Another notable company which has some Microsoft roots and focuses on proprietary software development (for tracking free/open source development) is Black Duck (background reading may be required).
“The Ohloh acquisition didn’t work so well for Free software, for obvious reasons.”One trend we have been noticing in recent years is that Microsoft alumni are getting authority in Microsoft’s opposition including Free software, occasionally counting all sorts of things in ways that are beneficial to Microsoft (we gave examples before, ranging from C# boosting to promotion of Microsoft’s software licences and insistence that Microsoft is an open source player rather than adversary).
Black Duck is finally picking some Microsoft alumni from Ohloh away from SourceForge (renamed and restructured for separation) and here is the official announcement:
Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, today announced that it has acquired Ohloh.net from Geeknet, Inc (NASDAQ: GKNT.) The transaction closed on September 30, 2010.
Ohloh, founded in 2006, is the largest free public directory of open source software, and also hosts a vibrant web community of software developers and Free and Open Source (FOSS) users. Ohloh’s directory contains information aggregated from over 250,000 public code repositories, projects and forums. Black Duck, which has acquired all assets of the Ohloh property, will maintain and enhance the Ohloh website, brand, and project information for the Ohloh community, and will ultimately combine Ohloh and Koders.com to establish a comprehensive, free resource for developers to find, create, use and manage FOSS.
The announcement is not open to feedback, so comments in LWN (if any) will go here.
Open source software company Black Duck Software (which is backed by close to $40 million in funding from Red Hat, Intel Capital and others) has acquired Ohloh, a free public directory of open source software and people. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Ohloh, sold by its previous owner and operator Geeknet (formerly known as SourceForge), will be integrated with Black Ducks’ free code search site Koders.com in an effort to further promote the adoption of open source software around the world.
For those who do not know, Black Duck has not a good relationship with the SFLC as they patented Bradley’s job, which led to polite confrontation last year. “A #Disturbing Combo” called Bradley the above development “#BlackDuck buys Ohloh [...] was already proprietary, now can only get worse. Use @openhatchery instead!”
Here is a post from last week where Black Duck tried to associate itself with the Linux Foundation. All in all, Techrights views this news as two Microsoft sympathisers (they facilitate Microsoft influence inside “open source”) becoming one entity. Whether that’s good or bad is open to debate. At least they are under a single umbrella now. █
Summary: Microsoft may be organising a coup against Linux, especially inside some of its very top supporters, and evidence from the news concurs
“Nokia’s MeeGo device chief quits,” reportsEngadget. This is the type of thing we have been expecting ever since a Microsoft president was made the CEO of Nokia, right after Nokia had become one of the top developers of Linux (the kernel) and told the press that its future crown jewel phones would run MeeGo. And now, just 2-3 weeks after Microsoft’s Elop comes to Nokia:
Nokia’s MeeGo device chief quits
[...]
In case you’re keeping track, Jaaksi’s departure follows the high-profile exits of Nokia’s former CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (replaced by Stephen Elop) and the head of Nokia Mobile Solutions, Anssi Vanjoki. Notably, Nokia’s MeeGo team picked up Palm’s Peter Skillman as the head of MeeGo User Experience and Services during the same period.
Nokia can whitewash this all it wants, but in recent weeks we learned that Nokia had allegedly started playing with Vista Phone 7 [sic] and the commitment to MeeGo was weakened. Microsoft comes in as CEO, Linux comes out, eh? Sounds like potential entryism to us, unless the import from Microsoft only came after a strategic decision from ‘old Nokia’ (perhaps the board). Microsoft would not mind it so much if Nokia carried on with Symbian because Symbian development — unlike Linux development — does not help hundreds of Microsoft competitor at the same time. It is “the Linux phenomenon” — not Symbian — which Steve Ballmer called “threat number one” 9 years ago.
A key partner and co-developer of MeeGo, Intel, appears to be procrastinating as a result of all that news from Nokia. “Intel Says No MeeGo Handsets Until 2011,” reports a Forbes blogger and David Wood, known for his old role in Symbian, says “(sounds like Q2?)”. That’s a whole year from now. From the informal article:
MeeGo, the open-source mobile operating system that Intel and Nokia are jointly creating, recently took a hit with the departure of its Vice President of Devices, Ari Jaaksi. In the wake of that announcement, an Intel executive who oversees MeeGo development insists the project is on track, but concedes that MeeGo-powered smartphones–and tablets, for the most part–won’t debut until next year.
The news could disappoint gadget fans that have been anticipating the release of a portable MeeGo device since Intel and Nokia joined forces in February. It could also have implications for Nokia. Though the Finnish mobile technology giant is still the world’s largest handset maker, it is struggling to reinvent itself under a new Chief Executive and has been looking to MeeGo to rekindle interest in its high-end smartphones.
MeeGo is very important because of relative LSB compliance which Android, for example, does not have.
Having expressed some concerns after the “pee in the pants to get warm” remark from Nokia (about Android), Glyn Moody told me that “Eric [Schmidt] is not stupid: that just makes his poker hand stronger” when he contacts Nokia:
As MeeGo VP Quits, Nokia CEO Taking Calls From Eric Schmidt
News broke this morning that Nokia’s executive in charge of MeeGo devices, Ari Jaaksi, resigned last week. This continues a string of high-profile people leaving the world’s largest mobile phone company as it attempts to establish an identity in the quickly-evolving mobile space. The internal turmoil and the recent hiring of former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop to be Nokia’s new CEO has led to quite a bit of speculation that Nokia may turn away from its own operating systems and go with the new Windows Phone OS — or at least fork its products to have this OS as an option on top of the upcoming MeeGo. But don’t rule out Google’s Android OS just yet either.
We’ve heard from a good source that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has called Elop to discuss the possibility of Android running on Nokia phones. We actually heard this information about a week ago, but today’s news makes it potentially more interesting. Around the time Jaaksi was resigning, Elop and Schmidt were talking.
Why would a CEO who came from Microsoft embrace the same platform which Microsoft is zealously suing? This whole affair is somewhat depressing and worth keeping track of. We previous covered it in:
Nokia is not the only company which seems like a victim of Microsoft entryism. “HP-SAP merger talk considered far-fetched,” opines a writer from IDG, but the Microsoft boosters now report that HP “Windows 7 slates [come] ‘this Christmas,’ touch optimizations in 2011″ (as a reminder, HP sort of abandoned Vista 7 when it comes to slate, but then top appointments were made from SAP and Microsoft [1, 2]). Are we seeing Nokia and HP going through a phase similar to the one Yahoo! and VMB_ware went through (they became occupied by Microsoft executives who brought more Microsoft executives, over time)?
Never underestimate Microsoft’s willingness and ability to compete against Linux using dirty tactics like FUD, lawsuits, and entryism. HP and Intel (of MeeGo) were both distinctly named in Microsoft’s SEC filing as threats, specifically because they were promoting Linux. Gary Clow, a famous victim of Microsoft, once said that “[a] lot of people make that analogy that competing with Bill Gates is like playing hardball. I’d say it’s more like a knife fight.” █
“Where are we on this Jihad?”
–Bill Gates (about removing Linux support at Intel)
Summary: With or without a patent strategy (attack on competitors) and with or without Steve Ballmer, cash cows decline in terms of their potency and there is no easy way to replace them with other cash cows
MICROSOFT’S RESULTS will be published very soon and after several downgrades (e.g. [1, 2, 3]) the company may have to make additional cuts by cutting down (laying off) staff.
Steve Ballmer has come to the UK and Hugo from the FSFE writes about this particular article: “another brilliant picture of Steve Ballmer (at London School of Economics)”
It is amazing that such an eccentric person is allowed to run Microsoft. Here is another funny new photo which shows bizarre gestures and facial expressions. It is not a good time for Microsoft and Ballmer is well aware of it. There is this internal Microsoft document (maybe leaked) which reveals an admission from the company itself that it is having real trouble. The person who mailed us a pointer to this article chose the subject line “End days for Ballmer?” Here is a little bit from the article:
An internal document, seen by The Register, was farmed out today to Microsoft flacks at the event, which explained in stark terms what the firm needs to do in order to move away from its current identity crisis.
Many subjects were covered in this event and OpenBytes focused on some negatives, including the patent part:
Yes Ballmer, we see that with the way you sign “deals” with HTC et al in regards to alleged patent infringements. It seems the current system is working very nicely for you since it’s a way you can attempt to tackle competition, competition I may add which doesn’t produce disasters like the Kin or sends its bloggers off to a Linux powered competitor because it wants to kill off another of its services (and you can read about the Microsoft Live spaces closing here)
“The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.”
So, in conclusion I must say I am very satisfied with my migration. It was much less painful than I expected and much more rewarding, too. Of course, there’s still a lot to learn, but I’m going one step at a time.
# Mailbag
# 2-Cent Tips
# Talkback
# News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
# Henry’s Techno-Musings: User Interfaces, by Henry Grebler
# Away Mission – PayPal Innovate, by Howard Dyckoff
# A Nightmare on Tape Drive, by Henry Grebler
# Making Your Network Transparent, by Ben Okopnik
Fedora 14 “Laughlin” beta was released last week, introducing Red Hat’s SPICE virtual desktop infrastructure, ipmiutil — which adds features including Serial-over-LAN and identity LED management, and a preview of systemd, a replacement for SysVinit that acts as a system and session manager and that will ultimately allow faster boot times.
One of the contributions that I have lent to LPI, and of which I am very proud, is the constant drum beat about making LPI multinational. From the very beginning I remember talking about the issues in various countries around the world in terms of language, costs of certification and ease of finding and taking the tests.
As in other interactions with LPI, I acknowledge that others also spoke and were concerned about these issues, but for me they were the heart-blood. Either LPI was going to be an international organization with an international certification, or it would be ineffective for the needs of Linux and FOSS.
[...]
I had been to Brazil before 2002, and even before 1999. Two years after I had met Linus Torvalds and a few months after Red Hat Software’s Alpha Linux distribution was first distributed, I was flown to Sao Paulo in 1996 to speak at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), and saw my first Beowulf high-performance computing system running Linux at that university. USP had 160 PCs hooked together to do real-time computer graphics of “Toy Story” quality. While others were using Beowulf clusters to render animation frames over time, USP was doing it in real time. USP was also using their Beowulf to shorten the time needed to analyze a mammogram for cancer from close to a day to a few minutes. And finally they were using Linux to help manage remote Windows systems. “When the windows systems do not boot we tell the user to boot Linux, then we FTP a new copy of Windows onto their system. Is this a legitimate use of Linux?” asked the school’s president. I told him that every use of Linux was a legitimate use of Linux.
Finally, in this statement the author summarize what I am trying to say: “I think it would still be better to have a Linux workstation if you manage Linux servers, due to the type of functionality required.”. It all depends on what you want to do, Windows can work for anyone trying just to read email, use some applications like, skype, messengers, and work with an office suite.
But to say that it does not crash, or that it does not slow down over the time, just because you’re dealing with delicate, is not fair for me.
If one put Windows (any flavor) and Linux (any flavor) side by side and over moths, you install and un-install applications to test them, one is going to fail someday, and that is going to be Windows.
So I’ve moved on to a different organization. Once at the new office, I received a new laptop: a Dell Latitude E6410. This is a pretty nice machine. A bit heavy and bulky for my tastes, but more than enough power for the things I need to do (write documents, edit spreadsheets, read e-mail, browse the web, etc.)
[...]
Easily, I’d say Linux “won” this one. But it would be dishonest of me to ignore that I’ve had some issues.
In this episode: Both Mandriva and OpenOffice.org have been forked, while Microsoft sues Motorola for bits of Android. Try the results of our text adventure challenge and hear your own comments in our Open Ballot.
AppArmor, entry points for on-access virus scanners, a rewritten Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer, as well as basic support of Xen-Dom0 code, are among the most important advancements of version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel. Due to various restructuring measures, this version will be slightly smaller than the previous version despite several hundred thousand new lines of code.
Drivers in 2.6.36 include considerably improved support for infra-red receivers and remotes, optimised USB drivers, and a solution for a much discussed problem that Android developers, in one way or another, had solved long ago.
This month Linux kernel legend Jon Masters talks about the release period of 2.6.35 and the opening of the merge window. Also this month: old security vulnerabilities, AppArmor, SELinux and the ongoing suspend blockers debate continues…
The release last month of the 2.6.35 kernel brought with it the implicit opening of the ‘merge window’, the time following a kernel release during which Linus Torvalds will accept intrusive changes for what will become the 2.6.36 kernel, in another month or so.
If you use Lubuntu or another LXDE / Openbox based Linux distribution, you could give ADeskBar – a lightweight application launcher for Openbox -, a try. Even though it’s especially designed for Openbox, ADeskbar also works great under Gnome or XFCE.
The innovative idea behind collaborative video editor ‘Novacut’ has been a hot topic of conversation with many members of the open-source and multimedia communities in the last few weeks.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Jason Gerard DeRose, the lead developer of Novacut, and asked him whether he was disappointed with the failure to meet the crowd-sourced funding target and what this means for the future of the video editor project that has gotten everyone talking….
For my senior design project in school, I decided to design and write a program for teaching sign languages on Linux. It was in a “working prototype” stage when I presented it in school in April. I had a few more things I wanted to get right before announcing it to the whole FOSS world, but I just got confirmation from Nigel Babu that the last known bug in RC3 is fixed, so it’s time to release!
UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) is the default firewall (iptables) configuration tool for Ubuntu and while it’s a great tool, it might scare those not very familiar with the command line. Gufw on the other hand (a graphical user interface for UFW) makes UFW truly an uncomplicated firewall for Ubuntu and lets you easily allow or block pre-configured services, common P2P or individual IPs or ports and so on.
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be really excited about KDE. It’s been a while since I last looked at KDE. Well, technically, I couldn’t really do much there. But there’s this time I was able to look at it. Let me just say that I no longer agree that it’s uglier than Gnome.
I have also come to realise that Linux is like ice cream. You can have any flavour you like, unlike Microsoft’s Windows where all you get to choose are which version is going to crash the least and how many cups of tea you can make while it boots up. PCLinuxOS comes with different versions of the desktop (e.g. KDE, Gnome, LXDE) which means you can choose what you like best in terms of look & feel, and applications, for example. There are other versions of Linux, for which the lingo is ‘distros’, like Ubuntu (the most popular), Fedora, Linux Mint and OpenSUSE.
In this Podcast dabbott aka comprookie2000, talks about Thomas Kahle’s (tom111) arch tool tatt, logtailer, a multi log tailer, iptables and asterisk and a bash mail script.
Sabayon 5.4, released at the end of last month (September, 2010), is the latest version of the Gentoo-based, multi-purpose Linux distribution. This is the third release this year. The other two releases, Sabayon 5.2 and 5.3 were released in March and June respectively. Going by the recent history of this distribution (there were four releases in 2009), do not be surprised if we get one more release before the end of the year.
I’ve done quite a bit of experimenting/learning with BSDs over the past couple of years, and I definitely recommend that Linux users set aside a box, do some installs and set aside some time to configure and use BSD.
* LXDE: Configure LXPanel
* LXDE: Get To Know Obconf
* LXDE: Add Wallpapers, Panel Decorations
* OpenOffice 3.2, Part 5: Draw
* PCLinuxOS Takes Center Stage
* Repo Spotlight: Know Your System With Systeminfo
* DeaDBeeF: A Lightweight Linux Audio Player
* Computer Languages A to Z: Pascal
* Reading Barnes & Noble eBooks On PCLinuxOS
* Getting Help In The Forum
* Firefox Add-ons: Rain or Shine, Forecastfox Tells All
* Two new testimonials
* And much more!
Mandriva’s XFCE is a lightweight distro but I don’t think so because it failed to install in my PC that supports KDE 4.5, Windows 7 and Vista. then How can I say it as light weight.But it installed successfully on my friend PC who has high end Configuration.
The Ubuntu 10.10 CDs (Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktop as well as Ubuntu server) are available for purchase in the Canonical store.
Canonical will still provide free CDs through ShipIt (not yet available for Ubuntu 10.10 – already available for Ubuntu 10.10) but if you can afford it, you could buy the CD and help Canonical and Ubuntu.
You might have read elsewhere that Debian has squeezed out Chromium. As of today, Debian has also squeezed Chromium back in. Does that mean that Debian Developers change their mind too often? Surely not. Rather, it means that the noise around the “squeeze out” has been a bit exaggerated and it would be similarly exaggerated to make noise about the “squeeze in” now.
Some days ago I have started testing Linux Mint Debian Edition and Archbang.
They have some things in common but a lot more different, why did I pick those to test?, because Arch and Debian are my favorites Linux flavors.
ArchBang is an Arch Linux based distribution, I think it is inspired in CrunchBang which until now is based on Ubuntu, and switching to Debian.
ArchBang features OpenBox on its newly released 2010.09 “Apeiro” release. With the change from LXDE to OpenBox it looks a lot more like Cruchbang Linux.
Debian GNU/Linux is a great, classic distro. It has a huge repository and features for everyone. It still has room for improvement and it may soon come to pass that the “testing” flavour will be joined by a “continually usable testing” flavour which would be more sure to boot and run usably.
Raphaël Hertzog wrote a detailed article on the recent activity surrounding the Constantly Usable Testing (CUT) proposal. CUT would be a Debian distribution based on testing, but with significant differences that make it more usable, i.e. more polished and stable. In the article he talks about the potential value of a “rolling” release and how it might work.
The Release Candidate for Ubuntu Maverick was released on September 30. We’re counting down the last remaining days before the final release of Maverick. Overall, I feel all the people involved in the development process have done a excellent job on this release. A pat on the back and a “Nice job!” to everyone who helped to make this release possible.
Ubuntu 10.10 comes with OpenCL support. OpenCL is a language that allows to access the GPU and other parallel processors. That means that the graphics card’s shaders can be used from within any application. Multimedia or image processing applications like GIMP or GIMP plugins are perfect candidates for this optimisation that is often just called “hardware acceleration”.
By default Ubuntu uses the Sans font sized 10. This is a much larger default font and font size than most are used to. There are ways of changing this.
Some, like the since-recanted attack by ex-Fedora community developer Greg DeKoenigsberg, seem openly partisan. The same is true of complaints from Debian developers, who often seem miffed that Ubuntu’s success is built upon their work (as if anything was wrong with that by free software standards).
In other cases, such as the denouncements of Ubuntu because it ships with Mono, the distribution seems unfairly singled out for doing exactly what plenty of other distros are doing. But, of course, other distros are not as popular, so they tend to be overlooked.
If you don`t like the actual theme of Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat, maybe the First thing you can do is to change this one to another you like. There is a nice collection of themes from Bisigi Project that you can try and sure you will like them( See the complete collection).
I bring this up because Trisquel feels, to me, to be more about promoting free and open source technology and showing people what can be done with FOSS than it is about ripping out the proprietary blobs. The project is more like a display of positive accomplishment, not a stand against something, and I like that. The Trisquel team has put together a solid distribution which manages to provide a good working platform without removing much functionality.
I write full reviews of Linux distros over on my other blog, Desktop Linux Reviews. Sometimes, however, there are distro updates that are interesting but not quite worth doing a full review. So I’ll be covering those over here on Eye On Linux; I call them “Quick Looks.”
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Quite a lot of the improvements in this release of Peppermint Ice are “under the hood” so it won’t rock anybody’s world in terms of new desktop features, but based on my experience with it, I’d say it’s definitely worth an upgrade if you are already running Peppermint Ice. If you aren’t, it’s also worth checking it out.
Peppermint Ice is a Live CD distro, so you can just pop the CD in and boot into the Live CD desktop. You don’t need to do an actual install unless you like it enough to want to run it from your hard disk.
While details are slim about the device so far, its rumored to be running on a Linux OS. The screen, while probably small, supposedly has an amazing resolution. We can safely assume The Jungle will have some sort of built-in WiFi, maybe even 3G capabilities, as well as some amazing battery life and a killer processor.
SpiderOak is a grand service. Should one need to access documents from a remote server, sync data between a Mac, Windows or Linux device, share documents with others, or simply backup you data safely, securely and automatically, SpiderOak is for you.
Beem is an XMPP client which, as yet, offers a fairly basic range of options but is under active development. There are a few quirks that mean it’s probably not quite ready for prime time yet, most notably the fact that it doesn’t always handle disconnections very well.
One of the biggest limitations currently is that you can only configure a single XMPP account. Ideally I’d like to be able to have several, which I could enable and disable individually.
In an Xconomy interview, Walter Bender has announced he’s rejoining the main OLPC movement. He’s working with Chuck Kane and the OLPC Association in building the usage of the Sugar Learning Platform in deployments.
Next, Negroponte says the actual XO-3, which will follow the CES 2011 computer, will not be ready until 2012. The XO-3 will use Linux, be targeted at the developing world, and use a plastic form factor with a dual-mode display.
So that makes me wonder what, exactly, that Marvell is funding? If XO-3 development, wouldn’t that last till the product launch in 2012? If the interim Marvell device, why is it so different from the XO-3? And last but not least, why $5.6 million? That seems like such an odd number.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has received a $5.6 million grant from hardware component maker Marvell to fund the development of an Android-powered mobile tablet based on a Marvell reference design. The product, which is expected to be ready for a public demonstration at CES next year, is intended for the developed world.
In a statement to Xconomy, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte explained that the Android tablet will likely not have OLPC branding and is a transitional step as the organization works to develop the XO-3, a tablet device for the developing world that will have more ambitious hardware and will run the Linux-based Sugar learning environment. The XO-3 will ship in 2012 and the Android tablet will supposedly be ready in 2011.
The One Laptop Per Child program has made another step towards the tablet they plan to release… well, sometime in the future. They’ve received a $5.6 million grant towards development of the platform, which will likely include much hardware from Marvell.
Thanks to the Android open source OS, “AlessiTab” can be continually updated and enriched with new functions.
The icons on the main screen of the Alessi applications enable users to connect with a carefully chosen selection of interactive services with just a single touch: real time news updates from news agency ANSA and weather services from Epson, recipes from the Cucchiaio d’Argento recipe book published by Editoriale Domus, 13,000 radio stations from all over the world via the Radiotime application, nutritional information from the INRAN Institute, presentations of the DOKI system for a new concept of domotics. Thanks to its Wi-Fi connection,
Subsonic is a free, opensource, web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Listen to your favorite music where ever you are and you can even share your songs with friends and family usnig Subsonic online media streaming service.
The community around OpenESB is actually fairly active, and they (or, as it includes ForgeRock where I now work, perhaps I should say “we”) want OpenESB to stay around. But what do you do if the project is hosted somewhere under the control of a disinterested party? There’s no huge crime or disagreement to “justify” a fork, but on the other hand any new plans really will need the source and the community presence hosted in a way that allows the interested parties can change and improve things without having to wait for weeks to get replies to requests and risk having them declined if they are deemed inconvenient.
“The creative lot at agencies have a different lifestyle and attitude. They used to come into the office at 5 pm and start their work. I could not digest that but I learned quite a bit from that experience.” That was the time IBM was looking for talent from outside the IT framework. The Big Blue was scouting for personnel from varied backdrops. “I felt like giving it a shot and I did. I got selected and was made to undergo training for three months. I distinctly remember me wanting to drop out that training. Something inside me told me that this was not my scene. A lot of jargon was thrown at me and I felt I was not able to comprehend them. The I remembered my advertising days. Advertising has a few jargons and I could master them with time. So I decided to stay back and complete the training.”
The training did wonders to him as a professional and he realised the importance of working in an organised, process oriented environment. “The 10 years at IBM were great. It taught me everything. I found the work place challenging my abilities everyday. It is at IBM that he developed the reputation of a business leader with demonstrated ability to tackle tough business and management challenges. People around Sandeep say that he has an innate ability to inspire people, and lead through vision and logic.
At IBM, he transformed an ailing Unix business, while aiding the development of the Linux market across Asean markets, and led significant business transformation for IBM…
But apart from OpenOffice.org, what else is there? I dug into my own program folders and searched the far corners of the Web to come up with a cache of free and open source productivity applications for a range of desktop productivity tasks: word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of these tools are worthy substitutes for expensive commercial counterparts.
After 10 years at Sun, half of them as the company’s chief voice on open source, he was one of the first out the door when Oracle’s tentacles closed in. This has liberated him to say what he feels, rather than just what he is allowed to say. It has given him the fire of a good Baptist preacher.
You don’t have to be a software developer to contribute to an open source project – there are all sorts of ways you can get involved, whether you are experienced or a newcomer, technically minded or otherwise inclined.
When it comes to open source text editors, it’s hard to find a programmer who hasn’t heard of jEdit. Under development for more than 10 years, it’s a perennial favorite of developers, writers, bloggers, and casual users alike. As Project Leader Björn “Vampire” Kautler succinctly puts it, “It is simply is the best text editor out there, that can be easily customized and extended to eternity and is cross-platform. It supports syntax highlighting of over 200 languages.”
So what did we do? I kicked off the day with explaining the galaxy that is Open Source and Free Software. the multitude of projects, the different governance models, how to find out about maturity and sustainability. I showed gource in action -. I love the visualization of open source projects over time that it generates.
We then went to our first round of checkount – build – modify – commit using git, which was fun and rewarding. People could actually learn how stuff works with immediate results.
Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples
Oh, IE, it pains us to do this to you. You who once so mightily won in the battle against Netscape Navigator now seem to be losing your war against a battalion of upstarts, relatively fresh faces like Firefox and Chrome. According to StatCounter, IE’s global usage stats have fallen to 49.87 percent, a fraction of a tick beneath half. Firefox makes up the lion share of the rest, at 31.5 percent, while Chrome usage tripled since last year, up to 11.54 percent. Two years ago IE had two thirds of the global market locked down, and even if Internet Explorer 9 is the best thing since ActiveX, well, we just don’t see the tide of this battle turning without MS calling in some serious reinforcements.
In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. While in North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%. The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.
ABC News Radio and StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, have “unofficially” partnered to unveil a newswire for the radio service.
While the partnership may not be “official”, it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.
According to Dan Patterson, the digital platform manager for ABC News Radio, the partnership is not yet official because the two companies haven’t done the “lawyerly dance”, among other things. In his explanation of why ABC chose to work with StatusNet, Patterson writes a mini-treatise for an open, distributed Internet.
So excuse the headline on this blog, but OpenOffice is not dead per se. It will continue to live out its existence breathing in the air on planet Oracle. The suite itself is mature, stable and works cross-platform, so there should be no major reason to worry about its future growth and well-being.
It’s not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn’t going to be having anything to do with it.
When The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, the group wanted to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project and make significant improvements to OpenOffice, such as adding Microsoft OpenXML format compatibility to the program. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they’d place LibreOffice in next spring’s update of Ubuntu.
JavaOne seemed to be near extinction last year, but Oracle’s acquisition of Sun revived it. We talked with some notable attendees to see how the conference went.
If it sounds familiar, it may be becuase it is based on the OpenDS project Sun used to work on. My old colleague Ludovic Poitou has joined ForgeRock to look after it for us, and I am keen to see a co-developer community grow around it in addition to the substantial deployer community that is now free to migrate from OpenDS to OpenDJ. There’s plenty more about it in the press release and FAQ.
Seven years after developers started working on ZFS, crypto functions have been added to the file system. The functions will probably be part of the forthcoming Solaris Express 2010. While no implementation details are available so far, a blog post talks about “support for encrypted ZFS datasets,” which points towards an encryption of the entire file system. The ZFS crypto project’s web site lists targets such as a per-dataset policy for enabling algorithms and key lengths as well as an encrypted swap area.
As can be seen in today’s announcement, today is my first day as full-time Executive Director at the Software Freedom Conservancy. For four years, I have worked part-time on nights, weekends, and lunch times to keep Conservancy running and to implement and administer the services that Conservancy provides to its member projects. It’s actual quite a relief to now have full-time attention available to carry out this important work.
Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.
Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.
Watching television at his Boston home in January this year, Patrick Meier, a director of the crowdsourcing internet platform Ushahidi saw early reports that a devastating earthquake had caused massive damage to Haiti. Within 40 minutes, he was working with a colleague to set up a dedicated Haiti-focused website, and in less than an hour the site was gathering intelligence from people on the ground.
With both private and public schools facing budget issues in tough economic times, it’s no surprise perhaps to hear a university employee say that the school is re-evaluating distance learning opportunities. But when an MIT employee made a statement to that effect at the OECD’s Institutional Management in Higher Education earlier last month, some media outlets erroneously reported it as an indication that MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) was considering implementing a paywall.
Countless developers use jQuery software tools today to provide advanced Web sites and to ease the difficulties of spanning multiple browsers.
Starting in about two weeks, though, they will start being able to extend their reach to the fast-growing world of the mobile Web as well. That’s when Mozilla plans to release the alpha version of jQuery Mobile, jQuery founder John Resig told attendees of the Future of Web Apps conference here Tuesday.
I wanted a reasonably sized photographic image with a 24-bit alpha channel. So I used a JPEG for what JPEGs are good for and a PNG for what PNGs are good for…
I combined them using an HTML5 canvas element and then inserted into the DOM. The results look the same as using a normal 24-bit PNG but are one-half to one-sixth the size. In one case we got a 573KB 24-bit PNG down to a 49KB JPEG with a 4KB PNG alpha-mask!
Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free, in which she called it “ironic” that “advocates of free online content” (including me) “charge hefty fees to speak at events”.
Lindvall says she spoke to someone who approached an agency I once worked with to hire me for a lecture and was quoted $10,000-$20,000 (£6,300-£12,700) to speak at a college and $25,000 to speak at a conference. Lindvall goes on to talk about the fees commanded by other speakers, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of a book called “Free” (which I reviewed here in July 2009), Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and marketing expert Seth Godin. In Lindvall’s view, all of us are part of a united ideology that exhorts artists to give their work away for free, but we don’t practice what we preach because we charge so much for our time.
It’s unfortunate that Lindvall didn’t bother to check her facts. I haven’t been represented by the agency she referenced for several years, and in any event, no one has ever paid me $25,000 to appear at any event. Indeed, the vast majority of lectures I give are free (see here for the past six months’ talks and their associated fees – out of approximately 95 talks I’ve given in the past six months, only 11 were paid, and the highest paid of those was £300). Furthermore, I don’t use an agency for the majority of my bookings (mostly I book myself – I’ve only had one agency booking in the past two years). I’m not sure who the unfortunate conference organiser Lindvall spoke to was – Lindvall has not identified her source – but I’m astonished that this person managed to dig up the old agency, since it’s not in the first 400 Google results for “Cory Doctorow”.
Looks like NYC subway stations are getting cell phone service earlier than expected: Six stations—Along 14th St., and at 23rd St. and 8th Ave.—should be wired by the end of 2011. It will be both convenient and annoying.
Google sees the adoption of Google Apps at schools and colleges as vital to the growth of the productivity suite; an outlook that Microsoft also seems to emulate as well. The strategy makes sense; not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for Google Apps and other productivity suites, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Today, New York is the fifth U.S. state to adopt “Google Apps,” joining Oregon, Colorado, Iowa, and Maryland.
The 2010 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine goes to British researcher Robert Edwards for pioneering in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a process that has led to roughly 4 million births since it was first successfully done in 1978.
A pair of new studies — one in the United States, another in Germany — reports strong evidence that diabetes rates climb with increasing air pollution in the form of of tiny airborne particles.
“Although previous studies had hinted at this possibility, the data were mostly from small studies or from animals exposed to high levels of particulate matter,” notes Aruni Bhatnagar, a cardiovascular researcher at the University of Louisville in Kentucky who did not take part in either study. He says the new data provide important and more rigorous evidence that real-world pollution may be tampering with blood sugar control in a large and growing number of people.
In 2001, Pat Gelsinger, then the chief technology officer of Intel, made a striking prediction about the future of microchips. If current design trends continue, he said, microchips will be running at 30 gigahertz by the end of the decade. However, he added, at this speed they will be generating more heat per cubic centimetre than a nuclear reactor.
Sure enough, by 2003, Intel and other chip-makers had found that their plans for faster processors were running into trouble. For a chip to speed up, its transistors need to be shrunk, but smaller transistors must consume less power or they overheat. With chip-makers unable to keep to the reduced heat budget, the race for faster chips hit a wall (see diagram).
Robots are a major part of the cultural fabric of Japan; they’re performing weddings, buying groceries and keeping people company. A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo is taking this robotic cultural immersion a step further — they’re making animal-robot hybrids. Sort of.
RatCar is a brain-machine interface that uses a rat’s brain signals to control a motorized robot. The rat hangs in the air, and the robot does what the rat’s limbs would do. It’s far from the only brain-robot locomotion contraption, but it’s arguably one of the strangest.
A Hull man has been given a suspended sentence for looking at hundreds of women’s medical records.
Dale Trever, 22, was working for Hull Primary Care Trust as a “care data quality facilitator” when he accessed medical records of 413 female patients. The court was told he accessed records 597 times.
He started his snooping when a female work colleague turned him down for a date, the East Riding Mail reports.
A French official told AFP that police had seized weapons “including a Kalashnikov (rifle) and a pump-action shotgun, as well as ammunition” in Tuesday’s raids.
About a century ago, Gandhiji started the world famous ‘Satyagraha’ in order to oppose the identification scheme of the government in South Africa. Hundred years later, India is repeating a similar programme under the pretext of unique ID numbers
As the old saying goes, ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’. It seems that both the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and ultimately the Indian government have overlooked history and even the Mahatma’s views while going ahead with the ambitious and expensive unique identification number (UIDN) programme.
An elaborate charade has begun with the rolling out of the first Aadhaar unique identity (UID) numbers by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi in a tribal district of Maharashtra. The 12-digit number for each citizen is supposed to achieve pilferage-free delivery of services to the underprivileged.
The Tea-Party crowd, the hardcore anti-science extremists, can’t stomach the scientific reality that mutiple independent studies back Mann’s core finding Hockey Stick: Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause. And so Cuccinelli goes after Mann and the University of Virginia once again. His new case is infinitely weaker but his fervor has reached OCD levels.
It’s called the “10/10/10 Global Work Party.” The goal of the day is to send a message to our political leaders: If we can get to work, you can get to work too — on the legislation and the treaties that will protect this planet for our children and grandchildren.
One in five of the world’s plant species – the basis of all life on earth – are at risk of extinction, according to a landmark study published today.
At first glance, the 20% figure looks far better than the previous official estimate of almost three-quarters, but the announcement is being greeted with deep concern.
One of the most extraordinary people I have met in 10 days of travelling around Peru and Ecuador has been Alberto Acosta. He’s head of Ecuador’s leading research group now, but until 2007 was the second most powerful man in the country after the president, Rafael Correa. He was not only charged with masterminding the new constitution but was head of the assembly, or parliament, a founder of the ruling political party and minister of energy of the country that depends on oil.
But Acosta will go down in my memory as the world’s only serving oil minister to have ever proposed leaving some of a country’s black stuff in the ground. That’s like Dracula renouncing blood, or a sports minister saying it’s better to play hide and seek than football. It just does not happen.
Greenpeace has been banned from intercepting a deep sea oil-drilling ship after the protest group sent “wave after wave” of swimmers into the north Atlantic to stop the vessel from reaching its drilling site.
The US oil giant Chevron was granted a wide-ranging interdict, or injunction, by judges in Edinburgh today, ordering Greenpeace to stop any further direct action preventing the Stena Carron from reaching its destination or impeding its “lawful business”.
When environmental campaigners began tracking a hi-tech South Korean trawler off the coast of West Africa, they were looking for proof of illegal fishing of dwindling African stocks. What they uncovered was an altogether different kind of travesty: human degradation so extreme it echoed the slavery they thought had been abolished more than a century ago.
“It was horrendous,” said Duncan Copeland, a senior campaigner at the Environmental Justice Foundation, who boarded the South Korean-flagged trawler at the end of 2008 with naval forces from Sierra Leone.
California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has come out fighting for his green legacy, going on the attack against the oil companies and rightwing groups bankrolling a campaign to suspend AB32, a landmark environmental law.
I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.
Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.
And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.
This is a story about how an economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. They had a crazy, unlikely plan, and it worked.
Twenty years ago, Brazil’s inflation rate hit 80 percent per month. At that rate, if eggs cost $1 one day, they’ll cost $2 a month later. If it keeps up for a year, they’ll cost $1,000.
California, if you didn’t know, has one of the highest tax rates in the nation. On top of federal rates that can reach 39% of each additional dollar, California takes up to 11% of each additional dollar. This means that top earners pay half of their marginal income (the part above a certain amount) in income taxes. At 50% of each additional dollar going to taxes, it is no wonder that people devote such tremendous effort to tax avoidance schemes. To do anything else wouldn’t be sensible.
The full cost of the 2008 banking crisis in Ireland will be laid bare tomorrow when the republic’s government is expected to admit that bailing out Anglo Irish Bank will cost at least €30bn (£25.9bn) – equivalent to a fifth of the country’s national output.
Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine-print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes, begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract, no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be.
That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are ordinary homeowners. As a number of news reports have shown in recent weeks, banks have been carrying through foreclosures at a breakneck pace and freely ignoring the legal niceties required under the law, such as demonstrating clear ownership to the property being foreclosed.
The proposal is a long-delayed response to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which specified reforms to better organize the intelligence community and to avoid a repeat of the 20S01 attacks. The law required that the Treasury secretary issue regulations requiring financial institutions to report cross-border transfers if deemed necessary to combat terrorist financing.
Many of these strategies are already being employed and Doctorow enumerates several: 40,000 people in the US sued by the record industry; mandatory DRM requirements for several digital distribution channels negotiated by Sony, Apple, Audible, and others; three strikes rule in effect in France that disconnects anyone (and their family) from the internet for “unsubstantiated accusations of infringement”; efforts by Viacom to prevent Google and other companies from allowing anyone to “upload content to the internet without reviewing its copyright status in advance.” This last one seems particularly intrusive and Big Brotherly to me because what Viacom wants is for a court “to order Google to make all user-uploaded content public so that Viacom can check it doesn’t infringe copyright – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as private and visible only to me and her grandparents.” The incredible arrogance of Viacom is that it wants to court to validate the presumption that everything posted on YouTube and similar sites violates copyrights. So, for example, if this came to pass, would a video of someone watching an NFL game on a network be a copyright violation if it included in the video the actual broadcast in the background? What if you post a video of someone dancing to music? Would the presumption be that the music was pirated? Such a ruling, Doctorow says, “would shutter every message board, Twitter, social networking service, blog, and mailing list in a second.” If he’s correct, the impact on culture, society, daily life would be immeasurable.
UK Internet providers have now banded together to challenge anti-P2P law firms who try to turn thousands of IP addresses into customer names—and a London court will hear their objections to the entire process.
The ISPs were burned last month when a massive e-mail leak from the top anti-P2P firm in the UK, ACS Law, exposed their own spreadsheets of customer names matched to the pornographic films they allegedly downloaded. The revelation of this embarrassing (and unproven) behavior was compounded by the fact that several of the ISPs were taking no security precautions, instead e-mailing their Excel spreadsheets unencrypted and without passwords.
BSkyB, one of the UK’s largest broadband providers, has said it will no longer cooperate with the requests of controversial solicitors’ firm ACS:Law and that it will challenge them in court, after around 8,000 of its customers had their personal information leaked online.
Contractually, the ISP would be reasonably justified in cutting off a user from the internet, as bot infection would be contrary to the terms of the ISP’s acceptable-use policy.
On the back of the ACS:Law debacle, there has been a lot of interest in the way in which firms like ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons obtained customer information from internet service providers linking IP addresses to broadband account holders. The information was obtained in English courts through what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order (NPO, named after the case in which it was first established). This order allows a potential claimant to ask for a third party to disclose the identity of an unidentified defendant.
In the High Court today, UK ISPs BT and Plusnet refused to hand over subscriber data to lawyers acting for independent record label, Ministry of Sound. Their objections followed the catastrophic subscriber data leak from ACS:Law two weeks ago. The hearing was adjourned until January 2011.
Finding CC licensed images and using them properly is something many people seem to struggle with: finding them can be straight-forward, but many sites don’t provide copy and paste reuse code that complies with the license. Xpert, a project of University of Nottingham, has launched an image search tool that helps with this. Xpert Attribution tool searches Wikimedia Commons and Flickr and provides an easy way to get the image with the attribution information overlaid, or (even better, in my opinion) with RDFa suitable for embedding. I’ve combined the two below (downloading the image with attribution, and adding the structured-data enriched embed code below it).
The creators of the BitTorrent-only movie The Tunnel are celebrating today. After being refused an IMDb listing on several occasions, the makers wrote an open letter to the Amazon-owned company which was featured in dozens of news articles. Today, the horror movie, which was funded by people buying individual frames of the production, has been accepted into the IMDb databases.
When we rolled out Hudson for CC code last month, I already knew that I wanted to have test coverage reporting. There’s simply no reason not to: it provides a way to understand how complete your tests are, and when combined with branch testing, gives you an easy way to figure out what tests need to be written (or where to target your test writing efforts).
A legion of Creative Commons (CC) Superheroes is already at work, using our amazing tools to save people from failed sharing all over the planet. GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical company, recently released its entire malarial data set using CC tools, speeding the urgent search for new medicines to tackle the devastating disease. Online communities at Flickr, SoundCloud, and Vimeo are making creative works available for anyone in the world to use freely and legally through license adoption. Publisher Pratham Books has begun to CC license more and more of the textbooks it provides to 14 million children in India, lifting them from a future of poverty and miseducation. When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Google and Wired used CC tools to keep information widely available to relief workers, journalists, and governments worldwide.
Now Jay sends in some news that continues to build on the legend of Minecraft, pointing to a story claiming that Persson is making $350,000 per day. With alpha software, and without going after “pirates” who are supposedly destroying the industry. Yeah. Apparently, he’s selling a copy every 3 seconds. And he’s done all this with no distribution. No retail deals. Just creating a really good game, getting people interested in it, not treating them like criminals, and giving them a reason to buy.
The Internet Policy Task Force of the United States Commerce Department today issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking comment from any interested stakeholders – including rights holders, internet service providers, and consumers – on the “protection of copyrighted works online and the relationship between copyright law and innovation in the internet economy.”
Textbooks are like dinosaurs: clunky, archaic, and not readily available. That’s why Neeru Khosla founded CK12 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to lowering the cost of educational materials and making them more freely accessible around the world. Khosla recruited teachers from all over America to help write CK12 textbooks and published all the material under Creative Commons licenses.
For years, one of the points we’ve raised in answering the movie industry’s $200 million challenge to us (i.e., “how do you keep making $200 million movies?”) is that, in part, it’s asking the wrong question. No one asks “how do we keep making $10,000 computers?” Instead, they look for ways to make them cheaper (and better, at the same time). But in the world of Hollywood accounting, there’s little incentive to make cheaper movies (sometimes the incentive goes the other way). And, we keep showing how the world is reaching a place where it’s cheaper and cheaper to make good movies. We’ve pointed out nice examples of people making high quality movies for next to nothing. The idea is not that movies should be made for nothing, but that the technology is making it so that movies can be made for less. In fact, with two of the examples of cheap movie making we’ve highlighted, the makers later went on to score deals to do higher end movies for more reasonable budgets.
[...]
The technology keeps getting better and the cost to do such high quality work keeps decreasing. This movie did cost $550,000 to make — involving a 14-person team. But, that’s a hell of a lot less than it would have cost not so long ago for anything of this level of quality.
The United States and European Union have reached a compromise over the use of prestigious geographical food names like Champagne and Parma, clearing one of the last obstacles to an international pact to battle the growing trade in counterfeit goods.
Reports that negotiations on the controversial agreement have ended alarmed MEPs, who have called on the Commission to explain the matter as soon as possible.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has always been the exception to the general rule for international negotiations – closed participation rather than open, secretive rather than transparent – so it should come as no surprise that the negotiations have come to an end in an unusual manner. The only thing that is absolutely clear is that there will be no further rounds of negotiation as the latest round in Japan is being described as the final round of talks. Other than that, the conclusion seems open to considerable speculation and spin.
From the U.S. perspective, the negotiations are done and ACTA is nearly a reality. USTR Ambassador Ron Kirk has been quoted as saying that there are solutions to even the toughest issues and that nearly all parties have agreed to them. Another U.S. official admitted that there were still as many as six issues without agreement, including two on border measures and another from the Internet chapter. The EU has been even less supportive, with an official quoted as saying “we’ve come a long way but we must still close the remaining gaps without which there will be no agreement.” Moreover, several European Parliament Members are already calling for a halt to the deal. Meanwhile, Japanese officials have acknowledged that there are issues that require further discussion back home and that “in that sense we haven’t gotten agreement.”
Four members of the European Parliament on Tuesday called for the international anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) to be halted.
The news comes after reports that the controversial accord had been “concluded” in Japan on Friday. The MEPs, Greek Socialist Stavros Lambrinidis, French Socialist Francoise Castex, Czech center-right Zuzana Roithova and German Socialist Alexander Alvaro, have long argued for the negotiations to be more transparent and were outraged that the U.S. prevented the E.U. from publishing the proposed agreement earlier this year.
Summary: New evidence which shows increased opposition to some software patents and bizarre turns taken by the patent system when lawyers are put in charge
For those who missed the context of it, the EFF supports an attempt by Microsoft to simplify re-examination/invalidation of software patents. Microsoft wants this not because it’s suddenly against software patents but because just like Apple it is being hit by some of them (i4i in this case is a key driver).
So, when another firm came along, named HairTech Int’l, and started selling hair extensions to make your hair look like Paris Hilton’s, Celebrity Signatures got angry and threatened to sue. After being told that HairTech was no longer making the product, it backed off, but upon learning that the Paris Hilton extensions were back on the market, it called up the patent attorneys and filed a lawsuit.
Additional patent propaganda and revisionism are now being used to pretend that patents are a crucial part of one’s business; not surprisingly, the source of this claim is a patent licensing firm, whose argument TechDirthas just debunked:
Hank Northhaft is the CEO of a patent licensing firm. He likes to claim that he’s the CEO of a technology miniaturization firm, but the majority of the company’s actual revenue comes from patent licensing, not actual product sales. He’s got a book coming out next year that’s all about making it even easier and cheaper to get patents, which he insists will create hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new jobs, and has been making the rounds writing opinion pieces for various publications pitching this plan. Unfortunately, each of his opinion pieces seems to rewrite history or misinterpret studies to make his argument. Frankly, that’s pretty sad.
The patent system is broken and evidence is abundant. █
Summary: Europe’s leading Web browser rejects the patent trolls who sell H.264 licences and Vincent Van Quickenborne gets accused of lying “about open source and software patents”
Despite H.264 announcing it would go royalty free, Opera says the standard isn’t open enough for them to support it
In late August this year the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA), a body which licenses pools of patents for various standards, announced that it wouldn’t charge royalty fees for Internet video that streams to end users for free.
Previously MPEG LA had said they wouldn’t charge royalties for such video until after 31 December 2015, but now it appears that this will be extended into perpetuity.
This move by the MPEG LA wasn’t welcomed by everyone however, with Mozilla speaking out against the move and questioning the relevance of the H.264 standard beyond 2014.
Mr. Quickenborne, whom we wrote about back in July, is still on the side of the likes of MPEG-LA considering the fact that he wilfully (perhaps knowingly) opens the door to software patents in Europe and, according to this new video, he also “lies about open source and software patents”. From the video’s summary:
Belgian EU Presidency lies about open source and software patents
Belgian Minister of Economy, Vincent Van Quickenborne, was interviewed about software patents in the Radio show “RTBF Matin Premiere”, lying about the current situation in Europe about software patents. In fact, the central EU patent court he is pushing has great chances to validate the practice of the European Patent Office (EPO) to grant software patents.
Summary: Microsoft’s patent tolls — which almost always rely on Microsoft APIs/protocols like ActiveSync, FAT, and C#/Mono — do not make much sense in relation to the Motorola lawsuit
MICROSOFT’S lawsuit against Motorola (see our new Motorola Wiki page for background) has been discussed quite a lot in our IRC channels recently. FAT patents in the lawsuit mean that Linux too is being targeted, but everyone seems to be paying attention just to ActiveSync, which baffled us because Google appears to have resolved ‘licensing’ of ActiveSync a long time ago [1, 2]. We haven’t researched this deeply enough just yet.
Jason Perlow, an IBM person, says about Microsoft that “if you can’t compete with it, litigate it” and he has a decent article about this case:
In doing so it lost several of its traditional OEM partners, such as Hewlett-Packard, who decided it was best to build and market phones its own OS with its purchase of Palm (Which has an ActiveSync license for WebOS, so HP won’t be getting sued by Microsoft anytime soon) rather than continue on with its Windows Mobile-powered iPAQ line of PDAs and phones, most of which were outsourced to HTC.
All of this Windows Mobile decline happened years before Android became a valid player in the smartphone ecosystem.
So what were Microsoft’s options? It could compete legitimately on its own merits, and aggressively market products that people actually wanted to buy. Or it could try to throw as many legal roadblocks against its competitors as they could. It sounds like they are going to try a little bit of both.
[...]
With their previous generation of Windows Mobile phones, Microsoft clearly failed and lost sight of what products the industry demanded. Instead, Google, RIM and Apple managed to figure out what customers wanted. Notwithstanding ActiveSync licensing by any of these companies, that’s really the bottom line.
One of our readers wonders if LG, which already pays Microsoft for Android, has just dropped plans to develop an Android tablet as a result of the lawsuit from Microsoft. The Source has this new post which it titled “Microsoft’s “anti-Linux” tactic” (quoting Microsoft apologists whom we mentioned before):
What I would like to draw attention to is how silent Team Apologista gets every time Microsoft pulls out the patent card against Linux, in stark comparison to how vocal they are whenever someone suggets Microsoft might pull out a patent card against Linux.
Dare to mention one may have patent-related concerns about Mono or Moonlight, and watch Team Apologista come storming in with tired half-truths and the same old debunked defenses – but see reported news of Microsoft using patents aggressively yet again and it’s nothing but crickets chirping from Waltham’s Warriors.
I’d also like to note that despite Team Apologista’s desperate and transparent attempts to paint people as “zealots”, “freetards” and so on, that anyone even casually following Microsoft with a shred of integrity must acknowledge that Microsoft has in the past and continues to this very day to use FUD — including patent-based FUD — against Linux. I suppose Seattle Times and the article’s author, Mr. Brier Dudley, are “unreliable sources” or “zealots”? Or, perhaps – just perhaps – they are simply reporting the facts?
Even the Seattle press seems to have become rather critical of Microsoft’s adaptation and leaning towards SCO-esque tactics. That ought to say something. █
“My message to the patent world is: Either get back to the doctrines of forces of nature or face the elimination of your system.”—Hartmut Pilch, Paraflows 06
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Roy is a Software Engineer, interdisciplinary researcher, and an advocate of fair competition. He holds a doctoral degree in Medical Biophysics. Contact us (encrypted/PGP)
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