05.05.10
Posted in Courtroom, FUD, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Red Hat at 3:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why patent trolls or puppets like Acacia (and Microsoft) do manage to cause harm to Linux, even when their case is altogether bogus
FOR reasons we explained before, Acacia has Microsoft connections and its case against Linux lasted for quite a while before it ended with a defeat.
If legal victory was not Acacia’s sole goal but rather the supply of FUD against Linux (and self publicity), then Acacia won either way. TechDirt correctly states that the ‘ammunition’ was invalid (just like SCO’s).
The latest is that Red Hat won after being sued by a patent hoarder, who claimed that every version of Linux infringed on its patents. The jury found that the patents in question were invalid and tossed them out.
The FFII gives a rough estimate of the cost of this type of litigation, putting it at somewhere around 1 million dollars.
Redhat an Novell were lucky this time because the plaintiffs had failed to acquire really bad patents. Bad software patents are those software patents that meet today’s bad statutory requirements. By contrast, those software patents that can be invalidated in court are called bogus software patents. Of course even when you are attacked with bogus software patents you lose time and money, even more so in the US, where the loser doesn’t pay for lawyer fees of the winner.
Typically, as a professional with experience in this area told me these days, winning a lawsuit of this scale is said to cost about 1 million USD. Often companies will prefer to pay license fees 250,000 USD to the owner of a bogus patent.
So, this cost them a lot of money, time, and damage caused by FUD factor, as already pointed out some days ago. On the brighter side of things, Steve Stites says:
This is an important victory for Open Source. It takes us another step in the direction of establishing that it is pointless to mount a patent attack against Open Source. We need to firmly establish the principle that there is absolutely nothing to be gained by a software patent attack on Open Source and it is pointless to even try.
Another person writes:
With MS up to its usual FUD about video codecs and patents, it’s nice to have a little more legal precedent stacked up for FLOSS.
Bob Robertson writes:
Hoorah!
This is just one more good reason to fight Microsoft’s “273 patents that are infringed upon by Linux” claim.
When does the class-action against Microsoft’s legal department’s FUD happen?
Why doesn’t Red Hat report Microsoft’s FUD/extortion activities [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], which are illegal in some countries? It might be cheaper than fighting those patent trolls whose management partly came from Microsoft. █
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Posted in ECMA, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, OpenOffice at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft does not keep its promises regarding “Open Source” in .NET and its MVP Miguel de Icaza is trying to ram .NET into Web browsers
“Running Mono directly into the browser” is what our reader called this disturbing idea from Microsoft MVP de Icaza. Another reader explained that “Miguel de icaza wants .NET CLI to be embedded in browsers *Not really going through w3c*“
Is anyone surprised?
This is the type of thing that makes de Icaza a Microsoft MVP. It’s only becoming clearer over time who he’s really serving, no matter his denials regarding the question.
Which browser will be the first victim? Firefox or Chrome? Moonlight is already messing up with Firefox. Microsoft also shoved .NET into Firefox (for Windows) without permission, only to cause great distress and trouble.
Elsewhere in the news (notably Slashdot [1, 2]) we find that Microsoft is faking “Open Source” when it comes to .NET (who didn’t see that coming?).
figleaf writes “Three years ago, with much fanfare Microsoft announced it will make some the .Net libraries open source using their Microsoft Reference License. Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise. The reference code site is dead, the blog is no longer updated and no one from Microsoft responds to any questions on the forum.”
To Microsoft, this whole “Open Source” idea seems nonsensical or “cancer” and “communism”; it’s just for marketing purposes and this is not the first time Microsoft is caught lying about parts of its code being “Open Source” (Sandcastle comes to mind [1, 2, 3, 4]).
The news above only comes to show Novell’s participation in Microsoft’s agenda, which is harmful to the Web as a whole.
Watch what Novell keeps doing to OpenOffice.org using its fork [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Novell advertises its OpenOffice.org fork as just a Windows office suite with OOXML and Visual Basic. Here is what Novell’s PR team wrote some days ago:
The answer is OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows. We’ve recently released the 3.2 version, which contains bug fixes as well as many improvements over both the previous and community versions.
If you aren’t already familiar with this offering, OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows is an open source office suite that is the best choice for interoperability with Microsoft Office. In addition to excellent performance and integrated extensions, the newest version allows users to access and edit Google Docs documents. It also includes enhanced spreadsheet capabilities such as more rows, better VBA macros and improved support for OpenXML files, the default format in the recent Microsoft Office versions.
Meanwhile, promoters of .NET/Mono (de Icaza included) carry on advertising for a Novell colleague who wants an image editor for GNU/Linux to be .NET-based [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] and thus promote Pinta , despite the known problems.
Novell is also trying to put MonoTouch in Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], regardless of or because of Apple’s actions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. This is problematic since Microsoft already uses patent threats against Android and this extortion sometimes works.
There’s a disturbance in the gadget force everyone. You probably aren’t aware of it because most you are Mac or Windows users, but those who’ve been using Linux on the desktop or on servers have known for some time that Microsoft has been bullying Linux software vendors with threats of lawsuits for infringing on their intellectual property (IP). Remedy: sign our “patent agreement” and share your technology in exchange for immunity.
Microsoft claims that most parts of what makes up the GNU/Linux OS infringes on Microsoft’s closed-source patent war-chest. To put it in simple terms, they claim that they came up with X process or X functionality first and they have a patent on that feature. I’m not a IP or patent lawyer, so I can’t get into specifics, but I can tell you that the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement prides itself on being open and sharing code with others to be used how one sees fit. And, if you make an improvement, to share that improvement back with the community. FOSS developers like to look at a proprietary app and say, we can make that… and not only can we make it, we’ll make it better through the inspection of thousands of users who will voluntarily test the code, kill bugs, improve upon the feature-set, and so on and so on.
This whole mess started with Novell, which is currently injecting actual patent traps into everything that uses Linux. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, HP, Vista 7, Windows at 2:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: HP gets WebOS and Google gets BumpTop (for 3-D desktop), which in turn help replace Windows that is simply too bloated and unimpressive
LAST WEEK we wrote about HP buying Palm, later to point out that HP products that run Windows are now dead (“Slate” as we knew it from public demos is called off).
Some say that “Slate” is only delayed (unlike Courier which is dead for sure), but it is likely that it will just come with Linux rather than Vista 7; it’s not the form factor, it’s the software. As Perlow put it some days ago:
HP’s Slate was an Ugly Baby with Windows 7
[...]
The existing WebOS application base of 1500+ programs, while not huge, will run pretty much as-is with some simple re-packaging and screen optimization, because the apps are all written in the lingua franca of the Web, HTML and Javascript, and are completely CPU platform neutral.
Other reports tell us that WebOS might have something to do with Windows being abolished.
Techcrunch is reporting that Hewlett-Packard is killing off its Slate tablet before it comes to market.
The reasoning, according to a Techcrunch source, is that HP isn’t happy with the performance of Window 7 as a tablet operating system. That means HP will be shopping around for a new operating system such as Google’s Android OS or they could be fixing to convert Palm’s webOS for tablets.
In other interesting news, Google acquires BumpTop probably to put it on top of Chrome OS or Android. Will Google port it to Linux/Android? Will it become Free software? We shall see.
Google is acquiring BumpTop, a startup that aimed to improve the interface of your computer desktop.
BumpTop launched its first product about a year ago. The idea, as founder and chief executive Anand Agarawala described it during a talk at the 2007 TED conference, was to do away with the “same old crap” found in the layout of both the Windows and Mac operating systems. By turning the desktop into a three-dimensional space, users can arrange things more naturally and creatively. They can pile things up, just like they can on a physical desk.
BumpTop is rather impressive and Google will probably bring it to GNU/Linux in one form or another. Given that Chrome OS and Android are mostly ‘open’ (not entirely), it would be reasonable to assume that BumpTop will augment the GNU/Linux experience as Looking Glass once did (even though it was proprietary). █
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Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Novell, SCO at 1:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Several bits of Novell news, starting with the significant report about RadeonHD going deprecated and more positive reports, such as BrainShare EMEA returning
SEVERAL years ago, apologists of Novell loved pointing at RadeonHD’s direction and say that Novell was a champion of Free software. Setting aside the fact that Novell laid off one of the key developers of RadeonHD (Luc Verhaegen, last mentioned here) while struggling with DRM and with AMD, it is important to separate (Open)SUSE from Novell. It’s the source of many straw man arguments. In any event, “OpenSUSE Says Farewell To RadeonHD Driver,” according to Phoronix.
Now though the RadeonHD driver has perhaps suffered its final blow as the RadeonHD driver is no longer being used as the default within Novell’s own openSUSE distribution. As is said in the OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 6 notes, “radeon video driver has superseded radeonhd, providing KMS/DRI support.”
This is actually not good news for Linux as a whole. Novell did contribute in some areas of Linux development (although less and less over time) and another important area is the SCO lawsuit, which will apparently resume some time later this year.
SCO has now filed with the bankruptcy court in Delaware its report on the small stuff it sold off, what it calls its First Quarterly Report of De Minimis Asset Sales Consummated By the Chapter 11 Trustee Pursuant to Order Approving Certain Procedures for the Sale, Transfer or Abandonment of De Minimis Assets.
[...]
Update: And news on the US Supreme Court front. SCO has been given more time to respond to Novell’s petition. The new date is August 5.
So, what have Ocean Park folks been doing for their $91,829.50? Some of it is rather vague. This covers the time period of the sale of mobility assets and the finalization of the Yarro loan, so the vagueness is a little frustrating. There are several items about conference calls regarding various “commercial, financial issues.” Whatever that means.
Novell is coming to Europe quite soon and it gives the illusion of interest by setting expectations accordingly.
Set expectations and beat them. That’s the situation facing Novell as the company prepares for BrainShare EMEA, scheduled for May 18 to 21 in Amsterdam. This is the first time in five years Novell is hosting a BrainShare conference for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) partners and customers. Novell Chief Marketing Officer and Channel Chief John Dragoon says the event is sold out.
We no longer post weekly links about Novell because the company is up for sale and there is too little news about it. █
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