Summary: “Good for trolls” is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

TODAY marks exactly one week since the bizarre statement from the British government, which enjoyed misleading coverage bought/paid for directly and less directly by Battistelli’s EPO.

In the previous four parts we explained the reality of the situation and in upcoming parts we’ll explain why the UPC is still going nowhere — consistent with what we have been saying for a number of years. Some words on a Web page of the British government are not enough to make the impossible (or barely possible) magically attainable.

It’s worth reminding readers that the legal firm which the EPO unleashed at us for legal threats (in an effort to silence us) is itself part of the UPC's advocacy, which comes to show just how crooked things really are. Basically, a bunch of law firms are attempting to hijack the European patent system by means of endless lobbying, lies, fake (or biased) 'news', and fake job ads (for jobs that don't exist). These are some truly malicious actors. Morals don’t exist because they have a mission and they are willing to combat opponents. Our activism is largely reactionary.

Who is the UPC good for other than some legal firms? “Good news for patent trolls,” said this comment, possibly from Mr. Benjamin Henrion (FFII) by the sound of it.

Several days ago Patently-O wrote about last week’s news, noting that “Europe may overtake the US as patent-litigation-central” if the UPC becomes a reality. Another way to put it is, Europe can become a patent trolls’ hub, complete with software patents and everything they currently enjoy in the US (where they file the lion’s share of lawsuits). The Unitary Patent fantasists include those who can either represent these trolls in court or represent their victims (defendants). What’s not to like, eh?

Earlier today we noted that Microsoft agenda was interjected into an event that’s supposed to be about “International Women’s Leadership Forum” (here is the report about it). Well, Microsoft and even the UPC were interjected into this event. The latter subject was mentioned by “Deanna Kwong of Hewlett Packard Enterprise,” who said that the UPC “will be “fertile ground” for NPEs,” i.e. patent trolls (NPE is a euphemism).

Even MIP took note of it, writing in Twitter: “Consensus at #EUPatentUSA2016 that UPC system will attract troll-type activity – IT/TMT panel with @marksandclerk pic.twitter.com/2cbvgnBeSl”

Henrion replied with “oh really? what a surprise!”

We have been warning about this for years.

Here is the relevant part of the report from MIP:

The last six months (since the UK Brexit vote) have led to great uncertainty for Europe’s planned Unitary Patent and UPC system, said Bethan Hopewell of Powell Gilbert. But much progress has been made with 11 ratifications so far and much work on the IT system, the Rules of Procedure and the financing.

The latest news, she added, is yesterday’s announcement by the UK government that it will proceed with ratification of the UPC Agreement. “What needs to be worked on now is establishing certainty for industry so that the UPC is not undermined when the UK leaves the EU,” she said, adding that the UK’s role in the system post-Brexit remains to be seen.

Deanna Kwong of Hewlett Packard Enterprise said that despite the progress made there remains a lot of “uncertainty”: “I don’t know whether it will be a more favourable forum or not … at the outset it may be a more plaintiff-friendly forum to legitimate it as a forum.” Hopewell predicted it will be “fertile ground” for NPEs in the early years.

Kwong highlighted some differences between the UPC and the US system, including less emphasis on expert evidence, faster injunctions and the possibility to amend claims. “Fee shifting is a really big factor – hopefully that will be a counter-balance to the patentee-friendly aspects of the UPC,” she added.

It seems like both Henrion and I noticed this at the same time. HP is admitting that the UPC would be good for patent trolls. Remember all those who used to deny it and mocked those who even dared to suggest so?

“HP says EU Unitary Patent Court will fuel trolls,” Henrion later wrote.

“This is what patent prosecution & litigation in Europe will look like post-UPC,” MIP added, “says Bethan Hopewell of Powell Gilbert at #ipwomen Forum pic.twitter.com/NXxNaFgAuu”

Yes, “prosecution & litigation”…

Not innovation.

Not sharing.

Not competitiveness.

Remember… “prosecution & litigation”…

That’s all it boils down to and no wonder prosecutors and litigators are lobbying so hard for it. They want ‘nuclear’ legal wars to profit from. It’s obvious at whose expense. █

WE habitually publish outlines of news about patent injustice. While we’re not inherently against patents, there are some domains that oughtn’t have patents in them because collective goals are being impeded rather than advanced by them.

Patents on Marijuana Plants

We start this roundup with the eye-catching article about patents on marijuana. To quote Vice: “On August 4, 2015, US officials quietly made history by approving the first-ever patent for a plant containing significant amounts of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, according to the patent’s holders, their lawyers, and outside experts in intellectual property law.

“One has to wonder how this relates to already-controversial patents on plants, putting aside the controversy surrounding legalisation of cannabis.”“Patent No. 9095554, issued to a group of breeders in California, “relates to specialty cannabis plants, compositions and methods for making and using said cannabis plants and compositions derived thereof,” according to the 145-page document, which is filled with charts, graphs, and reams of scientific jargon describing a range of hybrid strains with distinctive ratios of cannabinoids.”

One has to wonder how this relates to already-controversial patents on plants, putting aside the controversy surrounding legalisation of cannabis.

Patent Misconceptions

An article by Terry Ludlow, CEO at Chipworks, recently referred to patents as something one “develops” (rather than applies for after actually developing something), which probably highlights a common misconception about what patents actually are (many conflate them with physical objects — things that have had patents applied to them).

“Johnson’s assertion that maintaining high patent quality is important should be commended.”

Hewlett Packard

Hewlett Packard (HP), as showed here in past years, promoted software patents even outside the US and MIP has this new interview with HP’s IP litigation counsel. “The California-based counsel shares her views on the state of the IP environment in the US and how professionals can contribute to improvements, particularly in the patent field,” wrote MIP. One part of the interview said this: ‘Johnson adds that “creating and maintaining a balanced patent system that promotes innovation and good, valid patents, while also ensuring that bad, low quality patents are not used to abuse the system and ultimately undermine its effectiveness” is one of the biggest challenges in patent law. She says: “There are three main US venues that address patent disputes – the ITC, PTO, and federal courts. IP litigation counsel in my position have to stay vigilant about understanding trends and the discourse around all three of these venues.”’

We don’t generally regard HP to be so bad on the patent front, either because it doesn’t attack companies using patents all that often or because it doesn’t lobby for software patents as often as companies like GE, Intel, Microsoft, and IBM (comparable in terms of scale). Johnson’s assertion that maintaining high patent quality is important should be commended. Later today we are going to show that Microsoft and IBM push in the opposite direction.

Marathon Patent Group and Satellite Strategies

“It’s important to understand that what we have here is a patent company (or troll) acting as a satellite for another — an increasingly-common loophole to ensure no reactionary lawsuits.”Regarding a case which was mentioned here recently, MIP writes a decent article and so does IP Kat, which said late on Friday: “Dynamic Advances parent company, Marathon Patent Group (a patent licensing company) , stated in its SEC filing that under the terms of the settlement Apple will be granted a licence for the patent and a 3-year covenant not to sue. In exchange, Apple will pay $24.9 million under the agreement, with $5 million of that sum payable upon dismissal of the litigation.”

It’s important to understand that what we have here is a patent company (or troll) acting as a satellite for another — an increasingly-common loophole to ensure no reactionary lawsuits. It’s an anti-deterrence tactic. This discredits the theory of “defensive” patents; how can patents be used defensively against entities which have no products at all? As the headline of this article from a trolls expert put it, “Apple pays $25M to a university—and the patent troll it cut a deal with” (summarised accurately and succinctly).

“So one can see that Marathon Patent Group is nothing but a new (ish) kind of troll.”“Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a “patent troll”,” it says, in order “to end a lawsuit over its Siri voice system, according to documents filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Publicly traded Marathon Patent Group, whose business is focused on patent licensing and lawsuits, will split the settlement cash with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the New York technical university that provided the patents.”

So one can see that Marathon Patent Group is nothing but a new (ish) kind of troll.

‘Killing’ Patent Trolls

The Week has published a new article titled “How to kill patent trolls once and for all”. Composed by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who describes himself as “a writer and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center,” the article starts with some useful background: “Why are patent trolls so deleterious? Well, these companies exist for no other reason than to gobble up patents and then file frivolous lawsuits over semantic patent violations against any target they can find, with the hope of cashing in with a big settlement. Needless to say, this can wreck the finances of startup companies. (If you want more details, listen to this brilliant This American Life investigation of patent trolls from 2011.)”

“Militarisation of the world’s patent systems isn’t new; a lot of weapons manufacturers want a monopoly on ‘innovative’ new ways to kill people.”A commonly-cited (but controversial) study is then cited: “Patent trolls cost defendant firms $29 billion per year in out-of-pocket costs, according to one study. But the drag on innovation is much bigger than that. Think of all the fledgling companies that miss crucial time-to-market opportunities, and whose products don’t reach their full potential, because they have to fight patent trolls. Some would-be entrepreneurs are surely so frightened of patent trolls that they don’t even bother trying.”

The concluding words are these: “Always, always stand up to the bully. It’s the right thing to do, and it also happens to be the smart thing to do.”

That’s what NewEgg has been doing. It can at least afford to.

Patent Wars

Militarisation of the world’s patent systems isn’t new; a lot of weapons manufacturers want a monopoly on ‘innovative’ new ways to kill people. A new article, “The Pentagon Turns to Intellectual Property to Protect U.S. Military Dominance”, wants us to believe that there’s something to be cheered for because ‘we’ (readers), supposedly as US citizens, are ‘protected’ by the patent system, which keeps ‘our’ military strong, as if rival armies (like China’s or Russia’s) will bow to some patent offices abroad and pay patent royalties to corporations that try to nuke their nation (if it wasn’t for mutually-assured destruction and other forms of deterrence).

“The excesses/abundance/saturations reduce productivity, waste resources, generally slow down development in various fields, and ultimately help nobody but patent lawyers and their largest clients (usually global monopolists).”

Patent Merchants

It’s not so unusual to find patent lawyers in the media. They keep spewing out their pro-war/feud (in the patent sense) propaganda and they try to ‘sell’ patents (applications, lawsuits and other such ‘products’), in the same way arms manufacturers do. An article which misses the point that not all patents are equal and similar, e.g. software patents, was published in the Canadian press a couple of days ago. “Patents are no barrier to innovation, despite the myths,” says the headline. Well, ask software engineers about it and see what they say. The author wrote that “Canadian entrepreneurs should be vigilant to protest against measures that would cripple our patent system to the disadvantage of innovators. This vigilance should extend to monitoring changes that may be proposed to our laws pursuant to international treaty negotiations.”

Well, actually, some patents may be good (we don’t deny this), but their breadth and number made them so shallow and impractical to keep track of. The excesses/abundance/saturations reduce productivity, waste resources, generally slow down development in various fields, and ultimately help nobody but patent lawyers and their largest clients (usually global monopolists). A Web site of lawyers in Indiana has just said “Indiana patent law delaying demand letters” and an Australian law firm celebrates “Growth, Growth & More Growth” in so-called ‘IP’ (growth for patent lawyers, not for the economy). The Australian, a paper owned by News Corp. (‘Conservative’), plays along with this type of agenda, having just published “Innovators miss the bus on filing home patents”. The Financial Express, in the mean time, calls “a market-oriented approach (corporate-leaning) to patent box regime. Because hey, who cares what the general public thinks, right?

“WIPO doesn’t care about development. It doesn’t care about people. It doesn’t even care about its own staff, which it sometimes drives to suicide.”In contrast to this, based on this report from Africa, there is some resistance from a minister. “A South African cabinet minister speaking at an international conference on intellectual property has challenged the view that protecting the rights of creators and inventors leads to innovation,” says this report. “Rob Davies, the country’s trade minister, raised eyebrows recently when he told the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – the global HQ of patents – that the role of patent protection in promoting innovation has been controversial.”

WIPO doesn’t care about development. It doesn’t care about people. It doesn't even care about its own staff, which it sometimes drives to suicide. It’s Gurry’s way or the highway, just like at the EPO where Battistelli (previously competed with Gurry for the WIPO position) believes he is a king, so no opposition — however minute — can be tolerated. █

IT has been quite a while since we last saw such an ugly propaganda effort by Microsoft. Looking carefully at where the propaganda started or came from, we can be pretty sure that Microsoft’s disgraceful and unethical PR agencies are not passive. They are exploiting non-news and something of little significance to make it sound as though something pretty big is happening. They want the public to believe, yet again, that Munich’s migration (which saved a lot of money and was defended by officials repeatedly) is a failure. Microsoft did this many times before and even tried using bribes, bogus ‘reports’, proxy attacks etc. We covered dozens of examples over the years. Munich is dangerous to Microsoft because it sets an example; it shows how a whole city can completely abandon Microsoft and do a lot better thereafter, not just for privacy/autonomy/security reasons but also for technical reasons, not to mention all the local jobs this creates (economic gain).

Microsoft Peter played a role in the propaganda, as one ought to expect. He did, however, reveal that Microsoft bribery against Munich (just like in Norway) seems likely. Microsoft likes to offer facilities in exchange for political favours. We showed how it was done before in numerous countries which were planning too abandon Microsoft. To quote Microsoft Peter: “Microsoft announced last year that it was moving its German headquarters to Munich. This move is planned to take place in 2016. While Reiter was involved in the deal that precipitated the move and describes himself as a “Microsoft fan,” he says the criticism of LiMux is unrelated.”

Everything is related. People don’t compartmentalise their minds like this.

The above is not news; we saw that almost a month ago and reports (English) about it were numerous. “One single *opinion* is causing all the articles,” a reader told us. It was true back then and it is true this week. We must remember that this is not even a new thing, as the German press covered it almost a month ago and the only new thing is Microsoft’s amplification and distortion of the opinion. The Microsoft propaganda machine kicked off; that’s what’s “news”. As we continued to observe the news over the past 24 hours we found that the propaganda pieces came mostly from Microsoft fan sites, all cheering for Microsoft and inciting against Munich’s migration to GNU/Linux. Microsoft must be very afraid after China and Russia announced their plan to abandon Microsoft, so Microsoft ‘fan’ sites (or veiled marketing sites) do their thing, distort the facts, and then post “corrections” (after pressure from readers perhaps). Here is one Microsoft fan site that corrected its propaganda piece by stating: “While the deputy mayor of Munich seems to suggest in the article that the government will strongly consider a return to Windows, it appears a final decision to move from the Linux OS has not yet been officially determined.”

Exactly, there is no news. There’s just some old opinion of one person. But don’t let facts get in Microsoft’s way. Here is the Microsoft-bribed Ed Bott (one of the worst Microsoft boosters, but one who enjoys a platform of CBS and therefore enters “news” aggregation) disseminating the propaganda to a large audience. He has not even corrected his errors yet. The propaganda remains standing the editors let it be.

For now, we are done collecting examples of this Microsoft propaganda output. It’s not news and it’s not about Munich. A deputy mayor is not Munich and his opinion does not have so much weight. He is not a technical person.

It is rather clear that a lot the propaganda about Munich originally came to the English-speaking press from people like Ed Bott (backed by Microsoft) and brought to wider attention in the CBS propaganda network. Prior to that it was possible to find incorrect reports (probably not bad translations) which dared not say that Microsoft is bribing officials again (Microsoft already tried to pay Munich to abandon its Free software project).

The first article we saw about this (in English) came from Geek.com [1] and cited this article in German. An automated translation states: “End of 2013, the Munich City Council had to switch from Windows to Linux declared to be successfully completed and announced the regular operation of Linux systems to nearly 15,000 jobs.”

OK, so what’s the fuss? The migration is complete, people are generally happy (no nightmare stories in the press), and only shoddy marketing groups like Gartner (which recommends Windows on Microsoft's behalf) continue to badmouth the migration behind closed doors, as we covered numerous years ago. Also behind closed doors, HP attacked Munich’s migration with a report (this was uncovered a couple of years ago), reminding us that HP is only pretending to be competing with Microsoft. As this rebuttal to a piece from the chronically Linux-hostile Verge reminds us, HP too is among the factors antagonising GNU/Linux:

First of all dear, The Verge, it is *not* a Chromebook Killer, because you need to understand what a Chromebook is before calling a low-end laptop with an OS no one wants as a killer laptop.

Now coming back to the news: HP is supposedly working on a low-cost Windows 8.1 laptop which will be sold for $199. It seems like ‘netbook v2′ strategy of Microsoft to hurt Linux. This time it’s not going to happen as we have a heavyweight like Google and not smaller Canonical.

I already regret buying an HP mouse yesterday afternoon. Recalling how HP tried to derail Munich’s migration to GNU/Linux (secretly) should be another reminder of the many US-based forces aligned to destroy an escape from Microsoft, the NSA, the back doors, and PRISM. Munich would have to be insane to go back to Microsoft knowing everything it knows about Microsoft and the NSA, as well as the NSA’a attacks on Germany (espionage). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. 10 years later, Munich may dump Linux for Windows

   A few years ago, Linux sites were buzzing that the city of Munich, Germany was going to kick Windows to the curb and roll out a Linux-based OS on all their government desktops. […]

Update: Munich has fired back at what it claims to be false reports:

Munich city council demonstrated to the world that an organisation employing thousands could ditch Windows and move to Linux and free software.

When the project finished late last year about 15,000 staff at the German authority had been migrated to using Limux, a custom-version of Ubuntu, and OpenOffice.

But is the council’s move to open source about to be scrapped in favour or returning to Microsoft?

No says the council, in spite of numerous reports to the contrary. Suggestions the council has decided to back away from Linux are wrong, according to council spokesman Stefan Hauf.

He said the council’s recently elected mayor Dieter Reiter has instead simply commissioned a report into the future IT system for the council.

“The new mayor has asked the administration to gather the facts so we can decide and make a proposal for the city council how to proceed in future,” he said.

“Not only for Limux but for all of IT. It’s about the organisation, the costs, performance and the useability and satisfaction of the users.”

The study, being conducted by internal IT staff at the council, will consider which operating systems and software packages – both proprietary and open source – would best satisfy this criteria. The study is not, as has been reported, solely focused around the question of whether to drop Limux and move back to Windows, he said.

–Bruce Perens (years back)

Summary: Thoughts and analysis of HP, which despite pretending to have embraced Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is very much a Microsoft ally, managed to a large degree by people from Microsoft

HP is a scam when it comes to “open source” support. While their hardware is quite Linux-friendly (my wife uses an HP laptop), their extreme/radical policy of self interest in the server room and on the desktop continues to show. Their recent openwashing campaign, which I have campaigned against (they are claiming to invest in FOSS only for marketing purposes, just like IBM), should not impress too easily. What comes to mind is HP’s negative lobbying against FOSS and stories we have heard from Perens (former HP manager for FOSS). It’s all just a charade, intended for the most part to increase sales but also to attract talented staff (recruitment).

HP’s history has been quite well documented in this site for nearly 8 years of its existence. HP is an ally of Microsoft and many of its managers these days are people who worked for Microsoft. In order to keep selling GNU/Linux servers (hardware with GNU/Linux sells better) HP is trying to maintain an image that would appeal to geeks. However, it’s all fake, it’s a façade. Perens proves it now in part by repeating what he wrote some years ago [1]. The stuff Perens says about SCO and HP is dynamite, revealing a huge extent of collusion against GNU/Linux. HP was well aware of it.

Years ago in Slashdot Perens explained how HP offered him AstroTurfing help, i.e. it offered to spawn agents of propaganda if he needed it. To quote Will Hill (from last night): “Yes, I was just thinking about that the other day. He said this in 2008…”

…just about every PR firm offers to help “manage the perception of your company in online communities” these days. What do you think that means? Astroturfing Slashdot, Youtube, etc. In my various manangement positions it’s been offered to me. Indeed, some of the companies offer to create negative publicity for your competition that way – HP had a publicity firm for its Linux activities that told us it would do that when we wanted. I never asked them to do so and hope nobody else did either. This stuff is just standard these days. You’ve got to expect it.

As Hill adds: “There’s a grim similarity between that and government astroturf programs revealed by Snowden. Greenwald recaps well that in “No Place to Hide” by showing us that government hires teams of psychologists and has made a science of disrupting online discussions and deception. The point of it all is “strategic influence disruption.” The targets not terrorists but “hactivists” like Anonymous, environmental groups and people who might compete with the plutocracy. We should not be too surprised by the similarity because both programs are run by the same people – 75% of the spy complex money goes to private contractors and HP is probably one of them.”

There are some new examples of what seems like AstroTurfing by Microsoft. Some Microsoft lies (a placement) got posted in “CFO World”. It is an evidence-free denial of Microsoft collusion against public. This is how propaganda works.

Meanwhile, returning to the subject which is HP, watch Microsoft booster Julie Bort going into propaganda mode, claiming that HP has “Plans To Destroy Microsoft Windows” (we countered a similar bit of propaganda some months ago) and then calls HP CEO “gutsy” for inviting Microsoft’s CEO. This is utter deception, a sort of PR which seeks to portray Microsoft has burying the hatchet and smoking the pipe of peace with rivals. Here is a portion: “Moments after HP announced its grand new plans to compete with the Microsoft Windows operating system, Whitman was thanking Microsoft for being a major sponsor of the conference and inviting the company’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, on stage.”

This very much shows whose bed HP is in. The company, despite trying top appear as a backer of FOSS, is very much serving Microsoft’s agenda, still. HP is pretending. Yes, HP only pretends to be a friend of GNU/Linux in order to drive server sales to geeks. We know this also because not too long ago HP lobbied against GNU/Linux in Europe (amid national migrations), saying it would be more expensive than Windows. We covered this several times back then and also showed in over a dozen posts that around the same time HP was appointing Microsoft executives to executive positions at HP. The same happened in Amazon, but that’s another story.

There are other interesting bits in the new interview with Perens, including his take on dual-licensing, but most relevant to us was the following bit:

Perens: At some point I accumulated enough credit for achievements that it became unnecessary to fight over it . But I am hardly without flaws. Most visible might be that I want to get things done and don’t mind trampling others if that’s what it takes. I try to keep my ego down enough so that I get through those narrow doors.

The worst problems I saw at HP had little to do with Open Source. What I remember most was the sadness. There were and are many smart people there, and so many of us were conscious that the company was in a sort of death spiral and that we couldn’t do anything about it. The “pretexting” scandal was to the discredit of the board, the general counsel actually took the 5th in front of Congress on national television! Carly (the CEO) asked all of the employees to take a voluntary pay cut in the same month that she and other Board officers sold tens of Millions of dollars of HP stock. I remember my boss (a Section Manager, now the CTO) announcing at a meeting that an employee had gotten a “Reinvention Memo”. That meant lay-off, a sarcastic re-framing of HP’s “Reinvent” motto that showed how even upper managers like him were in despair. There was a series of ill-advised acquisitions of second-best or declining companies that HP failed to turn around, and then sold for cents on the dollar two years after acquiring them. The Compaq merger put the company at the very top of a business with vanishingly-small margins.

There was one really bad day that I guess is safe to talk about now, more than 10 years later, because the information is already in the public and thus no longer subject to NDA: Microsoft showed HP their plans to sue the Open Source projects for the Linux Kernel, Samba, Sendmail, and a list of other projects. Someone immediately shot me an HP VP’s memo recounting that meeting and concluding that we should back off of Open Source before the lawsuits started. When I passed it to my boss, I was told to keep it quiet. But I was hired to be an Open Source community leader first, and an HP officer second, and keeping quiet about that meant betraying the Open Source developer community. I just hated that and it poisoned my involvement with HP.

Microsoft eventually used SCO as a proxy to achieve what it disclosed to HP that day. I’d been warned long before that happened, and could do nothing until SCO announced their damaging but ultimately unsuccessful jihad against Linux.

What I think is worth remembering about HP is that it was once the great tech company that people wanted to work for, as Apple or Google might be for many today. I think a lot of what made it great left with Agilent. The Test and Measurement business was a low-volume, high-margin business that required lots of too-highly-paid old smart people who worked in expensive labs in Palo Alto, California. That became the most costly place to do anything largely due to HP’s own success. But Test and Measurement was also the brain-trust of the company, and lent its creativity to all of HP’s other aspects. So we lost a lot, I think, when Agilent was spun off of HP.

HP’s problem regarding Open Source and Linux was that systems running Linux competed with other HP lines running HP-UX or Microsoft, and HP was structured as Organizational Silos. Each line had its own sales-people, and different lines competed with each other for the same customer. HP-9000 folks were always complaining because Linux undercut HP-UX and thus HP-9000, as were folks who sold Microsoft Windows systems based on x86. If I said anything in the press about Open Source or Linux, a customer would ask one of those single-line sales-people about it, and it would come back to my boss as a complaint rather than a sales opportunity.

HP was always to some extent in Microsoft’s pocket, although they were also aware that Microsoft had screwed them and would continue to do so. HP de-emphasized further development of the HP 9000 hardware because Microsoft had told them in the late 80′s that they were soon to have an enterprise-quality NT. HP believed it, but MS failed to deliver for a decade. That lost HP Billions while Sun Microsystems took the engineering workstation market from HP. The HP officer who made that decision of course went on to be a Microsoft executive.

What we did achieve at HP was a good process for deciding what to do with Open Source when individual opportunities came up. If you wanted to incorporate Open Source in a product, or you had a business reason to Open Source something, we resolved the legal issues, the community issues, we even handled some security aspects and achieved a reasonable level of reuse. That could all be achieved by middle managers. So, everybody in the company knew that it was OK to use Open Source, but there was a process you had to go through. It wasn’t particularly expensive, it did sometimes sink multiple days of some engineer in doing paperwork, but that’s just due diligence and we ended up on a better legal footing when we used Open Source than otherwise.

There were things we decided not to Open Source because there was no good business reason for doing so. We weren’t UNICEF, so there had to be a business reason for everything. There were times when legacy customers would have gained benefit if we brought one of HP’s nine legacy operating systems to Open Source, but untangling the proprietary software that originated with third parties from the rest was too difficult. There were a few times when it was decided not to Open Source a legacy product because we were afraid that IBM might use it to sell their hardware against ours. Once that happened with a system that had only 5000 existing customers, and it would have been better for the customers for HP to open it but the decision – not mine – was not to do so.

I’ve since helped other companies start their own internal Open Source Process, and still do so today.

What we never achieved within HP, what I never had the power to do, was: to get HP to completely stand behind any innovative product regardless of what that meant for old-line products, to make innovation the #1 job of the company, and to grow a brand-new company from the old one every year that they were in business. They needed to embrace disruptive technologies as a pioneer rather than have the disruption done to HP by competitors. I think they tried to kill the Silo organizational structure after I left, I don’t know how successful that was.

Let this remind us that neither HP nor Microsoft has changed. In fact, many people from Microsoft moved to HP and there is now Microsoft agenda at HP. Microsoft’s FOSS moles too are now working for HP, in very senior positions in fact. Both companies deserve to be treated as a pair and the same goes for Dell; these are historically (in recent history) Microsoft hardware companies. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Interviews: Bruce Perens Answers Your Questions

   Microsoft eventually used SCO as a proxy to achieve what it disclosed to HP that day. I’d been warned long before that happened, and could do nothing until SCO announced their damaging but ultimately unsuccessful jihad against Linux.

Author: Max Morse

Summary: HP says Microsoft is a rival, but evidence suggests that HP is being occupied by Microsoft managers and that it attacks GNU/Linux, not Windows

People should not be taking HP’s claims at face value. Realising what the cash cows are, HP is trying to sell as many servers as possible (many will use GNU/Linux), so it tries to appeal to system administrators while quietly spreading Microsoft’s anti-GNU/Linux FUD [1, 2] to derail government migrations to GNU/Linux. Perhaps the inefficiently of Windows helps sell more such servers (for the same task).

Either way, HP sure is suffering from the decline of Microsoft’s desktop empire, but publicly HP wants us to think that “Microsoft Is At War With Its OEM Partners” (such as HP). More “sock puppetry,” calls it iophk, saying that “Microsoft Hilf is still inside HP, Ray Ozzie is still on the board, so this is just noise.” There are more such examples, including Vice Presidents. HP is gradually becoming somewhat of a proxy to Microsoft — a bit like Nokia.

Microsoft is hardly a competitor of HP; those two are partners and actions at the management level show this. Here is another article which blindly repeats HP’s claims:

APPARENTLY NOT CONTENT with making her employees draw lots or arm-wrestle for desks by banning telecommuting, HP CEO Meg Whitman has decided to let loose the hounds on Microsoft, declaring that it and Intel have changed from being “partners to outright competitors”.

HP is still using x86 and Windows, so how are Intel and Microsoft competitors really? Sheer nonsense.

Speaking of Microsoft and pretense, the company pretended to be “nice” to FOSS while essentially banning particular FOSS licence — an action which it quietly steps away from:

With little fanfare, Microsoft — or at least one part of it — has gone from considering the GNU General Public License v.3 (GPLv3) “evil” to “acceptable.”

That’s because this licence is popular, unlike Microsoft. “A company spokesperson didn’t provide a direct answer,” says Microsoft Mary, whose inquiry helps show just how Microsoft really feels about the GPLv3. Public statements are the area controlled by marketing people and professional spinners. In order to find out what’s true we need to investigate actions — not words — for ourselves. █

Summary: Bill Hilf is joining several other Microsoft executives who now occupy key positions inside HP; the ugly details behind Elop’s entryism begin to lay bear

HP, a massive company in the desktops and servers sectors (and back doors facilitator [1, 2]), has already had some Microsoft executives occupy key positions in recent years (Ozzie is a recent example). Remember this when HP is rationalising FOSS-hostile decisions inside the company. HP recently collaborated in Microsoft’s anti-GNU/Linux FUD [1, 2] and based on this reported it hired Microsoft’s anti-Linux and pro-patents, fear-mongering bully Bill Hilf [1, 2]. The conflict of interest is clear because this man pushed hard for Windows on servers and patent tax on GNU/Linux servers. Several years ago he was probably the most hated guy (alongside Ballmer) to have come from Microsoft, as viewed by the GNU/Linux community.

We really ought to learn from experience the threat of Microsoft moles and entryism.

“San Francisco investment firm takes more active role as CEO Steve Ballmer plans retirement,” says this report. But as one of our readers put it, “who is behind ValueAct Capital?” Gates-funded sites (with Microsoft spyware on page) say “Microsoft averts proxy battle” and Microsoft friends like Dina Bass call ValueAct an “activist”. The timing was interesting: “Redmond announced the “cooperation agreement” in the late hours of Friday afternoon in San Francisco before the Labor Day three day weekend, which is an ideal time to bury news.”

Let’s also recall the case of Nokia, where Elop’s involvement now starts to smell like fraud.

Nokia Admits Giving Misleading Information About Elop’s Compensation

Nokia’s board of directors seems caught in a tragicomedy of epic proportions. The latest twist is Finland’s largest newspaper claiming that Nokia made a false statement about CEO’s bonus package last Friday. Pressed by Finnish and international media last week, chairman Siilasmaa had claimed then that the bonus structure of Stephen Elop’s contract in 2010 was “essentially the same” as the one the previous CEO had received. But the largest daily of the country, “Helsingin Sanomat”, decided to dig into SEC filings to investigate the matter. By early Tuesday morning, the newspaper had uncovered evidence that Nokia’s board had made fundamental changes in Elop’s contract compared to his predecessors.

Check out this other article about Elop, who wants to be compensated having totally destroyed Nokia. To quote an English version: “According to the early Wednesday morning edition of Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Nokia has pleaded with former CEO Stephen Elop to accept a smaller bonus in order to silence the roar of disapproval and protest now roiling Finland. Drama in Nokia’s home country escalated on Tuesday as it was revealed that Risto Siilasmaa, Nokiia’s chairman of the board, had misrepresented facts last weeks when he claimed that Elop’s bonus arrangements were similar to those of previous chief executives. Nokia was forced to admit on Tuesday morning that Elop had in fact received a contract that seemed to have been designed to guarantee a quick $25 million pay-off if Elop was able to sell the handset unit. According to Helsingin Sanomat, Nokia is now scrambling to contain the public relations damage the ongoing drama is causing. Asking Elop to accept a smaller bonus might silence some of the critics — on Tuesday, the head of Finland’s Equity Investor Association called Siilasmaa’s mistaken claims about Elop’s bonus package “unforgivable.””

Elop should be sued for more than $25 million. He pretended to serve Nokia, but in reality he was a Microsoft investor, whose house remains near Microsoft and whose only goal is to feed Nokia to Microsoft and feed patent trolls who pose a threat to Android/Linux. There should be prosecution here, not compensation. If anyone deserves compensation here, it’s Nokia’s shareholders. Elop should personally compensate them. He was Ballmer’s henchman. █

Summary: More revelations about back doors which go beyond ‘the cloud’ and into people’s desks or offices

HP has betrayed people’s trust, not just because it helps Microsoft suppress Free software adoption in the German government [1, 2] but also because its hardware has remotely-accessible back doors. Never again should you trust hardware from HP.

Not only Microsoft Skype is a horrific piece of spyware on people’s desk (with microphone and webcam). As it turns out, HP backup servers too have back doors. As one article put it, “StoreOnce backup systems are not low-end products: the version with twelve 1TB disks (with a usable capacity of 6TB) costs more than €12,000. The price premium compared to a normal server of this size is explained by the StoreOnce Catalyst software included with the server. According to HP, the product’s deduplication functionality reduces the size of data backups by up to 95 per cent.”

“These primarily US-based or Anglo-Saxon companies seem to have total disregard for privacy, as their spy agencies reveal”Towards the end it says: “The disclosure is given added spice by Technion’s decision to publish the SHA1 hash for the password for accessing the hidden administrator account. Hashes can be brute forced to obtain the actual password. It will not be long before the decrypted string is circulating on the usual forums. The password is just seven characters long and draws on a ten-year old meme.”

These primarily US-based or Anglo-Saxon companies seem to have total disregard for privacy, as their spy agencies reveal. It seems like Germany is finally taking note of this. A major German newspaper says: “Overzealous data collectors in the US and Great Britain have no right to investigate German citizens. The German government must protect people from unauthorized access by foreign intelligence agencies, and it must act now. This is a matter of national security.”

They should be dumping Windows in Germany, following Munich's lead. Christine Hall talks about back door access by the NSA into Windows when she writes:

Time to Take Advantage of Microsoft’s Vulnerabilities

[...]

It wasn’t news to most of us in the FOSS world that Microsoft was one of the companies shoveling information over to the NSA’s project PRISM. As much as we’d like, we can’t fault them any more than anyone else in that sordid affair. Only Yahoo comes out with any degree of redemption, since they at least bothered to go to court to try to stop the No-Such-Agency guys.

Nor were many of us surprised to discover Microsoft was making it easy for U.S. spooks to monitor traffic on Skype. That news probably damaged the folks in Redmond a little more than the plain vanilla NSA/PRISM story, but there was still some wiggle room for Ballmer. It started before Microsoft’s ownership. My people hardly knew what was going on. We’ll fix it. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.

The latest news though, which so far seems to have little to do with the NSA scandal but plenty to do with espionage, might be a Windows breaker. Ballmer & Friends might not be able to squirm their way out of this, especially if the commercial GNU/Linux players get in gear and get moving.

This is definitely going to change how people view Windows. The latest TechBytes episode covers that as well. It’s reassuring to see what we covered for years becoming common knowledge, affecting people’s judgment. Free software is going to capitalise on all this. █

Summary: The largest freedom-in-software advocacy group offers advice regarding UEFI while large computer makers like HP move towards snubbing the Microsoft plot

AT THE END of the week the Free Software Foundation took an important step forward in its fight against UEFI.

Quoting the FSF Web site:

In the paper, the FSF outlines the difficulties Secure Boot poses for the free software movement and free software adoption, warns against the threat of Restricted Boot, and gives recommendations for how free software developers and users can best address the issues.

Red Hat is meanwhile finding new ways to embrace UEFI:

Gummiboot, which is German for rubber dinghy, was released on the same day as version 2 of the GRUB boot loader. Unlike GRUB, however, it only works with EFI systems. Poettering has proposed the project as the boot loader that Linux distributions should use where UEFI Secure Booting support requires a signed boot loader; this support being planned by both Red Hat and Canonical but neither are currently planning to use gummiboot.

There is more coverage in, e.g.:

• Gummiboot: New EFI Boot Loader Created

  Red Hat developers Kay Sievers and Harald Hoyer have create a new EFI bootloader called, Gummiboot, which ‘just works.’

  Lennart Poettering, best known for PulseAudio cross-platform sound server and systemd, posted on Google +, “It’s tiny (< 64K), can show a menu, discovers all kernel configurations automatically (no wacky autogeneration of boot loader scripts), and can chain-load another boot loader if necessary.”

• Secure Boot: Red Hat and Canonical present their alternatives

Related to this we have the release of the boot loader Microsoft has shrewdly marginalised:

• GRUB bootloader finally reaches version 2.00

• Grub 2 Released

The mistake Red Hat and Canonical have made is assume that hardware makers will just swallow UEFI because Microsoft tells them to. Based on new articles such as this one, Microsoft’s devilish plot is not taking off:

Microsoft Offends OEMs With Surface, HP Refusing To Build Windows ARM Devices

If this rumor is true – and it certainly sounds true – then HP and other OEMs are about to pull the plug on their own Windows on ARM RT (WART) devices thanks to Microsoft essentially beating them to market with potentially superior hardware.

Here is the source and some damage control from Microsoft, delivered by the longtime Microsoft booster, who gets “Reporter” status at CNET, not just ZDNet. She writes about the half (or less) that’s full, ignoring the rest (i.e. biased ‘journalism’):

Reports circulating on June 29 about Hewlett-Packard’s plans regarding Windows on ARM — or lack of such plans — got me thinking about which PC makers have committed to producing ARM-based Windows hardware.

Bloomberg helps confirm that Vista 8 is being shunned by HP and the OEMs bigwig at Microsoft steps down. How timely. █

Summary: Not so long after Microsoft had called HP a competitive threat (in its SEC filings) for exploring Linux on the desktop, Hurd mysteriously got fired and his purchase of WebOS thrown down the ashtray, sending HP’s stock into a downward spiral

SEVERAL months ago we continued to comment about the departure of Hurd from HP. It happened under mysterious circumstances [1, 2, 3, 4]. A former Microsoft ally took his place after HP’s new software chief had been appointed from Microsoft.

There is something iffy about HP giving up on its Linux-based operating system which Hurd spent billions on. This was not taken too lightly by prominent bloggers, who wrote:

1. Leo Apotheker’s HP never wanted webOS to succeed

   I liked webOS, HP’s Linux-based take on a tablet operating system. I thought it had a shot to be a tablet player. But, then, Leo Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, along with spinning off HP’s PC business, killed webOS. Was it because, as Apotheker said, the tablet effect is real and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations,” and that the TouchPad was quickly becoming a money pit? No, no it wasn’t.

   Yes, webOS and the TouchPad were doing badly on the market. But, so what? A company the size of HP doesn’t get out of the consumer PC market and new tablets and spin around on a dime because it can’t be as “as cool as Apple.” No, it does so because Apotheker and his cronies had planned for months to try to transform HP into their old company, SAP, and go head to head not so much with IBM, but his old sparring partner, Oracle.

2. HP Can’t Afford to Abandon Mobile Now

   In the same year that Microsoft added cut and paste to its mobile feature set, HP added cut and run, announcing last week that it would no longer produce webOS hardware, then dumping its failed HP TouchPad tablet in a $99 fire sale. At the same time, the number-one PC maker signaled its intent to spin off, sell, and otherwise dump its Personal Systems Group—the division that makes all of its computers for business and consumer markets—within 12 to 18 months. Unless a buyer like Samsung is waiting in the wings already, that’s a long time to go without a mobile strategy.

Well, investors agree. They “flee HP” (see the chart):

Hewlett-Packard shares have slumped as investors respond to last week’s announcement of a radical shift in strategy.

From a high of US$32.59 on Thursday, shares fell to US$22.89 on Friday before closing at US$23.60.

Wow. And this made sense why exactly? Microsoft is already trying to sort of bribe WebOS developers away from Linux. The remaining units of TouchPad are getting a new life because the hardware is great and the price is very low. Both Ubuntu [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and TouchDroid [1, 2] are being made available for these devices that HP bought just to kill (after Hurd had been fired and Microsoft-friendly people put in charge). Guess who is happy about this whole deal? Microsoft booster Ed Bott is now comparing TouchPad to KIN, which is said to have sold only 503 units. Just before Hurd got canned Microsoft listed HP as a competitive threat on the desktop because HP was exploring GNU/Linux, even its own distributions of it. █

Summary: New article about software patents reveals that HP, under new leadership, has quietly bought a group of Microsoft allies (Fortify)

Following Hurd’s departure [1, 2, 3, 4] a former Microsoft ally was made the CEO of HP [1, 2, 3, 4] and this is important because of HP’s leading position in the desktops/servers market, not to mention all of its patents. “Every time a software patent is registered, an angel is bludgeoned to death with a shoe,” wrote “MrAlanCooper” to a former Microsoft employee. Yesterday we noticed this article about software patents in security, in which it’s mentioned that Fortify has just been acquired by HP. It’s important because Fortify too is a Microsoft ally, as we noted in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The article says:

Can you patent the obvious? Apparently when it comes to software security, maybe you can. Gary McGraw explains how another party may get a patent on a technique he had a hand in inventing.

The notion of software patents is extremely controversial. The basic idea is simple and mirrors “regular” patents. An inventor invents something and files a number of claims about the invention. The Patent Office reviews the filing and determines whether to grant a patent for the invention. Holding a patent guarantees the inventor some rights to enjoy the fruits of the invention for a fixed period of time. Not so bad if you invent the next great inside-the-peel Tomato twaddler, but a bit harder to understand in the software space.

Can you patent the obvious? Apparently when it comes to software security, maybe you can.

[...]

On to patent land. Apparently the security testing firm Cenzic believes that they deserve a patent for software fault injection. In February 2007 (a decade after our book was published) Cenzic was awarded patent number 7185232 for “fault injection methods and apparatus.” The basic claims in the patent involve injecting some faulty input into a web program (thing one) and watching for error responses (thing two). Very nice. Or maybe not. A grass roots effort to collect prior art and dispute the patent is being spearheaded on the net byEnrique A. Sanchez Montellano.

As an inventor of security technology, I am not completely opposed to the idea of software patents. In fact, we hold eight patents in various aspects of software security at Cigital (some of which are likely to be infringed upon). We like the idea of licensing our ideas and our prototypes to others. In fact, that’s exactly what happened with Fortify which was recently acquired by HP. We licensed our code scanning ideas and prototypes to Kleiner-Perkins who went on to found Fortify, build a real commercial product, and sell the heck out of it. So the notion of protecting our ideas with patents is not foreign to us.

A lot could be said about the article’s attitude w.r.t. software patents, but the news that we missed about Fortify may be important in the future. Fortify attacks Free software quite routinely, so it’s unclear why HP would want this culture to become ‘in-house’. Incidentally, considering that Hurd was fired after Microsoft had pointed out that his work on a homebrew Linux-based operating system was a major threat (c/f SEC filing), one ought to watch carefully what Apotheker does at HP. Microsoft also named Intel’s work on MeeGo as a major threat (alongside HP) and we all know what Microsoft did to Nokia [1, 2, 3, 4], harming MeeGo a great deal using entryism (a manager from BT privately told us by mail that it was probably illegal, he called it “100% corrupt”). Yesterday we wrote about the contractual obligations of Micromoles. Watch out, HP. █

Summary: The companies behind the Linux-powered MeeGo and the Linux-powered WebOS are occupied by friends of Microsoft (CEO positions), but what will they do in the face of the Linux-powered Android?

IT increasingly seems like Microsoft’s Elop (a former president) will have Microsoft and Nokia wed each other, just like we feared. As a recap of previous posts about this issue, consider:

1. If You Can’t Beat Them, Hijack Them (Microsoft Joins Nokia and It Already Shows)
2. Linux Battle in Mobile Phones Becomes Primarily Legal, Not Technical, Due to Software Patents
3. Taking Over Linux, by Proxy
4. Microsoft Passes More of Its Executives to the MSBBC. What About Nokia?
5. Microsoft President Quits, But is Nokia the Next Victim?
6. Microsoft Insiders Galore: BBC, Nokia, Others Already Damaged by Microsoft Hires
7. Linspire/Ballnux in Tablets; HP Possibly Experiments With Vista 7 in Slate After Abandoning It, Then Hiring From Microsoft
8. New Article Says Nokia Might be Bought by Microsoft After Appointing Microsoft President as CEO
9. Entryism Watch: Yahoo! Keeps Being Abducted by Microsoft Executives, HP Cancels Android Projects After CEO Appointment From SAP
10. As Expected, Nokia and HP Betray Linux Under Microsoft-sympathetic New Leadership
11. Head of Microsoft Romania Quits, Entryism Revisited
12. Microsoft’s Favourite ‘Reporters’ Are Attacking Nokia, Pushing it Into Microsoft’s Arms
13. Will Elop Choose the Future (Linux) or His Past (Microsoft) for Nokia?
14. Analyst Wants Microsoft’s Elop (Now Nokia CEO) to Shoot Down Linux Programmes

Engadget has the headline “Nokia, Microsoft announcing partnership next week, possibly involving Windows Phone 7?”

This time around, it’s said that Microsoft will be the partner announced on the 11th — and though Nokia’s uptake of Windows Phone 7 would be the obvious strategic shift, it’s important to note that these companies have actually partnered before with pretty trivial consequences for the market; it’s entirely possible they could be ramping up to do that again, sharing apps and services between Windows Phone 7 and Symbian / MeeGo. We doubt it, but it’s within the realm of reason.

[...]

First off, the elephant in the room: recently-appointed CEO Stephen Elop comes from Microsoft on good terms and has clearly been given marching orders to take Nokia in a new, more profitable direction; the Symbian Foundation’s gutting happened on Elop’s watch, for example, and he just hinted a few days ago that joining an existing ecosystem could make sense.

These two companies signed some of their previous deals around communication applications and a sub-notebook (which never seemed to materialise really). It will be interesting to see what their announcement will be all about. In any event, the fact that they partner shows what a disastrous entryism we have here. Another company which builds phones with Linux is HP, which is run by Apotheker (a former Microsoft ally [1, 2, 3]). He became CEO and Hurd bought some Linux-related assets before he was ousted [1, 2, 3, 4]. What will Apotheker do with that? Well, first of all he “asks employees to get rid of iPhones”. We don’t know what comes next. Will they all be pressured or maybe forced to use WebOS-powered phones (with Linux)?

At the end of the day, all those ownership changes and cases of entryism should bother everyone involved. SCO too is said to be passing its business to another company:

In an email, SCO today (Friday) informed its partners that UnXis Inc. was chosen as the successful bidder for SCO’s Unix software business on 26 January. The slightly convoluted phrasing is probably due to SCO’s current reorganisation under Chapter 11. On 16 February, the transaction is to be submitted for approval to the bankruptcy court where SCO’s case is pending. The email also quotes Hans Bayer, SCO’s Vice President Worldwide Sales, as saying that “We are delighted that after years of shifting targets, that under the UnXis ownership, we now will be prepared to create a truly customer driven, fully supported, open systems platform for high reliability enterprise computing”.

We have already mentioned UnXis in the following old posts:

• Alleged Attack Site of Darl McBride Gets Suspended
• Today’s SCO Bankruptcy Hearing is Called Off, Potential Suitors Named
• Novell Responds to SCO Ruling, More News Coverage
• A Look at the Microsoft-funded SCO Lawsuit in Light of Newer Anti-Linux Microsoft Lawsuits
• IBM’s Latest Filing Regarding SCO Bankruptcy Mentions “Fraud”
• SCO Lies About Hans Bayer
• SCO Scandals Get Worse: unXis Seems to be All About SCO
• Groklaw Unearths Another SCO Scandal; SCO Heads Sued for Theft, Computer Fraud and Abuse
• SCO “Wants to Sue Linux Users Some More” After Another Mysterious Cash Injection

It is worth seeing what it all leads to. Microsoft is sometimes compared to a cult and whatever helps Microsoft make a profit — even if these are lawsuits against Android (lawsuits from former Microsoft employees) — cannot be ruled out. One need not look far to see how the Gates Foundation, for example, sometimes promotes Microsoft directly in all sorts of ways. It’s not as though Microsoft’s history lacks examples of dirty tricks and entryism, or even payments to SCO which sued Linux. █

Summary: Another sign that Linux is winning against Windows comes from HP, which has had enough of Windows Home Server

WE ARE almost back to normal coverage (yours truly has been coding more than usual recently) and one reader sent us this pointer which shows that Microsoft’s dead products continue to pile up. It was around Thanksgiving, i.e. just very recently, that we spoke about Windows Home Server (WHS) being a candidate for deletion. HP has been essential for Microsoft in this space [1, 2]. It is their main if not only hope in this area and that’s about to end too:

“HP has told us they do not plan to provide a platform for Windows Home Server code name ‘Vail’. HP has told us they will continue to sell the existing version of MediaSmart Server through the end of the calendar year 2010 and will honour service and support agreements,” said Microsoft in a blog post yesterday.

“This news is in no way related to recent announcements about feature changes in Windows Home Server ‘Vail.’”

[...]

According to MediaSmartServer.net, which quotes HP marketing manager Allen Buckner, the move away from Vail was due to “shifting additional resources to focus on webOS initiatives”.

All of which has got to hurt Microsoft, which already took a sizeable bruising from customers following its decision to kill the Drive Extender feature.

That’s despite Apotheker being in charge [1, 2] after Hurd got ousted by HP [1, 2, 3, 4]. As another reader, Ziomatrix, put it last night in IRC: “Dell starts selling laptops bundled with Linux again (look under Tech Specs): http://dell.to/idOer6 and HP drops its Windows Home Server line amid feature crisis and claims to focus more efforts on WebOS based Linux: http://engt.co/i8PsuP” (which further confirms that other report). █

Summary: Microsoft’s practices of blocking competition through abolition of a proper procurement process is going to end up in court again

THE LAWSUIT over Microsoft’s deal with the government of Switzerland was last mentioned in relation to this story about Canton of Solothurn. Links to resources about the case can be found in (chronological order):

1. Microsoft Sued Over Its Corruption in Switzerland, Microsoft Debt Revisited
2. Can the United Kingdom and Hungary Still be Sued for Excluding Free Software?
3. 3 New Counts of Antitrust Violation by Microsoft?
4. Is Microsoft Breaking the Law in Switzerland Too?
5. Microsoft Uses Lobbyists to Attack Holland’s Migration to Free Software and Sort of Bribes South African Teachers Who Use Windows
6. ZDNet/eWeek Ruins Peter Judge’s Good Article by Attacking Red Hat When Microsoft Does the Crime
7. Week of Microsoft Government Affairs: a Look Back, a Look Ahead
8. Lawsuit Against Microsoft/Switzerland Succeeds So Far, More Countries/Companies Should Follow Suit
9. Latest Reports on Microsoft Bulk Deals Being Blocked in Switzerland, New Zealand
10. Swiss Government and Federal Computer Weekly: Why the Hostility Towards Free Software?
11. Switzerland and the UK Under Fire for Perpetual Microsoft Engagements
12. Lawsuit Over Alleged Microsoft Corruption in Switzerland Escalates to Federal Court
13. When Microsoft-Only/Lock-in is Defined as “Technology”

According to this new report, free/open source service providers appeal the procurement case in Switzerland. We may finally see some justice, assuming the courts in Switzerland can be shown sufficient evidence.

Microsoft “Squeezes OEMs”, says Pogson in one of his latest posts which specifically names HP (now occupied by more Microsoft-sympathetic managers [1, 2]).

HP is bargaining so hard with OEMs that some are refusing to supply machines to HP. This is because M$ rakes in far too much for software licensing. The margins of manufacturers are just too thin. It is the end-game of monopoly when suppliers no longer accept the dictates of monopoly. They can make other products and sell to other customers. Once the monopoly concedes to the first OEM, there is no place to go for licence fees but down.

Microsoft is rarely selected for any merits; it very often gets selected due to lock-in, chokehold (obstruction of competition), corruption, and entryism. █

Summary: Microsoft may be organising a coup against Linux, especially inside some of its very top supporters, and evidence from the news concurs

“Nokia’s MeeGo device chief quits,” reports Engadget. This is the type of thing we have been expecting ever since a Microsoft president was made the CEO of Nokia, right after Nokia had become one of the top developers of Linux (the kernel) and told the press that its future crown jewel phones would run MeeGo. And now, just 2-3 weeks after Microsoft’s Elop comes to Nokia:

Nokia’s MeeGo device chief quits

[...]

In case you’re keeping track, Jaaksi’s departure follows the high-profile exits of Nokia’s former CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (replaced by Stephen Elop) and the head of Nokia Mobile Solutions, Anssi Vanjoki. Notably, Nokia’s MeeGo team picked up Palm’s Peter Skillman as the head of MeeGo User Experience and Services during the same period.

Nokia can whitewash this all it wants, but in recent weeks we learned that Nokia had allegedly started playing with Vista Phone 7 [sic] and the commitment to MeeGo was weakened. Microsoft comes in as CEO, Linux comes out, eh? Sounds like potential entryism to us, unless the import from Microsoft only came after a strategic decision from ‘old Nokia’ (perhaps the board). Microsoft would not mind it so much if Nokia carried on with Symbian because Symbian development — unlike Linux development — does not help hundreds of Microsoft competitor at the same time. It is “the Linux phenomenon” — not Symbian — which Steve Ballmer called “threat number one” 9 years ago.

A key partner and co-developer of MeeGo, Intel, appears to be procrastinating as a result of all that news from Nokia. “Intel Says No MeeGo Handsets Until 2011,” reports a Forbes blogger and David Wood, known for his old role in Symbian, says “(sounds like Q2?)”. That’s a whole year from now. From the informal article:

MeeGo, the open-source mobile operating system that Intel and Nokia are jointly creating, recently took a hit with the departure of its Vice President of Devices, Ari Jaaksi. In the wake of that announcement, an Intel executive who oversees MeeGo development insists the project is on track, but concedes that MeeGo-powered smartphones–and tablets, for the most part–won’t debut until next year.

The news could disappoint gadget fans that have been anticipating the release of a portable MeeGo device since Intel and Nokia joined forces in February. It could also have implications for Nokia. Though the Finnish mobile technology giant is still the world’s largest handset maker, it is struggling to reinvent itself under a new Chief Executive and has been looking to MeeGo to rekindle interest in its high-end smartphones.

MeeGo is very important because of relative LSB compliance which Android, for example, does not have.

Having expressed some concerns after the “pee in the pants to get warm” remark from Nokia (about Android), Glyn Moody told me that “Eric [Schmidt] is not stupid: that just makes his poker hand stronger” when he contacts Nokia:

As MeeGo VP Quits, Nokia CEO Taking Calls From Eric Schmidt

News broke this morning that Nokia’s executive in charge of MeeGo devices, Ari Jaaksi, resigned last week. This continues a string of high-profile people leaving the world’s largest mobile phone company as it attempts to establish an identity in the quickly-evolving mobile space. The internal turmoil and the recent hiring of former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop to be Nokia’s new CEO has led to quite a bit of speculation that Nokia may turn away from its own operating systems and go with the new Windows Phone OS — or at least fork its products to have this OS as an option on top of the upcoming MeeGo. But don’t rule out Google’s Android OS just yet either.

We’ve heard from a good source that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has called Elop to discuss the possibility of Android running on Nokia phones. We actually heard this information about a week ago, but today’s news makes it potentially more interesting. Around the time Jaaksi was resigning, Elop and Schmidt were talking.

Why would a CEO who came from Microsoft embrace the same platform which Microsoft is zealously suing? This whole affair is somewhat depressing and worth keeping track of. We previous covered it in:

• If You Can’t Beat Them, Hijack Them (Microsoft Joins Nokia and It Already Shows)
• Linux Battle in Mobile Phones Becomes Primarily Legal, Not Technical, Due to Software Patents
• Taking Over Linux, by Proxy
• Microsoft Passes More of Its Executives to the MSBBC. What About Nokia?
• Microsoft President Quits, But is Nokia the Next Victim?
• Microsoft Insiders Galore: BBC, Nokia, Others Already Damaged by Microsoft Hires
• Linspire/Ballnux in Tablets; HP Possibly Experiments With Vista 7 in Slate After Abandoning It, Then Hiring From Microsoft
• New Article Says Nokia Might be Bought by Microsoft After Appointing Microsoft President as CEO
• Entryism Watch: Yahoo! Keeps Being Abducted by Microsoft Executives, HP Cancels Android Projects After CEO Appointment From SAP

Nokia is not the only company which seems like a victim of Microsoft entryism. “HP-SAP merger talk considered far-fetched,” opines a writer from IDG, but the Microsoft boosters now report that HP “Windows 7 slates [come] ‘this Christmas,’ touch optimizations in 2011″ (as a reminder, HP sort of abandoned Vista 7 when it comes to slate, but then top appointments were made from SAP and Microsoft [1, 2]). Are we seeing Nokia and HP going through a phase similar to the one Yahoo! and VMB_ware went through (they became occupied by Microsoft executives who brought more Microsoft executives, over time)?

Never underestimate Microsoft’s willingness and ability to compete against Linux using dirty tactics like FUD, lawsuits, and entryism. HP and Intel (of MeeGo) were both distinctly named in Microsoft’s SEC filing as threats, specifically because they were promoting Linux. Gary Clow, a famous victim of Microsoft, once said that “[a] lot of people make that analogy that competing with Bill Gates is like playing hardball. I’d say it’s more like a knife fight.” █

“Where are we on this Jihad?”

–Bill Gates (about removing Linux support at Intel)

Summary: The more Microsoft executives enter other companies, the less committed those companies become to projects that use GNU/Linux and the more receptive they become to other Microsoft veterans (friend brings a friend)

Entryism is much cheaper than buying an entire company (rather than taking over it from the inside). Entryism is usually a zero-cost means of converting a rival into an ally, with examples that in Microsoft’s case include Novell, Corel, Xandros, and XenSource. One of the most recent examples is VMB_Ware, which now wants to buy SUSE. VM_Bware is filled with former Microsoft executives at the top. Other ongoing cases of entryism appear to be Yahoo!, Nokia, and HP. These are the ones we deal with in this post.

Microsoft’s multi-year shakedown of Yahoo! has had Yahoo! hijacked by Microsoft from the inside. We documented this in many dozens of posts since 2008. What usually happens is that old Yahoo! managers leave or get expelled, only to be replaced by managers from Microsoft. It becomes like a Microsoft alumni reunion inside the newly-conquered company, whose old logo and name remain even though the agenda is different.

Many top managers are fleeing Yahoo!, still.

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is finally confirming the departure of a trio of top executives, including Americas head Hilary Schneider. In a just-filed statement with the SEC, Yahoo says Schneider will “be leaving after a transition period.” And, in a statement provided to us, the company says it expects to appoint Schneider’s successor by year-end.

Yahoo is also confirming that SVP of audience, mobile and local David Ko and Yahoo Media Head Jimmy Pitaro are both also leaving. The company isn’t saying why, but Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says in a memo sent to staff (via AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher) that all three are leaving for “different reasons that suit their life.”

Here are the terms of Schneider’s departure from Yahoo! [via Joseph Tartakoff] and here is indication of more of this exodus (“Yahoo In Disarray: Schneider, Ko, Pitaro All Reportedly Leaving”). There is more coming later today, based on the now-AOL-owned TechCrunch. The third paragraph is quite revealing:

Yahoo is in shambles right now. You’ve likely already heard about the most recent SVP exits, which CEO Carol Bartz has tried to spin. Now we’ve heard another one is leaving as well — Jeff Kinder, the SVP of Media Products and Solutions. And you know what that means — time for a massive re-org at the top of Yahoo. Yes, again.

Based on what we’re hearing, this re-org will take place next Tuesday. Of course, us reporting on this means that it could possibly be moved (as has happened in the past with Yahoo deals), but as of right now that’s the plan.

Based on what we’re hearing Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving may be the big winner of this re-org, as he’s been seen as the rising star in the company. Word is that he’ll be bringing some of his old Microsoft chums in to join him in high-up positions at this new-look Yahoo.

So, according to this, the Microsoft VP who became Yahoo Chief Product Officer “may be the big winner of this re-org, as he’s been seen as the rising star in the company. Word is that he’ll be bringing some of his old Microsoft chums in to join him in high-up positions at this new-look Yahoo.”

Yahoo! is making it all quite stealthy. Joseph Tartakoff, who has been somewhat of a Microsoft watcher (especially in the past) and a Yahoo! watcher more recently, writes: “So, if this report of another Yahoo SVP leaving is true … umm … why didn’t Yahoo announce his departure with the others yesterday?”

He also says: “Like, if Yahoo announced it, then people would cover that. Instead, people are being forced to write all these analysis pieces.”

“It seems like Yahoo is just asking for yet ANOTHER story about how top people are leaving the company in droves”
      –Joseph TartakoffThe rants go on as he argues: “It seems like Yahoo is just asking for yet ANOTHER story about how top people are leaving the company in droves”

“But instead it seems we’ll have another week of stories about all the troubles at Yahoo,” he adds.

Lastly, says Tartakoff, “Yahoo will continue to leave their external PR/messaging to bloggers instead of taking control of it themselves.”

Microsoft is having problems and suffering many notable departures too (cannot be good for orientation); the issue is that these departing executives help Microsoft occupy some of its direct competition, due in part to HR mistakes. The thing about these seniors is that they land inside other companies and in the case of the mobile, entertainment, and Office businesses, we already see the negative impact. Microsoft appears to be poisoning Nokia these days, as we covered in:

• If You Can’t Beat Them, Hijack Them (Microsoft Joins Nokia and It Already Shows)
• Linux Battle in Mobile Phones Becomes Primarily Legal, Not Technical, Due to Software Patents
• Taking Over Linux, by Proxy
• Microsoft Passes More of Its Executives to the MSBBC. What About Nokia?
• Microsoft President Quits, But is Nokia the Next Victim?
• Microsoft Insiders Galore: BBC, Nokia, Others Already Damaged by Microsoft Hires
• Linspire/Ballnux in Tablets; HP Possibly Experiments With Vista 7 in Slate After Abandoning It, Then Hiring From Microsoft
• New Article Says Nokia Might be Bought by Microsoft After Appointing Microsoft President as CEO

Chips B. Malroy alerts us that following the latest news about SAP inside HP [1, 2] there are signs that HP is indeed losing some of its Linux direction, just like Yahoo! and Nokia. “If the headline is true,” wrote Malroy in IRC, “this is what Roy has been saying.” The headline says “HP Officially Drops Plans For Android Phones and Tablets” and here is a portion from the article:

The decision isn’t surprising, particularly as HP already announced it had no plans to make a phone running Windows Phone 7. However, the company still plans to sell that slate that Steve Ballmer was waving around back at a CES in January. Albeit, only business customers will see that still-unnamed slate.

This — combined with the lawsuits from Microsoft (against Android) — may lead to all sorts of conclusions or at least speculations. There was a lot more discussed in IRC (some parts to appear tomorrow as it went on past midnight). To quote some portions, Malroy said that “it looks like HP is only doing one Windows tablet” and Ziomatrix replied by saying that “it’s only logical considering [that] if the new CEO proclaimed to not use acquired Palm assets for future projects that’s worth $1.2B, the BoD would have him thrown out faster then you can say sexual harassment.

“I as well as other analysts foresee the new CEO forging a deeper relationship between SAP and MS in enterprise packages while competing more fervently with the likes of Oracle…”
      –Ziomatrix“HP as an OEM has plenty of room to continue to accommodate MS products in PCs and Enterprise. I as well as other analysts foresee the new CEO forging a deeper relationship between SAP and MS in enterprise packages while competing more fervently with the likes of Oracle, like this: http://tinyurl.com/2c8wudg Perhaps we’ll be surprised, don’t forget most of the folks who re-vitalized Palm came from Apple and they wanted to be as un-Apple as possible as far as software openness is concerned.”

“We are at the point where computer tech is changing at a faster rate and it becomes increasingly harder for Microsoft to hide both it’s failures and it’s decline,” Malroy remarked later on and Ziomatrix responded with the claim that “perhaps this is the start of HP wanting to assemble an executive dreamteam to pen a strategy that will take them on their own path with exclusively their own assets such as Pheonix or HP-UX 11i+. One can dream…” █

Summary: HP has been poisoned by Apotheker, whose long career took place in the “Microsoft of Europe” (SAP)

AS FAR as GNU/Linux at HP goes, the latest news (CEO appointment) is terrible for reasons we gave yesterday, but Microsoft’s booster Gavin Clarke pretends that the Windows versus GNU/Linux dimension does not exist at all (HP is a platforms company too) and instead he just apparently tries to make Oracle look bad (Oracle picked Hurd right after HP had ejected him under mysterious circumstances [1, 2, 3, 4]). Clarke for example suggests:

Apotheker’s hiring would suggest HP hasn’t forgiven Ellison’s remarks or forgotten. In fact, it has put a big fat reminder in Ellison’s face about who it’s dealing with by hiring some SAP blue blood. Apotheker’s presence reminds Oracle that HP is its own company and his presence suggests HP will leverage its business’ relationship with SAP in joint customers and work to deliver SAP apps on HP hardware as an alternative to Oracle.

Citing articles like the above and also this one, Mr. Pogson is surprisingly optimistic. He thinks that “Apotheker will no doubt have a global view of IT and may be friendly to GNU/Linux on desktop and server. They could increase margins by pushing GNU/Linux instead of that other OS. At SAP, Apotheker had no problem with customers running SAP on GNU/Linux.” (as long as it was Microsoft’s GNU/Linux, aka “Ballnux”). As the only comment on the post puts it, “If anything, I think Apotheker will make HP more unfriendly to free software. It is really debatable why Hurd was ousted. I happen to think he is removed by Microsoft because he engaged HP in free software “too much”. Acquisitions of Palm and Phoenix Linux BIOS tech as well contributions to GNOME and Linux kernel put HP on Microsoft’s hit list. Microsoft declared HP a threat in SEC fillings. Now Apotheker comes from proprietary company which is Microsoft ally. Make no mistake, SAP is enemy of free software. They feel the burn, and their business practices are incompatible with free software as much as Microsoft’s. SAP had a try when they released MaxDB under GPL, but they abandoned it after some time and continued supporting proprietary version. Since Apotheker lack experience with being a CEO (he was SAP CEO for only about a year) he will probably leave lots decision making to his underlings. And chief of HP software division is a Microsoft guy, appointed right about after Palm acquisition.” █

“Where are we on this Jihad?”

–Bill Gates talking about eliminating Linux at Intel

–Shai Agassi, SAP president

Summary: A SAP CEO becomes the CEO of HP after HP began to explore Linux very seriously, just like Nokia had its CEO canned to give way to a Microsoft President after it had moved aggressively and strongly in MeeGo’s (Linux/LSB) direction

WHAT WE dreaded the most is becoming a reality. One of the biggest OEMs in the world — just like the world’s biggest mobile phones manufacturer — seems to have become somewhat of a victim of Microsoft entryism and assimilation after supporting Linux ‘too much’. The CEOs got thrown out under mysterious circumstances. The subject was discussed in IRC a few hours ago, but here is just a preliminary summary (more information to come later).

For those who know not so much about Hurd’s departure, it turns out not to have been caused by sexual harassment at all [1, 2, 3, 4] (and it’s not surprising that Oracle immediately hired him after he had been ousted). The CEO who replaces him will be far less sympathetic towards Linux at HP because it is a SAP CEO, Leo Apotheker:

Today was the day eh? HP has chose Leo Apotheker as CEO and President. Who is Leo? Well, for the last 20 years he has been the CEO of a tiny little company called SAP.

HP has already hired some top guns from Microsoft, even a ~20-year veteran who became a Vice President at HP earlier this year. Microsoft must not have liked seeing Hurd drop Vista 7 like a rock Slate, putting instead on his tablets a nice touch of Linux, which performed a lot better (Vista 7 on the Slate is a subject of ridicule at the moment). When Hurd got canned Microsoft seemed to have managed to reverse Hurd’s judgment. And who exactly is this new CEO? It’s the top man from SAP (see our Wiki page about SAP). Microsoft wanted to buy SAP some years ago because it’s Microsoft’s #1 ally in Europe, perhaps if only large companies are accounted for. SAP is also the major party among the few lobbyists for software patents in Europe. As for its relationship with Microsoft at present, they recently signed yet another partnership (right after lobbying together against SUN), building upon other relationships that they had (there are many past deals between this pair). They are close to Novell because Microsoft-taxed SUSE is the main GNU/Linux distribution SAP would dare to touch these days (it was solidified last week). It’s all rather telling and there is a lot more ugly stuff about SAP (see the Wiki and today’s IRC logs).

“Imagine what they can do with their own as well as acquired IP, including Palm. WebOS will pay the MS. tax?”
      –ZiomatrixTo quote Ziomatrix about SAP: “They seem like MS’s minime concerning European lobbying. What’s their market cap? [...] Hurd was no saint but who knows what this CEO may unleash onto HP. He could be their Nero. [...] either that or HP will gain abundant market share by becoming a key patent hoarder. Imagine what they can do with their own as well as acquired IP, including Palm. WebOS will pay the MS. tax? [...] you think Nokia’s fate is as much sealed?”

Well, that’s the thing though, there are similarities there too. Nokia was assimilated to Microsoft right after it had moved a little ‘too close’ to Linux (MeeGo) and declared its intent to put Linux on the future crown jewel handsets (N series phones). In Nokia too the CEO got ousted, as if putting a Microsoft President instead of him and then exploring Vista Phone 7 [sic] would provide a lifeline somehow. For background see:

• If You Can’t Beat Them, Hijack Them (Microsoft Joins Nokia and It Already Shows)
• Linux Battle in Mobile Phones Becomes Primarily Legal, Not Technical, Due to Software Patents
• Taking Over Linux, by Proxy
• Microsoft President Quits, But is Nokia the Next Victim?
• Microsoft Passes More of Its Executives to the MSBBC. What About Nokia?

Getting back to HP, Hurd was canned (some would say “framed”) not so long after Microsoft had identified HP as a “risk” and its executives said this to their investors; HP was labelled a threat specifically for ‘daring’ to support GNU/Linux on sun-notebooks/netbooks (see the SEC filing for MSFT) and so was Intel, which built Moblin at the time (now it’s merged with Nokia’s Maemo and Microsoft has influence inside Nokia, the more dominant steward of MeeGo).

“Microsoft’s Elop does not even come from a mobile background, he comes from the Microsoft Movement and Steve Ballmer’s announcement of Elop’s departure seemed so optimistic that it aroused suspicion of it being arranged.”What are we trying to suggest here? In order to counter Android/Linux Microsoft seems to be invading companies which very much promote Linux and develop for Linux. In some cases, Microsoft signs Linux-hostile patent deals with those companies (e.g. HTC, Samsung, and LG), so Microsoft seems to have achieved a lot with this distasteful strategy. Just days ago it seemed like HP put Vista 7 on the HP Slate, even though Hurd had decided to call off this project (or focus a lot more on the Linux-based WebOS, which he bought along with Palm, expending billions). And then there’s the recent news about Vista Phone 7 on Nokia phones. Seriously, how much more evidence does one need to say that the Microsoft Movement is dealing some tricks? Companies don’t just reverse their strategies and return to old, discarded strategies overnight. Management can change in all sorts of ways and just as cats can be shaved in all sorts of ways, CEOs too can be disgraced and canned in many different ways. There was no reason for Nokia, for example (a longtime Microsoft sceptic/foe) to appoint a Microsoft President to become CEO. Microsoft’s mobile business is an utter disgrace and sheer failure, despite huge spendings on it. Microsoft’s Elop does not even come from a mobile background, he comes from the Microsoft Movement and Steve Ballmer’s announcement of Elop’s departure seemed so optimistic that it aroused suspicion of it being arranged.

The following timely links from Pogson may help explain why Microsoft had to prevent HP and Nokia/Intel (MeeGo) from releasing Linux-based products. Published today:

• Tablets vs Netbooks

  The OEMs are seeing that that other OS is holding them back. They can make more money by cutting prices and selling machines without that other OS but with no OS or GNU/Linux.

• Taiwan market: Vendors cutting older netbook models to below NT$10,000

• China white-box tablet PC rush may fail like netbooks; white-box makers disagree

  White-box players also believe that even though they have inferior quality over hardware and software, with the addition of GPS, WiDi, micro projector and e-book reading capabilities, as well as a price point of half the mainstream tablet PC’s price, their products can still attract consumers from emerging markets such as China, India and the Middle-East.

• Netbooks will not die, says Acer Taiwan president

  As for Intel’s new Atom N550 processor, based on Acer’s internal testing, the new processor performs 50% faster than the previous generation model, but the price is at about the same range. Since new netbooks are priced at US$300-400, about the same as previous models, while having better performance, Lin believes the price/performance ratio should help attract consumers.

• Volume shipments of tablet PCs to not start until 2011, says CPT executive

  While a number of IT companies and handset vendors have unveiled tablet PC products, volume shipments are unlikely to hit the market until 2011 as most of the newly developed tablet PC products are still in sampling or small volume production, as well as low yields in lamination of medium-size touch panels, according to Lin Sheng-chang, president of Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT).

• Netbooks are Doing Well

Microsoft is left out of these market segments.

Another question worth asking is, what will happen to HP’s role in GNOME (Stormy Peters et al.) and Free software? Why would a SAP guy be committed to it? SAP hates GNU/Linux (not Ballnux), it loves Microsoft, and it loves software patents (it still lobbies for them in Europe). SAP has a very Free software-hostile history, with notable remarks that include some from Shai Agassi (see the top of this post). █

Summary: A roundup of news about software patents with increased focus on the weakness of the patent system and its ill effects on software freedom

HP’s use of GNU/Linux scared Microsoft enough to put the company under “risks” in its SEC filings, warning investors that HP had become a threat. Then HP bought Palm, which used Linux its flagship product. Soon afterwards a Microsoft executive was put in charge of software at HP, Hurd got the boot [1, 2, 3, 4], and Slate saw Vista 7 returning, possibly at the expense of Linux/WebOS. Joseph Tartakoff, a Microsoft booster, was unimpressed by Vista 7 on Slate. He wrote:

Is this the HP Windows 7 Slate? Let’s hope it’s a joke news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-2… #pcbuzz

BackWeb, which Microsoft paid some money to settle a patent case [1, 2, 3], is now suing IBM and HP:

Looks like IBM and HP have just been hit with patent infringement lawsuits. According to a release, BackWeb Technologies has filed separate lawsuits in the United States District Court in San Francisco, California against IBM and HP, alleging patent infringement.

The patents seems to deal with technology for transmitting information between a remote network and a local computer and distributed client-based data caching systems. BackWeb alleges that IBM’s Tivoli Provisioning Manager and IBM’s recently acquired BigFix products infringe four U.S. patents owned by BackWeb. BackWeb also alleges that HP’s Client Automation product infringes three U.S. patents owned by BackWeb covering methods for transmitting information between a remote network and a local computer.

When it comes to Android, Microsoft has been trying to put a patent tax on it. Dana Blankenhorn provokes a little by suggesting that Google cannot defend Android’s good name although he is not referring to the patents issue. He wrote:

“Don’t be evil” may drive cynics away, but it’s a powerful message many people believe nonetheless.

Google is risking nothing less than its brand through its passivity over Android. Carriers have hijacked the mobile Linux distro and turned it decidedly evil, sometimes even preventing buyers from accessing Google without jailbreaking their phones.

CEO Eric Schmidt’s response has been completely passive. Were we to restrict the use of the code, we’d be violating the principles of open source, he says.

It is being claimed that Google is now infringing on Yahoo! patents, because of Google Instant [1, 2] (trivial idea, just bandwidth- and server resources-consuming).

Yahoo! owns several patents covering Google’s new Instant search engine, according to Shashi Seth, Yahoo!’s senior vice president of search and a former search product leader at Google.

The Microsoft-dominated Yahoo! was said to be such an issue a couple of years ago. Some sites argued that Microsoft wanted control of Yahoo! only/mostly because of its patents.

The most effective solution right now would be to eliminate software patents. The FSF is working towards that and Stallman campaigned on the issue down in Australia this month [1, 2]. Here is some more coverage about that [1, 2] (the latter is a Slashdot discussion). Stallman carried other messages too, basically about the importance of sharing.

Looking at some patent news from around the Web, here is another update on Newegg’s battle against a notorious software patent [1, 2, 3]. Patent trolls still roam free in land of the free (but with low success rates when it comes to patents in software) and TechDirt has a lot more to say about that:

Digging deeper into the report, it looks at and tests a variety of different concepts around patents and litigation. In theory, if a patent is used in multiple patent cases, you tend to think that it must be a pretty solid patent, and one that has been vetted plenty of times. And yet, when the researchers looked at the 106 patents that have been involved in eight or more lawsuits since 2000, they found that the patent holder wins such cases only 10.7% of the time. For patents that have only been brought to litigation once, the patent holder wins 47.3% of the time — an astounding difference.

My first thought on hearing such numbers is that the data could be misleading in that many companies may be a lot more willing to settle when sued by a serial patent litigator. However, the researchers tested that and while they did find that a higher percentage of those sued will settle in cases involving a “most-litigated” patent as compared to a “once-litigated” patent, the higher settlement rates don’t offset the huge difference in win rates.

[...]

On the whole, the results certainly seem to suggest that patent trolls with software patents do very much view the system as a lottery ticket, and they’re willing to use really weak patents to try to win that prize. That is not at all what the patent system is designed to do, but it’s how the incentives have been structured — and that seems like a pretty big problem that isn’t solved just by showing how many of these lawsuits fail. The amount of time and resources wasted on those lawsuits, as well as the number of companies who pay up without completing a lawsuit, suggest that there is still a major problem to be dealt with.

WIPO is under scrutiny from singing legend Mr. Wonder, who continues to make them look bad, even in the UN. Here is an update on the “pay-for-delay” patent lawsuit, courtesy of TechDirt:

Among the many, many nasty things done in the name of patent law is the rather disgusting practices of “pay-for-delay”, where a big pharma firm sues a generic pharma maker for patent infringement, with no legal basis, and part of the “settlement” that is then worked out is that the big pharma will pay off the generic pharma not to enter the market with a generic for a certain period of time. Basically, it’s a (by definition and government support) monopoly player in the market paying off competitors to keep the market exclusive. It’s difficult to see how that’s not a blatant violation of anti-trust law. But, alas, apparently the Second Circuit doesn’t see it that way. In April it tossed out a lawsuit over this issue, because the pharma companies involved put in a few worthless other things into the deal that acted as “cover” for the real anti-competitive move — and, since the “monopoly” was from a patent, the court didn’t see it as an anti-trust issue.

Apple turns out to have just gone suppressing rivals using a trademark on “Pod”. [via]

The trademark battle centers on independent entrepreneur Daniel Kokin (right), founder of startup Sector Labs, and his in-development video projector called Video Pod. Apple had previously filed oppositions against Kokin’s usage of “Pod,” alleging that it would cause customers to confuse it with Apple’s iPod products.

Apple, which sued Linux via HTC, is also using patents to exclude competitors right now. “Apple sues ‘HyperMac’ accessory maker over MagSafe, iPod cables,” reports Apple Insider:

Apple has filed a lawsuit against Sanho Corporation, maker of the HyperMac line of accessories, alleging violation of patents it owns related to the MagSafe charger and cables that use the iPod 30-pin connection.

TechDirt wonders, “Is It Patent Infringement To Reuse Recycled Apple Magsafe Connectors?”

AppleInsider has the details of yet another patent infringement lawsuit filed by Apple, who has become a lot more aggressive on the patent front lately. This lawsuit is against Sanho, a company that makes a variety of external batteries for Apple products. There are six patents listed in the lawsuit, but two are design patents, which are pretty narrow.

Apple is just killing competition using patents and in another new story the same tricks are being used quite blatantly (to drive a competitor into bankruptcy also). [via]

Football gear maker files for bankruptcy after losing patent-infringement suit

[...]

The phrase “bet-the-company litigation” is an overused metaphor to describe high-stakes cases. But once in a while the survival of a business is hanging in the balance, as in the case of Schutt Sports Inc.

The Illinois-based maker of football helmets and other sports gear filed for bankruptcy on Labor Day, a month after it was sacked with more than $29 million in damages for violating its rival’s helmet patent. Schutt Sports said in bankruptcy court papers that the verdict was the final hammer, as the company already was struggling with deteriorating revenue and profit margins and an overleveraged balance sheet prior to the jury decision.

Instrumental in blocking competition is the ITC (International Trade Commission), whose role we wrote about in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Here is Sony meeting the ITC wall because of “alleged patent infringements” (mere allegations).

THE US ITC (International Trade Commission) will investigate complaints from a Taiwanese manufacturer about Sony regarding some alleged patent infringements.

The accusations about patent toe-stepping come from Chimei Innolux, one of the biggest LCD manufacturers in Taiwan, Chi Mei Optoelectronics, and Texas based Innolux Corporation, all of which appear to be related companies and are complaining that Sony has ridden roughshod over their patent rights on gadgets ranging from Sony’s televisions to its games console, the PS3.

Innolux Corporation is a company of just 5 or so people and its Web site lists no products. █

Summary: Former Microsoft staff seems like a possible reason for HP Slate running Vista 7 (even just in a prototype phase, assuming the new video is authentic)

Y

ESTERDAY we wrote about Ballnux tablets, which are still a threat (but also somewhat complementary) to GNU/Linux tablets (which Microsoft makes no money from). A new survey shows that one in four Americans would want an Android/Linux tablet (sub-notebooks are another growth area for GNU/Linux and not for Apple); sadly, only the Ballnux-based Galaxy Tab is named at the start:

With the coming of the Galaxy Tab and possible releases of a number of Android tablets at the end of the year, the question still remains: do most consumers really want or need a tablet device? We have seen the success of the iPad but have yet to see anything really go up against it, Android or otherwise. It’s a bit hard to judge sometimes what “real consumers” in the market place want as opposed to us Android fanboys, but a recent Zogby pole may clear some of this up.

Then there is the tablet-class device called “Slate”. Watch the following new video of Vista 7 choking on it:

Direct link

Assuming that it’s not fake or just experimental, how come it doesn’t run Linux as promised? HP deemed Vista 7 unsuitable at one point. A Microsoft booster — not just GNU/Linux advocates — says that the “HP Slate video shows all that’s wrong with Windows 7 on tablets”. He also writes:

But then HP bought Palm, and with it webOS. webOS may be a phone operating system, but ever since news of the purchase came out, there has been widespread conjecture about a webOS-powered tablet. The appeal of webOS on such a device is that webOS is designed around a touch-screen, and built for low-power hardware—ideal for battery life.

As we pointed out throughout the HP-Hurd scandal [1, 2, 3, 4], Microsoft has apparently increased its level of influence inside HP thanks to high-level staff that went there. Might this explain a return to Vista 7 (see the Windows elements hard-coded on the device)? █

Summary: “Microsoft tax” in tablets is recalled now that Linspire meets MeeGo and Vista 7 allegedly meets the HP “Slate” again

SOME DAYS AGO we wrote about Linspire disputes following the sale of the company’s assets, including invisible ‘assets’ like the “Linspire” trademark.

Well, trademarks are a touchy subject in the Free software world and “Linspire” was never truly used as a trademark by Xandros which bought it. It has been MIA for 2 years.

Xandros is hardly mentioned anymore (with few exceptions like this one) and Linspire is rarely but still mentioned as a supported platform.

Earlier today we learned about this “Linspire on MeeGo” tablet thing, which is baffling as no other source seems to be covering it and it’s not clear what Linspire has to do with it.

The Linspire-MeeGo tablet will likely support touch-based input methods and gestures. Linpus will be creating touchscreen-specific apps to run on MeeGo, such as an eReader, maps, mail, a browser, and a media player. Linpus will also include a contact manager.

We were pretty sure Linspire (Ballnux) was in its grave by now; given that it was a Microsoft-taxed distribution, no love was lost. Is this “Linspire-MeeGo tablet” taxed by Microsoft for imaginary patent violations? What would Nokia say now that its CEO is a former Microsoft president (also see [1, 2, 3])?

Speaking of tablets, in our previous posts about the HP-Hurd scandal [1, 2, 3, 4] we explained that Microsoft entryism at HP seemed to have had the effect of making the company neglect Linux and bring back Vista 7 to the “Slate”, even after HP had officially abandoned it. According to this new video (“Supposed HP Slate prototype video”), Microsoft cronies at HP may have had their way.

It’s a Windows 7 version of the same old Microsoft Tablet PC form factor, but this time, with a finger instead of a stylus. They used to call these “slate”-type Tablet PCs. They were slaughtered in the market by the “convertible” type that had the flip-around laptop keyboards, because most Windows software simply works much better with a keyboard and trackpad.

This was brought to our attention by lnxwalt, who dented: “HP “Slate” video: http://cl.ly/2W0J via @mikegrace@twitter.com — should have killed it; #WebOS tablets should be *much* better. [...] Holy cow! That thing is awful! Is it Flash that makes it so slow?”

Well, Vista 7 is not suitable for portable devices. That’s why Linux/Android does so well on these form factors whose sales grow. █