Using software patents, Microsoft turns Linux into its own cash cow whilst also making it more expensive
Summary: Techrights’ fight against ‘Linux tax’ from Microsoft is getting a lot more attention this Friday
“BOYCOTT NOVELL” was all about stopping Microsoft tax on GNU/Linux. More people are beginning to wake us and realise that our cause was all along on target, as several distributions of GNU/Linux which paid Microsoft for this ‘privilege’ simply went extinct (Xandros' price was $50 for Microsoft patents). Our goal was to ensure that people/companies do not become dependent on Microsoft-taxed distributions, as that would simply serve Microsoft’s goal of making GNU/Linux its own cash cow. SUSE, Turbolinux, and Linspire were also part of this problem and all those companies went into the ashtray of history. There are more such companies, but they sell hardware, not purely software.
Buy an HTC smartphone and $5 of what you spent on it goes to Microsoft – even if you’ve just bought an Android device.
So says Citi analyst Walter Pritchard in a note sent out to investors today, according to Business Insider.
Microsoft announced the royalty payment deal – the result of a legal settlement – last year, but the amount the software giant receives was not made public. MS has alleged Android infringes its intellectual property, and has other smartphone vendors in its sights.
Pritchard reckons Microsoft is pursuing other Android handset makers for a royalty of $7.50-12.50 per device. HTC clearly got of relatively lightly by settling Microsoft’s claims out of court.
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Microsoft can’t be too forceful. If can’t afford to overly annoy those vendors who’re also selling phones based on its Windows Phone OS – they might just drop it, in a huff. Or they may trade lower royalties for a stronger commitment to WinPho – something Microsoft needs far more than even a few hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty payments.
Saumsung, LG, and Kyocera Mita also pay Microsoft for Android. There might be more such companies, perhaps not prominent ones though. Faced with a price tag, people act surprised about it even though our site has highlighted this issue since 2007 when Samsung signed the first such deal and in order to discourage similar deals we called for a boycott. The bottom line is, we do have a problem here, but it is not a new problem. We even found one anti-Linux propagandist writing: “This is just fraud. I really like HTC phones with their Sense interface but I have a Galaxy S II on order and I will not buy any HTC phone again while they give in to Microsoft’s blackmail.”
According to other news from today, Lodsys wants to go after Android developers. “Patent holding company Lodsys caused a stir recently when it demanded money from iOS developers using in-app payments,” says this report, “something it holds a patent for. Now it appears that Android developers could be next in line for a stern email from the firm.
“Android Community has spotted one developer who is claiming to have received a request for payment in relation to integrating in-app payments into an Android app. If true, it could stir up another hornet’s nest of anger in the development community.”
“Saumsung, LG, and Kyocera Mita also pay Microsoft for Android.”This is actually not news and we alluded to it before. Apple, unlike Google, is a patent aggressor, so it is not the same situation for Android and Apple’s hypeOS. Interestingly enough, Microsoft’s ally Nokia is also giving a hard time to Apple. How long before Microsoft uses Nokia to sue Android distributors too? Nokia has given hints about it. Microsoft’s strategy is to tax Linux from as many directions as possible. It’s blackmail [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], so regulators should step in to intervene. █
“That’s extortion and we should call it what it is. To say, as Ballmer did, that there is undisclosed balance sheet liability, that’s just extortion and we should refuse to get drawn into that game.”
Summary: OpenSUSE is gradually and quietly losing its pulse in the hands of a proprietary Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, which keeps the Microsoft-taxed SLE*
WE can safely assume that Novell has passed the “OpenSUSE” trademark to AttachMSFT if they have not done so already. Despite the inevitable tainting brought on by the Microsoft-Novell deal, OpenSUSE is still a valuable and well-recognised brand, one that took several years to build (just over 5 years to be exact). Considering that the OpenSUSE Build Service has just dropped the SUSE part and AttachMSFT continues to not make any direct references to “OpenSUSE”, what can one conclude?
The news about the OSB renaming [1, 2] has been noted by the typical PR people. Speaking of those PR people, it seems they may have been laid off in large numbers if the lack of activity in their blog of late is any indication. Amie Johnson, a fairly new name who has not posted in months, has appeared in the PR blog just to drop in information about OBS, as we have already noted. Johnson then reposted (or passed) a guest post from Michael Miller, whom we never heard of before. Miller is proclaimed to be the “Vice President, Alliances and Marketing, SUSE”.
As a result of this increased focus on our core market, we will better align our future investments with business results. Focusing on what matters most to customers is the key to our innovation strategy and will drive the growth of our business. This has meant reductions in certain areas, such as Mono. However, Mono remains part of the SUSE business and should customer demand for Mono products accelerate, our development efforts will rapidly respond. Regardless, we will continue to provide maintenance and support for all Mono products – MonoTouch, Mono for Android, Mono Tools for Studio and SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension.
It is very important to notice that, once again, there is no mention of OpenSUSE here, and the project’s blog has only had about 3 posts during this entire month! The OpenSUSE Web site has more or less become yet another a ghost town in the dying Novell community network. The only exception is obligatory posts like this one from AttachMSFT staff. We do believe that OpenSUSE is being phased out quietly, simply because AttachMSFT doesn’t seem to care. As we have said before, it is a proprietary software company first and only. It is also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. █
Other developers are less certain that Apple will really fight for them and have banded together in an effort to pool resources and stand up to Lodsys.
Steve Jobs is often quoted as saying “Good artists copy, Great artists steal” (though he was quoting someone else).
Heck, in the PBS show “Triumph Of The Nerds“, Jobs go so far as to say “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”. And, looking at the history of Apple software… this is obviously the case.
Yet, somehow, many people now seem to consider Apple to be the source of the vast majority of software (Desktop and Mobile) innovation.
This is the first part in a series of articles that seeks to dispel that very notion.
We look forward to the next posts in this interesting series. We have already written some prior posts demonstrating that Apple is an imitator and not a real innovator. Apple’s is more successful as a religious cult than a technology company. █
Posted in Bill Gates at 10:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Traditionally a progressive publication with guts, The Guardian has softened after receiving money from Bill Gates and it now provides a platform for the software patents lobby
“Patent lawyer argues for USA style software patents laws for Britain,” warns Satipera about this new article. “All the same old false claims, good only for patent lawyers,” he continues. What is the Gates Foundation-funded Guardian thinking when it resorts to publishing such unpopular opinions recently? Last week it published a piece from a lobbyist against open standards (or patent-encumbered ones) and not so long ago it also gave a platform to Microsoft Florian, whose agenda is similar. They let him write entire articles there. Where is the criticism of Gates’ patent monopolies? It seems to have vanished when Gates them some money to keep silent and self-censor. The Guardian became a ruling class guardian rather than watchdog press when it accepted the money [1, 2, 3] (it could decline politely, but it did not), which probably made it part of the corporate press. Will they also accept money from BP?
Posted in Site News at 9:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A note and a tip about going from audio to video with Free/libre software
TECHBYTES, our audiocast as we call it, currently comes in two methods of delivery. One is purely audio and another is video plus audio. But YouTube is a large platform and many shows put their material in there. Turning 50 shows into video can be a tedious task with a graphical user interface, whereas with command line tools this process can be automated. After some exploration we found a way to turn audio into a slideshow and then split the files for uploading the resultant Ogg files (given the known upload limits). To encode using a command line utility or set thereof, the following chain of commands gets issued:
where -ss 00:00:00 means it starts at 0 seconds, -endpos 00:10:10 defines an endpoint using the same type of time format, mf://*.jpg takes all the images in the current directory — images that are generated by duplication except for the first one. Files can be easily replicated (e.g. to serve as dummy sequence) with:
for file in *.jpg
do
`nice cp ${file} ${file}-dupe.jpg`
done
The remainder of the arguments specify the -audiofile, encoders, frames per seconds (fps), and an output file at the very end. To split videos into smaller chunks, we have tried many different tools but eventually used mencoder to simplify the pipeline (thanks to all those who helped in IRC). This whole command basically turns a simple sound file into smaller ogg files that also contain images with transitions between them. Since it is scriptable, we can now apply this to all past episodes. YouTube is moving to WebM quite soon and in any case, making it a mere option using Ogg format and free software utilities simply broadens our reach. █
Summary: Tim and Roy speak about some of the latest news items which pose danger to software freedom
TODAY’S show is unique as it is the first time we produce a Flash option for listening to the show. We talk about GNU/Linux in North Korea, HTC’s Microsoft tax on Linux, and the pressure for Steve Ballmer to step down (among many other topics). Update: the show notes are out.
Today’s closing track is “1977″ by Anita Tijoux. The track comes from the usual source. All tracks are from SXSW 2010 (get the torrents legally here). In previous shows we played many good tracks such as April Smith’s “Colors”. There was also “Edge of My Seat” by Amber Rubarth, “Have This Drink” by Black Mike and Kemistry, “Joyful Noise” by Breakestra, “Sei La” by Erika Machado, “El Camino” by No te va gustar, “Future Eyes” by Ear Pwr, “Tokki no Rassha ” by Dolly, “Quanto Tempo” by Doces Cariocas, “Cos I said so” by Fangs, “Iguana” by SambaDa, “We Should Give” by Amity, “Blackout City” by Anamanaguchi, and “She’s Got You” by Cosmo Jarvis. We thank those artists for choosing to spread their good work. We have many more in the pipeline for future shows. We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date. █
As far as the operating system, all of the home-grown computers will run Red Star, North Korea’s own Linux distro. Hardware-wise, though, the report is vague: the educational machines have no USB ports, while the business machine have two, and both netbooks have a battery that last two and a half hours.
Awesomium windowless web framework and engine has been ported to Linux. Awesomium can be used for web page capture, site scrapping, in-app advertising, in-app browsing, web automation, rendering custom in-game web browser and creating HTML UIs for 3D games.
“Measuring market share of open source software is extremely difficult,” Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, told LinuxInsider.
“The basic problem is that one can use sales data as a close proxy for market share when one is selling a tangible and restricted resource, but for something like Linux, actual product sales probably account for a very small portion of installed systems,” Travers explained. “In the end, it is reasonably impossible to estimate market share in this area with any accuracy. I don’t think anyone has a solid idea of what the actual Linux desktop market share is.”
While we have already delivered a number of benchmarks from the Linux 2.6.39 kernel, surprisingly we have not yet published any new file-system benchmarks from this latest stable Linux kernel release. Fortunately, that has changed today with a fresh round of Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS file-system benchmarks on the Linux 2.6.39 kernel and compared to the preceding 2.6.38 and 2.6.37 kernel releases.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, and Linux User’s 100th issue special guest editor chats about the 20th anniversary of Linux, the future of embedded Linux devices, and the current state of the kernel among other things…
Frogatto & Friends is an old-school 2D platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog. The world is viewed as a cross-section seen from the side, and your character walks and jumps between solid platforms whilst fighting monsters. It’s a big adventure with all the classic fun – you fight monsters, collect coins, talk to people, and buy new stuff.
Just a day after the KDE camp pushed out KDE SC 4.7 Beta 1, the GNOME camp has come to the desktop with their stable 3.0.2 release. The GNOME 3.0.2 release, like is usual for GNOME point releases, just brings bug-fixes and translation updates.
With the release of version 3.6, the Tiny Core crew have added a GUI method for hard disk installation. As I have, on previous occasions, banged on about this omission, I thought I’d take a look.
In the past, I’ve had a love/hate relationship TinyCore Linux distribution. On the one hand, it sports some amazing technology. It’s a lightweight distribution based on a custom core. By default, it gives you a basic desktop with a dock along the bottom and enough GUI tools to begin adding applications and making other customizations. See our overview of Tiny Core circa 3.3 for more details.
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On the whole, I think that Tiny Core has now reached the stage where an experienced computer user with little or no Linux experience, could be trained to deploy it. I always thought that Tiny Core had the potential to fill a useful niche, and the addition of a GUI installer now makes it accessible to a broader range of users.
Whenever an anti-Unity discussion happened on the web, users had only one statement “Let’s see what Fedora 15 packs in”! Finally it is here. We had always convinced people to learn to use Unity. Though we are not reluctant towards publishing stories featuring Fedora and other competant distros. (Not a disclaimer! No way! )Now onto some Fedora love. Yesterday, the Fedora community announced their release of new version named Deadlock.
A long time Mandriva user, I was distro-hopping for the past 6 months. I tried openSUSE 11.3, 11.4 and Fedora 14 – all in their KDE avatars. I couldn’t wait to try Fedora 15, which was released this week. I downloaded the KDE Live CD and copied it onto a USB stick using Unetbootin (I hate booting from a CD/DVD since it is terribly slow). Fedora booted up in less than a minute on my 4-year-old laptop and presented me a clean, pretty and solid desktop. After playing around a while, I decided on replacing openSUSE 11.4 KDE with Fedora 15 KDE.
We are pleased to announce the release of Bodhi Linux 1.1.0. This is the first of our quarterly scheduled update releases to keep the software on the Bodhi live CD current.
This will undoubtedly echo many user opinions, but they will fall on deaf ears just as those leveled against early KDE 4. Determined developers with a vision trump public dissent and soon most dissent disappears. [...] they will have to bite the bullet and upgrade at some point.
Many have called sub-$100 Android smartphones Google’s doomsday weapon. Some have also noticed that the onslaught of inexpensive Android devices is killing competition as we speak, resulting in the Android/iOS duopoly. One can buy inexpensive Android phones today the vast majority being white-label Chinese knock-offs. There are a few exceptions, like the affordable Android handsets Huawei’s been shipping to the UK and US.
The Motorola Droid X2 went on sale today in Verizon Wireless stores for $200 plus contract. Although the Android 2.2 smartphone adds an improved 4.3-inch qHD display and a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 to the original Droid X design, that’s not enough to cut it considering today’s high-end, 4G competition, especially when the performance boost appears to be surprisingly negligible, says this review.
Following Firefox 5 Beta, Mozilla has followed up and filled all other developer channels as well. For the first time, Mozilla is now offering a full and coherent range of nightly builds, developer versions, a beta and a final release. Mozilla plans to release the second public beta this Friday.
Word Press has announced the availability of the Beta 2 for testing purpose. The Beta 2 is not recommended for the production use but it will help developers to prepare their plug-ins for the upcoming release.
In this article, I’ll talk about my tryst with WordPress in developing a Progressive Contemporary Issues’ website. These lines are based on personal experiences, and whatever humor, terrific or pathetic, is not aimed at harm or defamation.
Business intelligence (BI) is one of those buzzphrases that sound super-cool, but are often misunderstood. What is business intelligence and should you care? Do you need to drop a giant bucket of money on BI?
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is investigating whether Goldman Sachs’ (GS.N) mortgage servicing arm did not conduct proper reviews before denying borrowers the option to lower their payments under a government loan modification programme.
In its quarterly filing with the SEC earlier this month, Goldman said regulators had sought information on the foreclosure and servicing protocols and activities of its mortgage servicing unit Litton Loan Servicing.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has begun an investigation into the mortgage-servicing arm of Goldman Sachs, looking at whether it systematically rejected borrowers’ efforts to lower their loan payments through government programs.
The inquiry by the New York Fed arose from a letter sent by an anonymous employee, who accused the Goldman unit, Litton Loan, of denying loans without properly reviewing applications.
The deadline for the implementation of a European privacy law on cookies passed with a whimper at midnight last night, after just two Member States issued a full notification to Brussels.
Meanwhile, 19 of the 27-bloc countries that make up the European Union ignored the 25 May deadline on implementing the full, or indeed partial, set of measures laid out in the revised legislation for the e-Privacy Directive.
Shaw has announced new broadband plans that offer far more data, faster speeds, and better pricing than comparable plans at competitors such as Rogers, Bell, and Telus. Shaw says the plans will be rolled out over the coming months and offer far bigger caps (including some unlimited plans). While the company says the move is linked to a shift away from analog channels, it seems more likely that Shaw is the first of the large ISPs to respond to mounting public and political pressure over the uncompetitive pricing in the Canadian broadband market. Consumer regulation from the CRTC is not likely in the short term, but government officials have made it clear that they are concerned with the current competitive environment.
Yesterday’s post highlighted the recent Access Copyright decision to refuse pay-per-use transactional digital licences (late in the day I received a note that AC appears to have had a change of heart). As I noted in the conclusion, the copyright collective faces an increasingly problematic balance sheet. According to its 2010 annual report, it spent more on itself in the form of administrative costs (including legal fees and board compensation) that it actually dispensed to Canadian authors. Admittedly, these numbers are not easy to find. Indeed, for an organization devoted to collecting licensing revenue and distributing it collective members, the annual report is incredibly vague in providing clear numbers about precisely what gets distributed to Canadian authors.
We’ve written about this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to make it easier for people to follow and refer back to.
The FSFE’s intention is to write a paper which shows how widely deployed the applications are, thereby making them as attractive as possible to UK public sector procurers and suppliers.
The experiment, which spanned more than a decade, suggests that the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 1E-27 cm. This means that if the electron were magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair.
Given that no one actually knows what the statute covers, you would think that Congress would have a hearing on what the law should punish and whether Congress wants to punish the routine computer use of millions of Americans. Instead, the House Judiciary Committee is having a hearing tomorrow on cybersecurity, in which I believe one of the issues covered will be proposed legislation backed by the White House to raise penalties under Section 1030 and add a new aggravated offense statute
Microsoft Corp.’s revenue in China this year will only be about 5% of what it gets in the U.S., even though personal-computer sales in the two countries are almost equal, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told employees
the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion … Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm. … [intentionally or] inadvertently, due to errors or carelessness.
Those looking for dramatic examples of harm can study the US Cointel program and imagine a young Martin Luther King Jr had been trolled into submission or ruined instead of going on to lead a civil rights movement. Who wants to pay for this invasion?
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property… [try] incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years.
his conference is one of the most scary I’ve ever seen. It’s finishing up, and the panel, including Eric Schmidt, are summing up all the findings. Schmidt has just pointed out to the panel that copyright is not an absolute right that authors hold, that the law doesn’t say that, that there are fair use rights in the US, for example, and something similar in other countries. The look of surprise on the face of the other panelists was palpable. Go Eric!
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