04.05.19
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Picture contributed by a reader
Summary: Events are very “big business” for the Linux Foundation; the business model, however, is highly disturbing; this is the first installment of a series about Linux Foundation events
LIST OF ARTICLES to date (this year) was last published on Tuesday. The list is probably essential reading ahead of our next batch of articles, which examine the operations of the Linux Foundation. They call themselves “Linux Foundation”, but the Linux Foundation isn’t what it seems. It is also changing over time, certainly not for the better (unless betterment is judged on financial terms alone). Here is that list again:
“They call themselves “Linux Foundation”, but the Linux Foundation isn’t what it seems.”What we are about to show is the troubling role the Linux Foundation (LF from here onwards) plays; it’s almost like a corporate shim if not dagger inside the community. By filtering and censoring talks, for example (just like the CoC in the case of mailing lists and events), LF became a filter of what’s permissible for “Linux” (they own the trademark) to say. And remember that “Microsoft loves Linux”; Microsoft paid, so it must be true. Don’t dispute that!
We’re aware of GNU/Linux developers who actually write all the code (used by millions, even large corporations all around the world) while broke. Ideology is their driver. Some receive maybe (at most) $500 a month, sometimes through donations, to just pay for food and secure a roof over their heads. Meanwhile, LF management staff (people with degrees in PR or accounting) get over $500,000 a year. Tax-free! And they’re marketing people who help Microsoft; they don’t write a single line of code (never did, they lack the skills). We know where they get this money and the strings attached to this money. Future parts of this series will cover this subject.
We’ve decided to separate our findings so as to better present the facts about LF. We’ll publish something every couple of days. We will break it down into logical units as there are many different aspects and one very long article simply wouldn’t be effective.
A few weeks ago I received an E-mail message (from LinkedIn): “More people who want to connect with you: Kimberly Andrews, Event Partnership Manager at Linux Foundation”
Interesting. I never heard of that person before. Why would I connect? Why did that person attempt to connect? I no longer connect with anyone anyway (especially since Microsoft bought this platform, whereupon I stopped logging in).
So Kim tried to befriend me through Microsoft’s LinkedIn. Why? There can only be one explanation. It’s because I write about LF. Much could be said about the choice of Microsoft’s LinkedIn, but LF used that well before the takeover, as did I.
Readers of ours have longer been curious about these events. “So,” one reader told us a month ago, “as I wrote this I wondered, what are the tiers for membership and contract…. I think I’d like to research that next.”
So… LF people “want to connect with” their critic. Just like typical PR people. Like Novell’s PR people.
As one reader put it: “Oh. They do, do they? Is that a good thing? Or…? What do you suggest?”
There are words for these tactics. A decade ago when I covered or uncovered Microsoft’s suppressed documents (obtained through subpoena) I saw how they targeted their critics. It was more or less like that. Now it’s the LF people doing it.
LF is big money. Very big money. More and more money each year. Notice the figures in the following sponsorship brochure. Add these up and you soon reach tens of millions of dollars (for events alone).
Companies that support GNU/Linux could (if not should) pay the development firms/developers, maybe the LUGs, not Zemlin PAC. It would do a lot to help actual development. What we see above is the ‘monopolisation’ of events.
Giving directly to developers would be equivalent of giving to the needy and not ‘charities’ that just belch out scraps to the actual people in need (while paying themselves astronomical salaries). But that analogy aside, let’s look at some findings we’ve had verified.
In the words of one of our readers: “Taking money and swag from Microsoft + Selling Magazine space + selling tweets + not even using Linux… When one organization has control of the media, training, and propaganda, we enter a very dangerous phase — where there is an organization representing Linux — that is actually… “Evil Empire”.”
“You would not believe my findings,” said this reader, whose research into this leads into our next part, a guest post titled: “Putting the CON in Conference!”
Stay tuned. █
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Posted in America, Deception, Europe, Patents at 3:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
These patents harm not only programmers; they also contribute to the deaths of many patients
Summary: The patent trolls-aligned EPO is a massive liability to Europe; staff of the EPO admits this, but management of the EPO ignores the warnings and carries on granting fake patents (not compliant w.r.t the EPC) like there’s no tomorrow
IN the United States, 35 U.S.C. § 101 undermines a lot of patents on nature and mathematics. It prevents a lot of patent grants but more importantly it’s used to dismiss lawsuits that leverage such bogus patents. The lawyers aren’t happy. It prevents them making a lot of money from lawsuits, whose number is collapsing.
Watchtroll’s new editor (the founder stepped down after two decades) has just used a former Federal Circuit chief judge to pretend patent law is to be made up by bribed politicians, not actual courts (“Judge Paul Michel: Look to Congress, Not Courts, to Fix the U.S. Patent System”). Michel is like a ‘retired’ lobbyist for software patents that patent trolls leverage (David Kappos does the same thing, often alongside Michel). This is nothing new. He always appears alongside the usual people, mostly former USPTO chiefs who are in bed with the litigation ‘industry’ (the new USPTO managers too have come from there). Donald Zuhn takes note of “effort by the Office to increase patent examination quality and efficiency through the development of an automated tool for USPTO examiners…”
Sounds familiar? It is more or less the same language we often see in Europe (“quality”, “efficiency”…) and the same methodology that failed miserably.
The European Patent Office (EPO) is being copied by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). They want to grant lots of questionable patents which they know courts would reject (and judges aren't happy with that).
About a week ago we wrote about the Office kidnapping the branch of justice. It even abducts its overseer, the Administrative Council. There’s no separation of powers (essential for real justice). So it’s getting harder to demonstrate just how appalling patent quality became. The Office hopes to hide the facts and muzzle those who speak about it.
Meanwhile, J A Kemp, a proponent of patents on life, praises the EPO for liaising with nefarious groups. These are not “standards bodies” as the headline claims but more like front groups for patent trolls with their FRAND/SEP thickets which they exploit for anticompetitive blackmail. To quote:
The EPO has announced a cooperation with European Committee of Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) under which the three organisations will work together to improve and disseminate knowledge about the relationship between standards and patents. The agreement builds on existing co-operation in this area between the EPO, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the European Commission.
Whilst the exact nature and intended outcomes of this cooperation are not known, the comments in the EPO’s statement suggest a focus on providing further information resources for inventors and researchers in fields which are, or which may be in the future, affected by standards. This can only be welcomed as the increasing growth of Internet-of-Things development causes more and more diverse areas of industry to be impacted by the need to comply with (and potentially licence patents relating to) communications standards.
As we explained at the time, this is the EPO aligning itself with patent trolls and extortion rackets such as MPEG-LA.
Who can stop the EPO doing this? Seemingly nobody. This article which was cited by SUEPO on Thursday (yesterday) speaks of the judges’ loss of independence:
Alluding to this pending referral, in the present case T 0403/18 one of the parties present at an oral hearing in Haar requested that this hearing be held in Munich. As can be inferred from the minutes of this hearing (the written decision has not been published yet), with agreement of all parties the oral proceedings were indeed relocated to the former home of the Boards of Appeal in Munich, i.e. the Isar building at the Bob-van-Benthem-Platz
It could be argued that all BoA decisions since 2014 have not been entirely valid because Battistelli eliminated judges’ sense of independence and perception of impartiality. They decide with greater caution, having seen what happened to their colleague, Judge Corcoran.
Also cited by SUEPO on Thursday was this new article. Reported by Barney Dixon (IPPro Magazine) was a bunch of stuff based on a document we had published yesterday morning. To quote:
Despite a change of hands at the European Patent Office (EPO), little has changed in terms of social dialogue, representatives from the office’s Central Staff Committee (CSC) have claimed.
In an intervention at the EPO’s most recent Administrative Council meeting, staff representatives claimed that while they would have liked to provide positive news about social dialogue and the social situation at the office, “no progress worth noting has been observed”.
During the meeting, EPO president António Campinos gave an update to the council on the development of the EPO’s strategic plan.
Campinos also discussed developments on social dialogue and the need to foster it.
The first goal of the strategic plan is to build an engaged, knowledgeable and collaborative organisation.
This includes looking at ways to attract talent, as well as achieving more harmonious social relations and to ensure there is meaningful dialogue between social partners.
[...]
SUEPO also noted that despite claims of increasing social dialogue, SUEPO—which represents about half of the staff—is still excluded as a negotiation partner.
So the union is too fearful to speak out, judges cannot speak out, and European authorities refuse to intervene. Immunity entails impunity. So the EPO continues breaking the rules by granting CRISPR patents. Not even a pretense of following the rules or consistency in decisions anymore?
Life Sciences Intellectual Property Review, an advocacy front group for patents on life (still disguised as a “news” site), has just covered this latest example. It’s not an objective article but agenda-setting jingoism. Too much of that nowadays (decay of journalism). To quote:
The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued a new CRISPR/Cas9 patent to inventor Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the key figures in the CRISPR landscape.
Today, April 3, ERS Genomics, the company providing access to CRISPR/Cas9 IP owned by Charpentier, announced she had been granted European patent number 3,401,400.
We took note of it earlier this week. Here they are granting patents in violation of the EPC. SUEPO has just estimated that about 30,000 such fake patents (European Patents not compliant with the EPC) may have been granted each year. Forward Pharma should know, having seen its granted patent implode, whereupon its very existence came into jeopardy. Yes, the EPO’s abuses are crashing European companies' shares, invoking layoffs. The company has just published these results, taking note of its lost patent:
Research and development costs for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2017 were $2.7 million and $20.5 million, respectively. The decrease in research and development costs for the year ended December 31, 2018 is the result of lower costs incurred in connection with the EP2801355 patent (“‘355 Patent”) opposition in Europe (“Opposition Proceeding”), lower share-based compensation and the wind-down of our development efforts of dimethyl fumarate (DMF)-containing formulations.
The damage caused by the deterioration of the EPO remains to be realised. It can take decades to be fully evaluated. In the US, for example, patent trolls are said to have incurred losses of many tens of billions of dollars (taken out of the productive economy). Researchers such as James Bessen have done work to that effect. This is a lot more than the EPO budget for an entire decade. They just externalise the costs for private profits. The public pays. █
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