10.30.10
Posted in Patents at 5:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about controversial patents on genes, life-saving drugs, and TRIPS in ACTA
THIS post presents some news where patents are a matter of life and death.
• US Government Argues in Court that Isolated Genes are Unpatentable (patents on genes were also covered in [1, 2])
In March, 2010, District Court Judge Robert Sweet held Myriad’s gene patent claims invalid for failing to satisfy the subject matter eligibility requirements of 35 U.S.C. 101. The ruling was directed toward claims that cover particular isolated DNA molecules (genes) and processes of detecting and screening for those genes, but was written broadly enough to essentially invalidate all patents covering genes that were isolated from an organism.
[...]
Thus, the patent laws embrace gene replacement therapies, engineered biologic drugs, methods of modifying the properties of plants or generating biofuels, and similar advanced applications of biotechnology. Crossing the threshold of section 101, however, requires something more than identifying and isolating what has always existed in nature, no matter how difficult or useful that discovery may be.
• Big Pharma Stranglehold: Thwarting India As Independent Maker Of Blockbuster HIV Drugs? (“neocolonialism kills AIDS,” remarks Dr. Glyn Moody)
Until recently, the pharmaceutical giants were little interested in the developing world, while looking almost exclusively to the profitable United States and European markets. But now, their momentum is substantially slowing down there mainly due to stiff costs to renew product pipelines, generic competition, recent economic downturn and cost-conscious government and commercial payers. Additionally, over the next five years, drug companies will lose patent protection of products worth US$140 billion in yearly sales [1]. As a result, the brand industry is increasingly looking to the emerging markets of fast-growing middle-income countries (including India, China, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Colombia, Egypt, Vietnam and Turkey) where a number of well-off elites, who can afford out-of-pocket spending (about 300 million people in India, at least 800 million in China), now live. Expanding middle classes in such countries are not only spending more on healthcare, but their rising wealth is contributing to increased rates of chronic diseases once limited to the western markets. Without counting that, sales of prescription drugs are forecast to wane in the United States as an effect of new health-care legislation that could lower the price of medicines. This is adding pressure on drug makers’ US businesses.
[...]
Cheap brand and branded generics to rural India
Now that big pharma industry is pushing forward its breakthrough in India, the acquisitions of local firms, as just mentioned, have resulted in a multi-pronged, deeply profitable strategy wherein the impact of lower prices applied to end products is offset by taking advantage of the lower manufacturing, distribution and marketing costs in the country.
Until recently, the brand companies doing drug business in emerging economies have focused mostly on the wealthy and middle class. Now, they are turning also to the “bottom of the pyramid” and are conducting an exercise in how to cut prices down to seduce poorer customers and rural villagers in India while still turning a profit. To this aim, nearly all companies have boosted their sales forces (as an example, Abbott now employs approximately 10,000 people across all of its country businesses) [8]. Reportedly, these pitchmen are fanning out in rural India, where they train doctors and patients also hoping to capitalise on a $19.5 billion Indian public healthcare programme for 742 million villagers [10].
In short, the multinational companies are selling some branded treatments to Indian customers at lower-than-Western prices, while licensing cheap therapies from local firms (the so-called branded generics) to build portfolios of low-cost medicines [4]. Through the branded generics (90 percent of drug sales), the multinationals are deeply involved in the current rise of India’s pharmaceutical market [11]. It comes as no surprise that in countries where generic drugs may frequently be substandard or fake, selling generics under the brand of a leading enterprise can look to doctors and patients as a more trustworthy and reliable option. The branded generics market is generating nearly $8 billion in pharmaceutical sales this year, a figure that is expected to more than double by 2015 [11].
• USTR positions in China WTO TRIPS dispute at odds with talking points on ACTA flexibility (“ACTA: Brazil, Ecuador and India made interventions on ACTA at WTO TRIPS Council,” summarises ThiruGeneva in this first part of Knowledge Ecology International coverage on ACTA in USTR, Brazil, and India)
In a dispute between the United States and Canada over the enforcement of intellectual property rights, Article 1.1 of the TRIPS played an important role. See: WTO DISPUTE DS362, China — Measures Affecting the Protection and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights.
In the US/China WTO dispute, the USTR took the position that parties have an obligation to “give effect to the provisions of the Agreement,” and that “Article 1.1 deals with the method by which a Member implements TRIPS Agreement obligations, not whether or to what extent a Member should implement them in the first place.”
One United States pleading in this dispute mentioned Article 1.1 of the TRIPS 15 times…
• Brazilian intervention at TRIPS Council: ACTA
• Extracts of India’s Intervention to the WTO TRIPS Council: ACTA (bricking BRIC)
On Wednesday, 27 October 2010, the WTO TRIPS Council held its annual review of the Paragraph 6 System. IP-Watch has a link to the detailed program of the annual review. This annual review of the Paragraph 6 system lasted till around 8 PM Geneva time. More details of this closed door meeting will be provided in due course. Sources close to the negotiations indicate that Canada provided a comprehensive overview of its implementation of the Paragraph 6 system, Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR). Rwanda was not present at this review; neither was Ghana, a country which has tried unsuccessfully to make use of Paragraph 6. After 8 PM, the TRIPS Council resumed and certain Members took the floor to discuss ACTA. Here are some key extracts from the intervention made by India yesterday concerning ACTA.
• TRIPS Council Discusses Efficacy Of ACTA, Public Health Amendment (for more on ACTA and TRIPS see this video which slams TRIPS [1, 2, 3, 4])
ACTA “completely bypasses the existing multilateral processes provided in particular by the WTO and WIPO” as well as providing for much higher level enforcement than called for under TRIPS, India said in prepared remarks. It is already doing so with a “startling” decision to overturn a decision of the WTO dispute settlement on a US-China dispute over counterfeiting and copyright piracy (IPW, WTO/TRIPS, 26 January 2010), India said. ACTA reinterprets the definition of “commercial scale” to mean “any activity carried out for a direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage” while the WTO recently determined that it meant a particular level of activity, the statement said.
As “ACTA members account for about 70% of world trade,” there is a risk the agreement will “undermine trade liberalisation when there already are several threats to the multilateral trading system in the form of trade protectionist measures in wake the of the economic crisis and a simmering currency issue,” India added. For this reason, India requested that “Enforcement Trends” be discussed at this TRIPS Council meeting, despite having a position in the past that enforcement should not be a permanent TRIPS agenda item, they said.
[...]
A WTO source said ACTA parties largely argued the agreement “does not affect TRIPS and that action is needed to tackle the real dangers arising from counterfeit products such as medicines and spare parts.”
Drugs counterfeiting prevention has had ACTA misused to push for draconian copyright law, under the guise of saving lives. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 5:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another patent lawsuit is filed by Apple against the Linux-powered Android (now at Motorola) and Microsoft’s attempt to ‘tax’ Android everywhere is slammed even by boosters among Microsoft sympathisers
HAVING already sued HTC for its Linux-powered phones, Apple proceeds to using Motorola with similar allegations of software patents violations:
Another day, another patent lawsuit. And this time around it’s Apple suing Motorola over multitouch on nearly all its Android phones — basically everything up to and including the Droid X.
This improved lawsuits map (see above) ought to be updated to include this lawsuit. We found it as part of today’s exchange between the FFII and a Red Hat employee. FFII also wrote about this “consultation on IPR enforcement in third countries” and someone else shared this new patent cartoon from Nina Paley. Yes, the good news is that patents unrest is growing (not just when it comes to software patents as we’ll show in the next post).
“Microsoft can’t compete with free, and as such, needs to jack up the perceived price of an Android installation.”
–Thom Holwerda, OS NewsDespite usually promoting Microsoft’s side and products, Thom Holwerda from OS News is now criticising Microsoft for using software patents against Android. He writes: “Microsoft does have a different angle, though. Microsoft can’t compete with free, and as such, needs to jack up the perceived price of an Android installation. They do this by dredging up some software patents, and by using the utterly broken US patent system, they mafia manufacturers into paying protection money for every Android device sold, thereby levelling the price difference between Android and Windows Phone 7.”
“Redmond threat level: bright orange,” summarises Canonical COO Matt Asay, who says that “Microsoft holds Androids hostage in open source wars” and provides a good explanation starting as follows:
For years Microsoft has raged — and whined — against the open source machine, once going so far as to castigate open source as being “un-American”. Something must be wrong with a development model, as Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Jim Gray once lamented, that evaporates the possibility of profit in software sales.
And yet open source has marched on, eventually claiming mainstream acceptance as it helped highly capitalistic companies such as Google create hugely profitable businesses. While these companies thrive, however, Microsoft remains cautious, as evidenced in its product strategy and in its hiring patterns.
Click here to find out more!
As Microsoft has watched the open source world pass it by, it has had two main responses:
1. Threaten open-source developers with lawsuits.
2. Adopt open source within its own product lines.
Microsoft has been earnest but uneven in its open-source adoption, but sadly consistent in its threats — and the Microsoft-against-open-source threat level moved to bright orange this week with news that Redmond is trying to hold Acer and Asustek hostage by levying patent royalties on them in reponse to those device manufacturers’ use of Google’s open source mobile platform, Android.
TechDirt too has a couple of relevant new posts on this subject area. The first reminds us that OIN (and the likes of it) is not the answer:
We recently wrote about the incredible patent thicket in the smartphone space. For some reason, in the course of a few days, about ten different publications all created a very similar graphic about “who was suing whom” in the smartphone space for patent infringement.
[...]
Are patent pools better than the legal jumble of lawsuits from the graphic above? Maybe. But are they the best solution out there? Absolutely not. Instead, a better solution would be to just let the market compete on the merits of the products and let the market decide, rather than focusing on any monopoly rights that will exclude innovators.
The second post says that “All The Big Social Gaming Companies” got sued for patent violation (including Zynga, which wants patent monopolies of its own):
Someone, who prefers to remain anonymous, sent over the news that a company named Everglades Interactive has sued basically all of the big “social gaming” providers for patent infringement. Among those sued are EA, Playdom, Disney (which just bought Playdom), Zynga, Playfish, Rockyou and Crowdstar. The patent in question? It’s patent 6,656,050, for an “odds accelerator for promotional type sweepstakes, games, and contests.” If you read the details, it seems like the pretty standard process of taking various sweepstakes involving matching pieces (bottle caps, peel off stickers, etc.) to get certain prizes but moving it online. Of course, once you move such a physical process online, you can do slightly different things since you’re not limited by geography and physical distribution. But all that seems like it should be obvious. Not to the patent examiners of course, who judged it patent worthy.
The bottom line is, software patents ought to go. They not only harm Linux but they also occasionally harm large companies (which resort to using them when they can’t compete); the main winners are patent trolls and patent lawyers, who are sometimes the same. The vast majority (or Digital Majority) remains unhappy. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 4:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Light of Silverlight
Summary: Microsoft gives up on Silver Lie, but it stays around in one form or another because of Vista Phony 7 [sic] which depends on it. Bad design decisions continue to demonstrate the chain/domino effect in Microsoft’s stack collapse.
“M
oon Lie” is a pet name of the Mono-based Moonlight, which endangers the Web as it puts a Microsoft dependency in it. What will be next for Moon Lie now that Microsoft drops Silver Lie for most practical purposes? Yes, Microsoft is calling a lot of it off because it failed badly, but the company starts spinning this as goodwill and commitment to web standards. Beware the PR and spin exercise, which amongst other things gets used to promote Internet Explorer 9 [1, 2, 3, 4].
It was not so long ago that Microsoft insiders spoke about the death of WPF, whose apparent death was bound to have a negative effect on Silver Lie [1, 2]. It appears as though we were right all along when claiming that Silver Lie was dying [1, 2, 3, 4]*, at least based on this new report which says Silverlight is nearly dead for most purposes, so they redefine it in a way (rather than throw in the towel):
At Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week, the future of Silverlight is one topic that has gotten short shrift. There have been no sessions about Silverlight 5 and only one mention of Silverlight in the kick-off keynote.
But there were plenty of mentions of HTML 5 and Microsoft’s commitment to that technology, not only in the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, but also as the glue “facilitating a level of independence and innovation between the back end and the front end” (as CEO Steve Ballmer said during an October 28 keynote address at the PDC).
There is a chain reaction here and it is one that we explained weeks ago. Microsoft’s Vista Phony 7 [sic] may become the next “KIN” because the death of Silver Lie may mean end of Vista Phony 7 development; yes, with Silver Lie losing its main reason for R&D investments, Microsoft’s mobile ambitions too are likely to suffer. Vista Phony 7 is dependent on it. Our reader Sternreise has just said: “better investigate status of moonlight as well (are they going to proceed with the implementation, etc)”; Our administrator Tracy has argued that “MS will never succeed in mobile. Apple/Google have them totally beat there.Windows as a platform is dying. They’ll never recover from that”; Sternreise carries on by saying (in IRC): “well, ms dumping Iron* and drawing SL to their proprietary development alone tells something about Microsoft abandoning .net as “world domination” technology and focusing on keeping it as proprietary implementation tech… I guess it’s good news for both MS and the rest of the world as well, i.e. MS can drive the technology according to their proprietary needs, instead of maintaining a pretense of being a “neutral” technology” (expect it to get more aggressive with software patents and lawsuits as it’s the only way to possibly ‘compete’ now).
Glyn Moody, writing in Identi.ca, agrees that Silver Lie is going “gravewards, evidently” and Joab Jackson from IDG writes in Identi.ca that “Microsoft shifts Silverlight to being a Windows Phone development platform only”; he also links to Joe Wilcox’ article that asks, “Why is Microsoft suddenly so hot for HTML5?”
Microsoft has quite aggressively touted HTML5 during PDC 2010, which wraps up today. It’s seemingly inconsistent with Microsoft’s revamped cloud strategy, which is very much about taking propriety software to the cloud. How then does Microsoft’s platform-independent HTML5 approach reconcile with extending the proprietary Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack into the cloud?
“Maybe because Silverblights sucks,” is the reason our reader gnufreex gave for the failure of Silver Lie (in response to the above headline), but the huge blow to Vista Phony 7 [sic] is what we care about a lot more because Microsoft’s future depends on adaptability as such. “Microsoft Giving Up On Silverlight, Joining HTML5 Party,” says the headline from GigaOM which plays along with the spin that Microsoft shifts and drifts away from Silverlight because of HTML 5 and not due to its defeat in the face of Adobe Trash (Flash) ubiquity .
We now have further confirmation that Microsoft is giving up on its Silverlight rich Internet application platform. Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s president in charge of server and tools, told ZDNet that the company is “shifting away” from Silverlight as a cross-platform development framework, and pushing the HTML5 web standard instead.
Simon Phipps writes:
Very smart move (also covered at GigaOm) – Microsoft are trying to lead the race to the bottom with HTML 5, presumably in the hope of killing Adobe, rather than cascading money faster and faster into Silverlight in an attempt to fight the old way. They only place Silverlight is still strategic is on mobile, and honestly they probably realise HTML 5 is the future there too.
This suggests Microsoft are finally awakening to the power of community. Instead of trying to fight their competitors alone, they are teaming up with open standards – and increasingly open source – to achieve that effect. You can tell where they think they are strong – those are the places they are still fighting with communities and consequently about to lose their lead…
Ray Ozzie’s departure [1, 2] could relate to this and some products like the Web version of Office were once envisioned as incorporating Silver Lie. All those puff piece about Ozzie’s Azure (e.g. [1, 2]) bear no real substance and since Vista Phony 7 has only been money down the drain, new predictions of an "end" of today's Microsoft do make a lot of sense. Just watch this extensive list of dead Microsoft products. Silver Lie is candidate for addition now. █
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* Months ago Techrights was cited by many sites as saying Silver Lie was nearly dead and we were attacked for showing early evidential proof.
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Even one of the more Microsoft-sympathetic publications foresees the end of Microsoft, whose struggle against advancement Ray Ozzie warned about earlier this month as he quit
IN one of our later posts we are going to go through Microsoft’s results and explain (yet again) why Microsoft is not telling the full story. Today, just days after Microsoft results which it wants people to believe are wonderful, InformationWeek Global CIO says that “Microsoft [is] Looking Like An End-Stage Company” and expands as follows:
I believe that Microsoft as we know it may not be around in another decade–maybe not even in five years. There’s hardly a single tech industry trend line pointing in Redmond’s favor right now, and some of those curves are about to get a lot steeper, real fast.
We have actually heard from people who predict the Enronisation of Microsoft within a few years. As this one new post (amongst others that cite us this week) put it, “Enron was a cash maven too, till nearly the very end” and Microsoft’s “moves are not a marker of a company with coffers full of cash.”
We wrote repeatedly about Microsoft’s growing debt and other oddities (there is a recorded history of financial fraud at Microsoft). Mini-Microsoft, an anonymous employee of Microsoft, wrote about the company’s latest results, and s/he argues that Microsoft should lay off another 15,000 workers:
I still believe we need to chuck about 15,000 positions (and half of our super-ballooned contingent staff) rather than continue the slow squeeze around the company that’s making this an ordinary job with some extraordinary wonderful people who just haven’t given up on the company. Yet. I hope that the analysts realize that continued, consistent bloodletting because a negative for hiring, and (allow me to be pro-hiring for a moment) if we can’t bring in deep-talented new blood to replace the departed dead wood, our future is doomed to mediocrity.
The blog of Mini-Microsoft is the source of rumoured layoffs that we wrote about recently. Layoffs are usually announced a week or two after results are announced and if the layoffs are slow (or involve offshoring) they may never be formally announced. Either way, be not afraid of Microsoft. Increasingly it will be companies like Apple that find Free software to be a thorn in their behind. Apple is already suing Linux/Android because it’s losing to it. Microsoft may be gone sooner or later (not altogether), but the demise of Microsoft is not necessarily the arrival of software freedom Utopia. The struggle or at least the vigilance will be perpetual because, as Dr. Richard Stallman once put it, “value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history.” █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 2:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Analysis of Microsoft’s latest interactions with the free/open source software community
HOW CAN one tell that a particular team loses? That team envies the opposing team and amid defeat tries to simply become that opposing team. Microsoft’s OuterCurve [1, 2, 3] and its Windows vision of “open source” (still PR driven) reminds us that Microsoft can no longer ignore or just laugh at “open source”. In order to remain part of the future Microsoft must try to co-opt “open source”, but it has not succeeded for years (it tried repeatedly under different names, e.g. “Shared Source” and “CodePlex”). The following new post helps remind us that Microsoft is not a friend of “open source”, it’s simply trying to exploit and hurt it:
Yesterday, I finished the analysis of a survey I passed for one of my courses.
I used tables, pie graphs, bar graphs, and many of those features people love to see when data analysis is presented.
Oh…I also used Open Office to build the whole thing.
That reminded me of the video bashing Open Office that Microsoft launched, I presume, as part of their “We LOVE Open Source” campaign.
The video, which some view as a desperate rant by the Redmond giant while others see it as an implicit warning of the dangers a hasty migration may cause, called my attention when it mentioned the academic sphere…
Can the use of Open Office actually cause students to get lower grades? Tricky question.
OpenOffice.org (or LibreOffice) is often the first step taken before abandoning Windows and moving to GNU/Linux. Microsoft knows that. Well, Microsoft Office requires operating systems that are not secure and it is also insecure on its own, as this new post reminds us as well:
Why do people accept faulty operating systems?
[..]
Sure they will throw the same tantrums with a physical computer fault however, on the software side of things they will accept without a murmur and actually request to install the most bug ridden, virus infected and unstable operating systems in the history of computing. They will use these systems and not care that it is sending spam to the four corners of the world (why do people say that? The world is round) or some fifty odd viruses are siphoning off their passwords, credit card numbers and personal details for sale on the black market.
Russia is said to be preparing for a nationwide move to GNU/Linux and the following article author wonders how Microsoft will respond.
Will Russia’s Move to GNU/Linux Prompt Microsoft to Repair Its Image?
[...]
The Russian government recently made a surprising decision: to create a national operating system based on GNU/Linux. The motivation for this development is crystal clear: escaping the Microsoft Windows monopoly. Russia will gain two other huge advantages due to the shift: lower software expenditures and full access to the operating system’s source code. The source code access will allow any discovered security flaws to be quickly fixed. Russia appears to be following China’s lead. A few years ago, China also decided to shift to a Linux-based operating system known as Red Flag Linux. In this article, I will discuss some of the underlying issues that are causing countries, institutions, individuals, and governments to defect to GNU/Linux.
We wrote about it days ago in relation to Microsoft Office. The bottom line is that it’s Free software (OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and GNU/Linux) that gives Microsoft a major headache. Apple is very different in nature on the desktop (where Microsoft Office runs natively too). █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Finance, Marketing, Microsoft at 12:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I think he [Bill Gates] has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses [...] They don’t act like grown-ups!”
–Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
Photo from Jackson’s firm’s Web site
Summary: The world’s richest person (on and off) is trying to portray himself as the person who fights against rich people and greed; A look at other PR-imposed inversions
SOME truly unbelievable spin has come out of the Gates Foundation recently. For those who read this site regularly it ought to be known that the foundation pays many journalists to worship Gates’ agenda in the press. No wonder a lot of people are unable to critically assess this agenda, which revolves around patents, publicity, control, and monopolisation. But today’s post is about a different type of spin we have covered here before [1, 2, 3, 4]. It is basically the spin which would have the gullible believe that the world’s richest man is in fact the enemy of rich people and the only one who can help fair distribution of wealth. Yes, no kidding, that’s what readers are occasionally begged to believe. A good example of this storyline is those recent trips to China’s rich men, who are far less wealthy than Bill and Warren who daemonise and pressure them (Bill and Warren have a shared tax haven). But wait, it gets worse.
This newer bits of spin dissociates Microsoft’s greed (which is how Gates made all his fortune) from Gates himself. Are people truly expected to absorb the spin that “Microsoft Hates Bill Gates’ Rich People Tax” (as the headline puts it)?
That’s just not the story at all. The main story is that this “Rich People Tax” has loopholes which Gates exploited because it does not apply to him. The father of Bill (with identical name) is lumped in even though he too appears to be enjoying those same tax exemptions. Well, the corporate press cannot possibly miss those simple facts, maybe it is just not interested in investigating and reporting accurately. It’s really quite striking. See a related and very informal discussion in IRC where Facebook’s actions are shown to be similar. Therein too there is the schools PR (“think about the children!”) and as Dr. Ravitch has warned [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], danger lurks as it’s a strategic move. Gates continues to exploit the government for education that’s actually his indoctrination and based on this new report, Steve Jobs wants a piece of the pie too:
The White House says President Barack Obama has discussed American competitiveness and education with Apple Co. co-founder Steve Jobs.
It helps show that fortune holders continue to act as somewhat of a shadow government and we wrote about it a week ago.
Apple and education don’t mix. It’s quite an oxymoron to them. In fact, Apple encourages ignorance in some ways.
A day or so ago we also noticed that the Gates PR team is busy advertising the “Bill Gates” brand in some articles regarding action against global warming. It is problematic when Gates talks about climate danger while his own advancement of patents and investments in large oil-producing companies not just make matters worse emissions-wise; it gives money to sponsor global warming denial, which two firms Gates gives money to are confirmed to be doing.
Most people know about Gates only what PR agents are telling them (or paying journalists to recite). █
“As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.””
–Sun’s CEO)
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Ubuntu at 9:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bar/excepting disc space constraints, Canonical intends to replace Rhythmbox in the next version of the very ubiquitous “Ubuntu” distribution, adding to it components that are explicitly excluded from Microsoft’s Community Promise
THE ROCKY LOVE affair of Banshee and Ubuntu goes a long way back and we wrote about it in posts such as:
OMG!Ubuntu asks: “Which would you choose as default: Banshee or Rhythmbox?”
“So much for the vote they had yesterday,” wrote gnubie in our main IRC channel as s/he pointed to this news from the same site which says that “Banshee becomes Ubuntu 11.04 default music player” (the comments talk about Mono).
The news headline cannot be confirmed by Webupd8, which is another popular information resource that’s focused on Ubuntu and says:
- Banshee might be included by default in Ubuntu 11.04 (and thus replace Rhythmbox) if it can be slimmed down to fit on the CD
Compare this to the statement from OMG!Ubuntu, which says: “Banshee is to be the default music player in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal – providing issues with disc space can be overcome.”
By making Mono unavailable by default in Ubuntu a lot of disc space would be saved. But there are other issues or noteworthy factors here, notably the Microsoft APIs and the fact that Banshee contains parts of Mono that we know for a fact based on the Microsoft Community Promise (MCP) to be a patent trap.
Why does Canonical add software which Novell totally controls and Microsoft has power over? There are still some people out there who thank Novell for such gifts and even call Mono “great”:
The Great
Mono -
I know Mono isn’t the most popular project in the open source community but working in the real world mono is one of the most important project Novell backs. The need to have C# programs work across multiple platforms has become very important. It finally blurs what operating system you need to run a program and given the choice of SUSE with Mono vs Microsoft Server with .Net from a cost prospective SUSE is the best route. Porting .NET applications to Mono isn’t that hard and any new applications written in Mono will work perfectly on Windows so there really is no reason not to use Mono to develop your .NET applications
The main goal here is to develop with Microsoft’s API what could otherwise be achieved with Java for example. Mono is not a GNU/Linux project (it is about .NET) and it’s risky. Now that the SCO-esque Microsoft sues many companies without prior provocation, Canonical would be wise to stay with Rhythmbox. █
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Following a New York Times story (subscription required) from a couple months ago, Russia announced this week it would reduce its dependence on Windows and work toward a national Linux-based operating system. As Katherine Noyes points out on NetworkWorld, we’ll have to wait to see how this unfolds given that this isn’t the first time Russia has said this. Noyes’ story includes some good information on what businesses can learn from this.
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Welcome to the 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards. We love doing these awards because we get to interact with you, our readers, more than usual. This year, more than 12,000 of you generously took time to participate and share your perspectives on what tools are helping you work and play. We always are fascinated by your preferences and how your usage patterns change over time. This year, we have more categories than ever, so let’s get right to the results. Here, ladies and gentlemen, Linux geeks of all kinds, are the winners of your 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards.
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In response to this high profile case, many Russian schools started to switch to Linux, and in response to that, Russia apparently declared that all schools should switch to Linux-based software by 2008.
However, apparently that didn’t actually happen. Glyn Moody points us to the news that another Russian school teacher has been fired for complaining that his school still used Microsoft software. Even though the 2007 order required schools to switch to Linux, apparently a training system the government is making the school use requires Microsoft Office. So the teacher filed a complaint, pointing out the contradiction in orders… and for his efforts he was fired.
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With penetration of Android will come mobile developers and with them will come a large application suite. Those applications will automatically run on an Android desktop.
[...]
It is for this reason that I think it’s too early to write off Linux on the Desktop.
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Linux is my sandbox. It is where I go to play. It is also where many people go to be productive. Desktop Linux has many millions of users. You probably have not heard much about it because of the way that it is developed and promoted.
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On the desktop, you can run over 300 distributions or varieties of Linux.
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For this Halloween season, I decided to post a few old but entertaining and somewhat educational Linux/Unix horror stories that were compiled by Anatoly Ivasyuk. Actually, Anatoly has created an entire page filled with Unix-related horror stories and I just picked a few interesting entries to share with you all. Don’t worry, I will provide you the link to the complete horror stories page right after my choices. Enjoy!
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It’s Halloween and nothing scares proprietary companies more than the cute little Linux Tux. Our Editor set out to a mission to carve a Linux Penguin on our pumpkin and scare some non-free companies. Here is the step by step creation. The process has not been patented, you are free to copy, modify and distribute it, as long as you maintain the attribution.
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Yes. We actually watched these movies. We suffered through them for you. We tracked them down in video stores and on Netflix, and sorted through piles of rubbish and even the Youtubes. We watched them all, and this is what we have gleaned: technology, guys, is scary. It causes addiction, it connects us with weirdos, and it is responsible, we suppose, for Emmerich-style mass destruction. Yet, Hollywood seems to be most fascinated with that last bit — and when it comes to attempting to scare the bejeezus out of its horror-loving public, current tech trends are unfortunately ripe for the picking.
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I couldn’t make this up if I tried: The Linux Foundation is offering a platinum rewards Visa credit card. There is no annual fee, a low introductory APR — in fact, it’s a normal credit card with Tux on the front.
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Server
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If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the Tianhe-1A , which means “Milky Way,” at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Rakudo Star is a more usable and stable distribution of Perl 6.
Guest: Patrick Michaud, for Rakudo Perl.
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Topics for this podcast
*Latest release and support for OpenStack, Austin code release
*Development and devops consolidation continue with CollabNet-Codesion
*Funding for a number of open-source-focused players
*Open core, Canonical and the ongoing discussion
*OTRS provides open source helpdesk and service management
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Ballnux
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Samsung today launched its much anticipated Android 2.2 tablet Galaxy Tab in India. Samsung Galaxy Tab will be available in India from November 10, right right after Diwali festivities, but if you are too excited, you can pre-book one now. It is available for pre-order on Samsung website as well as on Flipkart and Future Bazaar.
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The WiFi-only version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has shown up in the FCC’s testing database, complete with the model number GT-P1010. The Froyo slate differs from its GT-P1000 sibling by omitting the 3G chipset and instead relying on WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 for its connectivity; otherwise it has the same 7-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, the 3-megapixel rear camera and front-facing 1.3-megapixel webcam.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three stable kernel updates: 2.6.27.55, 2.6.32.25, and 2.6.35.8. Users of these kernel series “must upgrade”. Also there will be only one more update for the 2.6.35 series, “so you should be using .36 instead.”
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The integration of the TILE architecture in the Linux kernel enables many open source projects to support Tilera natively and start optimizing their code for many-core. It also allows Tilera customers across embedded and cloud markets to run their Linux applications on Tilera’s technology without software change.
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Kernel 2.4 was revolutionary because it was the first kernel release that was truly embraced by enterprise users for use in their operations. Linux had had support for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing – another term for multiple CPUs) since 2.0, but the improvements in 2.4 driven by the newly involved big players (such as IBM) brought improved scalability, stability and new features that finally pushed it over the edge as a serious contender to proprietary UNIX systems of old.
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Graphics Stack
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Chia-I Wu, the open-source developer who previously worked to bring Mesa to Android devices and worked on the new EGL state tracker, is now working for LunarG and has just published a patch-set that enables the Nouveau graphics driver to run the Wayland Display Server.
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Just earlier today we reported that Wayland is becoming compatible with Nouveau so that users of this open-source NVIDIA driver can begin using this alternative, lightweight display server that leverages the latest Linux graphics technologies. About the only caveat right now is the needed Nouveau page-flipping support, which is here for some hardware but not in the mainline Linux kernel yet and the page-flipping hook-up for the newer NVIDIA GPUs is coming soon. Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland, also made another announcement today.
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Applications
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In this day of heavy eye candy and all point ‘n click desktops, the command-line seems to be falling further and further into disuse – at least by regular desktop users. The command-line and its power can perform everyday tasks faster and easier than a bunch of clicking around, yet new users are still intimidated by the prospect. But there really is nothing to fear. To help prove its usefulness, here are my top 15 used commands (from a fairly fresh install).
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This is an open source clone of Evernote designed to run on Linux. It is written in Java so it will also run on Windows & OS-X, but the primary focus has been to try and get a usable environment for Linux. While this is designed to work with Evernote, it is in no way connected with or supported by Evernote. Any problems you encounter will not be corrected by them and, since this is GPL software, you are using this software at your own risk.
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Proprietary
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Many hard-core Linux users will tell those who have yet to adopt it to use Wine or Crossover Office to get their favorite application running on Linux. This, of course, is simply not a solution for the new user just trying to get accustomed to an entirely new operating system. These applications need to be ported over so they can run natively. When/if that should happen, Linux adoption will be rampant.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for GStreamer filters.
– Mapping of standard cursors to native desktop cursors.
– Improved support for installers with services.
– Many MSXML improvements.
– Decoder for TGA-format images.
– Translation updates.
– Various bug fixes.
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Wine 1.3.5 came two weeks ago with better Shader Model 4.0 support for Windows applications/games and the ability to use the CUPS print server directly, among other features, while today Wine 1.3.6 has been released with support for more features.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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For those unfamiliar with the concept, plasma desktop themes deal with anything from the menu panel to dialogs, widgets, etc.
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GNOME Desktop
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In order to promote the GNOME 3.0 launch and spread the idea amongst the GNOME community members, I’m sharing the following message! Please translate it and share it with your friends and help us organize the biggest GNOME Launch ever!
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The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work.
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Pardus have its own package management system: PiSi (For more information about pisi you can checkout development page). Package-manager uses its backend. As you may remember from my previous posts, we are using an infrastructrure for managing operations called Çomar. Package-manager calls Çomar where it can check that if the user have necessary priveleges to use PiSi by using PolicyKit (which calls PolicyKitKde on KDE). You may see that this operation resembles KAuth. One can ask why we are using this method, instead of KAuth. Well, the simple answer is that this infrastructure is nearly 4 years old. 
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Reviews
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It attracts a lot of users because of its ability to give the user a feeling of ownership without an excessive amount of time and effort.
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Tiny Core Linux 3.2 is truly the polar opposite of Ultimate Edition 2.8; it provides the absolute minimum necessary to get you going and from there it’s really up to you to decide what you want to do with it. You’ll need to have a clear understanding of exactly what you want to use it for before it has the possibility of creating real value for you. So it’s definitely helpful if you know in advance what you want to get out of it before you attempt an install.
I suggest that intermediate and advanced Linux users use Tiny Core Linux 3.2. Beginners can certainly give it a whirl in a virtual machine, but the install might prove to be a bit overwhelming to those who are completely new to Linux.
Click to the next page to view the full image gallery (9 screenshots) of Tiny Core Linux 3.2 screenshots.
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New Releases
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Version 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) of the very best Free-Libre Open-Source data recovery software toolkit based on Ubuntu is out.
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Red Hat Family
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To hear that charge made about something as fundamental as the way enterprise software is currently sold, however, is rare. That, however, is just what Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst asserted last week in a speech at Interop in New York.
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Fedora
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Fedora 14 will be released on schedule on Tuesday, Nov. 2nd, which many of us know as “voting day”.
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Debian Family
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As I’ve written more times than most any of you would probably care to read, the six or so months during which I ran Debian Lenny as my main desktop were some of the smoothest months I’ve experienced in my FOSS-running life. That’s because Debian releases are conservatively built and never change. Security updates are pretty much it; the kernel stays the same, with patches backported into the same version and then pushed to users via apt/Aptitude. I’m sure the occasional critical bug-fix comes through as well, but often a broken piece of a stable Debian release stays broken (e.g. the Ted RTF word processor in Etch, thankfully fixed in Lenny).
But if your particular Debian setup (system and applications) is running well, you’re good for at least two and maybe even three years if you don’t want or need newer versions of your applications. I have yet to explore Debian Backports or pinning apps to Testing or Unstable. I might need to do that to get a 2.11/2.12 version of gThumb (I could also just install a .deb package with dpkg or gDebi).
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Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is awesome! Based on Debian Testing it is a rolling distro. That means if you are running LMDE you will always have an up-to-date system running, and as the saying and experiences go, Debian testing base is more stable than the so called final/stable releases of most other distros. But if you are a stability freak like me, you can make your Linux Mint Debian stable by pointing the apt sources.lst to squeeze. This ways you won’t have to install point updates of applications every now and then. You will always have the most stable and workable system for quite a long period, till squeeze becomes obsolete. Here is how I did it.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Widgets on the desktop; some people can be quite snooty about them but there is a reason they are available by default on two of the most popular Operating Systems.
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As if it were a Christmas gift to all ubuntu users, it has been announced at the UDS that a development version of Ubuntu Software Center with ‘Ratings and Reviews’ feature will arrive by Christmas.
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“I’m interested in Ubuntu and the cloud, how do I get involved” is a question I got a few times already. I thought it would be a good idea to answer this as a blog post. I believe one of the very first things you’d want to do, is to make sure you’re on the main communication channels, talking to the community, asking questions, seeing other questions being answered, trying to answer some yourself, sharing opinions and generally “connecting” with the rest of the community. That is a great first step. So I’ll highlight the main communication venues for the Ubuntu cloud community, as well as way to get kick-started.
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Translators, educators, school children and students all have a natural home in Ubuntu too, I believe, and Edubuntu and a bunch of other efforts will continue to try and reach out to them.
There are many many, more, I don’t doubt.
A further benefit of reaching out to groups who tend to be more mixed in gender and background than the Linux community is that it brings that diversity into the Ubuntu community. It will be interesting to watch these efforts develop.
But back to UDS. It’s been a great week.
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Tonight I will concentrate on answering your questions about Unity on Ask Ubuntu. Questions will be answered based on the number of votes they receive and ones that I can answer.
Unity developers will be advising me best on how to answer your questions and we can continue to develop the answers based on feedback. If you’ve already asked then we’ll keep working on our answers to be better.
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Ask many Linux users about the concept of “fragmentation,” and they’ll pooh-pooh the very concept. They’ll argue that the beauty of open source is the rich array of software flavors that open platform components give rise to. Canonical is a business, though, and at a certain point it has to evaluate whether a “rich array” of desktop interface flavors is necessarily in Ubuntu’s best interests. Yes, Unity is new, and will have to go through bug testing and other challenges, but it is also a standardized desktop that Canonical can command control of.
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One thing that I have noticed with Unity so far, is that heavy usage seems to have a greater impact on the performance of Unity than with Gnome or KDE.
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RAM wise Unity is awesome, but the spikes in CPU usage tends to kill the interface, and often you need to wait for ten or more seconds between clicking a launcher and actual response. But there is hope…
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This day is starting early. We are going to a family get together in a few hours (why is the end of the year always to crazy!?) and I want to get something readable for you guys who are following this series before I am Internetless for a few hours.
I have something interesting for you folks – a custom unity launcher…
SUCCESS!!!
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So what if Ubuntu does not have the user interface you want. You don’t have to use it. You can change it. You can do anything you want with it. You can even release your own distribution based on Ubuntu with your changes. Waaaiiit a minute….hasn’t that already happened? Something Minty I believe?
If this Unity is more popular than Gnome then it will succeed. If not, well then back to the Gnome board. If the Ubuntu distributions users like what Canonical will do then Ubuntu will be more popular than ever before. If not then some other distribution will.
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But while the decision may be in keeping with the times, it’s still every bit the ‘risky step’ that Mark Shuttleworth described it as when he made the announcement earlier this week.
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It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don’t see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a “Mobile Internet Device”. Their use cases do not overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.
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Ubuntu’s Jorge Castro has confirmed that Maverick users will be able to test the newly announced Compiz port of Unity via a PPA ‘as soon as possible’.
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To celebrate the 500th member of the Ubuntu DeviantArt group. I’ve put together some stats for Operating System Use based on self stated use on profile pages:
Windows 7/Vista/XP – 410,000 (76.9%)
Mac – 87,700 (16.3%)
Ubuntu – 20,300 (3.7%)
Linux – 16,000 (3%)
Total: 533,300
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You may have heard this before, but the latest release of Ubuntu – Maverick Meerkat – shows that Linux is ready for the prime time. The reason? The unifying nature of the web.
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Learning a new operating system can be difficult, but is also really fun. If you’ve recently installed Ubuntu 10.10 on your computer and want to explore what this operating system is capable of, don’t panic: you’ll enjoy it.
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It has often been said that the vibrant community of users and developers surrounding each distribution is Linux’s “killer app,” and I think in many ways that is true. Ubuntu is no exception. Not only is there free documentation and live support chat for help with the distribution, but there are also Web forums, mailing lists and a Launchpad-based Q&A system, among other resources.
Even before you have any specific questions, it’s a good idea to begin to explore this community so that you know what’s out there when you need it. The resources available far outshine what any proprietary vendor’s 800-number could ever provide.
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After reviewing Ubuntu 10.10 and Kubuntu 10.10, the next logical Ubuntu edition to review I think should be the Ubuntu Netbook Edition, or UNE. As the name implies, UNE is the edition of Ubuntu optimized for small screens, such as you will find on netbooks and tablet computers.
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Released at ten past ten on the 10th October 2010 (all the tens – get it?), Ubuntu 10.10 is the latest version of the popular Linux distro to hit the streets. If you were expecting a slew of new features and functionality, however, disappointment beckons. New features there are, but the expected headliners didn’t quite make it. Indeed, Ubuntu 10.10, or Maverick Meerkat as it’s known, is more about polishing the big changes of the last release, Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), than adding much that’s new.
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See, 42 really is the answer to everything. We’ve got issue #42 out for all of our readers and it’s packed with all the goodness you’ve come to expect from a FCM issue. This month, we’ve got an exciting new feature called Linux Lab. Take a look!
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Phones
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Android
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Sony Ericsson on Friday confirmed that it will begin releasing the Android 2.1 update for its flagship Xperia X10, X10 mini and X10 mini pro smartphones on Sunday. This makes good on a promise made back in May. European X10 owners will start receiving the update during the evening of October 31.
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Sub-notebooks
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We at litl had to skip last year’s GNOME Summit in Boston because we were too busy releasing our first product, the webbook. But we wanted to contribute with something this year. So, we’ll doing something similar than we did in 2008.
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I got to see an ARM Netbook at UDS-Natty. The Netbook is a EFIKA MX Smartbook. It is exciting to see an ARM based computing device running Ubuntu.
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Nifty, low-cost netbooks hit the scene in late 2008 and sold over 36 million units in 2009, according to ABI Research. Even with projected sales of 35-43 million units this year, the future of these diminutive laptop-like computers is being pulled under a dark cloud of doubt as new tablets grab the limelight and spare cash from consumers.
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While most ARM chips are running low-level smart-thingies like controllers, smartphones have really taken off. Total growth is around 30% year over year. News this year:
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Tablets
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Other OEMs watch ASUS. 2010 will finish well and 2011 looks to be even better for GNU/Linux.
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Asustek will also launch two 7-inch models and two 9-inch models in March 2011. One of the 7-inch models will feature support for Wi-Fi and the other 3.5G, while the later one will also feature phone functions. As for the 9-inch models, Asustek will have one model adopt the ARM-based Nvidia Tegra 2 platform with Google’s Android operating system and the other the Wintel platform. The two 9-inch models will have a price gap of about US$100, Shen noted.
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Most IT managers are well aware of the LAMP stack, which includes the Linux operating system, an Apache Web server, a MySQL database and a dynamic programming language such as Perl, PHP or Python. But other open-source system groups are growing rapidly. Some obvious examples are the JBoss Application Server with a JAX-WS Web services stack, the Zope object-oriented Web application server — written in Python — and the Plone open-source content management system that works with Zope.
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Events
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Are you interested in Open Source? At the exhibition, you will find several companies and parties who have specialized in or work with Open Source software and/or applications. Not only in the field of data security, but also storage. The seminar programme also contains sessions specifically dealing with Open Source.
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We also want to especially encourage open source software companies to provide some insights in their open source based business model, offered services and products.
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The ApacheCon conference–dedicated to all of the influential Apache-backed platforms and applications, ranging from Hadoop to Cassandra–is coming up Nov. 1st through 5th in Atlanta, Georgia, and we’ve been doing a series of guest posts in conjunction with it. Members of the Apache Software Foundation have weighed in on the foundation’s approach to open source projects, and now, Sally Khudairi, a VP at the foundation, has written a guest post focused on servers, innovation and the cloud. Here it is.
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As you can see from the list of participants, yours truly will also be attending. Apparently, there will be a live video stream of some of the sessions: not sure whether mine will be one of them. If it is, you can see me spouting my common commons nonsense around 11am CEST, 10am GMT.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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WoMoz internal survey results and conclusions are now available. The blog post says that the main purpose of the survey was to “… detect areas of improvement related to gender issues in Mozilla and FLOSS communities,” but also notes that finding women who are active contributors to Mozilla was a challenge. Only 18 of the 30 women contacted responded to the survey. From these responses, the survey team concluded that many of the women have experience with the Ubuntu project, so reaching out to Ubuntu Women might help attract more contributors. Some of the women who are contributing to Mozilla are doing so as a result of being contacted from somebody already involved with the Mozilla project. Also, “lack of time” seems to hold women back from contributing to Mozilla.
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As noted on Slashdot, which also has an interesting discussion from readers about Rainbow, support for live streaming and WebM are planned as additions.
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Oracle
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# Boggled at Oracle’s amended complaint against Google. Havn’t investigated the verbatim code copying claims in detail – which are of course fair game for copyright enforcement – but what interests me -far- more are the API copyright claims:
# As I wrote before, I believe that Java has rather weak patent protection, not being particularly innovative or novel really – rather a collection of existing techniques packed together into one (useful) package. With a load of design artefacts in the API that can be claimed as in some sense ‘novel’ though of little intrinsic technical merit. I wrote a long screed on the background to this: Why Oracle’s Java Copyrights Might Matter in August. As I also wrote before: I am not a Lawyer, and have no very deep understanding of the Java situation.
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My first question would be, why is the majority of council members stacked with Oracle employees in the first place? It is a community council, not the project steering board, it should represent the mostly volunteer community, which has certainly different interests than the a for profit corporation. Hence, the people with a conflict of interest all along have never stepped down in the first place.
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I would like to discuss a bit the position of the Document Foundationwith respect to copyright assignments. I understand there have been questions here and there about this topic, and it’s perhaps necessary to explain our position.
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The problem is that most of the people who are looking at the “line by line” example don’t actually understand code. SCO did this, through the same legal team (Boies Schiller) with its claims that Linux had direct copied code from UnixWare. That was debunked pretty quickly. The only thing missing here is Larry Ellison running around issuing open letters or ranting about Google to anyone who will listen. Never let it be said that Ellison isn’t classier than Darl McBride.
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Within hours Groklaw has an update that shows the “example” is from OpenJDK and was released under the GPL. Further, the “example” is not a copy but a derived work. This is like SCOG v World in fast motion.
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Oracle Gets Specific — Files Amended Complaint – Updated 3Xs: And More, More, More
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After four years working with the MySQL team, under three different companies, it’s time for me to pursue a new career.
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CMS
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Diaspora is getting better every day. Here are some of the features we’ve added over the last month:
* Public messages are can now be posted to Twitter and Facebook
* Friends can now be in multiple aspects
* Re-sharing of status messages to aspects other than the one originally posted to
* An invite system for inviting your friends not hip to Diaspora yet
* Email notifications on new friend request and acceptance
* Account data is exportable
* A more friendly “getting started” experience
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Education
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What is anything but inevitable is the adoption of any of these open educational resources. As a thought experiment, pick your favorite institution you believe is committed to open education. Have they ever adopted an open education resource produced at another institution for in-class use? If they have an open courseware collection, can you find a single third-party OER in the collection? If even the institutions that claim to be committed to open educational resources aren’t reusing them, who will?
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Healthcare
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Last Friday, I had a heart attack. As I was rushed to the hospital by the superb ambulance crews and through the operating theatre and onwards to the recovery room by the skilled surgeons, one thing stuck in my mind; how badly open source, and software development in general, has let down health care professionals, who I watched handle bundles of notes and forms which contained the crucial patient care information.
[..]
It’s not just a software problem though; we need to come up with new ways of rapidly capturing the health care professionals thoughts and information, ones which are as fast as handwriting, with devices which aren’t going to act as a vector for infection. To create those devices and the software, we, as an open source and IT community, need to create the framework and intelligence pool so that we can approach the severely time constrained doctors, nurses and other professionals, and find out what they need and how we can build it.
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Through the efforts of the FreeMED Software Foundation, many generous donors and help from the Pop-Wuj Spanish Language School, we were able to install an advanced electronic medical record, somewhat customized, for the a clinic in Quezeltenagno, Guatemala.
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Funding
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MacArthur is one of the nation’s largest independent foundations. The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society.
With assets over $5 billion, MacArthur will award approximately $230 million in grants this year. Through the support it provides, the Foundation fosters the development of knowledge, nurtures individual creativity, strengthens institutions, helps improve public policy, and provides information to the public, primarily through support for public interest media.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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For those interested in compilers, particularly GCC, or are interested in some technical slides to look over this weekend, the presentations from the 2010 GNU Compiler Collection Summit are now available online.
Some of the potential papers/slides that may be of interest are on GRAPHITE-OpenCL to generate OpenCL code from parallel loops, optimizing real-world applications with GCC LTO, real-time debugging with GDB trace-points, improving GCC’s auto-vectorization, the Google Go front-end to GCC, enabling more optimizations in GCC Graphite, GNU Tools for ARM, and the issues of supporting GCC on Microsoft Windows.
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We’ve just posted a recipe to follow for converting your videos to the new free WebM format, using VLC.
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Project Releases
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We, the monotone developers, are very proud to release version 0.99 of our distributed version control system.
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Government
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Award winners were announced during the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) 2010, in Portland, Oregon today. Winners include:
Open Source Deployment in Government: honors a U.S. government agency or body that has shown commitment to the use of open sourcee, through policy and/or adoption. The 2010 winner is Whitehouse.gov and the Executive Office for their deployment of Drupal open source content management system in October 2009.
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On Twitter, Eduardo Romero, involved in the city of Zaragoza’s move to an open source desktop, was one of those who quoted the Secretary General: “Free software is in the heart of policy and strategies of Andalusia.”
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Germany’s Competence Centre for Open Source Software’ (Ccoss), part of the country’s Federal Office for Information Technology, helps public authorities implement open source. The Ccoss website was renewed this summer and unveiled at the Linux Tag conference, which took place in Berlin last June.
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Openness/Sharing
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Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age builds upon “Internet & Creation : how to recognize non-market exchanges over the internet while funding creation” published in French in October 2008 by InLibroVeritas. See the French page for details on Internet & Création. Sharing and the Creative Economy has now found a publisher, and we are proceeding with finalizing the manuscript as soon as possible. The book is likely to be out in early 2011.
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Open means different things to different people. To some, open source and open innovation mean free access and a requirement to return enhancements back to a broader community. But businesses ask: where’s the competitive advantage? How can the two paradigms co-exist, for mutual benefit?
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Open Data
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This week I attended a panel session on open data and mobile government. In simple terms, open data is about governments making public data available in a way that lets clever people do useful things with it, such as an iPhone app that tells you when your bus will arrive.
A good panel had been pulled together. Chaired by Daniel Appelquist of Vodafone R&D and Mobile Monday London, it comprised David Mann from the DirectGov innovation team, Phil Archer of Talis, and Kenton Price of Little Fluffy Toys (makers of a Boris Bikes app). Broadly speaking they represented the owners, providers and developers
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Though anecdotal in many ways, Where’s My Villo?’s experiment shows that open- data allowing citizens to monitor the performance of a service of which they are the final users should be required in all public-private partnership contracts. Down the line, this may even play an ex-ante role by discouraging companies who intend to deliver frivolous services from chasing public-private contracts, as well as allowing citizens to demand better service ex-post.
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Programming
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Programming languages are unnecessarily difficult to work with because they rely on the artificial constraint of using only ASCII characters, a noted programmer argues in the November issue of the flagship publication of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
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Standards/Consortia
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Some good demos of new ODF-supporting software, including LetterGen, OFS Collaboration Suite, ODT2EPub and odt2braille.
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The Chinese Internet has been abuzz over a hit-and-run incident involving the young son of a high-level security official in Hebei Province, outside Beijing.
The episode shows how quickly outrage over abuses by privileged Chinese officials can come to a boil, as well as the power of Internet-fueled popular pressure in today’s China.
Still, many experts caution that while the Internet has become an outlet for anger against local officials, it is not a significant threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power.
What sparked the uproar was not only the hit-and-run itself, but the young man’s lack of remorse and high-handed attitude. “Go ahead and sue me, I’m Li Gang’s son,” he reportedly said, just after the accident.
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A WORLD-FIRST trial of a personal carbon trading scheme that will also target obesity, is to be conducted by Southern Cross University on Norfolk Island.
The three-year project will involve giving everyone on the island a card loaded with carbon units, according to the man leading it, Garry Egger.
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Now, this is a weird one. A team of Irish engineers says it could be possible to minimise the need for mobile base stations by getting phone users to act as base stations themselves.
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An “internet troll” who posted obscene messages on Facebook sites set up in memory of dead people has been jailed.
Colm Coss, of Ardwick, Manchester, posted on a memorial page for Big Brother star Jade Goody and a tribute site to John Paul Massey, a Liverpool boy mauled to death by a dog.
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FEMA exists to help after a disaster. And when disasters strike, over and over again, we see communities working together to help within themselves and to help each other. But FEMA is hoping that people who are willing to help after a disaster are also willing to help before one. Those are the ideas they’re looking for. You might have an emergency kit if you live in a hurricane- or earthquake-prone area. But what else could we proactively do to help each other and ourselves on a larger scale before the need arises?
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He wants an apology.
Tim Profitt — the former Rand Paul volunteer who stomped on the head of a MoveOn activist — told told local CBS station WKYT that he wants an apology from the woman he stomped and that she started the whole thing.
“I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Profitt said. “I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you.”..
Profitt also blamed the incident on his back pain.
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The topic of the panel was “Cultural Leadership: Forging a Shared Kernel While Preserving Individual Differences.” In other words, how can leaders inspire today’s workforces across geographical and cultural boundaries and through times of uncertainty.
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China’s Premier Wen Jiabao really has been on a roll in the past 8 months, seemingly mentioning the need for political reform and the importance of universal values like human rights, freedom and democracy on every possible occasion, starting with his prominently featured article about his former mentor Hu Yaobang in March.
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What does that mean? “Web linking is the most fundamental web building block,” says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. “Typed links – links with a clear semantic meaning – existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition… Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features.”
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Science
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Pressure flaking is a retouching technique that was used by prehistoric toolmakers to shape stone tips. They pressed the narrow end of a tool close to the edge of a piece they were working on to create rectangular, parallel marks; these are considered the hallmark of pressure flaking. This technique allowed them to more finely control the final shape and thinness of the tool edge than direct percussion could, and yielded sharp, thin, V-shaped tips with straight edges. The earliest evidence for pressure flaking came from the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean industry of Western Europe, and dates from around 20,000 years ago.
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Security
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CentOS has updated seamonkey (C4, C3: remote code execution), C4: firefox (remote code execution), and C5: xulrunner (remote code execution). [...]
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Environment ministers from almost 200 nations agreed late tonight to adopt a new United Nations strategy that aims to stem the worst loss of life on earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.
With a typhoon looming outside and cheering inside the Nagoya conference hall, the Japanese chair of the UN biodiversity talks gavelled into effect the Aichi Targets, set to at least halve the loss of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land area by 2020 up from less than 10% today.
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Finance
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Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the country’s central bank followed conflict of interest guidelines when it hired an adviser from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Bloc Quebecois lawmaker Daniel Paille and Thomas Mulcair of the New Democratic Party both asked about the hiring of Timothy Hodgson for an 18-month term. Flaherty said in response that the bank makes its own staffing decisions and that Hodgson has “severed” his ties to the private sector.
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Prosecutors asked a federal judge to seal the courtroom for part of the upcoming criminal trial of a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc computer programer, an effort to protect the secrecy of the bank’s high-frequency trading platform.
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Most accounts of the ministerial meeting last weekend of the Group of 20 — 19 nations plus the European Union that represent the world’s wealthiest economies —implied that it continued to perform sterling service – heading off currency wars, keeping explicit protectionism under control and deftly managing the process of reforming governance at the International Monetary Fund.
Post-financial crisis, middle-income countries continue to rise in economic importance, and the recent shift in global leadership from the Group of 7 (the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Japan) to the G-20 is commonly supposed to accommodate the growing claims of “emerging markets” on the world stage.
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U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been a genial caretaker for an Obama administration trade agenda mostly aimed at placating labor unions and their Democratic allies by erecting barriers to imports.
With the public more opposed to free trade than ever, and Democrats running hard against it this fall, the White House has shown no interest in the issue. Completed trade deals with other countries haven’t been sent to Congress, leaving U.S. allies hanging. Obama hasn’t even sought congressional authority for new agreements, a foreign policy tool presidents have cherished for 30 years.
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Life has been so dull since the nation’s major banks had their last existential crisis a year or so ago. Right now, it’s like watching a beloved rerun.
We know how the story is most likely to end. The banks will lose billions. It will take a decade or so to drain the swamps — also known as the balance sheets of institutions like the Bank of America and Citigroup — of overvalued and underperforming assets. In the meantime, however, the government will probably jump in and save the banks from themselves once again.
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Here’s the crucial thing to remember about financial reform: the status quo previous to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act financial reform bill was entirely favorable to Wall Street and the largest banks.
[...]
They have already signaled to Wall Street that, starting the morning of November 3rd, 2010, the GOP will be the party that fights sensible Wall Street reform and returns us to the world of 2009, the world most favorable to Wall Street.
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This is the lowest level for weekly claims and the 4-week average since July, however the 4-week moving average has been moving sideways at an elevated level for almost a year – and that suggests a weak job market.
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The foreclosure crisis intensified across a majority of large U.S. metropolitan areas this summer, with Chicago and Seattle – cities outside of the states that have shouldered the worst of the housing downturn – seeing a sharp increase in foreclosure warnings.
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For all the scandalous news about systemically sloppy foreclosure documentation, bankers are trying to reassure the public that no undeserved evictions resulted.
“At the end of the day, the underlying substance was accurate,” JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told reporters on a conference call this week. “There’s almost no chance that we’ve made a mistake”
That misses a key point, which I’ll get to shortly.
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Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show.
Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.
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The minister responsible for internet regulation is planning a new mediation service to encourage ISPs and websites to censor material in response to public complaints.
Ed Vaizey said internet users could use the service to ask for material that is “inaccurate” or infringes their privacy to be removed. It would offer a low cost alternative to court action, he suggested, and be modelled on Nominet’s mediation service for domain disputes.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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This means Usage Based Billing could begin implementation as early as January 2011. This will be a truly rude awakening for the many Canadians who are unaware that this is coming. Imaging getting an Internet bill for double what you are used to paying for monthly access. Just at the time Canadians are digging their way out of the seasonal spending chasm.
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Rémi Denis-Courmont is one of the primary developers of the VLC media player, which is free software and distributed under the GPL. Earlier this week, he wrote to Apple to complain that his work was being distributed through their App Store, under terms that contradict the GPL’s conditions and prohibit users from sharing the program.
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Open standards for file formats ensure portability of the content artifact (often with relevant metadata or context) across authoring or viewing applications. The emergence of the PDF/A standard, for example, as an ISO-managed specification outside the corporate control of a sole vendor happened because of the reluctance of many public sector agencies to accept a proprietary format and risk losing the opportunity to preserve essential content for the long term.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Limewire is probably more popular with the casual downloader who has maybe had use of the Limewire client for a number a years. Its certainly a simple application to use. The problem with Limewire seemed to me that the average user was not tech savvy and so Limewire became a haven for malware and all other sorts of nastiness. Its not a p2p Client I would have ever considered using nor would I have recommended it to anyone else.
For me the loss (in respect of the “service”) is no loss. On 26th October 2010 when Judge Wood served an injunction on Limewire, I saw no loss (from a contributory point of view) but what was worrying were the implications it could have for other p2p services in the future.
Whatever your views on copyright infringement, the technology behind it is not designed to infringe anything. As a user in a BT swarm for example, the sensible position is to give responsibility of any alleged infringement to the users engaging in it not a provider of a tracker or service where users frequent. If we look at this in the real world, it would be like holding a bus driver responsible for a robbery on his vehicle, a landlord responsible for their tenants behavior whilst renting his/her property. The idea that Limewire can be held responsible is to me as inconceivable as any of the above examples I have given.
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I’m getting more questions about my latest book than about any other I’ve written. And this is before the book is even out—before anyone has even read the galleys.
That’s because the questions aren’t about what I wrote, but about how I ended up publishing it: with an independent publisher, for very little money, and through a distribution model that makes it available on only one website. Could I be doing this of sound mind and my own volition? Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big publishing house?
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To many people the movie piracy Scene is something mythical or at least hard to comprehend. Who are these people who are the source for the majority of the pirated movies online? In a rare conversation, TorrentFreak had the chance to pick the brain of a former member of one of the world’s largest movie piracy groups, who speaks out about pride, ego, money and the changes that the Scene has gone through in recent years.
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When a Universal Music Group employee sent a routine notice to a San Francisco Bay Area mother back in 2007 ordering her to take down a grainy YouTube video of her son dancing, there’s no way he could have known what he was about to stir up.
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Governmental bodies around the world are adopting Creative Commons licenses and signaling to their constituencies that these works can be shared in simple, interoperable ways. Just this week, the current Portuguese President Aníbal Cavaco Silva released his official photostream under CC BY, while also posting a CC BY-licensed announcement to run for re-election on SoundCloud.
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ACTA
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Dear President Obama,
As academics dedicated to promoting robust public debate on the laws and public policies affecting the Internet, intellectual property, global innovation policy and the worldwide trade in knowledge goods and services, we write to express our grave concern that your Administration is negotiating a far-reaching international intellectual property agreement behind a shroud of secrecy, with little opportunity for public input, and with active participation by special interests who stand to gain from restrictive new international rules that may harm the public interest.
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Funny, even though consensus couldn’t be reached, the ACTA countries have each taken the agreement back to their respective governments to try and get it signed. They have all agreed that there will be no further rounds of negotiation.
Apparently though, changes can still be made to the text. Since I am a citizen, not a diplomat, I have to wonder if this means that each country can sign a version of ACTA that they are comfortable with, respective of the wants and needs of the others? If so, it would detract from the point of having one universal treaty.
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In the midst of increasing controversy on the extent to which ACTA would alter current or proposed changes to U.S. law, over 75 law professors sent a sharply worded letter to President Obama asking him to “direct the USTR [US Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to a meaningful participation process that can influence the shape of the agreement going forward.” The letter comes as U.S. government officials having been informing public interest advocates that this is last week of consideration of the text, even while reports are increasing that the text as written conflicts with current and proposed US intellectual property law.
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However, some are noticing that it’s actually even worse than that. While I already disagree with the court’s interpretation of various forms of secondary liability, at least they’ve included some safeguards in terms of what standards need to be met before secondary liability might apply by looking at things like whether or not there are substantial non-infringing uses and whether or not there’s intent or knowledge. Unfortunately, it looks like ACTA partly seeks to wipe these out by changing these more nuanced standards into a simple “aiding and abetting” standard, which could lead to criminal infringement claims. As we’ve already noted, ACTA has already broadened the definition of “commercial scale” in order to increase criminal liability for infringement, but law professor Michael Carrier’s analysis suggests the “aiding and abetting” language also greatly broadens the liability for secondary liability as well
Android Netbook – Acer D250-1613
Credit: TinyOgg
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