07.10.12
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 5:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Apple aspires to be the next Microsoft (in the bad sense)
Summary: The apples are rotting after largely failed attempts by Apple to embargo the competition
WE OUGHTN’T lose sight of Apple’s attacks on Linux, however indirect or subtle they may be. Some reports say that even Apple followers are fed up with it. To quote: “A new movement has started on the social “networking sites it’s called BoycottApple. We noticed that even the hardcore Apple users have come out in protest of what Apple is doing against its competitors.”
“A new movement has started on the social “networking sites it’s called BoycottApple. We noticed that even the hardcore Apple users have come out in protest of what Apple is doing against its competitors.”
–MuktwareSJVN, who is not usually against Apple (his wife uses a Mac), writes about the Koh decision, calling Apple’s patent lawsuits “lousy”. He wrote: “U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, has granted Apple’s request to halt the sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which runs Google’s Android operating system. The Galaxy Tab’s crime? It looks writes a tablet.
“No. I’m not making that up. Judge Koh claims that “Samsung appears to have created a design that is likely to deceive an ordinary observer.” True, from a distance of ten feet, it’s not easy to tell them apart. It’s not easy to tell any tablet apart from any other tablet at that range. Most people I know prefer to use tablets at arm’s reach, but that’s just me.
“Apple’s legal case rests on a single design patent, USD504889. In it, Apple claims “the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described.” You can see Apple’s patented design for yourself in this story. Looks pretty much like a tablet doesn’t it? Do you see anything about it what-so-ever that looks unique?”
The Nexus ban is temporarily lifted, so Apple’s strategy is hardly working at all. It’s just alienating journalists and/or clients. Oracle’s (or Ellison’s) attacks on Android failed to impress the now-dead Steve Jobs, who is Ellison’s best friend. Oracle lost all cases and Google is now demanding millions from Oracle. To quote Pamela Jones, “Google has filed its Bill of Costs [PDF] in the Oracle v. Google case — $4,030,669 is the whopping total it would like Oracle to have to pay.” This is also covered here.
Apple also failed in the UK, where “Colin Birss (sitting as a Judge of the High Court, UK) 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.””
“The company is being sued by patent trolls for the most part; contrariwise, Apple sues non-troll (i.e. producing) companies.”Apple continues to collect multitouch patents in vain. In fact, Apple itself is being sued for patent violations such as this. Back in June Apple got sued for other alleged violations, but do not cry for Apple. The company is being sued by patent trolls for the most part; contrariwise, Apple sues non-troll (i.e. producing) companies. As one writer put it, “When patents protect Apple, are they okay?”
Of course not.
Apple cannot sue troll, so when it sues it will usually be an aggressive display of power. The WSJ published an article titled “‘Silly’ Apple and Google”. To quote: “There were great expectations when technology giants Apple and Google squared off in court, each accusing the other of violating its patents in competing mobile phones. No one expected this case would end in a whimper, with one of the country’s most influential judges dismissing the claims as “silly.””
Yes, Apple is a silly company capitalising on some “silly” people who overpay for products that Apple merely brands. Android sites are growing angry at Apple, with headlines like “Judge Who Threw Out Motorola V. Apple Thinks We Don’t Even Need Software Patents”. To quote: “One of the best things about this ongoing patent war between every mobile phone company in the business, is that it’s finally starting to attract attention to how crazy it is all getting. Judge Richard Posner recently threw a case out of his court that involved Motorola and Apple and did so with a little bit of a flair. Luckily for us, Posner is one of the most respected Judges in the States right now, and he has started to put his mind behind this whole patent system.
“Posner recently sat down for an interview after being thrust into the spotlight after his decision on Moto v. Apple. Posner has been seen by many in his field as a visionary rather than following the rules as they state. This outlook is what causes him to think critically about cases and come up with thoughts like “most industries don’t need patents.” Posner said that in the smartphone industry, patents are “a problem. You just have this proliferation of patents.””
Similiar article with slant against software patents appeared in major news sites [1, 2, 3] and Motorola receives some good publicity. Here is a summary of “The Mobile Tech Patent War: A History Of Nokia vs. Apple vs. Android vs. Microsoft”
“The monopolist continues to amass patents, but it’s not just about Microsoft anymore. We must also track Apple.”To quote the part about Microsoft: “Microsoft Corp filed an International Trade Commission complaint against Motorola in October 2010 for infringing nine patents. Motorola responded the next month with its own ITC complaint against Microsoft for infringing 16 patents.
“In May, the U.S. trade panel ordered an import ban on 18 infringing Motorola devices, which has not yet taken effect.”
In May we saw Microsoft’s aggression paying off, leading to blockades like Apple’s. This went to trial and the ITC collaborated with Microsoft. In order to drive away Microsoft with its embargo-happy aggression Motorola did offer to settle, but Microsoft did not take it. Some corruptible members of congress took the side of the abusive aggressive monopolist in front of the ITC, showing just how deep Microsoft’s influence in the US government is running. It was about the fires-causing gaming box that the Microsoft-funded Obama infamously likes to name a lot (free advertising). The monopolist continues to amass patents, but it’s not just about Microsoft anymore. We must also track Apple. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 4:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“There won’t be anything we won’t say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go.”
–Bill Gates (Microsoft’s CEO at the time)
Summary: Gates is abducting a future generation of adults through the education system
THE Gates Foundation is better understood by more people now that more and more of the media (alternative for the most part, not corporate) is less afraid to criticise. The facts speak for themselves, even in Gates-funded avenues like Education Week. It’s not so simply to buy one’s silence.
Diane Ravitch has been exposing Bill Gates for quite a few years and Valerie Strauss gave her a platform at the Washington Post after the Melinda Gates scandal (which left the Gates family with less influence over the publication). To quote parts of the article: “When one foundation has amassed over $30 billion, it has the financial power to shape the policies of government to its liking.”
“Educator Anthony Cody published a guest column on his Education Week Teacher blog that describes how the Gates Foundation intervenes in agricultural and environmental issues around the world, often in ways that support corporate profits rather than the public interest. (Education Week is in part funded by the Gates Foundation.)
“I have never believed that the Gates Foundation or the Gates family puts profits above the public interest. I work on the assumption that anyone who has more riches than they can ever spend in their lifetime or in 100 lifetimes is not motivated by greed. It makes no sense.
“I believe that Bill and Melinda Gates want to establish a legacy as people who left the world a better place.
“But I think their their efforts to “reform” education are woefully mistaken.
“I have tried but had no luck in my efforts to meet Bill Gates. On the two occasions when I was in Seattle in the past year, I tried to arrange a meeting with him well in advance. He was never available.
“I am puzzled by what I read in the column cited abovee. I am also puzzled by the Gates Foundation’s persistent funding of groups that want to privatize public education. I am puzzled by their funding of “astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.”
It is gratifying to see those who speak about this issue in the public arena. In the remainder of this month we’ll focus on catching up with software patents news and then we will catch up with Gates Foundation news. A lot of it can be repetitive because once a person grasps the key strategies, these are seen and understood easily. Critical skills are needed when the press is PR and thus not critical at all; it is deceitful and repetitive for its real clients (the readers/viewers are the products, not the clients). █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 4:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The FUD war of Microsoft against Linux is reaching new lows, bordering laws, and Microsoft quickly backtracks
THE FUD from Microsoft was noticed not just by us. Microsoft staff is trying to accuse Android of sending out SPAM, but there is soon a retreat. As the WSJ put it, “Internet security researchers said Thursday they may have been mistaken about claims that mobile devices powered by Google Inc.’s Android operating system were hacked and used to send spam emails.
“The researchers from security company Sophos Ltd. and Google rival Microsoft Corp. each had written blog posts in recent days identifying what they said were incidents of Android devices being used to generate spam emails from Yahoo Mail’s app. A “spammer has control of a botnet that lives on Android devices,” Microsoft engineer Terry Zink wrote in a blog post Tuesday. A botnet is a cluster of computers taken over by hackers.”
So much for ‘researchers’. At Microsoft, “secure” means does not work with Linux — a claim that the FSF has been challenging and others played along with. As Christine Hall put it: “The FOSS community is understandably upset with both Red Hat and Ubuntu for their planned ways of implementing UEFI Secure Boot. Indeed, both companies plans are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. Free software isn’t free if it requires permission from an outside source before it can be loaded onto a new or used computer. This is true even if the permission comes from a well-meaning bureaucratic regulatory agency. It’s doubly true if that permission must come from a self-serving monopoly with an anti-FOSS history, like Microsoft.”
“Microsoft’s folks usually pretend that Microsoft used to truly create valuable stuff rather than a lot of dirty tricks.”Microsoft has turned to dirty tricks and FUD, just as it always does. It tried to daemonise those who complained about UEFI; one of Microsoft’s mouthpieces labelled them “fanatics”. Microsoft’s folks usually pretend that Microsoft used to truly create valuable stuff rather than a lot of dirty tricks.
Pogson notes that EU cyber security agency ENISA” now suggests that we “Assume all [Windows] PCs infected”. He adds: “If the banks cannot trust that other OS, why should users? I recommend Debian GNU/Linux, an operating system that works for you rather than for criminals.”
Debian supports the FSF's position on UEFI, whereas Canonical is aiding criminals at Microsoft, so that’s another way/context in which to phrase the above remark.
A former Microsoft executive has just spoken out against Microsoft. As one report put it, “Microsoft has fallen behind the times in several key industries; the company’s mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share, and Microsoft won’t launch Windows RT, its response to Apple’s three-year-old iPad, until later this year. In a recent piece titled “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” Vanity Fair contributor Kurt Eichenwald analyzes the company’s “astonishingly foolish management decisions” and picks apart moves made during the Steve Ballmer era.”
“So why does Microsoft bother trying to FUD Linux or Android on grounds of “security”?”The company is already publicly reporting losses and security is not improving. We gave examples of serious security flaws in Vista 7 and the new article “How Hackers Attack” shows that it’s continuing to affect large institutions. To quote: “The firm’s computers run on the Windows 7 operating system and the company uses an internal firewall to connect to the Internet, Mr. Keilson says.”
“”We see far more infections on Windows than we do Macs, Unix and Linux,” says Wade Baker, author of the Verizon 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, a study based on cybercrime investigations conducted by Verizon’s team, which is comprised of data-breach reports from Verizon and various law-enforcement groups around the globe, including the U.S. Secret Service and the Australian Federal Police.”
So why does Microsoft bother trying to FUD Linux or Android on grounds of “security”? Maybe it’s just a sign of desperation. But using libellous remarks is no noble way. It’s also a path to legal entanglements. █
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Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 3:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The true weaknesses of a longtime abusive monopolist are shining bright and the sea of change in form factors leads to “desperate” acts
THE word about Microsoft’s financial woes is getting out there, with more reports about “[a]n ugly first week for Microsoft Corp’s new financial year” because it “has done little to inspire confidence that the software giant can jumpstart a stubbornly stagnant share price.”
“Microsoft is said to have hidden its losses using accounting tricks (hiding losses is made possible by borrowings too).”“It was not the news agenda Microsoft had in mind as it prepared to unveil fourth-quarter results on July 19. The writeoff is expected to hand the company its first quarterly loss – on paper – since going public in 1986.”
As noted recently, this is not true. Microsoft is said to have hidden its losses using accounting tricks (hiding losses is made possible by borrowings too).
Meanwhile, notes Cringely, the personal computer is changing. “Microsoft knows this on some level,” he stresses. “Their reptilian corporate brain is beginning to comprehend what could be the end. That’s why the company is becoming increasingly desperate for ways to maintain its central role in our digital lives. We see the first bet-the-company aspects of that in Redmond’s recent decision to run the Windows 8 kernel all the way down to ARM-powered phones and tablets even though it requires shedding features to do so.”
This is not working so far. Even UEFI is a case of too little, too late, not to mention that it is anti-competitive. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, Microsoft at 1:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft and its unofficial offshoots continue to grow the proprietary software industry whose goal is to grow fear of FOSS
TECHRIGHTS has been tracking the moves of Microsoft-linked companies which are creating an industry of fear of FOSS. One of those companies recently “reported a 730 percent increase in the number of open-source scans in the past year, another indication of the growing use of open source in the enterprise” (source). The problem is, based on this press release, OpenLogic continues to focus on increasing paranoia and distrust, turning those into profit.
Black Duck does the same thing and it too was created by a man from Microsoft, only to deliver proprietary software and monetise fear while pretending to be an “open source” company. The openwashing of Microsoft goes along the same lines in the press. When people say that Microsoft develops for Linux, for example, they neglect to say that it’s all about proprietary, namely Hyper-V. The word “open” is widely misused. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A quick update about the unitary patent and a pointer to feedback pigeon holes
THE European Union has been under a threat of software patents in recent months and we intend to cover what we missed at the time. The latest news is that the Parliament “avoids disaster” because “[o]n Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th July 2012, the European parliament was due to debate and vote on the unitary patent. However, MEPs rebelled against the European Council’s desire to substantially change the text at the last minute: they were being asked, in essence, to be a simple rubber-stamping assembly. On Monday, 2nd July 2012, they unanimously postponed the vote and sent the text back for reconsideration by the committees.”
Glyn Moody calls for help in stopping this loophole that can enable software patenting in Europe. He analyses the text and notes that “[d]ropping those [aforementioned] clauses would mean removing patent matters from the European Court of Justice. That is important, because a court outside the jurisdiction of the EU would be free to broaden the range of patentability – including software patents, for example. The ECJ, by contrast, has shown itself inclined to defend European citizens from disproportionate action by companies (from example by forbidding ISPs from being forced to spy on their customers at the behest of media companies), and is more likely to police the ban on software patents in Europe more strictly.”
Moody provides advice and communication routes to those who are eager to take action by informing their representatives. They are:
arlene.mccarthy@europarl.europa.eu
gerard.batten@europarl.europa.eu
sharon.bowles@europarl.europa.eu
mary.honeyball@europarl.europa.eu
sajjad.karim@europarl.europa.eu
rebecca.taylor@europarl.europa.eu
The unitary patent protest site writes more on this subject, which we are going to revisit this month by going backwards in time, collecting key news that led to this present fiasco.
The situation is mildly reminiscent or related to the lobby for RAND in European standards, which constitutes another loophole for those who try to legitimise software patents in Europe, notably Microsoft. The public needed to speak out to enlighten politicians. One Debian/SkoleLinux developer noted that “[h]ere in Norway, the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs is behind a directory of standards that are recommended or mandatory for use by the government. When the directory was created, the people behind it made an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions to the government. Free software and non-free software could compete on the same level.” This goes on to discussing RAND.
The president of the FFII notes that “Nokia’s head of litigation Richard Vary” is getting involved in the unitary patent debate. To quote some British patent lawyers: “That unified patent court: the case against bifurcation. If you have been thinking that everything has gone quiet and that no-one cares about the proposed unified patent litigation system and the bifurcation of dispute resolution — hearing infringement issues in one court and validity in another — think again. Here’s a paper by Nokia’s head of litigation Richard Vary which seeks to demonstrate that bifurcation is not just bad for the Brits, it’s bad for all European industry. This paper, delivered last week to the UK’s Intellectual Property Office, can be read here.” Nokia is a subject we’ll deal with in a separate post this week. Microsoft is now shaking up KDE through Qt’s ties to Nokia. Very vicious. In several other ways Microsoft has used Nokia to cause harm to Linux. When it comes to software patents in Europe, Nokia has been among the worst. █
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Posted in Site News at 1:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Recent and coming changes in this site
IN recent days we’ve added some pages to the Techrights Wiki, based on topics that recur quire a lot and do not have their own reference page/category.
Pages include Nortel, CPTN, ITC, Hyper-V, USPTO, and Canonical (because of the UEFi move, which showed us the company’s decreasing commitment to freedom).
We have a lot planned for the coming month. The summer months are quieter in my daytime jobs. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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CERN has “played a major role in bringing together scientific technologies and know-how regarding Linux in their Scientific Linux project, which acts as a clone and extension of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” noted Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “This goes *way* beyond the normal high performance computing usage of Linux. CERN is in the forefront of bringing Linux to the scientific community.”
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FixMeStick is a USB flash drive with a rudimentary version of Linux and a set of malware-removal tools. Insert it into a Windows-based PC infected with viruses or spyware and you’re able to boot from the basic OS on the drive. It will then scan your PC and attempt to remove the malicious code so your PC is functional again.
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I read an article on ZDNET. You can read it for yourself here. The Author was raising the point about companies who release Linux based services but fail to even mention Linux or their services’ heritage and what provides the actual base for their service. The Author points the finger specifically at Google’s Android and Canonical’s Ubuntu. I just want to extend on the Authors’ thoughts a little more.
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Desktop
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Google has announced the launch of new Chromebook laptops and a new Chromebox desktop running version 19 of Chrome OS, a major software update to the minimalist Linux-based operating system built around the Chrome web browser. Chrome OS, the proprietary version of the open source Chromium OS, is designed primarily for accessing the web and cloud applications such as the company’s Google Apps web-based productivity suite. According to Google, the new devices and version of the OS represent “the next step”.
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In fact, the company is so proud of their product they sell it at a premium price. That is justifiable because of the huge touch-screen, the freedom from worry about software updated and viruses and the great ease of use. It’s still a small computer, though, an all-in-one. No big box at all, and with fewer cables.
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Server
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Isnt’t that a laugh? M$’s charges more money in relation to how much of your own IT you can use? Do we have parking meters in our garages? Do we have coin-slots on our refrigerators? Do we pay to use our tools? Those are silly concepts. So is that other OS in IT.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Dan Risacher, a self-styled “policy wonk” in the directorate for enterprise services and integration under the office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer and open source advocate, spoke May 24 before Mil-OSS LANT, a military open source adoption conference.
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Kernel Space
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With the help of uprobes, performance monitoring tools can now monitor userspace software. The ongoing overhaul of the ARM code is showing tangible success.
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Several Phoronix readers have written in that Eugeni Dodonov, a former Mandriva developer who since last year has been working for the Intel Open-Source Technology Center on their Linux graphics driver, lost his life this weekend.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Amarok Development Team is looking for beta testers ahead of the release of version 2.6 of the open source Amarok music player.
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Starting with version 2.6, digiKam features the Tools → Maintenance menu which gives you access to tools designed to perform a variety of housekeeping tasks: from scanning for new photos to running a face recognition action. Here is a brief overview of the available tools.
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GNOME Desktop
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Elena Petrevska is a fresh member of GWOP* and GnomeWeb Team from Macedonia. Recently Gnome decided to give a new look to all pages and Elena is a part of the team responsible for these changes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I have heard a lot of good things of PCLinuxOS and yesterday, finally I decided to try it out. I downloaded the stable version 2012.2 (KDE) from the PCLinux FTP. The ISO is about 690 MB and I booted it up in my VirtualBox. The initial liveCD boot was easy, it asked a couple of questions on my keyboard and location and finally landed on the desktop.
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As Mandriva SA plans its future roadmap, the company will be taking a unique and bold step with its commercial offerings: using and participating in two separate upstreams for its product lines.
According to CEO Jean-Manual Croset and Director of Community Charles Schulz, the Mandriva server products will be based on the Mageia distribution of Linux, while desktop and OEM products will be based on the historical Mandriva Linux distro.
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The heads of Mandriva SA have decided to base upcoming server versions of Mandriva on Mageia, the community run Mandriva fork
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Gentoo Family
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Every year members of the Gentoo project hold their annual Gentoo screenshot contest, and it’s that time of year again right now. And just as the name implies, it is indeed a contest for the prettiest, coolest, or whatever-vague-criteria-is-used-but-isn’t-published-anywhere Gentoo desktop setup. All you need is a Gentoo install and an Internet connection to win.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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ARM employee Catalin Marinas has released a set of 36 patches that will extend the Linux kernel to provide support for ARM’s AArch64 64-bit architecture. This 64-bit ARM support will be provided by the ARMv8 instruction set, which was announced in the autumn of 2011 and is expected to be first used in processors in 2014.
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I feel a certain kinship with newer Linux converts. Switching to Linux on the desktop is definitely a unique experience that many of us tend to forget. For instance, the need to stop and think about where a tool’s located can be challenging for newbies.
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THE INQUIRER sat down with Eben Upton, executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation this week to hear about why he became involved with the project and how the development of a cased model of the small, inexpensive computer for schools is coming along.
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Phones
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STOCKHOLM—Finnish start-up Jolla Ltd. is in talks with various hardware makers and hopes to unveil within the next six months a smartphone that runs Nokia Corp.’s largely-abandoned MeeGo operating system, the company’s chief executive said Monday.
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Nokia’s MoeeGo team has left the company and created a start-up called Jolla Ltd to build on top of MeeGo. Nokia has been severely criticized for ditching all of its open source projects and turned the company into a Microsoft’s Pizza delivery boy. Instead of going with Android or company’s own MeeGo, ex-Microsoft execute Stephen Elop adopted Microsoft’s failed Windows platform. MeeGo based N9 was a massive success, but Elop declared that even if N9 succeeds they will not divert from their Microsoft plan. N9′s success proved that MeeGo holds great potential.
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When it lost support from both Intel and Nokia, the MeeGo mobile platform appeared to be dead in the water. But it seems the OS still has a few faithful friends. JollaMobile, a company made up of former Nokia employees, aims to create a smartphone that will propel MeeGo back into the market. Whether it will find a warm welcome there remains to be seen.
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Android
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HP will reportedly hand over a portion of the team behind its Enyo HTML5-based webOS framework to Google.
As reported by The Verge, several Enyo team members – including leader Matt McNulty and many of those behind the software’s code – will leave the troubled HP and join the search giant.
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Sony Mobile has just rolled out the open source code for the Xperia S Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich firmware version number 6.1.A.0.452. This particular version will carry all the relevant files required if you are a budding third-party developer who intends to construct a kernel that hopefully, will be worthy of making its way to the public as your very own ROM for the Xperia S.
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Your procurement rules have gradually built up as you’ve played the procurement game with your suppliers. At its rawest, the vendors’ game is a chase to obtain as large a share of your IT budget as possible, preferably locked-in so that it becomes recurring revenue, while exposing themselves to the least cost and risk possible. Your suppliers’ tools of choice are proprietary software, proprietary data formats, and as much complexity as can be slathered into the solution.
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The announcement by NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext, that it is expanding the terms of its partnership with the Warsaw Stock Exchange, illustrates how the exchange company expects to significantly increase revenue by commercializing its own technology.
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The open source Puppet configuration management system is widely used to get software onto servers. Now the developers behind Puppet are going a step further, taking aim at bare metal provisioning in an open source effort with EMC called Razor.
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The term ‘open source’ comes from computer programming. It refers to a computer program that isn’t owned by any company and is freely available to the general public. Microsoft Word, by contrast, is ‘closed source’ — the Microsoft Corporation owns the code for its software and will never make it available or give it away for free.
A little-known program called Open Office is a freely available alternative to Microsoft Office with many of the same features. A loose group of programmers around the world created Open Office and constantly tinkers with it to make it better. They do this for free with no benefit besides the pleasure of providing a useful service for anonymous users.
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There has been a long standing belief (or perhaps more accurately, fear), that developers who chose to release the source code for their software under a free and open license can’t turn their project into a viable source of income.
It’s not hard to see how this negative connotation has developed. Those who may not be well versed in the various free and open licenses may believe that they are literally prohibited from charging for their software. Others may fall victim to the failed logic that, if the source is freely available, people won’t pay for the convenience of a binary build.
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On August 1st, Berlin-based filmmaker Sam Muirhead is abandoning all copyrighted products and switching to Open Source software, hardware, and services for one year, as the subject of his own series of online documentary videos.
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Network security companies looking for an open-source-based intrusion detection and prevention engine have a next-generation tool that can be incorporated into their existing or new offerings: Check out the latest beta of the Open Information Security Foundation’s (OISF) Suricata Engine.
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Collide, which lets multiple programmers tap into a software development project, is open-source software now that Google has cast it off. One project member hopes it’ll inspire related projects.
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Electronic business has many levels. No surprise then that e-business (or e-commerce if you prefer) is served by e-accounting, which itself comprises of e-payments and (before that) e-invoicing… and every other level of e-accounting if you have the stomach for an endless stream of new-age e- prefixes.
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The discovery of the Higgs boson is of course a monumental achievement. But also noteworthy is how the physics community has evolved to get things done – and what this trajectory suggests for other scientific fields and fast-changing industries.
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Google has been developing a Web-based editor for computer code–what’s known as an integrated development environment, or IDE–for several years now. Mark S. Miller, an engineer for the company, revealed the existence of the project, known as Brightly, in a post to a mailing list in November 2010 about Google’s Dart programming language.
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Events
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Mozilla
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With the recent news that Mozilla will no longer be innovating with new versions of Thunderbird, many Ubuntu users might be left wondering what this will mean for their favorite distribution’s default suite of software. In fact, it seems like Canonical has had it’s hands full over the last two years trying to find a winning combination. Canonical has thrown it’s hands up in the air before and changed default software on a whim, most famously switching from enterprise friendly Evolution to user-friendly and mainstream Thunderbird. Also, it chose to abandon the stellar Banshee player in favor of the more homely and less feature-rich Rhythmbox.
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Mozilla’s current success is born out of a decision made over a decade ago to split up the Mozilla Browser Suite. The original Mozilla Browser (now continued in SeaMonkey) has both email and browser which was split out into separate projects: Thunderbird and Firefox.
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SaaS
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NASA was one of the primary driving forces behind OpenStack, an effort to provide an open source alternative to Amazon’s popular cloud services. But as OpenStack takes off in other places, the space agency is turning away from the open source platform — and into the arms of Amazon.
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Open source software is driving innovation in cloud computing, mobile apps and big data, CloudPro reports.
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Databases
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Increasingly the third standard within enterprises for databases, MongoDB, has been claiming a lot of victories lately. In relative terms, it has become the second-hottest skill to have on one’s resume, right after HTML5, according to Indeed.com job trend data. And despite plenty of hating on its technology, with one person telling me recently that “it sets database technology back 25 years,” MongoDB continues to get deployed for numerous, large mission-critical applications.
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Just a few short years ago, MySQL was the undisputed king of the open-source database hill. But with the NoSQL market emerging at an 82 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it’s looking like MySQL may get bulldozed by its NoSQL peers.
While this shift toward NoSQL provides an interesting commentary on where the industry is heading, it’s even more instructive about the frenetic pace of innovation that open source is driving.
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CMS
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Joomla!, one of the world’s most popular open-source content management system, has recently launched a website for Joomla! World Conference.
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Education
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Meanwhile, the responsibility of the government is to provide “source code”, the basis for teaching that can be tweaked and changed.
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Earlier this year, Department for Education secretary Michael Gove said that the lessons would be altered to include “an open source curriculum” and “rigorous computer science courses.”
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Business
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We all know that PEPPOL focuses on e-procurement, but it is no secret that pan-European adoption of e-invoicing is also high on the project’s agenda. The technological PEPPOL developments have taken another step towards this goal. And this all thanks to Norwegian SendRegning.
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Under development for the past 19 months, Zurmo is the brainchild of McKay, cofounder Ray Stoeckicht, and Jason Green, cofounder and lead architect, who are all part of the leadership team at Intelestream, an open source enterprise applications developer and professional services firm.
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Company hopes gamification principles in its CRM application, now in beta, will make it stand out and better engage users
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Sirius is launching an Open Source Open Day programme to educate Government, Public Sector and business organisations on how to get the most benefit from using Open Source software within their technology infrastructure.
With the UK in double-dip recession, no let-up in the Government drive for austerity, and the old-fashioned idea of economic growth making a comeback, Western economies have much to learn from the BRICS in utilising Open Source to combine public austerity with private growth. Extensive usage of Open Source is a signature of those economies which are thriving despite the global downturn and contrast markedly with the malaise throughout European economies.
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Funding
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10gen, creator of the open source MongoDB database software, has raised $42 million in new capital in a venture round led by New Enterprise Associates, says Forbes.
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Project Releases
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The developers of the open source web analytics engine Piwik have released versions 1.8 and 1.8.1 of their software. Version 1.8 brings several key improvements to the user interface and introduces Do Not Track (DNT) support. The 1.8 release is also rated as a critical update after a security review identified a “limited” XSS vulnerability, a cookie denial of service vulnerability and a local file inclusion vulnerability. The Piwik developers recommend updating to the latest version as soon as possible, with the latest version being 1.8.1, released a few days after 1.8 after a number of regressions were found.
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In the latest major update to their open source BitTorrent client, the developers at the Transmission Project have mainly focused on enhancements that affect Mac users. The 2.60 release of the peer-to-peer file sharing client adds support for the new Retina display (HiDPI) in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro laptop and is, the developers say, now ready for the Gatekeeper security feature in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which is expected to arrive later this month.
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The FFmpeg developers have announced the first major update to the open source audio and video codecs package since January. FFmpeg 0.11, code-named “Happiness”, includes several new encoders and decoders for additional video formats including Blu-ray and Apple’s ProRes. A significant number of bugs have also been fixed.
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Public Services/Government
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As government agencies and departments expand their capabilities for collecting information, the volume and complexity of digital data stored for public purposes is far outstripping departments’ ability to make sense of it all. Even worse, with data siloed within individual departments and little cross-agency collaboration, untold hours and dollars are being spent on data collection and storage with return on investment in the form of information-based products and services for the public good.
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The October 2009 memo on Defense Department use of open source software may have inadvertently created an additional roadblock to it, said attendees of a conference on military use of open source.
The October 2009 memo (.pdf), widely seen as a landmark for its assertion that open source software qualifies as a “commercial item” under federal and Defense acquisition policy definition of the term (and so removing a previous barrier to is wider use), also stipulated that program managers before using open source software must “ensure that the plan for software support…is adequate for mission need.”
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Talk within the Defense Department of creating a government open source foundation hopefully will become reality despite the climate of budget austerity that might prevent its formation.
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The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.
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The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.
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Licensing
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The first NHS Hack Day has highlighted applications which could help the UK’s National Health Service provide better, more customisable services for people. The event was won by a group who developed an electronic patient task list for doctors.
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Openness/Sharing
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Avination Virtual Limited announced today that it has released code for llCastRay to the open source OpenSimulator project, as promised at Linux Day in Berlin last month.
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If you’ve ever watched ski or snowboard films and thought “I could do that”, Teton Gravity Research (TGR) have now given you the perfect excuse to prove it. They’ve put up a $100,000 cash prize for the best segment submitted to TetonGravity.com during the 2012/13 season.
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The future of the UK economy depends on the switch to ‘open-source banking’, according to Alistair Milne, Professor of Financial Economics at Loughborough University.
Speaking at today’s launch of the Loughborough University Centre for Post-Crisis Finance, which is part of the School of Business and Economics, Professor Milne advocated radical change in the structure and process of banking, defining ‘open-source banking’ as having open access to banking information and systems.
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Open Data
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TomTom makes its money from navigation solutions, so it’s not a huge surprise that it’s not terribly fond of open source maps on a general level. It has been accused, however, of overstating the error potential in competing open source map sources as part of a blog post discrediting them.
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Satnav manufacturer TomTom has written an article strongly criticising cartographical open data projects like OpenStreetMap for their “accuracy and reliability”.
“Open source mapping has really come into the limelight in the past few years, and many businesses have started to experiment with its use in industry,” says TomTom on its website. “The limelight, however, brings with it closer scrutiny, and recent reports on the accuracy and reliability of open source maps make for uncomfortable reading.”
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Open Access/Content
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Science-publishing ventures continually battle for market space, yet most operate on one of only two basic business models. Either subscribers pay for access, or authors pay for each publication — often thousands of dollars — with access being free. But in what publishing experts say is a radical experiment, an open-access venture called PeerJ, which formally announced its launch on 12 June, is carving out a fresh niche. It is asking its authors for only a one-off fee to secure a lifetime membership that will allow them to publish free, peer-reviewed research papers.
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Open Hardware
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3D printing may still seem like a science fiction concept to the uninitiated, but to those who are willing to open their eyes, it is very apparent that it is here, it is now, and it is exploding in popularity. Don’t take my word for it.
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In the 20th century, getting your child a toy car meant a trip to a shopping mall. In the 21st century, it can mean going to your computer, downloading a file and creating the toy on your 3-D printer.
Only that is not quite revolutionary enough for Massimo Banzi, who spoke at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in late June. As Banzi pointed out, the 3-D printer a friend of his used to build a toy car was itself an open-source device — one that could be produced by anyone from freely available plans.
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Medical device design is heavily regulated for obvious safety reasons. But a number of researchers–including those with support from the Food and Drug Administration–are developing “open-source” healthcare equipment. The idea is to offer completely transparent, shared software code and mix-and-match interface and hardware designs. While this might seem risky, the goal is to spark faster and more effective innovation in the medical device field, while making it easier to spot potential programming bugs and other device failures.
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Medical technology: Applying the “open source” model to the design of medical devices promises to increase safety and spur innovation
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Standards/Consortia
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Alas, I’m not surprised that the customers of the various services will view this as “business as usual.” We’ve all become accustomed to the idea that web sites go down, emails go astray, computers fail, and in general Internet services are mostly available.
Many years ago, I worked for a short while on telephone switching systems. Those were the days of Ma Bell, and Ma was very demanding. As I recall, switching systems were required to have a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of ten years, and a Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) of thirty minutes. It wasn’t easy, but those specifications were met…and rare indeed was the occasion when you picked up a telephone and were met with total silence. (Telephone offices typically had 48 hours of backup power.)
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Finance
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Wall Street employees, who dispense financial advice to individuals and companies, aren’t following a basic investing tenet with their own money: diversification.
Workers at the five largest Wall Street banks saw the value of company stock in their 401(k) accounts, sometimes the biggest holding of those plans, decline more than $2 billion last year, according to annual filings. Those losses don’t include shares received as bonuses.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This month, a former leader of the Internal Revenue Service filed a complaint that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has violated the terms of its nonprofit status by operating primarily for the private benefit of its corporate members, based on documents and research from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which manages PRWatch, ALECexposed, and SourceWatch. The complaint, which also alleges that ALEC misrepresented itself in tax filings, raises additional allegations beyond those in earlier IRS complaints filed by Common Cause.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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DRM
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A few months ago, we outlined a few of the major moments in the history of digital rights management (DRM) in the music industry. This time, we’re talking about TV, video, and the events in the ongoing fight over copying. We’re still calling it the “DRM graveyard”–but as you’ll see, the failures that DRM has seen in the music world aren’t quite yet as plentiful when it comes to video.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Every year, I teach the AMOS class, a lab course on “Agile Methods and Open Source” that combines lectures with a real software project that ideally turns into a startup (see the AMOS Project concept, in German). To explain open source, I have to introduce students to intellectual property rights, of which most have been blissfully unaware of until then. Nothing teaches concepts better than a colorful story, and so I have been using the IP strategies around Java to make this dry topic come alive. For fun, comments, and corrections, I’m providing the short version of my talk below, including commentary. (You can also download a PDF version of the talk, licensed as CC-BY 3.0. If you find this useful for teaching, please tell me.) Students at this point have a basic working understanding of intellectual property and exclusion rights. Please let me know what you think! Finally, IANAL.
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Copyrights
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In a move that scares the pants off of online software distribution such as Steam, the Court Of Justice of the European Union has just ruled that people should be able to resell downloaded games.
While this does not effect the Land of the Free, where its French-backed Junta wants its people to pay many times for software they own.
However, the ruling means that what it might say in the EULAs you are allowed to sell your old software. Steam, Origin, and GamersGate will now have their work cut out trying to work out a way to restore some rights to those who buy software online.
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