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10.21.12

European Debate on Patents Should Borrow Lessons From Apple vs. Samsung

Posted in Patents at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Bundestag

Summary: Updates on patents from Europe and some uses of the Apple vs. Samsung case to show why a US-style system is misguided at best if not truly destructive as a whole

CAFC was recently accused of legitimising software patents in the US, but who is behind the effort to bring these to the EU?

The “European Patent Office is not accountable to any democratic body in Europe,” says Simon Phipps, citing Karsten from the FSFE. He writes:

Now that software patents are back on the table, it’s important to understand how the European patent system actually works. You need to know this in order to discuss the unitary patent and FSFE’s demands with the MEPs you call and ask for support.

The most surprising point is that the European patent system isn’t actually in any way related to the European Union. Instead, it is run by the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg). This is an entirely different organisation from the EU. It is governed by the European Patent Convention. The EU and the EPOrg are two separate supranational bodies. The EPOrg is not subject to decisions of the European Union or the European Court of Justice.

The EPOrg consists of two bodies: The European Patent Office (EPO) as an executive body, and the Administrative Council as a supervisory body. The Administrative Council exercises very little control, so that the EPO basically runs itself. While the EPO claims that it merely administers existing law, it has over the years, little by little, reinterpreted the limits of the European Patent Convention.

The EPO has been suppressing critical comments and the FSFE is not alone in criticising the EPO, which is run by beaurocrats and patent lawyers.

We recently found a lawyers’ site trying to appear balanced while the patent lawyers lobby to storm the media and push for the loophole that facilitates a greater patent mess (i.e. business for lawyers) in Europe, especially after experts warn about this whole travesty. This is rather telling:

The AmeriKat urges readers to distribute these documents to your contacts in the media, government and industry. When the Max Planck Institute flexes their intellectual muscles and concludes that the unitary patent proposals have the potential to be worse than the current system, its time for politicians in Brussels and the Heads of State to listen.

There is more of this lobbying for the Unitary Patent in other patent lawyers’ sites. Resistance to it uses the Apple case as a cautionary tale:

For a couple of years, patents have hit the headlines with companies struggling to buy out portfolios of bankrupted competitors, with more and more ridiculous obvious patents granted by patent offices, or with “trials of the century” going on and on. This inflation of concerns around patents has culminated on August 24th, 2012, with Samsung being found liable for infringing some of Apple’s mobile patents by a Californian jury. This over one billion dollars fine has given concrete expression to Steve Jobs’ testimony, as laid down in his posthumous biography: “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product, I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

The New York Times article indicates that Apple said they spent millions to develop the slide to unlock. This is nonsense. It was invented millennia earlier. There is friction even within Apple:

Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Phillips to Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees.

When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom faceoff, a jury ruled that Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Ricci’s company.

But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Phillips agreed to sell his company to Ricci.

Apple and Microsoft continue to arm themselves with Android- and user-hostile patents [1, 2] as the trial of most importance carries on:

The Apple v. Samsung battle is being fought just as hard after the trial as before it and during it. Maybe harder. If you’ve ever wondered how it would look if your lawyer really fought hard for you, this is how. Both sides are doing everything they can think of for their client, but particularly Samsung. It’s quite a sight, I must say.

This whole charade, from both sides in fact, has only helped show how patents hold innovation back. █

Patent Debates After the Apple Debacle

Posted in Apple, Patents at 11:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Couple chats

Summary: A collection of patent news, especially news about software patents and patent trolls which use these

THERE has been a huge number of articles about patents since Apple got a favourable — albeit corrupt — ruling.

Apple co-founder Woz disagrees the other co-founder, Steve Jobs, and his potential "thermonuclear" war on Android, wasting Google’s time and money, slowing down innovation and progress.

So-called ‘legal’ folks talk about software patents and FOSS folks like the OSI’s head, Simon Phipps, provide actual evidence. For instance:

Recent research supports view that patent troll activity is rising — costing America a fortune in wasted legal fees and lost jobs

A game widely known in the FOSS community has been hit:

Software patents: this needs to stop. X Plane is an awesome flight simulator, made by an independent developer who injects tons of innovations in his product and he is been patent trolled.

The EFF gets increasingly involved and the press too calls firms “patent trolls” even in headlines (but not the mainstream press). There are around 9,423 patents on the subject of WiFi alone and some trolls exploit this to create thickets. Some even put thickets around the Web:

The New York Times has decided to take on the noble task of battling the scum of the Earth: patent trolls.

Rather that cave into one troll’s ludicrous monetary demand for what essentially is the basis of the internet, the Times’ lawyers have headed for the court room, says the Associated Press. At issue? Hyperlinks in text messages.

Here is another troll which harms the Web. We recently found out that W3C people too had lobbied for FRAND. It’s just like RAND, but rather than sounding random it sounds like “friend” and the F stands for “fair”. It’s a propaganda term for software patents, championed by IBM, Microsoft, and so on. It is like calling war “for peace” and the W3C just embarrasses itself again [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. █

Vista 8 Drives Away OEMs, Linux to Gain

Posted in Asia, GNU/Linux, Google, Hardware at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Covered by snow

Summary: Windows is having a hard time getting bundled with tomorrow’s hardware, suggest reports

The Vista 8 crisis and the collapse of the Windows monopoly sure affect OEMs. They are turning the other way and citing this report, BGR says:

Microsoft’s Surface tablet continues to ruffle feathers ahead of its imminent launch next week. According to a report on Friday from Digitimes, Microsoft’s partners feel their software supplier “will no longer be concerned about its downstream partners’ thoughts or complaints” following the launch of the Redmond, Washington-based company’s debut tablet. Instead Microsoft is focused on establishing its own hardware business and breaking into the tablet market that has eluded it thus far.

This is driving many companies to Android and GNU with Linux, e.g. ChromeOS or Ubuntu. Benioff says that this is the end for Windows [1, 2]:

Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 will mark “the end” of the computer industry’s dominant OS due to increasing competition and choice sparked by alternatives, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff predicted Friday.

Windows 8 is a catalyst or “gambit” for CIOs, forcing them to say “am I going to Windows 8, or am I going to something else,” Benioff said during a question-and-answer session at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce event in New York, which was webcast.

There is already fragmentation in Windows, not just in Windows file systems, and in turn this removes the inertia/advantage of applications compatibility. Hardware became a game changer. “Windows RT does not support running XNA applications,” quotes Patrick from Techrights. “You can still write an XNA game for Windows 8, but it won’t run on the Windows RT devices.”

“Microsoft,” he writes, “meet thy iceberg!”

There are other issues emerging:

Some claim confusion by consumers may have killed off GNU/Linux on netbooks. What will “8″ and “not 8″ do for WARM? I certainly cannot tell them apart from the “notStarting Up” and the “notStart” screens. I think */Linux on ARM is safe for now. I wonder if x86 is safe from GNU/Linux though? Consumers who will buy a PC with rectangular regions of the screen with widgets may well prefer it. If I were a retailer, I would stock up on GNU/Linux PCs just in case consumers run away from “8″.

We are at the cusp of change. The client side will soon be dominated by Linux.

Intel and Microsoft are so scared of ARM/Linux that they play dirty again, according to a blogger in Asia who writes:

As a government agency, SKMM has no rights in determining which software vendor’s solution should be used. Interestingly enough, it does not prescribe a preferred broadband service provider – which is the way it should be done.

The tender stinks of suspicion, especially looking at Microsoft’s poor records in using underhand tactics to promote it’s products. See for example, Microsoft’s indirect lobbying against OpenDocument Format (ODF) back in 2008, in Malaysia and the Phillipines.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft’s annual report declares how much of contribution to politicians it gives, down to individual House of Representatives and Senators’ names. Surely it can do the same on lobbying on a per-country basis?

Something similar happened in Thailand [1, 2, 3]. █

Canonical Does Not Want Critics, Mono Boosters Return

Posted in Mono, Patents, Ubuntu at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Sunglider

Summary: Ubuntu’s founder, who calls critical Ubuntu users “trolls”, closes down some of the development process and suppresses voices which helped defend Ubuntu from bad policy like Mono inclusion by default

Techrights’ iophk has noticed that “there are still people trying to infect mono into Gnome and everything else,” to use his own words. Here is the evidence, which reminds of events from half a decade ago. We also learn about Mono infections in KeePass. To quote this one person, “I’ve been using KeePass as my password manager for some time now. It works on Windows and the Android, but on OS X it runs under Mono” (negative mention).

Not too long ago Canonical removed Mono under pressure from users of Ubuntu. The company is now closing down development, right after getting flak for not respecting privacy (by default) and many criticise the move. Mark Shutteworth is in ‘damage control’ mode right about now (see our Daily Links). Without public scrutiny or at better actual involvement Ubuntu might become more users’ rights-hostile. It is thanks to community involvement that antifeatures are kept out. This includes Mono. Watch Jan from Fedora as he spots the latest spin:

Reality Distortion, much? The future of .NET is Open Source! Whowuddathunk! http://haacked.com/archive/2012/10/21/monkeyspace-dotnet-oss.aspx

Microsoft drone Miguel de Icaza has been indirectly behind it:

MonkeySpace is a rebranded and refocused Monospace conference. While MonoSpace dealt mostly with Mono, the goal of Monkeyspace is to put the spotlight on .NET open source everywhere, not just on Mono. Obviously Mono is a big part of that. But so is Microsoft. But most of all, the many small “labor of love” projects from those in the .NET OSS community are a big part of this.

Canonical used to defend its Mono policy by saying it was Open Source, even though de Icaza admits an Open Core business model. █

10.20.12

Links 20/10/2012: Chromebooks in the News, Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10

Posted in News Roundup at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • Servers

      Notice that the rate of growth of GNU/Linux is nearly double that of that other OS and at that rate,

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • Nouveau DRM Commits Supporting Z Compression

        Ben Skeggs of Red Hat pushed a number of new DRM commits into the Nouveau driver development repository today, including new support for Z compression.

      • Unigine Engine Does Real-Time Global Illumination

        The Unigine Engine has been revised with a number of new features and impressive capabilities. One of several new features is “real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics”, which may be a mouthful but is for delivering even more beautiful graphics.

        About the real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics, Unigine Corp says, “A new, real-time global illumination based on precomputed spherical harmonics allows to render high-detail diffuse lighting with interreflections and angle-dependent specular highlights. It is fully interactive: soft environment light illuminates both static geometry in the scene and dynamic objects moving around it…The stunning lightmap-like quality is achieved by using automatically generated LightProb…Global illumination is available across all APIs and is well scalable performance-wise… As you can see, GI makes a huge difference: it brings a truly photorealistic visual quality to a scene.”

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Cinnamon 1.6.2 Out With Nemo 1.0.4

        Linux Mint team has released a bug fix of Cinnamon desktop and Nemo file browser. This is a maintenance release, which means no new features have been added, but a variety of bigs have been fixed which will make the desktop experience even smoother. Some of the major bugs that have been fixed are:

      • Prefer GNOME Shell? Download Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10

        Ubuntu GNOME Remix, a Linux distribution which aims to become an official Ubuntu flavour, uses GNOME Shell as the default “shell” and tries to provide a “mostly pure GNOME desktop experience built from the Ubuntu repositories”.

  • Distributions

    • Highly Recommended Linux Distributions for Beginners (Excluding Ubuntu)

      If you are a longtime Windows user, then switching to Linux is quite a challenging task. Not that Linux is difficult or something, it’s just that many users get perplexed as to which distribution to choose. This is actually where the problem begins for most users. They go to various sites and forums, ask for questions and different people recommend various distributions.

      That said, it’s quite obvious that most of the time new users go for Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution at the moment. They choose it either because one of their friends recommended it to them or they heard something good about it from news, blogs, or forums. In both cases, it’s evident that Ubuntu has been, and will be the first choice for most of the new users.

    • Chakra Linux Makes Full Switch To Systemd
    • This Week in Linux: Fedora, Mandriva, and Mageia

      Ubuntu’s latest release and controversies have dominated the news this week, but it wasn’t the only distribution making announcements. Fedora 18 is running behind schedule, but developers are already looking ahead. The Mandriva foundation has a name and Mageia has officially changed its schedule.

    • New Releases

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Review – Linux User’s biggest ever super test
          • Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 Released
          • Was it something I said?

            Leave it to Ubuntu/Canonical’s Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life Mark Shuttleworth to completely ruin a perfectly good release day for Ubuntu 12.10 and its arguably superior derivatives like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Edubuntu.

          • “in addition to”
          • The development of Ubuntu Tweak is stopped

            No matter how you got this news, what I want to announce is the same: I want to stop the development and maintenance of Ubuntu Tweak. This means you will not be able to use “Apps” (Since it is a web service), I will not response for the bug report, the last commit of the code will be: Add cache support for Apps, only available in Ubuntu 12.10, so sad…

            You may ask why I made this decision to stop the development of Ubuntu Tweak, I may write 10,000 words to describe how I start this project, how I feel happy from this project, how I feel bad from this project…But I just want to say: If making free software is not free any more, why still doing this?

          • What’s New In Ubuntu Linux 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’
          • Shuttleworth ruffles feathers with Ubuntu Linux 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ plans
          • AMD Catalyst: Ubuntu 12.10 vs. Windows 7

            For those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu Linux 12.10 versus Microsoft Windows 7 when using the same system and the Catalyst graphics driver, here are new Phoronix benchmarks of an AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card when running a variety of OpenGL workloads from Ubuntu 12.10, Kubuntu 12.10 (the KDE desktop version of Ubuntu 12.10 to avoid the Unity desktop overhead), and Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64.

          • Canonical claims Amazon integration in Ubuntu is what users want

            Canonical released Ubuntu Linux 12.10 yesterday, which brought tighter integration with Amazon in system search results, a move that has raised some criticism from the community. According to Canonical, Amazon integration in Dash is something users expect and the firm will integrate other online services in future Ubuntu releases.

          • Ubuntu Linux 12.10 Offered in Desktop, Server Flavors

            Ubuntu Linux 12.10 includes innovations such as document search capabilities that allow users to easily find documents whether they are stored on their computers or in the cloud.

          • Canonical dresses Ubuntu 12.10 in garb fit for the cloud
          • Is Ubuntu Development Becoming Less Open? [Updated]

            While the larger Ubuntu community was busy downloading, installing and enjoying the latest edition of Ubuntu yesterday, a post by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth ruffled some feathers.

          • Mark Shuttleworth: Nothing That Was Previously Public Will Be “Taken Private” [Exclusive]
          • Ubuntu moves some Linux development inside
          • Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth Tires Of Critics, Moves Key Ubuntu Developments Out Of Public Eye
          • Ubuntu Tweak Stops Development, Claims No Longer Free

            Popular Ubuntu configuration utility Ubuntu Tweak has officially ended support for its long-running project today. Ubuntu Tweak has been a mainstay application on newbie machines since the days of Dapper Drake, and between then and now has gain a lot of respect within the community regardless of being merely a front-end for already trivial tasks.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Screenshots
          • Shuttleworth: Secret development of 13.04′s “Tada” features – Update

            In the wake of the release of Ubuntu 12.10, Mark Shuttleworth has announced a new style of development for Ubuntu 13.04, the next major version of the Linux distribution. Referring to “a few items with high ‘tada!’ value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled,” Shuttleworth said that there will be a new process where the new features will not be talked about “until we think they are ready to celebrate”. Before that time the company says it will only engage with “contributing community members that have established credibility”.

          • Free Ubuntu manual updated

            The Ubuntu Manual Team has announced that the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal version of the Ubuntu Manual, “Getting Started with Ubuntu 12.10″PDF has been published. The 143 page manual provides an introduction to Ubuntu covering topics such as how to try out a LiveCD, how to install the distribution, using the Ubuntu desktop, working with Ubuntu, managing hardware and peripherals, managing software and updates, and offering pointers for further research and reading.

          • Ubuntu Ported To Google Nexus 7

            In announcing Ubuntu 13.04 is the Raring Ringtail, Mark Shuttleworth encouraged attendees going to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen to bring along their Nexuis 7 tablet. At that point it could be deduced they would be bringing Ubuntu Linux to this popular Google tablet, but now it’s confirmed.

          • Fancy A Ubuntu Boombero Speaker To Boost Your Sounds?

            You’re listening to your tunes or watching a video on your Android phone and you’re not too happy with the tinny, low audio. So you wander over to your new Ubuntu Boombero Speaker and place your device on top and suddenly Mr Bombastic is filling the room with big base vibes. Well now it’s a reality.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 brings the cloud Juju

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 | Review

              Yesterday marked the release of Ubuntu 12.10, the latest version of the most popular Linux distribution. What’s interesting now is that GNOME and Ubuntu are back together after 18 months.

            • Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Review

              The first stable release of Ubuntu Gnome Remix has arrived with a lot of promises for long-time Gnome users. Ever since Ubuntu switched to Unity, it became harder for Gnome users to get the pure Gnome 3.x experience on top of their preferred operating system. Quite a lot of users moved to other distributions and we saw the rise of derivatives like Linux Mint which seems to have become the favorite distro of seasoned GNU/Linux journalists like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

              As a long time Gnome+Ubuntu user, I was personally excited about this release. However, before I picked this review, I reminded myself that ‘this is the first release of Ubuntu Gnome Remix’ so treat it as the first release. At time tend to start judging things in their beta or alpha stages, which is simply unfair. So, before we bring UGR under the microscope keep in mind that this is the very first release and Gnome 3.x is still going through heavy development so my criticism of this release should be taken too seriously.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Building a computer from scratch: open source computer science course
  • The Genesis Of Free Software Projects

    Like other Linux distributions, we take a range of upstream components and assemble them together into an integrated system. Throughout this integration work our community actively participates in a range of different areas – development, testing, bug-fixing, translations, documentation, and more.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Delivers Preview of Firefox Marketplace

        Mozilla has been steadily moving forward with its Boot to Gecko, Firefox OS and smartphone initiatives, and now the company’s long awaited app store is available in a preview edition for Android developers. A Mozilla blog post on The Future of Firefox includes instructions for how Android users can get the preview edition of Firefox Marketplace through Mozilla’s Aurora channel. This app store will play a key role in Mozilla’s serious efforts to become entrenched in the world of smartphones and open mobile operating systems, even though it is Android-focused for the moment.

      • TED Talk: Ryan Merkley demos Popcorn

        Today, a powerful new Popcorn Maker demo makes its debut on TED.com, showcasing Popcorn’s potential to change the way the world tells stories on the web.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 3.5.7 maintenance update released

      At the LibreOffice Conference, currently taking place in Berlin, The Document Foundation has released version 3.5.7 of its open source LibreOffice productivity suite, fixing more than 50 bugs. The seventh maintenance update to the 3.5.x branch corrects problems that caused the application to crash, including one that occurred when pasting data into more than one sheet in the Calc spreadsheet program. A number of bugs related to RTF and SmartArt import, ODF and DOC export, and program crashes when using tables were also fixed.

  • Healthcare

    • Did Open Source EHR Summit answer questions?

      The nonprofit Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) organization recently held its first annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop. Seong K. Mun, PhD, President and CEO of OSEHRA, talked about goals for the workshop and OSEHRA in general before it began. This was first time that the OSEHRA community to meet and develop their skills with open source health IT training and educational workshops.

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Open Source R10 Quadcopter Zooms Past Kickstarter Goal

      Quadcopters are all the rage right now for amateur drone projects and hobby flying, and it’s no wonder; a quadcopter has outstanding speed, maneuverability, and payload capacity. They are as fun to fly as they are useful, but unfortunately they tend to be something else: prohibitively expensive.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Anything but open source!

      It’s another of controversial tenders tracked down by Foundation of Free and Open Source Software experts in the scope of “Monitoring of public procurement for software and hardware in units of government and local administration and intervention in case of detecting irregularities”. This time their attention was brought by tender for “Equipment for Regional Centre for Transferring Modern Technologies in Mielec” issued by District Starosty. Announcement has been issued in Official Journal of the European Union – TED: 292946-2012. Estimated value of the tender is over 200 thousand €. Time limit for receipt of tenders is due on 22.10.2012. Documentation of this tender is available here: District Starosty in Mielec.

    • New OpenITGov partnership offers complete open source solution for the new public sector

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

10.19.12

Links 20/10/2012: Ubuntu Getting More Closed, OpenOffice.org Promoted in Apache

Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Achieving Photorealism in Blender

    (Unfortunately the video I recorded on the day was too dark and difficult to hear, so I figured there was no point in uploading it. Sorry about that!)

  • The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache OpenOffice™ as a Top-Level Project

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Open Office has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.

  • OSI and OSHWA agree on logo usage

    The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), which was officially launched in June, has signed an agreementPDF with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to settle a dispute over its Open Source Hardware (OSHW) logo. Following concerns that the logo OSHWA was using to denote the open hardware nature of devices was too similar to the OSI’s trademark, both organisations worked out an agreement that clarifies the difference between the logos and the areas they are applied in.

  • Open Call for Packagers!

    In the past, we’ve had people pull code right out of our master branch. There were a few problems with this technique for deployment; pulling out of the active branch of development meant that a podmin had no idea as to how stable the latest code for a pod could be. Secondly, we think that setting up a pod should be easier, as people shouldn’t have to mess around with a terminal and lots of config files to enjoy the benefits of a decentralized social web.

  • Open Source Vendor Zarafa Solves Apple’s iOS Problems

  • Events

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • 10gen: Growing the MongoDB world

      10gen, the company set up by the creators of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, has been on a roll recently, creating business partnerships with numerous companies, making it a hot commercial proposition without creating any apparent friction with its open source community. So what has brought MongoDB to the fore?

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Congrats Apache OpenOffice!

      Today the Apache Software Foundation announced that Apache OpenOffice ™ is a top level project, and I really wish to congratulate with the Apache OpenOffice Community to have achieved this important milestone.

    • LibreOffice 3.5.7 Released

      What’s a conference without a release announcement? The Document Foundation didn’t find out today because it announced the release of LibreOffice 3.5.7. 3.5.7 is “the seventh and possibly last version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family, which solves additional bugs and regressions, and offers stability improvements over LibreOffice 3.5.6.”

    • Mark Hurd: Oracle Accepts Cloud And Hadoop

      Oracle chief operating officer Mark Hurd says the company really is enthusiastic about open source, big Data and the cloud

    • Is Hadoop the Answer to Oracle Customers’ Big Data Problems?

      Oracle customers are facing a big data problem, and Hadoop is the answer – reluctant as Oracle is to admit it.

      Speaking at the Oracle product and strategy update in London yesterday, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that the company’s customers are growing their data up to 40% a year, putting tremendous pressure on IT budgets.

    • Apache Elevates Open Source OpenOffice – So What?

      There was a time when OpenOffice was where I spent a good chunk of my work day. Those days are now in the past, as I’ve moved on and so has every single major Linux distribution. We’ve all moved to a faster more agile open source office suite. We have moved to LibreOffice.

  • Education

    • Parents of non-traditional learners advocate for open education

      While Thomas Edison is often lauded as the most prolific American inventor, his mother, Nancy Edison, and how she fostered an open education and an open mind in her son is often overlooked. When a headmaster labelled Edison as being ‘addled,’ slow, and unteachable, his mother disagreed and decided to withdraw her son from school and teach him at home. She knew her son was a bright, curious, creative child who thought divergently yet was often disorganized, disruptive, and hyperactive; today he would most likely be diagnosed as having ADHD.

  • Healthcare

  • Business

    • Up to Date on Open Source Analytics

      I’ve been updating the computational analytics platform on my Wintel notebook the last few days. I’d fallen behind several versions on each of the main tools and decided to get them all back in synch at once. The good news for hackers like me is that there are so many freely-available, open source analytics products to choose from. The bad news is that it takes a focused effort to stay up to date on the latest largesse.

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • New Features Coming Up For The GCC 4.8 Compiler
    • Initial ARMv8 Support For 32-bit GCC Port

      Developers from ARM Holdings have published their initial ARMv8 patch for the GNU Compiler Collection for the 32-bit “AArch32″ compiler port.

      ARM developers had already been working on their 64-bit ARM / AArch64 compiler port, which was officially approved just days ago. The latest ARM open-source compiler patch is ARMv8 in the AArch32 port with basic functionality.

  • Project Releases

    • VLC Media Player 2.0.4 supports Opus decoding

      Version 2.0.4 of the VLC Media Player has been released by the VideoLAN project. While the minor version number change may not reflect it, the new release is described as a major update by its developers as it fixes numerous regressions and introduces support for the IETF’s Opus lossy audio compression format. It also brings several other improvements and platform-specific changes.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming

    • The Growth of Google Summer of Code

      I recently sat down with Chris DiBona to talk about the 15th anniversary of Slashdot. In addition to discussing the joys of heading an email campaign against spamming politicians, and the perils of throwing a co-worker’s phone into a bucket, even if you think that bucket is empty, we talked about the growth of Google Summer of Code. Below you’ll find his story of how a conversation about trying to get kids to be more active with computers in the summer has led to the release of 55 million lines of code.

    • Subversive brings Subversion to Eclipse

Leftovers

  • The Pioneers of UNIX

    Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn’t do jack. If you want to know who is responsible for the modern world you have to look at the people working at Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s. The people who created UNIX. It was from that invention that we have the modern world. UNIX led to Linux which led to Android. UNIX led to the BSD family of operating systems which led to Apple OSX. UNIX led to the C programming language in which most system-level software today is written. Ever wonder why URLs use forward slashes? It’s because UNIX was instrumental in the creation of the Internet.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Why I Left Goldman Sachs, Chapter Three: “My Alleged Competition”

      On Monday morning, Grand Central Publishing will release Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, a memoir penned by former Goldman employee Greg Smith, based on his op-ed for the New York Times entitled, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.” When Smith’s piece came out last March, few if any senior executives inside the bank were pleased, in part because it came as a total shock. No one at Goldman had known Smith was planning to have his resignation letter printed in the paper. No one had known he had issues with the firm’s supposedly new and singular focus on making money at all costs. No one, at least at the top, even knew who Greg was. Obviously all this left the bank at a competitive disadvantage in terms of fighting back and for the time being, Smith appeared to be handing Goldman its ass. Getting cocky, even. Perhaps thinking to himself, “When all of this is over, I could be named the new CEO of Goldman Sachs.” As anyone who has ever won a bronze medal in ping-pong at the Maccabiah Games will tell you, however, winners are determined by best of threes. And that anyone going to to the table with Goldman Sachs should be prepared for things to get ugly.

    • Big Oil and the U.S. Chamber Fight to Keep Foreign Bribery Flourishing

      In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.

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Windows Franchise Collapses, Microsoft Unable to Hide It

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 5:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hard winter for the monopolist

Snow on car

Summary: At Microsoft, revenue is down 33% for the client operating system and no encouraging change over the horizon

Some wonder where Microsoft is heading, but financial reality bites hard and the company is unable to keep hiding the losses as a 24% slump gets reported company-wide.

Prices are being raised, but inflation too leaves Windows devalued and unwanted:

Even if they counted the deferred revenue for filling the supply-chain with “8″ they would still be off 10% so they are doing worse than the unit shipments of PCs, expected because their share is falling. Retailers are really hoping they can sell “8″… There was no back-to-school bump. The whole operation was off 8%.

Apologists of course would scream, “but Windows 8!!” Well, no… it won’t do the trick. It gets negative reviews already and it’s not even out yet, so the
AstroTurf is clearly not working.

Now is the time for UEFI to kick in and for Microsoft boosters like Kurt Mackie to promote it. They need to discourage Android or GNU/Linux installs. Microsoft is lying about its tablets in a desperate attempt to get pre-orders, but buyers don’t want it; neither home users nor corporations. As Murdoch’s press put it:

Microsoft Corp. has made big changes to its familiar Windows operating system to stay relevant amid booming sales of mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad. But some corporate customers worry Microsoft has made its workplace workhorse too unfamiliar.

They basically end their inertia with application incompatibility and unfamiliar GUIs. It is easy to see why developers — not just users — drift away from Windows:

Being more like Apple isn’t always a good thing. That’s apparent in the growing developer resistance to the new “Windows Store” in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

Increasingly, developers and users move to Linux. Game makers bring Steam to GNU/Linux, Android has become the best selling operating system, and the list goes on. This week marks the huge public decline of Windows. █

Apple Loses in the UK, Must Publicly Admit It Lied

Posted in Apple, Europe, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Apple headphones

Summary: Apple does not find favourable rulings outside the United States and moreover it must apologise at its own expense for libel against Android devices

THE USPTO has been getting docile support from Obama and from the US Congress because the Establishment is there to defend the interests of plutocrats, pushing their competition out of the market, especially foreign competition. Here is fear of doing something which may upset those plutocrats:

Three out of four panelists at an Oct. 16 Congressional briefing agreed that the smartphone patent wars show that “the patent system is broken,” but none was optimistic that Congress can or will do anything to fix it.

For a Congress that entertained patent system constituencies’ battles for many years before passing the America Invents Act, there was little appetite, it seemed, for continuing the fight–especially considering the AIA has not even been fully implemented–on the highly controversial question of whether software patents should be banned.

So, despite sweeping public consent for an overhaul, nothing is being done, still. The problem is political in nature, in the sense that “institutional corruption,” as Professor Lessig calls it, prevents progress. Large corporations always get their way. In the courtroom, however, it’s not always so, especially for US corporations in other countries (that too is political). There are exceptions of course, even from hypocrites like Bezos who pushed for software patents in Europe and now wants change. To quote the original report about his latest realisation:

Government action could be needed to bring an end to a litany of patent lawsuits in the consumer technology market, such as those between Apple and Samsung, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has told Metro.

Another exception to the rule (US companies winning cases in the US) is Apple, but as more evidence comes to the surface we often find that politics, nationalism and trial misconduct cannot outweigh the truth. “UK Appellate Court Confirms Pan-European Win for Samsung on iPad Community Design Charges,” say the lawyers as Apple loses in the UK again [1, 2, 3]. Apple wants secrecy around its claims because these are so darn ridiculous. “In post-trial battles with Samsung, Apple fights to keep documents sealed,” says Ars Technica. Here is a noteworthy quote:

Apple has lost is appeal in a UK court against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. The court of appeals has upheld its previous judgment that Samsung did not infringe on any Apple design. The judge had said that ‘Samsung products were not as cool as Apple’.

The previous decision had come in July. Colin Birss (sitting as a Judge of the High Court, UK) had said that Galaxy Tab does not infringe upon the design of Apple’s iPad. The judge said that Galaxy Tab is not identical to the iPad even if there are some similarities but that doesn’t account to design infringement. The judge actually criticized Samsung’s design by stating that they “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.”

In other words, Android has more features. The MSBBC covered this as well. Apple will need to apologise to the public, to apologise to Samsung, and adding insult to injury, Apple will need to pay for it. It’s like a public walk of shame after military surrender. Jobs’ troops will hang their big heads in shame. █

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