Looks like Python Hosting is no more. I’ve seen nothing official, but I note from veber.co.uk that the new name for their cloud hosting is Veber Cloud. My story at InfoWorld today has a few updates on what I wrote earlier in the week. Let’s hope this means the trademark application will also be withdrawn.
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Python logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As soon as I heard about the trademark dispute concerning Python, I tried to contact both sides and understand why there was even an issue. I got through straight away to the Python Software Foundation, but the other party – a UK company called POBox Hosting – waited until Monday afternoon to put me through to their CEO. The result was pretty extraordinary – someone in the hosting business who essentially hadn’t heard of Python until last Friday. Read about it on ComputerWorldUK.
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The IoS may have uncritically picked up the messaging the UK’s “Intellectual Property Office” has been spreading, but the likely outcome of the unitary patent is likely to be much less savoury. Rather than helping small business, this new regulation introduces yet another threat against small business owners, especially those basing their business on open source software who have no corporate sugar-daddy to protect them. Read why on ComputerWorldUK.
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LibreOffice is built from a large legacy codebase that dates back over 20 years. It includes millions of lines of code, can be compiled for a wide range of platforms and incorporates the ideas from long-superseded approaches to programming. Meanwhile, the LibreOffice development community is diverse, international and distributed. Bringing together the immovable object with the irresistible force has resulted in all sorts of interesting innovation. Read about it in my InfoWorld column this week.
Filed under: InfoWorld, LibreOffice | 1 Comment »
A rare en banc hearing of the US federal circuit court today will re-hear the arguments over a fiercely-fought software patent case, CLS Bank vs Alice Corp (the aggressor here is actually Alice; CLS is named first as they sued pre-emptively). Among the amici briefs is one from the EFF proposing Mark Lemley‘s elegant re-examination of the patent statute as a solution. This involves treating “a computer which…”, the weasley phrase added in front of abstract patent claims to make them patentable, as unacceptable unless it refers to a specific implementation of a computer. In this case, the statute’s rules on functional claiming would then apply, severely restricting the scope of the patent. I explain in more detail in InfoWorld today.
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The release of LibreOffice 4.0 continues the regular drumbeat of feature releases (coupled with maintaining a known-stable earlier version) that’s a signature strategy for The Document Foundation. While a lot of the long-term investment they’ve made has been in cleaning the code, speeding it up and making it more stable, there are also important features in the new release that improve LibreOffice’s enterprise value, such as CMS integration, MS Visio 2013 support and support for large spreadsheets and XML data import. Overall, the pressure on Microsoft to innovate remains high. Read more on InfoWorld.
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The Communications Data Bill may have come under heavy fire in Parliament, but it’s not dead yet – and it’s already cost us a fortune even without becoming law. Read more in ComputerWorldUK.
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Visual Studio now includes GPLv2 code, derived from the libgit2 project. They are also collaborating with GitHub over the project. Did hell just freeze over? I don’t think so, as I explain in InfoWorld today, but it’s definitely part of a cooling trend in Microsoft’s war on FOSS which could eventually lead to a Hadean skating rink.
For those who are interested, they have been able to do this because libgit2 adds an extremely broad exception to GPLv2 that defines a clean project boundary absolving Microsoft from any need to apply the GPL to other parts of Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server. I view this as another manifestation of the trend toward the middle ground of open source licensing, although as with LGPL this remains a “strong copyleft” license, just with a limit to its scope.
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Package management in Perl and Linux may have seeded their existence, but app stores have been hostile to open source and failed to pass on software freedom to users. But that could be changing, and today’s exemplar could be … Microsoft. Read on in InfoWorld today as I lay out the groundwork for the discussion Amanda Brock and I will lead at FOSDEM.
Filed under: InfoWorld | Tagged: FOSDEM, Microsoft | Comments Off on Open Source and App Stores
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