It sure sounds like that dreaded attempt of ISO/Microsoft to take control of ODF, at the expense of OASIS. SC34 is already stuffed with Microsoft people [1, 2], most of whom have their interests disguised. It’s worth remembering that this is an SC34 meeting near Microsoft which is responsible for everything and it’s Microsoft employees who seem most pleased. Henrion from FFII is rightly angry, arguing that one should “Scrap ISO. They have a stupid system of physical meetings around the planet. I don´t have the money to travel to such meetings.”
This SC34 meeting at Microsoft sure seems to have served as a stepping stone in the hijack of ODF, which Groklaw warned about one year ago. Simon Phipps from Sun is seemingly unhappy. He asks Brown (Microsoft mole and OOXML convenor): “What responsibility does SC34 have for ODF beyond forwarding mail to OASIS?” Later he tells a Microsoft employee: “SC34′s role in ODF maintenance probably matches the Linux Foundation’s role in Windows maintenance following your kernel code drop”
Phipps is referring to this incident, which we last mentioned here. Rob Weir just posts this Q&A, leaving no clear indication of how he feels about this development, into which he could as well be pressured. “Rob Weir tells more than we probably want to know,” argues Glyn Moody.
Question: So who owns ODF maintenance?
Rob: The OASIS ODF TC owns the maintenance of the OASIS ODF standard, and WG6 will own this activity for the equivalent ISO/IEC text. However, neither committee has absolute freedom of action, both being governed by applicable procedural rules of their parent organizations, as well as various joint agreements between OASIS and JTC1.
Given the corruption at ISO [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], is this a safe bet? How did it come about and whose proposal was it?
NZOSS has also just reminded the world of XML and OOXML patents from Microsoft. This is a subject that we wrote about in:
Charles from the OpenOffice.org community had this to say:
I remember that a while ago, as I was attending a heated debate on the (in)famous standardization of OOXML. As we were arguing with Microsoft on some specification details, I happened to state all aloud that when it came to this level of security (the topic at hand was security), I had my concerns about the encryption algorithms used by the specification but that in a general sense, security relied much more on the application using the format and the underlying operating system’s level of security. I went on to say that for the specific portion of the draft we were studying, it was perhaps not necessary to waste time in fruitless discussion topics including the behavior of OOXML documents in a computer undergoing a nuclear attack and being stored on a computer facing a zero-day exploit at the same time.
The response from one of the Microsoft spokesperson (I’m coining the term spokesperson, because that’s what most of them were) was a mix of surprise and sarcasm: “Everything happens, today you agreed with us!”. And indeed, I agreed that we should continue to parse the 6000 pages-long draft.
[...]
First, one has to realize that what happened with Novell was a serious attack against free and open source software, but although it was serious, it never really had any major impact on the community itself. What I mean by this is not that it did not have any real and damageable impact on IT companies or OEMs that ended up signing phony IPR deals with Microsoft. I mean by this that when you step back, you end up realizing that even the divide it caused inside the community is not that big. There is no one “Novell Community” and one “FSF Community”. That simply never existed except perhaps in the mind of some Mono architects. Even the Ximian bunch is very much on its own; influential because of monthly salaries, and time to devout to their pet projects and an historical ties to Gnome. But aside this, the impact of the Novell agreement with Microsoft did not create the “grand schism” many feared or wished at that time.
[...]
That is, I believe, the essence of the Codeplex foundation that is described here. Forget the code for a moment, and you might come to the conclusion that either Microsoft wants to impose its views on patents and copyrights, or it genuinely wants to have a fruitful conversation with the free and open source software community. The former is only surprising as it shows a different approach, but if that’s what they’re looking to achieve I am afraid that unless this foundation comes out with the most radically innovative ideas in the field of IPR, it will fail, for the first reason I outlined much above: Nobody will follow them, except people and constituencies who have an economic incentive to do that. What is left, then, if not the latter hypothesis? Interesting times are ahead of us in this case.
Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation is still seen as undesirable by the Free software community. It’s a subject we covered in:
The next few posts will carry on along the same theme. Microsoft’s bear hugs are merely attempts to take control of its very own opposition, thus diffusing it. █
Summary: Mass-migration to OpenOffice.org in Kazakhstan may imply adoption of the international standard; Nokia makes use of KOffice, which also implies wide use of ODF
A move to OpenOffice.org would imply ODF support — support which is improving in OpenOffice.org 3.2, based on this report from Malte Timmermann.
Further improvements in OOo 3.2 and/or the ODF 1.2 specification
ODF 1.2 now allows for using different encryption algorithms, and all details about the algorithms used need to be documented in the manifest.xml (which is the reason that the manifest.xml itself can’t be encrypted). These ODF enhancements have been submitted to the OASIS ODF TC, and OOo 3.2 already implements them.
Today Thomas Zander from Nokia announced in a blog (http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/09/17/office-viewer-…) that Nokia will be using KOffice as the core of the office viewer of Maemo 5.
“The KOffice community is very happy to see this development”, says Inge Wallin, marketing coordinator of KOffice. “It shows that our long and persistent work on compatibility and adaptibility within KOffice has paid off and is visible to outside viewers.”
This ought to help KDE, which will in turn help ODF, despite the recent Microsoft-Nokia deal. Here is the original post from Zander, which leads IBM’s Rob Weir to saying: “Zander rocks! RT @gwidion: Kudos to @KOfficeHacker, Thomas Zander. Just ported #koffice to the nokia #n900! #ODF to go!! #kde”
This nicely demonstrates how ODF and Free software are complementary. It may be worth pointing out especially today because it’s Software Freedom Day throughout the world (there is also Document Freedom Day). According to this, the spread of ODF on phones is wider than just Nokla devices. “#odf on the iPhone (FileAid), Blackberry (Visor ODF movil), WinCE/PocketPC (SoftMaker) and soon Maemo/Nokia N (KOffice),” writes one person in Twitter. QuickOffice too is to be pressured to offer ODF support. Microsoft may try to fragment ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], but people are smart enough to find ways around Microsoft’s broken ‘support’. █
No chief technologist wants to deploy unproven open source software, risking the operational integrity, revenues and reputation of his or her enterprise. Yet just as certainly, no CTO wants to be left behind as technologies such as the open source LAMP software stack ripen, leaving the field open to its innovative use by nimbler competitors. To help technology decisionmakers assess the tipping point, Nashville-based Remarkable Wit, LLC has invited global leaders in open source development to an Enterprise LAMP Summit to make their case that LAMP-Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python and Perl-has proven its ability to provide performance that CTOs at the world`s largest enterprises can rely on for global deployment.
Clearly, taking a $50 cut from a $300 netbook is something that most OEMs would probably find to be disadvantageous, which would make one think that alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu would have the upper hand. But Microsoft seems to think that it would be happy if it could score five percent from every new PC sale, particularly with the increased range of PC prices with the advent of netbooks and $300 laptops at Wal-Mart.
Although Red Hat promised its customers to retain Xen in the OS through at least the end of RHEL 5 and to provide support for several years thereafter, Red Hat said its future development would focus on KVM. Today, KVM is included as a hypervisor along with Xen in the latest RHEL 5.4 release. Customers are free to choose one or the other as part of the installation process and, essentially, encouraged to experiment.
While some say the cloud doesn’t perform well enough and isn’t stable enough, others say it is perfect for their usage model. Why not take advantage of such a scalable architecture? It can make a great place to “stuff” data, such as backups.
The Linux Plumbers Conference is happening for the second time. The first was a great success – by most accounts, one of the very best technical events of the year. Quite a bit of serious work got done there, with effects being felt throughout the development community. This year – which has just sold out – looks to be just as good.
In an earlier article I demonstrated how to get started with Money Manager Ex, a versatile budgeting and checkbook managing software from Codelathe. I showed how to handle transactions involving “cash back”, that are a little less than obvious. This article will demonstrate a similar technique for handling credit card transactions. While I am using MMEX as an example, any good accounting software should adapt to the technique. An actual event will be used for the tutorial.
After taking 2008 off, I’m happy to say that 2009 is turning into a banner year for GNOME Journal, and 2009 has seen more issues published than any year other 2005, and we’re on pace to break 2005’s record of five issues.
Since we now all know that Kate is holy (thanks to rms. By accident, he obviously confused Kate with emacs, though) let’s have a look at what’s going on. In the last months Kate development is quite active, so here is a quick update:
* new: on-the-fly spell checking thanks to Michel Ludwig. Highlights include e.g. spell checking in comments of source code or latex parts. Also, constructs like sch\”on work in latex.
* extended scripting support in the command line, more on that later
The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is for Alfresco 3.2 Community Edition. It is built on Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, leveraging the Alfresco package from the Canonical partner repository.
Wind River announced that Wind River Linux 3.0 for MIPS now complies with the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 4.0 networking equipment specification maintained by the Linux Foundation (LF). The CGL 4.0 support extends to MIPS64-based multi-core processors from Cavium Networks and RMI Corp., says the Intel-owned company.
Things are looking increasingly bad for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, and they may be looking bad for Palm, too. As GigaOm notes: “Like a desperate gambler down to his last few chips, Palm is ditching Windows Mobile and going all in with its own webOS.” That will leave the Pre as Palm’s big bet in the smartphone arena, and the company has said that the Pre now accounts for the vast majority of the smartphones that it sells (823,000 units in the most recent quarter, in line with analyst’s expectations).
Technically, both Maemo and Android run on Linux kernels. However, Maemo is a full Linux distro, based on Debian, while Android is a sole kernel with a few programs on top of it (namely, Dalvik virtual machine and Sqlite database). On Adnroid all applications run within Dalvik virtual machine, which is heavily optimized and modified version of Java virtual machine (JVM). I tried to analyze the benefits of each platform from the perspective of a software developer, as well as platforms’ current “strategic position”. If you are too busy to read all the details, there is a short summary paragraph at the end of each chapter.
ARM has set the stage for 2GHz processors aimed for devices like set-top boxes and netbook computers. In netbooks, Intel’s Atom leads, and since ARM’s design does work well with Windows, Intel’s Windows netbook market shouldn’t be threatened by this. However, ARM’s chips do mix with Linux.
On 19 September, we celebrate Software Freedom Day. At tomorrow’s Boston gathering, I will have an opportunity to thank the Free Software Foundation on behalf of Sugar Labs for their support. I will also have a chance to tell the story of Sugar, our efforts to help children learn to learn and learn to love and exercise their freedom. I will also solicit your help.
Sugar Labs (R), nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform for children, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which promotes computer users’ right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs, have announced joint efforts to collaborate and promote Sugar on the occasion of Software Freedom Day, September 19th.
It is upon us! Horay! After much planning we have managed to secure a great spot to park ourselves, beg, borrow and get sponsorship to pull this off.
Hundreds of people all over New Zealand, and in fact the world have been doing this. Why? Because we are sick of paying out massive amounts of cash to companies for stuff we can get for free that’s just as good!
Maybe they should. Once it acquires Sun, Oracle will be the largest sponsor of open source projects people use every day. We’re talking Java, we’re talking mySQL, we’re talking OpenOffice.org.
What really goes on in open source projects has nothing to do with his “great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches”.
In his classic “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Eric calls us “happy networked hordes of programmer/anarchists”. We are hordes alright, but are we anarchists? Workers building pyramids is what we are.
The Open Innovation Awards’ Jury today announced the list of the top 20 open source innovative startups that will be invited to present at the Open Innovation Summit on the 2nd of October.
In his first Facebook blog post today, David Recordon has announced the open sourcing of Tornado, FriendFeed’s real-time web services technology. As described by Recordon, Tornado is a “non-blocking Web server framework written in Python”. In addition to open sourcing many of their other technologies, Facebook is continuing to support the open source movement by providing more libraries for developers.
The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) says its use of open source software is a logical consequence of being a publicly funded organisation. “Open source should be relevant for all public administrations.”
KnowledgeTree®, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider focusing on affordable document management software that is easily installed and used by business professionals, today announced a partnership with Zend Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications.
Open Sources: What got you interested in Hadoop initially and how long have you been using Hadoop?
Gottfrid: I’ve been working with Hadoop for the last three years. Back in 2007, the New York Times decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge in the form of images scanned from the original paper. That’s 11 million articles available as images in PDF format. The code to generate the PDFs was fairly straightforward, but to get it to run in parallel across multiple machines was an issue. As I wrote about in detail back then, I came across the MapReduce paper from Google. That, coupled with what I had learned about Hadoop, got me started on the road to tackle this huge data challenge.
As the current hot platform of choice for a lot of developers, we’re not seeing too many Twitter apps just yet in the Deadpool. But one, TwitApps, will hit it tomorrow, the developer is notifying users.
Over the past couple Firefox releases, the Mozilla community has proudly shipped a Mongolian localization of Firefox. And, based on the blocklist pings that Firefox makes everyday, we can estimtate that we have between 10,000 and 20,000 active daily users in that locale. That’s a nice accomplishment by the Mongolian community!
After far too long in development, Thunderbird 3.0 seems to be nearing the home stretch. We take a look at the latest test builds for Thunderbird 3.0 beta 4. Is it worth the wait? Despite the sluggish development cycle, signs point to yes. Read on for how Thunderbird can help you manage your inbox.
OneWebDay exists to celebrate the awesomeness of the internet. It’s also an chance to remind people that the web is a precious public resources. Your poster and photograph are a part of this. When you poster, you’re helping to keep the web open and free.
BonitaSoft, the first provider of open source Business Process Management (BPM) software, announced today the completion of a first round of funding of $3 Million from Ventech and Auriga Partners. Chausson Finance acted as advisor for this transaction.
At the same time, the company marks the arrival of Bertrand Diard, CEO and co-founder of Talend, to its Board of Directors.
Sugar Labs, nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform for children, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which promotes computer users’ right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs, have announced joint efforts to collaborate and promote Sugar on the occasion of Software Freedom Day, September 19th. The FSF will host an event in Boston featuring Sugar Labs Executive Director Walter Bender, FSF president Richard Stallman, and other speakers. Peter Brown, FSF’s executive director, said, “The Sugar Learning Platform is fast becoming an essential route to computer user freedom for children around the world. The international free software movement is getting behind Sugar, and we want to use Software Freedom Day as an opportunity to help draw community attention, developer resources, and external funders to the important work going on at Sugar Labs.”
While Linus is responsible for the development of the Linux kernel, Richard is responsible for almost all of the most important foundation on which Linux distributions are based on. I would say that seventy to eighty percent of any Linux distribution can be attributed to Richard Stallman and his efforts.
AccesStream, an open source provider of security solutions, is pleased to announce the release of version 1.1 of its identity access management (IAM) solution to the open source community.
“Recent years show that openness and collaboration is essential to the generation of innovation in the software sector. Technology increasingly means software. In Ireland, we can see that the production of hardware technology in many, but not all, cases is providing ever diminishing returns. Here we outline some key policy recommendations that are crucial to the fulfilling the vision of making the Irish Smart Economy a reality for the software industry through the adoption and encouragement of Open Source technologies.”
The above extract is from a paper we have produced for the Innovation Taskforce is requesting submissions by the Department of Taoiseach.
The Danish Competition Authority wants to discuss with the European Commission how to enhance competition in the market for office software. It thinks the Danish public sector is too small to do this by itself.
An appointment with the Commission has not yet been made. “We have awaited the translation of the report”, says Michael Fibiger, chief special advisor to the Danish Competition Authority.
Why noop in particular makes sense to me is that even though the noop language might be different than Java, the final product is complied to run on JVM’s. Which means that even though no one is really actually developing application with noop (yet) when they do, they’ll be able to run where ever there is a JVM (which is nearly ever OS, server and desktop in use today).
Considering the success that Google has had to date with GWT, I think developers have a lot to look forward to in noop.
For the first time, the state’s highest court ruled today that the state Declaration of Rights allows police to break into a suspect’s car to secretly install GPS tracking devices, provided they have a warrant before they act.
The JUSTICE Act would renew two of the three expiring PATRIOT provisions, PATRIOT sections 206 (John Doe roving wiretaps) and 215 (FISA orders for any tangible thing), but would also add strong new checks and balances to those provisions and to the PATRIOT Act in general, especially those provisions dealing with the government’s authority to issue National Security Letters. If passed, the bill would also establish critically important protections for Americans against surveillance authorized under the FAA.
It’s really quite sad when you think about what kids are missing because of this “worst case scenario” mentality. In this particular case, these kids missed out on the opportunity to potentially hear from an innovative author of popular kids’ puzzle books (Eric Berlin, author of The Puzzling World of Winston Breen.) That’s troubling enough. But just think what other interesting people or topics these and other kids may never get to experience because of this mentality.
Baroness Patricia Scotland broke the law when she employed a woman who, it turns out, was not legally entitled to work in Britain. A law she should know about: not just because she was one of the youngest ever QCs, nor because now, as Attorney General, she is the government’s own in-house lawyer, but because she was a minister in the Home Office when the law was passed.
It could also create major market opportunities for companies focused on the technology like Google Inc. and Salesforce.com, but raises some troubling questions about privacy and security, observers say.
This is a huge breakthrough. At the moment, you have to choose between the pleasure of reading an analogue artefact, and the convenience of its digital equivalent. With this new scheme, Google will let you find a particular phrase – or even word – in the book you have in your hands, because the latter is a physical embodiment of the one you use on the screen to search through its text.
The trouble is, of course, that this amazing facility is only available for those books out of copyright that Google has scanned. Which gives us yet another reason for repealing the extraordinarily stupid copyright laws that stop this kind of powerful service being offered for *all* text.
So, long story short, it’s a tale of sad customer service which reached depths of incompetence I have never before seen. No company has ever been this bad at keeping promises and meeting expectations. We’d cancel the contract, but no one comes out to collect the damn thing and we keep getting billed.
But then, light! Yesterday an engineer appeared at 9am without any due warning and replaced it. 24 hours in, it’s still working. But then today I get the final straw – in the form of a mass marketing letter from Powwow.
“Powwow is pleased to announce the launch of the most exciting website the bottled water market in the UK has ever seen”.
I sh*t you not. The most EXCITING WEBSITE EVER (for bottled water). They follow this up with more great stuff.
“This is a huge step forward in our company history… join us in supplying any good news you think would be of benefit to Powwow”
Two days ago I wrote a rather rushed appeal for people to write to Ofcom about a BBC enquiry concerning the addition of DRM to its HD service.
[...]
Cynics might even think that Ofcom didn’t really want comments, but was just going through the motions of carrying out a consultation – and a brief one at that – because that’s what the rules say it has to do.
Although this is the first time I’ve come across Ofcom – or anyone else – trying to staunch the flow of comments it had solicited, I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last time.
Despite strong opposition from ORG, ISPs and parts of the music industry, Peter Mandelson is still hellbent on enacting laws that would bring internet disconnection without trial to the UK.
One of the downsides of working in security is that we seldom get to do cool things. The desktop engineers, VM engineers, even kernel engineers get to show off cool stuff. But security guys usually only ever get to show how we broke something, if that. Sometimes all we can do is say “trust us, it’s working.” But I think I have something cool to show off which I’m calling sandbox -X.
On one of their web pages they did something that will disturb many of the Microsoft Sheep out there, they referred to the Linux system they are offering as being user friendly
What can be said is that by corralling some mainframe engines, slashing their prices, and letting them run Linux instances or speed up Java or DB2 workloads, IBM has been able to keep the installed base of mainframe processing power, as measured in MIPS, growing – even as it has its ups and downs each quarter. And the downs have been especially sharp since the economic meltdown kicked in a year ago.
So the bottom line is that I hope Scribus does as well as some are claiming, because having a free, open-source application for creating high-quality printed documents, and having that application run on just about every computer out there is just what I’m looking for.
What is the difference between the “Indicator Display” plasmoid and the “Incoming Message” plasmoid from kdeplasma-addons?
Both plasmoids have the same goal, but the “Incoming Message” plasmoid tries to implement this goal with application-specific code: it has specific code for Evolution, KMail, Pidgin, Kopete and XChat.
The Amarok team is pleased to release the second beta version of Amarok 2.2. For a list of the most important changes and fixes see the changelog below.
As always please help us by testing, reporting bugs, sending patches and most importantly by enjoying discovering music. Thanks to everyone who already helped us this way. We are especially looking for help with podcasting support.
If the traditional Ubuntu with GNOME on the desktop is not your thing, 9.10 Alpha 6 spins are already available for Kubuntu, Ubuntu Server EC2/UEC, Ubuntu ARM, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, and Edubuntu. More information on this release is available from its Ubuntu Testing Page.
A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the sixth and last alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, due for release in late October this year.
As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.10 development.
Ubuntu will be staying here, on my laptop, for the foreseeable future. I like Ubuntu, as I’ve discovered. And, since I’ve started recommending it to others, people for whom I provide ongoing computer support, I now need Ubuntu as well.
So well, I’ve decided to stick to Ubuntu, Synaptic, and to my very own surprise, even GNOME. I am liking it thus far. Synaptic “just works”, and GNOME gives timely responses to my keyboard commands and mouse gestures.
Freescale Semiconductor has announced a quad-core “P4040″ version of its eight-core QorIQ P4080 system-on-chip (SoC), aimed at networking, military, and industrial applications. The company also announced a new power-efficient dual-core “P1022″ member of its Linux-ready, PowerPC-based QorIQ family.
Aitech Defense Systems has released a rugged 3U single-slot CompactPCI single-board computer (SBC). Targeting embedded and harsh environment applications, the Linux-compatible C800 SBC offers an Intel Core 2 Duo clocked at up to 2.2GHz, 8GB of SATA flash, plus dual gigabit Ethernet and serial ports, says the company.
Part of that strategy involves dumping any distractions, including both the company’s original Palm OS and the Windows Mobile partnership that Palm forged with Microsoft in 2006, a year before Rubinstein arrived. Palm’s support for Windows Mobile helped nearly double Microsoft’s market share at the time.
The first netbook preinstalled with Moblin v2 for Netbooks will likely launch next week, possibly at Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. Following that, the Moblin Project will release the first milestone release of the Moblin v2 Linux distribution, which began beta testing in May.
Popular open source implementations of the specification are Apache Felix and Eclipse Equinox; almost all enterprise application vendors use OSGi to provide modularised Java software.
Hadoop effectively gives enterprises the power of Google or Yahoo Web indexing for free, or for the cost of a CloudEra subscription if you want to involve Hadoop’s core developers in your rollout. Credit card giant Visa is an early corporate adopter of Hadoop, and points to a bright future for the open-source project.
Developer Matthew Dillon has announced the release of version 2.4 of DragonFly BSD, originally created as a fork from FreeBSD 4.x. The major release includes several bug fixes, performance improvements and a new 64-bit port.
It’s unlikely that everyone will ever agree on the most important dates in the history of IT. I know my IT timeline has a personal and professional bias. But I’ve tried to be objective in examining the events that have served to shape the current landscape of the modern computing industry.
Stratis Scleparis, the former BT Retail chief technology officer who joined Phorm after overseeing secret trials of its web monitoring and profiling system, has quit the firm.
Top reps from Time Warner Cable and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association have met with the FCC to back the MPAA’s bid for selectable output control. It’s a sure sign that Big Content is still big on this proposal, despite tons of opposition from device makers and public interest groups.
The FCC has reasserted its power to regulate fleeting nudity and says it wants to further investigate “whether CBS’ indecency violation [in the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake Super Bowl reveal] was willful.”
School kids in American could certainly stand to learn about copyright in the classroom—it’s a fascinating topic that increasingly impacts the life of every “digital native” and intersects with law, history, art, and technology. But should they be exposed to industry-funded materials meant to teach kids:
That taking music without paying for it (“songlifting”) is illegal and unfair to others (RIAA)
Why illegally downloading music hurts more people than they think (ASCAP)
How the DVD-sniffing dogs, Lucky and Flo, help uncover film piracy (MPAA)
To use problem-solving approaches to investigate and understand film piracy (The Film Foundation)
The importance of using legal software as well as the meaning of copyright laws and why it’s essential to protect copyrighted works such as software (Business Software Alliance)
EMI has been involved in a lawsuit with MP3Tunes for a while now. The whole lawsuit seems weird, since MP3Tunes is about creating a storage locker for the songs you already have. But one of the points that MP3Tunes made in response to EMI’s claims is that EMI was lying in saying that it has never authorized MP3s to be available online.
Offering your album online for free seems to becoming quite a trend these days. The concept was pioneered by acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, and the latest group to jump on the bandwagon is Smashing Pumpkins.
There were rumors that following this little dustup, that the UK music industry would drop its support for three strikes. Instead, Feargal Sharkey, the head of the UK Music lobbying group, has come out with a totally meaningless statement that basically says that the industry supports the government’s plan and there’s nothing to see here in terms of a rift in the views of the UK music industry.
That’s not very believable. More and more musicians have realized that a proposal to kick people off the internet does nothing to promote better business models and does a lot to create significantly more ill will with fans.
It’s been really stunning to see just how little dignity groups like ASCAP and BMI have in trying to suck every last penny out of any kind of musical usage, without ever once considering the damage they’re actually doing to songwriters. It’s as if the folks who run these groups have no concept of the actual impact of their crazy demands.
Frank Sinatra made movies to reach a bigger fan base. Elvis’s hips and haircut were as much a part of his success as his recordings were. David Bowie learned that image and imagery could propel him to greater heights. After Saturday Night Fever, dance steps helped propel many live shows and for a time MTV made being visual an important component of success.
Summary: Microsoft keeps dodging laws that are very controversial to begin with; Broadcom still on patent warpath
A writer for the Huffington Post has just called for the abolishment of patents [via Mike Masnick’s take]. It comes a day before the President of the FFII wrote: “Give me your ideas on what to do next Thursday for the World Day Against Software Patents, my idea is to make a fire with some EPO patents.”
[P]erhaps, without all those extra monopoly profits we wouldn’t have such great new products? The fact is there aren’t so many great new products – a well known fact among health economists is that while big pharma’s spending has soared the last decade, as patent control has tightened, drug discovery has plummeted. Pharmaceutical innovation is not lower in Europe, despite of big pharma’s lower monopoly profits. While the market for pharmaceuticals is now largely a global one, so local rules may not be so important, this was less true in the past. Historically, before pharmaceutical patents were introduced in Italy in 1978, that country accounted for about 8% of new pharmaceutical discoveries worldwide. After the industry was strangled by patents, that percentage dropped to practically zero. Switzerland, a powerhouse in the world drug industry, introduced pharmaceutical patents at about the same time. While Switzerland’s fall has not been as dramatic as Italy’s, it too is much less of a powerhouse today than it was before 1977.
Patents do not seem to lead to the innovation their proponents claim. The list of examples goes on and on: the discovery of the one-dose HIV cocktail that replaced the complicated multi-pill regime? That took place in India a country that at that time did not allow pharmaceutical patents. Of the fifteen great medical milestones recently identified by the British Medical Journal – only two were patented or could be attributed to the “incentive” that patents supposedly provide. Numerous technical studies by economists of the effect of stronger patents on innovation have failed to find any consistent increase. Put it plainly: while the social gains from abolishing patents on drugs are obvious and computable, the losses are dubious and, on the basis of empirical evidence, probably nil.
Pharmaceutical patents and the resulting monopolies have many other corrosive effects, over and above raising the prices of prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies spend far more money promoting their products than on R&D. Some of the giants spend as much as four times on marketing as they do on research and development. How do these companies market their products? Most of the money goes to “scientifically convincing” the medical profession to prescribe patented products. How? Well, for example, by inviting doctors and their families to week-long conferences in exclusive resorts, where two hours are for a marketing presentation (the “medical symposium”) and the rest for (all-included) leisure. A spectacular – but hardly unique – example of the level of corruption is the conviction of Pfizer for encouraging doctors to bill the government for drugs they were provided for free. These practices not only raise the cost of drugs, but corrode trust in the medical profession.
There is a mythology in the US about the value and importance of patents — and because of that, it’s not surprising that patent trials involving juries quite often end with the patent holder being declared victor, and a huge amount being awarded by the jury. Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent have been involved in a whole series of patent battles recently.
Broadcom says Emulex is using its patented technology unlawfully and is off to court to stop Emulex using unlicensed technology and to get cash damages.
JohnForDummies alerts us to Broadcom’s latest patent infringement suit, this time against Emulex. Broadcom is quite aggressive on the patent front, so at first this didn’t seem like a big deal.
Broadcom is not just “aggressive on the patent front”; it has fraud going on, which seems typical for patent aggressors [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], Microsoft included. █
“The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation”—Pr Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Laureate in Economics), IP-Watch
In a posting on the MySpace blog MySpace’s Mike Jones says that “Quizmt is unique because it was developed using C#.NET specifically for Windows platforms”.
What Fox is doing here may only increase confusion, just as Miguel de Icaza and Novell do (see the comments here, including this one from GreyGeek).
For Microsoft, causing all this confusion is part of the plan. And “plan” they sure do.
Microsoft Frees CodePlex: Now What? The Q&A
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A: Yes. Microsoft is a RedMonk customer, and I was prebriefed on this news.
It sure sounds like that dreaded attempt of ISO/Microsoft to take control of ODF, at the expense of OASIS. SC34 is already stuffed with Microsoft people [1, 2], most of whom have their interests disguised. It’s worth remembering that this is an SC34 meeting near Microsoft which is responsible for everything and it’s Microsoft employees who seem most pleased. Henrion from FFII is rightly angry, arguing that one should “Scrap ISO. They have a stupid system of physical meetings around the planet. I don´t have the money to travel to such meetings.”
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