Posted in America, Patents at 9:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Important case about patents on life can helpreformthe system, but there’s more…
Summary: News analysis and patent lawyers’ take in light of some encouraging developments in the fight against algorithmic exclusions
THE past year has brought a lot of press coverage that’s hostile towards software patents. Increasingly, people are being informed and are brought into the side of real justice, not what’s written on paper because some lawyers (typically politicians) help fellow lawyers.
“You really can receive a software patent for almost anything these days,” says this new article from CNET. The context is this: “This time, Facebook is countersuing Yahoo, charging that Yahoo violated 10 of its patents. This move, of course, comes less than a month after Yahoo sued Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 of its patents.
“Facebook’s countersuit shouldn’t surprise anybody; it was always going to fight fire with fire, especially since Yahoo started this unnecessary fight. It’s the same reason Facebook purchased 750 patents from IBM last month — it needed more ammunition in a patent arms race that is quickly escalating.
“But I’m shocked by some of the patents over which these two companies are suing each other. One of Yahoo’s patents focuses on the “optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage”, while Facebook has two patents that cover a “system for controlled distribution of user profiles over a network.” Yahoo owns the patent for a “method to determine the validity of an interaction on a network”, but “generating a feed of stories personalized for members of a social network” belongs to Facebook.”
A lawyer and proponent of software patent seems concerned about the following new development:
Last week the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a curious decision in Ergo Licensing, LLC v. CareFusion 303, Inc. This decision should send chills down the spine of everyone who has patents in the software space, and needs to be carefully considered by all those who draft patent applications in the software space.
It does seem like, provided more people are made well-informed about software patents, the lawyers who run for office will need to deliver real change and remove software patents. Engineers never approved the emergence of such patents, it was never really for them but for the leeches.
With this good news we return to Easter idleness. More patent news will come soon. █
Apple and Microsoft whine that Motorola is stepping on their toes
Summary: A glimpse at patents that affect Linux at present and the situation Microsoft strives for
THE file system patents from Microsoft may be on the verge of collapse. Nonetheless, companies like this one called Paragon — not just Tuxera — help spread those patents to Linux. Equipment running Linux gets a Microsoft tax penalty this way. Former Microsoft staff adds a tax to FOSS through licence compliance placebo — openwashed proprietary software from a company with “Open” in its name. We just know the trick (c/f OpenLogic).
Microsoft is still trying to penalise Android through Motorola, which is now becoming more like Google. But Microsoft tells a story that’s a complete contradiction and reversal of reality. Microsoft dares to complain about patent abuse from Motorola. Yes, the hypocrisy is astounding and this whole charade acts as a distraction from Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour, an “extortion” one might say.
The European Commission’s anti-competition division has opened two formal investigations into Motorola Mobility after complaints from Apple and Microsoft about how it uses its patents against them.
Apple and M$, two of the biggest monopolists in IT (personal computing certainly, and branching out), are accusing Motorola of doing what they do… The irony makes me chuckle. M$ and Apple have been suing the world and don’t want to be sued and injuncted in return. Bullies hate it when someone has the nerve to stand up to them. It makes being a bully difficult when the herd stands and fights.
It’s worth remembering that before Google decided to make its largest ever bid for a technology company in the Motorola Mobility play, it had just lost in an effort to buy the patent portfolio of beleagured telecom company Nortel. That patent portfolio went to a consortium of companies that included Apple and Microsoft–both of them companies that are very seasoned in fighting intellectual property battles.
When Page announced the Motorola Mobility acquisition, he was quite clear that it was a patent play. “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.” It’s worth noting that he singled out two of the companies that had just outbid Google for mobile patents.
Here we are 5.5 years after this site was conceived and we are dealing with the patents issue more than ever before. Now that software freedom spreads, all that the old guard can do is pull software patents to strike back. Some companies just learned to accept change, instead. █
Information provided by Cupertino to support staff and Apple Store employees across the US, snapped by a worker and send to 9to5Mac, shows the company is now replacing iPad 3s brought in by customers who claim to have found the device’s wireless networking facilities wanting.
Would Apple have done that if nothing was amiss? And how can replacing one unit with a unit of the same kind actually resolve anything (unless there are manufacturing defects and poor quality control)?
Meanwhile, notes this one article, there is a group out there that truly believes that Apple products are the best of their kind. To quote the opening:
iPhone users are elitists. It’s one of those things that we’ve always suspected — including iPhone users themselves — but to maintain the status quo and to prevent high tech culture devolving into all out war, we dance around the issue by using euphemistic terms like hipster. The fact is, many iPhone users consider themselves a cut above the rest. They sneer at unresponsive Android devices, laugh derisively at crippled BlackBerrys, and guffaw at Windows Phone 7′s lack of apps. When they buy an iPhone, they’re buying into a way of life and an elevated, entitled echelon of society — the upper class of the technorati, if you will.
I have personally met some of those so-called “elitists”. I once dated one. What’s common to all of them is that they buy iStuff for the brand, not because they think it’s necessarily the best (in technical terms). They expect people to think highly of them because of affiliation with the brand. That’s a really bad reason to choose one product over another.
Summary: How Microsoft gave the illusion of putting many lines of code inside Linux and what this code really does
THERE were many stupid ‘reports’ recently — so-called “news reports” about new statistics from the Linux Foundation. We link to the original reports but ignore as a matter of principles the poor news coverage. Many journalists got it wrong. Many of them were spinning the real report and painting is with the “Microsoft” brush (Novell too played a role)– something along the lines of Microsoft as a top “contributor”. Putting aside all that we wrote before about what those patches are and what they achieve, let it be noted that Microsoft stole he thunder from real Linux contributors for reasons that people who blog fail to mention. As Joab Jackson explains, “Microsoft tallied so many code contributions to Linux due to fact that its original Hyper-V code needed fixing,” Here is a proper report about it:
In the latest study by the Linux Foundation, Microsoft only just misses out on a spot among the top 20 groups and companies contributing to the Linux kernel. It has, however, achieved this only by dint of delivering bad code and then slowly improving it.
Summary: A few updates on SUSE and OpenSUSE (aka “Microsoft Linux”)
THE OPENSUSE project plans a “summit”, which will of course be assisted in part by Microsoft funding, through SUSE the company. The project’s leadership makes improvements by integrating other companies’ work and OBS addssome features. The OpenSUSE project still supports both KDE and GNOME (latest versions) and based on the experience of some:
When I started this blog, I intended to make it my step by step log of the trials and fixes experienced in openSUSE so that it may be a benefit to others. However, when I first tried 12.1 with KDE it was such a terrible experience that I rolled my machines back to 11.4. But this time I went with Gnome instead of KDE; since I had experienced some of the speed improvements in the newer KDE I knew that rolling back would make it seem even worse than it really was. And in any event, I needed the experience with Gnome in order to help others. Indeed, I learned the Gnome way and it was good. Brilliant actually, we have a FANTASTIC Gnome implementation. But now, I have recently acquired a new (to me) laptop with which to be a little more risky and experiment on. So, after trying a few distros I have come back to openSUSE 12.1, but this time with Gnome 3. And I must say, it is fantastic.
SUSE has generally become the sort of company which doesn’t do much for GNU/Linux. It does, however, do a lot for Microsoft (notably taxing GNU/Linux). No matter how it’s judged on technical grounds, SUSE harms software freedom and supporting it by usage is unwise. I sacrificed years of my life explaining to people why they should boycott Novell. Now that Novell is dead the job is not done because Microsoft provided the bribes through SUSE. In the next post I will provide a new example of what those bribes achieve. █
For a number of years, many Linux users (myself included) struggled with Wireless on Linux. Simply put, Linux distros didn’t always correctly recognize or work with the Wireless hardware on the user’s laptop. That has changed in recent years.
Speaking on a panel at the Linux Collaboration Summit this week, Linux Wireless maintainer John Linville said that wireless on Linux has matured.
There’s growing interest in being able to build the mainline Linux kernel with the LLVM/Clang compiler as an alternative to the kernel’s long-standing love-affair with GCC.
Chris Mason, the Oracle engineer who’s the lead developer of the Btrfs, just finished a session at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about his promising and feature-rich file-system.
First week of the month is typically when the KDE team releases its maintenance updates. These releases are nothing to get excited about — but they still hold water for us users. Why? The project steers clear of the glitches introduced with point zero releases towards stability, by squashing bugs and adding minor feature improvements.
Gnome 3.4 was released several days ago. This update brings a plenty of improvements to the user experience, including many bug fixes and small enhancements. Most of the applications have also gone through a redesign and have become more Gnome3-ish. Best of all, this release also brings an improvement to its performance and is now running faster and better. Let’s check it out what is in store in Gnome 3.4.
This story is special, as it was created in an open source manner. The story was written in collaborative fashion by 2-3 dozen people working on it simultaneously. The story is a shining example of the collaborative power of Google Docs. We would like to thank all those who contributed to this story.
The Linux Foundation recently published its annual report about the development of the Linux kernel. As usual, Red Hat and SUSE topped the list as major contributors to the development of Linux kernel. Even Microsoft made it to the top 20 due to their code cleanup of hypervisor. But Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, was missing from the list again.
The package comprises of 14 winners from Ubuntu 12.04 Wallpaper Contest plus the new ‘incrementally updated’ default wallpaper (tweaked noise version).
Many of the community contest selections differ from those previously proposed following copyright, quality, and CD space considerations.
Tired of waiting for Raspberry Pi? With delay after delay, and no fixed release date in sight, maybe it’s time to look for an alternative
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The Raspberry Pi is no doubt a very exciting device, with an unmatched ratio of size, power, and value. However, after months of delays and false starts ranging from manufacturing problems to certification issues, the open source wonder board hasn’t actually been delivered to those who have bought it, or would love to buy it.
All is not lost though, as there are several alternatives available that might just pique your interest.
Or you can pick it up from your local Asda supermarket. The Walmart-owned chain didn’t say how many of the low-cost e-readers it has in stock, and we note the comments from some Reg readers who tried to take advantage of the offer the last time Asda slashed the price of the Kobo and found stores without them.
Bubs thinks you should just go out with the bingers and act like a crazy person right along with them – they won’t know the difference! Fair enough, but I’m not interested in ‘partying hard’, I want to talk with like-minded people about subjects I don’t necessarily get to talk about at the office. For example, we don’t use Node.js at work – so I go to JSConf to chat and learn about it in a casual atmosphere. Except I don’t get to do that. It’s always the same: talks, then binge time.
The roboticist on the panel argued that AI is an intellectually challenging field where the problems are difficult, and therefore can be solved only by highly intelligent people working on obscure mathematics and algorithms. The future, he argued, will look much like the past: a series of incremental, hard-won improvements in very narrow fields.
LibreOffice has breathed new life into the stagnated open source productivity suite. Under The Document Foundation it is moving ahead aggressively. We talked to Charles-H. Schulz Co-founder & Director, The Document Foundation, to understand the development process of LibreOffice, the current status and future plans.
I’m not trying to start a flame war, but OpenBSD packs a lot more current, useful information into fewer pages than does FreeBSD into its still-excellent, more-massive Handbook. The same is true for NetBSD’s also-excellent documentation when compared to what OpenBSD has to offer.
While we have seen that Intel’s Sandy Bridge is doing well on the new GCC 4.7 compiler (along with LLVM/Clang 3.1), has AMD’s Bulldozer CPU architecture advanced at all for this leading multi-platform compiler? Up today are benchmarks of GCC 4.7.0 — with comparative benchmarks going back to GCC 4.4 — from an AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core Bulldozer setup.
The kernel may be the core of a Linux system, but neither users nor applications deal with the kernel directly. Instead, almost all interactions with the kernel are moderated through the C library, which is charged with providing a standards-compliant interface to the kernel’s functionality. There are a number of C library implementations available, but, outside of the embedded sphere, most Linux systems use the GNU C library, often just called “glibc.” The development project behind glibc has a long and interesting history which took a new turn with the dissolution of its steering committee on March 26.
In its early days, the GNU project was forced to focus on a small number of absolutely crucial projects; that is why the first program released under the GNU umbrella was Emacs. Once the core was in place, though, the developers realized they would need a few other components to build their new system; a C library featured prominently on that list. So, back in 1987, Roland McGrath started development on the GNU C library; by 1988, it was seen as being sufficiently far along that systems could be built on top of it.
Tufts University is taking its enterprise content, course, learning, knowledge, and curriculum management system for health sciences, known as Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK), open source. Medical schools around the world now have the opportunity to install TUSK at their own institution, customize it to suit their own needs, and optionally contribute their customizations back to the TUSK source code.
Hollywood and Obama should’ve learned: No form of censorship will be acceptable to Internet users, and we’re fed up with corrupt, back-room deals that are driven by the rich and well-connected. Any major Internet policy changes should be negotiated in the light of day, so the millions of people who’d be affected can have their say too.
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