in New York and elsewhere reverberated up to the White House on Thursday, with President Barack Obama saying the protesters are expressing the frustrations of the American public.
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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg slammed the Occupy Wall Street protesters on Friday, saying their attacks on banks could harm one of the city’s major employers.
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US President Barack Obama has said that the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in New York and other US cities reflect “broad-based frustration” among Americans with how the US financial system works.
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One of the most well-rehearsed axioms of the Occupy Wall Street event is that “the media does not know how to talk about it,” and, as a result, is talking about it to as minimal an extent as is possible. Fortunately for the occupation’s supporters, their presence is getting harder and harder to ignore. And so the media’s problem is slowly but steadily becoming the nation’s problem.
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Copyrights
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He writes in response to PETER DECHENEY’s piece which provides details on US trade agreements and legislation that extend copyright to foreign copyrighted works that had not previously been covered as they were in the public domain and the period of copyright by another 20 years link here. Yglesias point was a simple one: that so much of what is produced in the arts is derivative (i.e., it has a hard time being anything else), covering more and more works with copyright greatly complicates and raises the cost of producing new works you have to get “rights” or permission at cost in both time and money.
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The internet’s authoritative source for time-zone data has been shut down after the volunteer programmer who maintained it was sued for copyright infringement by a maker of astrology software.
David Olson, custodian of the Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Database, said on Thursday he was retiring the FTP server he’s long maintained. Also known as the Olson database, it’s the official reference Unix machines use to set clocks to local time and is used by countless websites and applications to reconcile time differences across the world.
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ACTA
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Posted in Apple at 1:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The king of showmanship remembered, but with a factual look at his achievements, not hype
STEVE JOBS was a very successful capitalist. He helped create a company that made a lot money.
Sure, the iPhone 4S is a sign of stagnation and more of Apple’s usual delusion, deception, media hype, and reality distortion field, but Steve himself did a very good job after he had rejoined Apple. By the word “good” we mean effective, profitable. See my thoughts on Apple (video) and why the company was in fact unethical. Whether it was Jobs’ decision to make those final decisions is not an issue we ought to go into because there is too much uncertainty there. Only people deep inside the company can shed light on these issues. We have some wiki pages about Apple to provide some more background information on some of these issues.
Apple’s outrageous software patents have not gone away along with Mr. Jobs. A day after his death we read that “Steve Jobs Patents OS X Dock Day Before his Death”. To quote: “A search at the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) site reveals 312 issued Apple patents where Jobs was one of the listed inventors; 269 of these of these were design patents, which cover ornamental design aspects of some device. (A search leaving Apple out found 317 patents issues to Jobs, implying he also filed a few patent applications in the years he was not at Apple.) There appear to be dozens more pending patent applications filed in Jobs’ name, as well.”
Those were not innovations. Those were design monopolies. Many of those are not deserved due to prior art and generality. We saw these in the courtroom. Apple needed to doctor evidence (lie) to fool judges.
Richard Stallman’s comment on Steve Jobs’ death is polite and direct. He wrote in his political blog that “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
“As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.
“Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.” [source]
Stallman summed it up quite well. Steve Jobs’ legacy was also mentioned by Jamie Love, who noted that:
Jobs was willing to build his newer products on free open source software and then use proprietary extensions and standards and patent litigation to marginalize free software. He was quite good at turning the operating system and applications into a store to buy things from Apple.
Over at Slated.org we found much harsher words about Jobs, including the following observations:
But no, it wasn’t Gandhi, nor indeed anyone of even the slightest nobility. It was a patent extortionist with an apparent objection to altruism, called Steve Jobs. Even El Presidente fawned over this selfish racketeer, like he was the new messiah, or something…
[...]
According to the CIA World Factbook, 160,521 people die every day. Steve Jobs was just one of them.
I bet very few of the other 160,520 people who died that day ever made sinister threats to ‘go after’ an altruistic software project like Theora, or ran around suing everyone for making ‘rounded rectangles’ and ‘green phone icons’. I bet they also donated a helluva lot more to charity than Jobs too, given that he apparently had some kind of objection to it, which is sort of like having an objection to love and compassion. Or how about the time Jobs bribed the police to act like they were his private security agency, to kick down the front door to a journalist’s home, seize his property and interrogate him like a criminal, just because of some crap iGadget accidentally lost by an Apple employee, after that journalist had already voluntarily contacted Apple and returned it to them?
So given the sort of monster Steve Jobs was, witnessing the spectacle of everyone from Joe Blogs to El Presidente gushing over him, like a bunch of schoolgirls at a rock concert, is absolutely sickening.
[...]
As for being a ‘visionary’ … the only ‘vision’ Jobs ever had was the one he nicked from Xerox PARC. From that point forward he made a career out of shamelessly stealing others’ ideas, shoehorning them into shiny but otherwise dysfunctional and DRM-infested toys, then branding an Apple logo on them (ironically also nicked, from the Beatles). And then to add insult to plagiarism, Jobs fraudulently stamped his ‘IP’ seal on those ‘shamelessly stolen’ ideas, then embarked on a hypocritical and vicious rampage of litigation. How’s that for gratitude? Add that to the litany of virtues Jobs didn’t subscribe to.
Paula Rooney chose another approach by doing PR for Mr. Jobs, essentially openwashing him. Her colleague did something similar. In a more respectful post from SJVN and from Muktware we find an openwashed Jobs whose relationship with FOSS is at least being described as “complicated”. To quote:
For whatever reason, Apple holds its secrets in a death grip. When new products are rolled out, developers are threatened with being removed from the program if they leak any information. Obviously, this seems over the top when you’re used to open source development and the collaboration that comes along with it.
Mr. Jobs was using patent monopolies to manipulate this market, so here at Techrights we stopped being apathetic towards Apple some time last year (after Apple had filed a lawsuit against HTC). Here is what Mr. Pogson wrote about the disinformation we keep seeing in the media:
I am being inundated with wild claims of fans of Steve Jobs about how wonderful he was. The facts are a different patchwork:
* He invented the PC – Nope. Not even close. I still have a working PC from 1980. The Macintosh did not emerge until 1984.
* He invented the GUI – Nope. Not even close. He got the idea from Xerox who got it from … I was using crude GUIs in the 1970s and they were old then.
* He inspires inventors – Nope. Many inventive people don’t even bother because some bully like Apple will sue them for inventing something.
And about the attack on Android he wrote:
The issues of patents is a house of cards soon to fall under its own weight. Samsung and Apple are in a mutually assured destruction battle and the same will happen to all the players unless patents are kicked out of software.
We wrote about this case earlier and also mentioned the likely demise of iPhone with the 4S. Apple has just lost a symbolic figure, not just a number or a brand.
People die every day. Over a hundred thousand of them. Even a celebrity dies every day, but we are not seeing press releases from the White House issues for each one of them. What troubles us is that the death of a person not only became a media feeding frenzy (they are trying to monetise this death) but also an opportunity for revisionism because nobody is willing to say negative things about a person who has just died. Here at Techrights we care about what’s true, not just what’s PC (politically correct). Jobs and Apple — like Gates and Microsoft — were copiers of other people’s great ideas. They admitted this. So let’s not give more credit than deserved just because of a tragic and undeserved death. █
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