04.02.10

IRC Proceedings: April 2nd, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 6:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Read the log

Enter the IRC channel now

To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.

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Links 2/4/2010: Ubuntu 10.10 is Maverick Meerkat

Posted in News Roundup at 2:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Clip of the Day

SourceCode Season 1: Episode 5 (2004)

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Patents Roundup: Microsoft Patents “Guardian Angel”, Subverts EIF; 20 Years Wasted on One Patent

Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: New indicators of a failed patent system, with Microsoft playing a role in this failure; April responds to Microsoft’s lobbying

‘Tis the season to abolish ridiculous patents, such as patents on human life [1, 2].

Microsoft is one of the major barriers that continue to plague the world with software patents (sometimes exploiting loopholes that allow them to be filed almost everywhere). It’s one of those things that make Microsoft a unique competitor and not “yet another” proprietary software company. According to this new post from the blog of Om Malik (whom Microsoft paid to secretly recite slogans):

….Microsoft has been granted a patent for a virtual assistant called “Guardian Angel.”

Based on the description in the patent (which was originally filed in 2006), Guardian Angel sounds like someone took the idea behind Bob and Clippy and turned the dial up to 11.

April, an advocacy group from France, writes to the European Commission about the EIF (European Interoperability Framework) which we wrote about earlier this week after repeated warnings from David Hammerstein that Microsoft had injected its patents agenda.

April publishes a letter to the European Commission supporting Commissioner Neelie Kroes’ approach in favor of open standards and interoperability in the digital agenda.

At the European level, open standards and interoperability are endangered and could disappear from European Union’s digital policy agenda. Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner in charge of Digital Strategy (and former European Commissioner for Competition), is currently drafting the agenda for Europe’s digital policy.

[...]

These pressures come within a context in which proprietary software lobbies, Microsoft at their head, are trying to revise downward the open standard definition. See especially “EIF 2.0: lettres ouvertes à la Commission européenne pour sauvegarder l’interopérabilité”.

In other patent news we have:

• After 20 years, local physicist gets patent for magnet [via]

Roy Weinstein had given up.

To heck with the patent office, the 82-year-old physicist decided. After waiting two decades for a patent on his potentially revolutionary superconducting magnets, he’d had enough.

“As you might imagine, waiting 20 years is a pretty nasty chore,” said Weinstein, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston.

• Don’t Protect Patent Lying [via “Patent Reform Bill Would Curtail Lawsuits Against Those Who Falsely Claim Patent Protection”]

Without the cloak of behind-the-scenes corporate influence, it becomes immediately apparent that there is no rational explanation for the Senators’ sudden rush to overturn a law that has been part of our country for over 150 years and whose only impact will be to help rid our marketplace of intentionally deceptive false statements.

Daniel Ravicher, who has been really active in these kinds of lawsuits — and, incidentally, was also a major player in the Myriad gene patent case — helping to get gene patents invalidated — has an article up trashing the patent reform bill for “protecting patent lying.”

• Rejoice: It’s No Longer Patent Infringement To Sell A Trading Card With Memorabilia

Justin Levine highlights the ridiculousness of the patent system today by noting that it took the court system eight years to determine that attaching memorabilia to a trading card shouldn’t be patentable (pdf)… and even then, a CAFC judge dissented, claiming that the patents could be valid. The patents in question, 5,803,501 and 6,142,532 are pretty straightforward. Basically, they’re about taking some piece of memorabilia and attaching it to a trading card (for example, attaching a piece of a jersey worn in a baseball game to a baseball card of the player).

We wrote about that last one in this post. █

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Red Hat/Fedora Deliver GNOME Without the Mono

Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Red Hat at 1:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: GNOME 2.30 is out and Fedora leaves Tomboy out of the loop

F

edora rejects Mono and Moonlight, so with the new release of GNOME the following observations surface, thanks to an exchange of information with Stormy Peters:

Not all Linux distributions that use GNOME choose to include the application, however. Fedora Linux, for example, has moved to the gNote application as a substitute for Tomboy. Tomboy relies on the Novell-led Mono effort, which provides .NET functionality on Linux, but which has raised eyebrows of some in the Linux community due to its connection to Microsoft technology and intellectual property.

“The Tomboy and gNote projects are different teams,” Peters said. “Tomboy is also working on Tomboy Online, which will be a Web service capable of hosting your notes so you can access them from multiple locations.”

Opponents of Gnote (mostly Mono bullies and Novell employees) have been spreading the rumour that Gnote is dead, but it's doing just fine. It works a lot better than Tomboy and Fedora has been using it for almost a year. █

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Federal Appeals Court Deals Blow to OOXML as This Proprietary Microsoft Format Becomes Increasingly Irrelevant

Posted in Courtroom, Deception, Formats, ISO, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 1:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“ISO is dead for software standards. Do you need an official funeral?”

–Benjamin Henrion, FFII

Summary: This past week of Document Freedom brings even more abysmal news for Microsoft’s corruption-riddled response to ODF (OpenDocument Format)

LAST NIGHT we wrote about attempts being made by Alex Brown to pass the blame to Microsoft, having actually helped Microsoft be where they are. What a fox. Does he really believe that people will forget what he did to promote OOXML while serving as a supposedly-independent participant [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]? Tim Anderson, a longtime Microsoft booster, has mentioned Brown’s mea culpa and so did Andy Updegrove, who apparently foresees failure for OOXML.

In reviewing my RSS feed this morning, I found this interesting blog entry by Alex Brown, titled Microsoft Fails the Standards Test. In it, Alex makes a number of statements, and reaches a number of conclusions, that are likely to startle those that followed the ODF-OOXML saga. The bottom line? Alex thinks that Microsoft has failed to fulfill crucial promises upon which the approval of OOXML was based. He concludes that unless Microsoft reverses course promptly, “the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.”

Wow.

Andy Oram points out in the comments: “The OOXML battle is no joke; it had serious repercussions throughout the public setting. Microsoft launched its OOXML campaign in the mid-2000s at a time when several countries and US states (notably the state Andrew and I live in, Massachusetts) made real efforts to move to ODF for the public good. The fake standardization of OOXML helped Microsoft’s propaganda campaign to keep MS Office in government use, although I’m sure it wasn’t the critical factor. The movement failed and history has moved on. Microsoft avoided the loss of customers and the PR boost open source could have achieved had ODF gotten into government agencies. Now the question is whether desktop office tools will be replaced by Software as a Service, so there’s little point in refighting the old battle. But open formats are more important than ever, and the new power of the movement for transparent government can correct the historical grievance.”

“The fake standardization of OOXML helped Microsoft’s propaganda campaign to keep MS Office in government use, although I’m sure it wasn’t the critical factor.”
      –Andy Oram, O’ReillyAs we pointed out before, fragmentation issues already plague OOXML (there have always been too many Microsoft implementations, none of which complied with the specifications). These are further exacerbated by the i4i case [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12], which revealed that Microsoft had hidden software patents affecting OOXML.

Some sources have spoken about a potential appeal in the i4i case (or a settlement), but OOXML seems to be dead in the water at least as a ‘standard’ because the i4i ruling is final, based on Reuters.

A federal appeals court denied on Thursday Microsoft Corp’s request that a full panel of judges rehear arguments in its long-running patent dispute with a small Canadian technology company.

One of the more troubling patent rulings in the past year involved a Canadian company, i4i, that held a patent (5,787,449) that appears to broadly (very broadly) cover editing a custom XML document, separate from the presentation layer of a document.

The 5^th anniversary of ODF is less than a month away. From Rob Weir’s Web log:

We’ll be hitting a significant date next month. It was on May 1st, 2005 that Open Document Format (ODF) 1.0 was approved by OASIS.

I hope we can all take time to reflect on far we’ve gone, with the specification itself, with the quality and diversity of implementations and with world-wide adoption.

A lot of coverage about “Document Freedom” has appeared over the past week (included in our daily links), which is evidence of continued momentum for a real standard that everyone can use and many vendors have already implemented. According to this new gem from Glyn Moody, Tim Berners-Lee refuses to accept Microsoft Office files.

We all knew that Sir Tim was a total star, choosing to give away the Web rather than try to make oodles of billions from it. Some of us even knew that he contemplated using the GNU GPL for its licence, before being persuaded that placing it in the public domain would help it spread faster.

Tim Berners-Lee is also against software patents. █

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Microsoft Hijacks Ed Roberts’ Death, Not Just His Career

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Photo by Spencer Smith, 2002

“He [Bill Gates] acted like a spoiled kid, which is what he was.”

–Ed Roberts, Gates’ employer at MITS in the 1970′s (Atlanta Journal-Costitution, 04-27-97)

Summary: Thanks to publications that are in Microsoft’s pocket, Microsoft uses yesterday’s death of Ed Roberts to boost its own image

THE TRAGIC DEATH of an historical pioneer has just been hijacked by Microsoft and Microsoft boosters who pretend to be journalists. What really irritates about this is that they dance on the grave of the very same man whom they virtually ‘robbed’. As a reminder of the history of Microsoft, in 1975 “Bill Gates and Paul Allen “borrowed” computer time to produce a rip-off of the BASIC computer language (see 1964) for the MITS Altair. The product was announced and advertisements placed before work began to keep others from entering the market. It was expensive, released late, incomplete and riddled with bugs. When copies were passed around by users trying to come up with bug fixes (and who were reluctant to spend a lot of money for something that didn’t work), Bill Gates accused them all of “Software Piracy”. Thus we find the tone of Microsoft’s ethics, business practices, product quality, and attitude toward users (they’re all thieves) already fully formed in the first weeks of the company’s existence.“

What did the BBC publish upon the death of Microsoft’s roadkill/victim? Here:

Microsoft founders lead tributes to ‘father of the PC’

The “father of the personal computer” who kick-started the careers of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen has died at the age of 68.

An anonymous reader who logged it to our IRC channel an hour ago (his nickname was “MSBBC”) wrote: “How MS hijacks even Altair founder’s death, and MSBBC reports on it” (for those who know nothing about Microsoft and the BBC, we are adding links below). █

On Microsoft and the BBC

• The BBC, Gates and revisionism
• Bill Gates and the importance of source code
• Beeb slammed for ‘fawning’ to Bill Gates
• Microsoft and the BBC: A letter of Complaint
• BBC Corrupted
• The Gates Transition
• Bill Gates and His Press Rewrite History Amid Semi-retirement
• Novell as Microsoft’s Orwellian Revisionist
• Does Microsoft Start Abusing the Word “Free”?
• Microsoft Proud of Digital Colonialism in Africa
• BBC: Bill Gates a “Famous Thief”?
• Microsoft and the MSBBC Say Sub-notebooks Are Dying So It Must be True
• The BBC’s Anti-Internet Pro-Microsoft Revisionist Propaganda

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Cory Doctorow Explains Why Apple’s iPad is Bad and SJVN Shows That Mac OS X is Not Secure

Posted in Apple, DRM, GNU/Linux, Google, Security at 12:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Apple’s shoddy-but-highly-expensive products come under fire for artificial limitations and security problems

WE have already written quite extensively about why the iPad is technically inapt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] (never mind the inapt company which makes it — a clearly misguided company that is suing Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] with Microsoft’s support [1, 2] because it has fallen behind GNU/Linux).

Here is Cory Doctorow’s new explanation of why he won’t buy an iPad (and thinks you shouldn’t, either).

Danny O’Brien does a very good job of explaining why I’m completely uninterested in buying an iPad — it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution” in which “content” people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I’d have a lot of AOL shares.

And they wouldn’t be worth much.

Coincidentally, SJVN (occasional OS X user) shows:

The latest Mac OS X upgrade is both enormous, 784MB and necessary. It fixes no fewer than 88 security holes.

“I have found that Macs are less secure than their current Windows and Linux counterparts,” said Dai Zovi, the co-author of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook. OS X is probably the most closed operating system that exists for the desktop and the iPad is no better in that regard. █

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Windows Wimpy (22.22)

Posted in GNU/Linux, Humour, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Update: just to clarify (this might be elusive), the image shows Ubuntu influencing Microsoft rather than the other way around.

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