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• The “legal blackmail” business: inside a P2P settlement factory
  Very interesting article. The practice of “legal blackmail” extends further than this, of course. That would also be an excellent description of the use to which software patents are put by their owners.

  While geeks across Europe are comforted by the fact that there are no software patents “as such” in most European countries, the fact is that they exist sufficiently to allow this sort of “legal blackmail” to be conducted throughout Europe. Legal certainty about a claim by a patent owner can only really be obtained at the end of a court case. Given such things are punishingly expensive, it is enough just to threaten most companies in order to trigger settlement.

  This is why, despite the rumoured non-existence of software patents, they remain a serious problem for all software companies.

• A Look At The Technologies & Industries Senators Leahy & Hatch Would Have Banned In The Past
  Each time I see an article like this, I wonder whether today’s legislators realise the position they are taking protecting the interests of the lobbyists around them are both untypical of their predecessors and also harmful to their constituents.

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• LibreOffice – A fresh page for OpenOffice
  This is a good and balanced article that is worth reading. At Sun I tried several times to get a Foundation started for OpenOffice.org and it had to happen in the end.

  Today was the day that the OpenOffice.org community (apart, significantly, from the Oracle-owned team in Hamburg) got tired of waiting for the fulfillment of the commitment at OSCON in 2000 to liberate the project into an independent Foundation and did it themselves. The Document Foundation has been a long time in the making, and has been created rather reluctantly, but it is broadly-based (not a Google or Novell initiative, regardless of what people are going to try to tell you) and stands every chance of success. I warmly welcome it, both personally and on behalf of OSI.
• The CodePlex Foundation Rebrands, Renamed Outercurve Foundation
  The new initiative was being weighed down by its association with Microsoft, so this rebrand is an essential step if they are to achieve the potential they speak about.
• And now, page 2 : Jeff Bonwick’s Blog
  Key Solaris ZFS developer Jeff Bonwick quits Oracle.
• End of the Road for Xmarks
  The natural pathway for great ideas is for them to be integrated into the platform they use, and that’s finally happened to XMarks (originally FoxMarks). Maybe if they had use d a community-centric strategy they would have been the locus of innovation for web sync?

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• Guess What, You Don’t Own That Software You Bought
  It turns out that software publishers really don’t like copyright law alone. It gives their customers far too many rights – in this case “first sale” rights – and they would much rather use contracts that avoid giving any rights similar to ownership.

  Doing so allows them to control and manipulate the customer in ways the framers of copyright law never imagined and which negate the social contract – benefit to society in return for a limited monopoly – that is its foundation. The use of copyrights and patents as a lever to force contractual agreements is common and is rapidly eroding both our liberty and our cultural commons. Used with proprietary EULAs it is the antithesis of both software freedom and the Creative Commons.

  “The American Library Association and eBay argued against the outcome. The library association said it feared that the software industry’s licensing practices could be adopted by other copyright owners, including book publishers, record labels and movie studios.”

Also:

• If It’s May It’s Time For The Press To Parrot Bogus Stats Announcement From The BSA
  Just in case you thought the article by Glyn Moody that I linked yesterday was a one-off, this techDirt article from earlier in the year alleges that sophistry is a BSA strategy rather than an accident.
• Mozilla Joins Open Invention Network
  Just as ForgeRock did recently, The Mozilla Foundation has become a licensee of the Open Invention Network so they can use OIN resources in the event of a patent attack. Note they are clear to point out that, like us, they are not endorsing software patents, just adopting an obvious and free defence against them.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Copyrights or No Rights

• BSA’s Piracy Numbers: Less than They Seem
  Glyn’s research here is very useful. The BSA use of statistics is very regrettable, as is their use of inuendo and framing to build the impression that their outlook is correct. They are a vestige of a passing business model and everything they say should be questioned and disbelieved until independently proven.
• U.S. to escalate War on Piracy at domain name level
  This is a very worrying development. The creation of an ideological firewall for the US, under the essentially unaccountable control of corporate interests, is a huge threat to the future of internet freedom.
• Oracle Announces JDK Roadmap for Advancing Java SE
  No mention of the future of the JCP or a plan to unblock the Apache Harmony issue. Instead, an appeal to populism redolent of a plebiscite: “The decisions regarding the features to be included in the JDK 7 and JDK 8 releases were made with active participation of the Java community.”

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• Twitter kills the password anti-pattern, but at what cost?
  Jon Udell argues that the switch to OAuth comes at the cost of a loss of flexibility and the potential for innovation. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention the other problem – the impact on open source software.
• A New Home for the WordPress Trademark
  Excellent approach to trademark stewardship here. The open-by-rule principle – that a community should be an equal place where every participant has the same rights to the collective copyrights, trademarks and patents as everyone else – seems to be scrupulously observed in the WordPress community and I’m very impressed.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Wise Handling

• Licensing Change for Solaris 10 and Solaris Cluster
  It’s still only an evaluation license, but at least they have got rid of the limited period.
  (tags: Solaris Oracle)

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• A Peek Behind the Curtain of the Texas Antitrust Complaints against Google
  Fascinating and detailed analysis of the anti-trust complaints against Google. The conspiracy theories Pamela espouses are well-based.

  At the start of last year as I was working on other technology policy issues with colleagues in Brussels, there were constant stories of indirectly-but-identifiably Microsoft-sponsored lobbyists and lawyers forming groups to initiate a variety of cases against Google over there, on the premise that “anti-trust has changed us and now Google are the new monopoly”. I heard the same from colleagues in DC too.

  So, as Pamela says: “Is this perhaps more abuse of the legal and administrative systems for anticompetitive purposes? If so, could somebody investigate *that*?”
• Project OpenIndiana
  “OpenIndiana is part of the Illumos Foundation, and provides a true open source community alternative to Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express, with an open development model and full community participation.”

Filed under: Links | 2 Comments »

• FSF responds to Oracle v. Google and the threat of software patents
  “Google could have avoided all this by building Android on top of IcedTea, a GPL-covered Java implementation based on Sun’s original code, instead of an independent implementation under the Apache License. … It’s sad to see that Google apparently shunned [the GPL’s] protections in order to make proprietary software development easier on Android.”
• Oracle vs. Google, not a private rant
  Carlo Piana relays an important message from his Oracle contacts to say that their action against Google is a one-off and not a sign of the commencement of general hostilities. Fascinating how it’s easier for them to do this than speak for themselves.

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