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05.21.12

Links – Explorer Goes Down, Oracle Judge is Coder

Posted in Site News at 4:42 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

    Explorer Abandoned

  • Ubuntu To Ship on 5% of All PCs Sold Next Year

    “We sell millions of PCs with HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, Acer,” Mark Shuttleworth recently told Bussiness Insider website. ”We expect to ship close to 20 million PCs in the next year.’

  • Linux accessibility – what is it and why does it matter

    I will not completely go into detail about why I use Linux. Suffice it to say that if you are a blind Windows user, you are, for the most part, a target of big name companies who make extremely pricey software products (namely screen readers and screen magnifiers as well as other technologies) which allow you the “privilege” of using your computer system. … Ever installed a system with your eyes closed, literally? … As of right now, at least to my knowledge, one can completely install Debian (see the Debian accessibility page), Ubuntu, Vinux (a Ubuntu derivative designed for blind and visually impaired users), Trisquel and Arch Linux (via Chris Brannon’s TalkingArch ISO image).

  • Google Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most used browser

  • Hardware

    • Lenovo dumps classic keyboard on new ThinkPad laptops

      I currently own an HP Envy laptop. I like the machine overall, but typing on its island-style keyboard is a frustrating chore, one that inevitably triggers a string of typos that don’t occur when I use a classic keyboard.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • Anti-Trust

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban

      The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

  • Censorship

    • If you are using non free software, you might not really see what’s published here.

  • Civil Rights

    • Noam Chomsky: Plutonomy and the precariat: On the history of the US economy in decline

      The current US economy is built on ‘growing worker insecurity’ – people who are too busy and poor to make demands. … For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

      Lots of missed opportunities are listed, but the Occupy movement is reason to hope that people won’t let themselves be walked on.

    • Colonized by Corporations

      The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Technology Patent Wars Sign of Robust Innovation, Patent Office Claims

      “Passage of the AIA has provided an opportunity to restart long-stalled discussions with our foreign counterparts toward substantive harmonization that will help U.S. businesses succeed in the global business environment. … I don’t think there is any reason to believe that either copyright or patent lawsuits of the kind that we’re seeing in the so-called smartphone wars are a sign of stifling technological innovation. … [litigants] have intellectual property positions resulting from massive investments. They seek to enforce those positions, level the playing field in some way, and you have a dust-up like we’re seeing right now. I do not believe that it’s a sign that there’s anything at all wrong with the innovation environment in the U.S. In fact, I think it’s a byproduct of a very healthy overall innovation environment. These things happen. They sort themselves out.”

      The US Patent Office is hopelessly corrupt, insane and self serving. This explanation begs the question of software as an invention worthy of a monopoly grant and the validity of the 600,000 patents on backlog. A claim to business methods is turned into a “position” which is good language if you think patents should be traded as a commodity, but that contradicts the protecting innovators excuse. People in other countries should take notice of the obvious fact that US Patents are used for US protectionism. People in the US should notice that this protectionism is mostly serving the interest of a few US companies at the expense of other US companies owned by less wealthy individuals. The net result is that the US market is a backwater of inferior goods.

    • Copyrights

      • Admitted file-swapper begs Supreme Court for help

        Dr. Tenenbaum has had years of his life wasted and faces a $675,000 judgment that is completely unjust and makes him a slave for the rest of his life because he admits to having shared a few files.

      • Oracle v Google Judge Is A Programmer!

        “I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I’ve written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There’s no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You’re one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?”

        I do not think this will end well for Oracle.

      • They’re Not ‘Orphan Works’, They’re ‘Hostage Works’

        In the metaphor of the romantic author, the works he creates are his children, born of his labor and genius. … We reflexively begin to believe that orphan works need the kind of protection that society provides to abandoned children. … What these works need are “special forces” that can free them from the constraints placed on them by the combination of the regulatory effects of copyright and the lack of a locatable owner who can grant permission to avoid the consequences of the regulation.

Links 21/5/2012: Linux 3.4 Released, Dream Studio 12.04

Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Introducing PuppetDB: Put Your Data to Work

    PuppetDB is the next-generation open source storage service for Puppet-produced data. Today, this includes catalogs and facts, and will be extended in the near future. The initial release provides a drop-in replacement for both storeconfigs and inventory service.

    We’ve designed PuppetDB to empower Puppet deployments, and built it from the ground up with performance in mind. It’s built on technologies known for their performance, and is highly parallel, making full use of available resources. It also stores all of its data asynchronously, freeing up the master to go compile more catalogs. Beyond that, we’ve devoted copious time to benchmarking and optimizing the performance.

  • GlobaLeaks: The Open Source Whistleblower Software
  • Military Explores Expansion of Open Source Technology
  • Miso Project Offers Open Source Tools for Data Visualization
  • Bangalore India slum kids use open-source software to learn computer skills

    The centre, supported by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), has so far taught 40 students basic GNU/Linux skills along with opensource tools to provide image and graphics software. “We use free software to bring home the idea of equality and freedom. Besides teaching computer skills, we also touch upon the issues of caste and gender discrimination. Also, we emphasise that free software does not mean subsidy for the poor. It’s about freedom from copyright. The focus is on freedom and equality offered by the community software as compared to corporate ware,,” says Balaji Kutty, an IT professional and board member of SFLC who also teaches at the centre.

  • NERC, EPRI Release Open-Source Code To Analyze GICs

    The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) have developed a simulation tool for the electric industry to analyze geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on their systems.

  • Open Source Spotlight – Yabi: Bringing drag-and-drop to supercomputers

    Supercomputers are powerful tools for scientists. They are also very expensive, so wasted time can mean a lot of wasted resources. But making the most efficient use of them is not the easiest proposition in the world; it’s not just a case of clicking a button to analyse a protein. However, fitting out the world of supercomputers with a user-friendly, web-based interface is the focus of an open source project based at Western Australia’s Murdoch University.

    Last year Murdoch publicly launched Yabi, a tool equipped with a web interface to make using supercomputers simpler.

    The computational physics community, as an example, may be very proficient in the intricacies of shell scripts and working with a command line, says Professor Matthew Bellgard, Director of Murdoch’s Centre for Comparative Genomics. “They’ve had a lot of experience in the past running their Fortran code using 4000 cores or 10,000 cores,” he says. However, “there are other domains where scientists don’t necessarily have that skill running command line code or porting their code from one supercomputer to another.”

  • Open Source Software Popularity Is Skyrocketing
  • The Morning Download: Open Source Software’s Coming-Out Party

    Good morning. Open source software is enjoying somewhat of a revival in business environments, although the revival is more about perception than reality. IBM‘s decision to swap out Oracle customer-account management software for similar software from SugarCRM was probably motivated at least in part by a desire to inflict some pain on rival Oracle, but also indicates an underlying confidence in the reliability, stability and scalability of open source software.

  • Winners Announced For International Space Apps Challenge

    While budgetary constraints and increasing commercial competition has clearly taken its toll on NASA, one area where the iconic government institution has unquestionably made headway is the implementation of open source.

  • Sigrok: open source framework for logic analysers

    While there are quite a few budget and even open source logic analyser platforms for recording and evaluating digital signals, each of them usually comes with a custom interface protocol and dedicated evaluation software of varying functionality. Usually, the software only works with one analyser family made by a specific company.

  • Open Source Spotlight: iSpy Connect
  • Open Source in the enterprise

    Open source software has come a long way. From the days when it was seen as a curiosity, to today’s scenario where some of the world’s biggest computer setups run atop Linux including Amazon and Google, it has been an interesting journey. According to IDC, Linux accounts for about 18-20% of the server market by revenues in any given quarter. That’s within striking distance of Unix, which had a market share of 20-22% in the second and third quarters of 2011. Of course, Windows ruled the roost with 45-50% in revenue terms.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice mentoring

      In fact it is about the difficulty to get started at the LibreOffice project, which is a quite bad thing, because we need supporters and contributors of any kind. In the past, the decade of OpenOffice.org, one thing what we missed were the developers (I was not involved at that time, but I heard it several times and I think it is true…). Now, at the LibreOffice project we have easyhacks (At least I assume this, because of THIS Google search). Loads of things have been done about that. Now, I would really want to show you 2 month old numbers from Italo Vignoli’s blog. On March the 15th, there were ~360 people contributing to LibreOffice and ~21 at Apache OpenOffice.

  • Education

    • The case for agile pedagogy

      Policy makers, industry and many teachers are eager that pupils should learn more about computing. This includes learning how to write computer programs, but also “computational thinking”, a transferable way of solving problems and exploring situations, which has wide applications across and beyond the curriculum. In short, as pupils learn to program computers and the principles of computer science they start to bring the unique insights of algorithms, abstraction and the like to other fields. The same is true for teachers – ideas from computing can dramatically change the way we think about our work, and one of these, agile development, is what I’d like to explore here.

      According to many A-level specifications, students are taught that software projects follow the “waterfall” methodology, starting with agreeing requirements, designing and implementing the software, testing it and then keeping things ticking over when it’s deployed to clients.

      In other words, the sort of approach that has characterised public sector IT projects like the NHS database. Hmm… This doesn’t sound that far removed from how we’ve designed curricula: a top down list of things “children should be taught”, schemes of work, implementation in the classroom, plenty of testing, and the “service pack” of INSET as and when needed.

    • UK science minister explains move to open source

  • Business

    • The Open Source Challenge in the Channel

      One of the ironies of the channel these days is that many of the data centers and network operations centers (NOCs) built by solution providers are based on open source technologies. Almost invariably, these platforms are being used to support commercial software and systems that have been deployed at any number of customer locations.

      That may sound a bit hypocritical. But in truth it just reflects an economic reality. Many solution providers have plenty of expertise available to them. What they are often short on is funding. When faced with the choice of throwing labor at a solution versus parting with cash to acquire commercial technologies, the decision is almost always to “sweat” the labor investment.

    • Open source Opsview polishes IT monitoring lens

      Opsview has around 19,900 customers using its free open source offering and a further 100 customers paying for all the bells and whistles as well as a support package in the shape of the Enterprise version.

    • The Serious Business of Open Source, Inc.

      Imagine what “Risk Factors” a hypothetical Open Source Incorporated would put into the regulatory filings that corporations file every year. The process could well provide insight into what the communities of Open Source should be prepared for.

    • Nuxeo growth shows increasing demand for open source solutions

      First a look at the numbers: Nuxeo reported global customer growth of 40 percent adding new customers that included Electronic Arts and InterContinental Hotel Group. It was North America where Nuxeo really took off, as North America became the company’s biggest market with revenue doubling there. Meanwhile, the community also grew. Nuxeo reported that the number of downloads tripled.

    • IBM Gets Behind Snort, Expands Anomaly Detection
    • Liferay Announces Strong Sales Growth in Europe

  • Funding

    • Great place to browse around

      Bocoup incubates Web startups, fosters open-source community [...] Web app and open-source consulting company that also provides space and funding for startups.

  • Project Releases

    • Lightspark 0.5.7 released

      A new ver­sion of Lightspark has been released yes­ter­day. You can give it a try by get­ting the source code from launch­pad. Ubuntu pack­ages should be avail­able shortly from our PPA

    • Cassandra 1.1 Brings Cache Tuning, Mixed Storage Support

      Apache has dished out another serving of Cassandra, the open source NoSQL database popular for handling big data. The improvements speak to a maturing NoSQL database that’s well-suited for big data deployments. This time around, Cassandra has improvements to its query language, and tuning improvements that will help companies trying to boost performance with a mixture of magnetic media and solid state drives (SSD). Its continued development helps maintain open-source dominance in the big data/NoSQL market.

    • OpenMAMA Project Delivers First Release of Middleware Messaging API

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Fighting for Freedom in Slovakia

      FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) is helping a Slovakian business fined for failing to use that other OS and IE for filing taxation information. It will be interesting to see whether or not the courts can order the Slovakian government to do IT the right way, with open standards for communication protocols and file formats.

    • Executive summary of the EURA case
    • OSI Supports Open Standards

      The Open Source Initiative agreed what made a standard open back in 2006 and today collaborated with the Free Software Foundation on a press statement about it.

Leftovers

  • Microsoft ejects DVD playback from Windows 8

    Digital media playback in Windows 8 has fallen casualty to the savage economics of the PC industry and changing tastes in consumer viewing.

    We knew Windows Media Center would be sold at extra cost in Windows 8, but Microsoft now says you won’t be able to play DVDs on Windows Media Player in Windows 8.

  • Hardware

    • Can Nvidia’s Kepler processor revolutionize virtual desktop hosting?

      In a BYOD world, this approach is compelling. By hosting the desktop, IT owns a virtualized generic hardware environment yet can supply that environment to a variety of hardware devices-smartphones, tablets, Linux PCs and even smart TVs, which could be used more readily for high-end, off-site conferences in rented facilities or as a cheaper alternative to more expensive conference room solutions.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Why Goldman Is Not a Simple Culprit in the Financial Crisis Report

      The Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee’s report on the financial crisis is an important document. It is an exhaustive look at certain main aspects of the financial crisis, a report which heavily criticizes Washington Mutual, the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision, the credit ratings agencies, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

    • A Sea of Robin Hoods Tell the G8, “It’s Time to Tax Wall Street!”

      Thousands of nurses from around the world descended upon Daley Plaza, in the heart of Chicago on May 18, to demand that the richest nations in the world put an end to austerity politics and start asking the people who collapsed the global economy to do more to “heal the world.”

  • Censorship

    • UK ISPs ordered to block Pirate Bay website

      The High Court said on Monday that Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media would have to block access to The Pirate Bay (TPB), following an earlier ruling in February over the role of the site in copyright infringement.

    • The Tor Project’s New Tool Aims To Map Out Internet Censorship

      For years, the non-profit Tor Project has offered Internet users the world’s most secure tool for dodging censorship and surveillance, used by tens of millions of people around the world. Now two of the project’s researchers aim to help users to not only bypass what they call the “filternet”–the choked, distorted and censored subset of the Internet–but to understand it and map it out, the better to eradicate its restrictions.

Articles Against Software Patents and Patent Trolls

Posted in Patents at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Glasses on a paper

Summary: An accumulation of recent articles on matters such as patent trolls, which mostly use software patents based on a recent survey

BOSSON from the FFII pays attention to some cost analyses regarding software patents. Quoting part of what he wrote:

Cost of software patents shown

Nice to see media addressing the cost of software patents. At CNET, Last Jim Kersteller writes “What is that patent lawsuit going to cost you”. Basically you’d have to pay lawsuits costs that are very high and pushes you to settle for anything under a million dollars. It certainly puts the small firm at huge risk. And to top that one off, Techdirt describes a study on why It’s Mathematically Impossible To Avoid Infringing On Software Patents. Even for the larger players patents are as Brad Feld at Business Insider says “Games Where The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play”. In fact this study, at techdirt, says that you earn more if you share for free. Oh wait, thats open standards and Internet.

Over at The Inquirer, a story is told about the “folly of software patents”:

Fax delays reveal the folly of software patents

SOMETIMES even the simplest ideas must wait. Markus Kuhn, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge has been waiting patiently since 1995 to be free to exploit a simple bit of coding innovation.

Sadly for him, the intervening years have seen the technology this innovation was aimed at become obsolete. And he’s in little doubt what’s to blame – software patents.

Back in 1995, Kuhn had written roughly 4,000 lines of code as an open source implementation of the image compression algorithms used by fax machines. The trouble was, a single line of that code was covered by a patent awarded to Mitsubishi for an image encoding standard known as JBIG1.

In Slate, which has some Microsoft connections, patent trolls are being criticised:

How “patent assertion entities” stifle innovation. (It’s even worse than you think.)

[...]

Measuring the effects of patent litigation is a tricky exercise—you need to figure out what innovation would have happened in the absence of a lawsuit. In the case of Acacia’s PACS suit, there was a convenient point of comparison: The lawsuit covered only medical-image-storage software, not text-storage systems, which are just as technologically complex. Since most companies named in the suit sold both image- and text-storage systems, the latter could be used as a benchmark to assess the impact of the Acacia suit on the PACS market.

Recently, CSIRO (a Microsoft client) took money from practising entities, raising the costs that customers will probably need to pay network providers (thus elevating the cost of everything for the benefit of parasites):

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has been awarded more than AU$220m (£142m) in an out-of-court settlement in the US concerning its patented Wi-Fi technology.

Acacia too (with Microsoft connections) found another victim while patent lawsuits generally expand and some defendants just pay to settle, thereby feeding/rewarding legal aggression. The world’s largest patent troll (with origins at Microsoft) extorts a very large number of companies this way, raising the costs of everything. A lawyers’ magazine asks whether this hinders innovation, but gives a somewhat inconclusive analysis (the readership includes trolls, so it tries to be “balanced”):

Do Non-Practicing Entities (aka, ‘Patent Trolls’) Hinder Innovation?

[...]

In addition to paying for protection, many of the bigger companies in the software business have also found themselves spending millions of dollars in order to acquire “defensive patents,” with the explicit purpose of defending themselves against being sued. Of course, the great expense of court cases means that many companies have been forced to change their spending patterns.

NPEs are destroying real jobs, distracting from innovation, and altogether banning some paths of exploration, so the headline is a rhetorical question. The legal press may be unfit to answer such questions because it never produced anything innovative in the first place and success is often measured in terms of litigation (conflict), not progress. Here is a new example of a small company litigating its way into profit (Uniloc was covered here many times before) and another very recent example of litigation as a business model:

A company that makes specialist talking tablet computers for speech-disabled children has mounted a patent lawsuit which seems set to kill off an iPad app that does the same thing for a tenth of the price. The firm is making no commitment to provide replacement affordable software for consumer devices.

How does legal action with patents help innovation at all? How does that drive society forward? Who does this whole mess really help? These are rhetorical questions, but politicians appeal to campaign funding, not to common sense, so patent law continues to be a sham. The same goes for copyright law. Real change won’t come on its own; it won’t come through the ballot box, either. █

“I’m always happy when I’m protesting.”

–Richard Stallman

New Zealand (NZ) Patent Debates Expand

Posted in Patents at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Kiwi slice

Summary: The kiwi (NZ) press turns its attention to a patent controversy other than the question of software patenting

THE patent situation in NZ resembles in some sense the situation in the EU. Although patents on software are in principle verboten, some companies lobby the system constantly and sometimes manage to sneak in software patents, as a matter of practice, not law.

The previous posts about software patents in New Zealand showed that the country is never left alone to decide on its own that it does not want software patents and this recent article says:

Throughout the debate on the patenting of software, a battle has been quietly percolating under the radar over a NZ patent application (NZ525001) that has touched upon just about every issue in the software patent debate.

This other battle is worth following too as it helps raise questions such as, is it just patenting of software that’s problematic? Or maybe a lot more? For sure, copyright and patent laws are outdated and unfit to deal with present reality. Law is a dynamic thing; the problem is that corporations are those which drive it these days, not people. There is an attack on NZ democracy and patents are just part of it. █

“Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won’t leave you alone.”

–Richard Stallman

AOL Helps Microsoft Infiltrate, Harm Open Source Communities, Feeds Facebook With Google-Hostile Patents

Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Lions

Summary: Microsoft is preying on AOL funds and patents

LAST month we saw and covered “Microsoft’s $1 Billion AOL Patent Buy” which was widely covered and publicised in the business press and beyond (leading to a price surge of AOL shares). An AOL investor said that the $1bn Microsoft patent deal was not good enough and he was right. AOL gave its patents to Microsoft probably in part because former Microsoft staff had taken positions of power inside the company, as we showed some years ago. It’s entryism. See again posts such as:

AOL does not stop at patents; it now helps the Microsoft proxy which seeks to disrupt the real Free/open source community. Microsoft booster Mary Jo Foley helps the spin (“AOL joins Microsoft as sponsor of Outercurve Foundation” says her headline).

Generally speaking, to be passing around patents like weapons is always a bad idea and this practice should ideally be banned (more on that later). Here are very recent examples of patents passage in ‘non-retail’ quantities (bulk transfers).

“Facebook use the same AstroTurfing firm to smear Google. Now they share patents, too.”What we failed to highlight last month is the fact that Microsoft’s good ol’ buddy got a share of the ammunition from AOL (via Microsoft). How blatant. This helps Facebook carry on with its patent hoarding and aggression while removing threats to itself. To quote a new article, “Facebook Inc. (FB) (FB), owner of the world’s most popular social-networking site, won an appeals court ruling that invalidated a software company’s patent for a network that lets users communicate on a large scale.” (source)

Here are some articles about Microsoft passing patents to Facebook. Had former Microsoft managers not run AOL (entryism), would Facebook have gotten those patents? This whole exchange of patents there poses a threat to Google not just because of Netscape patents (against Chrome and Android) but also patents that jeopardise Google+, Facebook’s #1 rival. Facebook use the same AstroTurfing firm to smear Google. Now they share patents, too. █

“When people understand what Microsoft is up to, they’re outraged.”

–Tim O’Reilly

‘Piracy’ and ‘Discount’ Propaganda Used to Kick Free Software Out of Governments in Favour of Microsoft Deals

Posted in America, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Spreading Democracy Microsoft

Bush daughters

Summary: A look at new tactics and moves which omit freedom and autonomy from nations foreign to Microsoft

SEVERAL months ago we covered diplomatic cables which show how concerned the US government was (on behalf of Microsoft) when Venezuela was using Free software. To name some of the relevant ones:

Based on the post “Venezuelan Government Blasted for Buying That Other OS” Microsoft eventually got its way:

The government of Venezuela which supplies computers, was caught agreeing to buy 205K licences for ’7′ despite its own policies to prefer FLOSS. The blast in a blog by COLIBRIS is quite thorough and debunks all the usual myths trotted out to prop up the monopoly. They demand a reversal and other action.

This type of forced sale is made after a lot of propaganda which calls Free software “piracy”, shaming government officials into a Microsoft deal. We saw this getting done before. ZDNet Asia helps it happen with pieces like this new one which uses “piracy” propaganda against Free software (it calls it “OSS”):

Open source software (OSS) has picked up in the region with different levels of adoption in different countries, however, it is not a silver bullet to combat piracy, say market watchers.

What watchers? The BSA? This is more of the same nonsense which tries to use shame and guilt to drive Free software out and have Microsoft blanket deals signed. Watch how in the UK, for example, Microsoft uses a familiar “discount” propaganda to imprison the government under an all-Microsoft deal (same trick as used by BECTA):

The British government will not feel the squeeze of Microsoft price rises on volume licensing when the three-year Public Sector Agreement (PSA)12 launches on 1 July, The Register can reveal.

The company yesterday gave UK resellers and customers a preview of the new look price list, also due to kick in at the start of July, confirming hikes of more than a third as it aligns licensing prices across the EU to the Euro.

This is part of the “discount” propaganda (giving away one’s freedom as a “bargain”) that we often see used by Microsoft and politicians to justify their selling of the future and the minds to a convicted monopolist. When will people elect those who actually truly serve the population as opposed to corporations? It is trivial to see what’s going on here. █

Sun: Interoperability More Important Than Patents

Posted in Interoperability, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 6:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Old chain

Summary: An old position paper from Sun Microsystems helps shows a certain resistance to patents such as those which Oracle uses against Android

GROKLAW has some superb coverage of the Oracle vs. Google case, so as the trial kicks into full gear we mostly refrain from covering it. A lot of bloggers use Groklaw as a source while providing summaries.

One interesting post from Groklaw shows Sun’s position on software patents.

“I can’t find it on Oracle’s website any more,” writes Pamela Jones, “but thanks to Internet Archive, we can find Sun Microsystems writing about software patents in 2006 and explaining its position. This was back when the European Union was for a while considering adopting software patents. You will not believe what Sun’s position was. It’s definitely relevant to the Oracle v. Google litigation.

“Sun’s position paper was titled, “Software Patents: A European Union (EU) Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions must not Jeopardize Interoperability.” The title says it all, but I’m going to show the entire statement to you in all its glory, so Oracle can’t pretend, as it tried unsuccessfully to do with the Jonathan Schwartz corporate blog, that it wasn’t an official company statement. Sun strongly urged that Europe, if it adopted the Directive, “allow for the creation of products which can interoperate with the protected products to safeguard competition in the sector and to provide greater choice and lower costs for consumers.”

“Imagine that. Sun said publicly that interoperability was more important than IP rights, even patents, because it led to competition and hence greater choice and lower costs for consumers.”

Can this be used to weaken Oracle’s case? We shall see. █

In Motorola Case, Microsoft Boosters Use Slashdot for Anti-Linux/Android Patent Propaganda

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 6:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Megaphone

Summary: Covering what’s right/correct — not what’s wrong/incorrect — about the Microsoft case against Motorola/Android

THE patent assault launched by Microsoft against Android is a really big deal. One of the fastest-growing platforms (ever!) is coming under constant extortion from an ageing monopolist. Need we stand aside helplessly while this is happening?

Apple’s continued patent hoard aside for a moment (Apple does malicious things too), Microsoft the acquirer/developer-turned-troll is hoardingpatents on tablets and software. Microsoft is trying to take Android apps (with a patent) while attacking Android, taxing it, and removing features from the platform (see this disturbing article. We’ll keep this post concise by citing, not quoting or rewriting).

“Both Apple and Microsoft like to pretend to be the victims, even when it’s Apple which is the litigator and Microsoft is the aggressor (or interchangeably so).”Microsoft seeks a restraining order in the patent case against Motorola, which will soon be part of Google (at least the relevant division). The response to Microsoft’s aggression can be seen as Google fighting against Microsoft’s extortion against Android as a whole (granted, resistance to aggression is not aggression). Some recent articles say that it’s only a matter of time before all green lights are shown for Google to indeed occupy Motorola’s seat in this court case and in the process there might be offloading. As Microsoft essentially bribed B&N to stop fighting for justice this case is very important and Microsoft goes to great lengths to dodge a loss, pretending it (Microsoft) is the victim in all this storm that it, itself, started. Both Apple and Microsoft like to pretend to be the victims, even when it’s Apple which is the litigator and Microsoft is the aggressor (or interchangeably so).

Sometimes Microsoft gets its way by removing deterrence like an embargo (after action in Germany, such as this or even this), but amid this legal fight we also find disinformation. Here is one failed embargo attempt, hardly at all reported while in the US we find that: “In a Seattle court hearing Monday, attorneys for both companies disclosed talks occurred shortly after Microsoft filed a lawsuit in October 2010 alleging that Motorola was unfairly charging the software company to use its video-streaming and WiFi technology. The talks may have continued as recently as February, according to statements in court and filings.”

Notice what Microsoft is doing here. While trying to extort Motorola it ensures it has some sob story, pretending to be on the defensive side (the Microsoft PR machine amplifies this to gain sympathy). As a matter of strategy, Microsoft also moves software distribution to the Netherlands, dodging a platform which is more likely to serve justice for Android:

What makes Germany hub of tech patent battles

Is Germany’s system of litigating disputes over patents bad for business? Microsoft’s decision to move its European logistics and distribution headquarters to the Netherlands from Germany has generated a debate over patent law here, where it is easy to block the sale of a rival’s product even before an infringement claim is verified.

Recently, an ITC ruling against Motorola was made publicly known and as Microsoft loves to use lobbyists such as Microsoft Florian we were showered with flagrant misdirections. The boosters are using Slashdot for their deception and one Microsoft booster wrote a deceiving article, ensuring it gets promoted in Slashdot (after being submitted by the booster himself), under a similarly misleading headline and description. Passive Slashdot followers further amplified it in other sites, perhaps not realising that they got bamboozled somewhat.

As one reader told us, “Groklaw didn’t seem to pick up this one. Slashdot tries to spin it as pro-M$ but the following comment has some good points: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2860233&cid=40048505.”

Microsoft boosters keep seeding the press with Android-hostile coverage and even in the Apple vs. HTC case we see spinners making an appearance (without disclosure):

Apple v. Google Case May End Patent Gold Rush

Since the Supreme Court refused to narrow patents on software and business methods two years ago, there has been a patent market boom.

Watch Microsoft lobbyists interjecting themselves into articles. From CNET:

At least, that’s according to the U.S. District Court of Delaware, which ordered the two companies to discuss a potential settlement. The talks would be moderated by Judge Sherry Fallon, Foss Patents reported today.

This is why Microsoft will continue to use lobbyists. It gets to distort press coverage, so trial by press is subjected to deception by people like Microsoft Florian as a source, briefed by paying clients like Microsoft and given instructions, then proceeding to ‘spamming’ journalists (spam by proxy). Well, another longtime Microsoft booster is relaying Microsoft propaganda for phones as though CNET is just becoming a Microsoft platform for whatever agent to pin ads/press releases onto. Bloomberg covered this better.

The bottom line is, the Motorola-Microsoft case is an important one for the freedom of Android and Microsoft keeps using lobbyists and boosters to misinform the public about it, having recently paid B&N to also stop exposing Microsoft abuses. This is a serious problem which should worry everyone. For development, I consider buying ANDROID+TABLET.htm”>this tablet later in the week because it seems like Motorola is the main company with enough of a nerve/guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep Android free. Being careless about what Microsoft is doing is the path to disaster. █

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’

–Edmund Burke

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