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No, seriously. We had serious doubts even before he had his stroke in November, but with his latests speechs, it's now confirmed: our president is running on a brain-dead automated bullshit-generating mode.

It is also a nice paradox that our EU leaders prefer to fund a huge, bureaucratic project with no clear goals or timelines, rather than actually protecting our capacity to develop and innovate freely, just by banning software patents. Unfortunately, it seems that software patents are back with a revenge...

Oh, and this was filed in the U.S. but approved by a European patent office so I don't think it's fair for this judge to bash only us Yanks.

Unfortunately the EPO and its Board of Appeal have been making up their own rules and approving patents on IP which should not be patentable according to the law establishing the EPO. Last night (EST) Groklaw carried this story about the European Parliament's recent rejection of the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive. The essay has many quotes from a British judge criticising the EPO for exceeding its brief, and from software industry sources as little as 12 years ago observing that software patents would be counter-productive. Open source advocate lobbying had little to do with the CII directive being thrown out. It was Microsoft and friends' sudden fright when they realised the European parliament was serious about enforcing the existing law as distinct from the existing practice of the EPO. Note that the bureaucrats of the European Commission were the ones who were lobbied by industry, and the ones who lost to the democratically elected members of parliament.

Just to show its fairness the Commission is now revisiting the whole field of industrial patents, including the possibility of software patents.

The EU Commission are trying to push through software patents again. There's a write-up on Groklaw. I think their idea is to keep trying again and again until we get sick and tired of protesting it.

Microsoft Corp. seems to be moving away from focusing on the actual number of security patches and updates that it and its software competitors release.

But of course they are...since Joe Brockmeier and Joe Barr of NewsForge , as well as Pamela Jones of Groklaw did such a masterful job of debunking the ridiculous annual summary of vulnerabilities by US-CERT (discussed earlier on Slashdot), Microsoft has necessarily had to switch propaganda tactics.

Instead, it is concentrating on making it easy and efficient for customers to obtain the security fixes and update their systems.

That's funny...I've never had a problem with my Yast Online Update...

"...patching, particularly for security, is not a 'Microsoft problem,' but something that affects all operating system and platform vendors," Hilf said.

Nice straw man, Hilf. No one is claiming that non-Microsoft operating systems don't need to be patched. The issue is whether the patches are issued in a timely manner...or not.

> Who ever said that you have to sign a contract for it to be valid?

You don't necessarily have to, but you do need to have an agreement, and do whatever you promised to do in the contract. The GPL doesn't require you to do anything, it merely allows you to do some things you normally can't do because of copyright. It doesn't care whether you agree or not.

>I hate to pull rank here, but I am a copyright lawyer, and I do write licenses and other agreements for a living. I know what I'm talking about.

Well, I'm not a lawyer (and I don't play one on TV), but if you want to pull rank then I will just leave you to wrestle with this. You can decide whether it has credibility or not, but you haven't given us any reason to think you have more. I certainly wouldn't hire you!

The GPL needs to be tested in court.

Eben Moglen (the FSF's general counsel) feels differently. Almost two years ago, while speaking at Harvard Law School, at he had this to say on the subject:

"To those who like to say there has never been a court test of the GPL, I have one simple thing to say: Don't blame me. I was perfectly happy to roll any time. It was the defendants who didn't want to do it. And when for ten solid years, people have turned down an opportunity to make a legal argument, guess what? It isn't any good."

You can read the entire transcript or watch the speech (but make sure you'll be free for the following 90 minutes or so).

The judge has already commented on SCOX's astonishing lack of evidence; he's giving them lots of rope to hang themselves on, so when he hands them their collective ass, they don't have any grounds to come back and claim they didn't get a fair chance to make their [non-existant] case. And the positive PR accruing to Big Blue for defending Linux far outweighs the cost of the legal team, especially when sites like Groklaw are doing half the analysis work for them gratis.

As usual there is great information on this at Groklaw.

Apperently the PTO and the companies they are working with are looking for input from the general community so here's a chance to have your $.02 heard somewhere else besides /.

Per PJ:

I know from your comments that some of you feel that the only solution is to get rid of software patents altogether, and if you can accomplish that, feel free. But others of you have expressed the thought that high quality patents are legitimate, for ideas that are truly innovative and represent real scientific progress. Think what it means that the USPTO is participating and asking for your help.

And Groklaw has a reply to it.

It has turned into a major political FUD-fest, but one of the more important details is IMHO that Microsoft *chose* not to support their customer (Massachusetts)'s wish to open and save files in OpenDocument format, and instead they questioned why their customer made such a silly decision and who did they think they were anyway. Read the articles on groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/); most news you read about this will be biased one way or another, but groklaw always also has the bare facts. Disclaimer: I don't like MS and I like groklaw.

Groklaw has the skinny, and a comprehensive history.

What it means for the commonwealth of Massachusetts: sovereingity.

You can find exhaustive coverage of the whole thing on Groklaw, naturally.

As always Groklaw is the place to go!

Groklaw for info on SCO, Google for everything else... :-)

SCO is suing about the copyrights, which they admit are owned by Novell, and weren't even part of the deal?

SCO is hoping to use this vague wording to override the clear wording of the original contract. They're claiming that the conditional clause has been met and that all the copyrights should be transferred. Novell is going to argue that SCO doesn't need the copyright to exercise their rights "with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies". No doubt they're going to ask what technologies SCO is seeking to acquire and why they'd need the copyrights to do so. It's going to be up to the courts to decide this one.

I don't see how this can be read the way SCO wants to read it. SCO doesn't want the copyrights to acquire UNIX technology (which they did a decade ago); they want the copyrights to sue Linux users. This clause was put in so SCO could co-develop Monterey with IBM, so the historical context doesn't help SCO out either.

Sorta. According to this article, their legal fees were capped, but it does not include "expert, consulting and other expenses". I just wonder how motivated their lawyers are going to be now that they know they're not going to make any more money from the case.

Not probably. The same vulnerabilities were counted multiple times.

See this story over at Groklaw

Basically UNIX (BSD, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, SCO, OS X), and ALL LINUX distributions are counts as ONE (1) bin, against MS Windows!!! So, have basically EVERY popular mainstream operating system other then Windows in one bin and windows in another, and you are trying to toute THAT as a stat that Windows has less flaws then Unix/Linux? Sure, it does when you count ALL VERSIONS OF UNIX AND LINUX TOGETHER AND ADD UP ALL THE VULNERBILITIES FOUND IN ALL THE DIFFERENT VERSIONS!!!!!

THEN there is the fact that different CERT warnings appear multiple times! For instance, Eric Raymond Fetchmail POP3 Client Buffer Overflow (Updated) is counted at least 4 times under the SAME NAME, and at least 1 more time under a different name, but it is still the same vulnerbility!!!

See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200512311 42317870 for more details.

Groklaw has comments about this like:
Second, the Unix/Linux list duplicates items, counting a vulnerability more than once in the list. For an example, note that it lists Eric Raymond Fetchmail POP3 Client Buffer Overflow (Updated). However, the same vulnerability is listed, under the same title, four times. That's because it was reported in the week of August 10-15, again in the week of August 17-23, in September 6-13, and the week of November 9-16. Worse, for any comparison purposes, the same vulnerability is also reported as Fetchmail POP3 Client Buffer Overflow, so in reality one vulnerability is listed 5 times, making the total of 2328 meaningless unless you carefully comb through it to weed out duplications.
Kind of makes a numerical count of reported security problems pointless. (BEGIN SARCASM) Of course, the Linux/Unix security holes are much more serious than are Windows security holes because automated worms. viruses, etc. attack Linux/Unix machines but not Windows computers.(END SARCASM)

This is old news. PJ has done a pretty thorough job debunking this one on Groklaw.

I [PJ] just interviewed Quinn's prior boss, Eric Kriss, and here's what he tells me, although note that it's not an official statement, since Kriss is no longer with the administration.

Kriss:

I've heard that Peter Quinn resigned as the CIO of Massachusetts effective Jan 9, 2006. I met with Peter briefly on December 21, prior to his decision, and he indicated to me he was extremely uncomfortable with the personal attention surrounding the open format controversy. Peter is an IT professional who is not accustomed to the rough-and-tumble world of politics. He found the last few months to be very distasteful, especially the Boston Globe article that seemed to imply some sort of improper influence related to his conference travel. He was completely cleared after an internal administrative review.
As far as I know, Peter was not forced out over policy differences with senior administration officials.

Everybody talks about the OS as the lock-in for business, but it's really MS Office. So long as Office only runs in a predictable way under Windows and cannot BY DEFAULT interact seamlessly with any other app, Microsoft retains the monopoly. Businesses really don't care about the OS, what they care about is their intellectual output looking "right" without a hitch. Anybody who has dealt with the bloody mess that results from a Mac Office to PC Office conversion knows that real interoperability is a distant dream. And since "everybody" runs Office, Office and Windows become the only choice.

Which is why killing widespread support for the Open Document Format is Microsoft's primary goal right now. You can see how MS freaked when the state of Massachusetts mandated *support* for ODF. Not that MS had to use it by default, they just had to read and write it. Not a big deal, but MS recognized it as the thin edge of the wedge for erosion of their desktop domination, and began all kinds of political dirty tricks to overturn the decision. This obscure corner of policy may be the most important fight about electronic freedom in this country.

Here's the Wiki article, read it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
Learn more here: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page= 20051216153153504

I don't think it is likely that every man, woman and child in the US, each spent the equivalent of $100 on Potato Head sets.

Apparently Forbes is maintaining their high standard of journalistic excellence.

Groklaw has a good article http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200512150 14700305 on this story including the transcript of Alan Yates.

One was giving short insight into ODF v. M$' DOCX. (*)

ODF is flow based a-la HTML.
DOCX is record based a-la files generated by Write (.wri) & WinWord' text changes stream.

Application of styles is very different. Even if conversion of text can be made, conversion of styles is almost impossible. In DOCX styles are more or less inlined - ODF was redesigned by OASIS with styles to be more like HTML+CSS.

Basicly, M$'s concept boils down to "anything can occur anywhere in document". ODF hence standard is more strict.

Additionally M$ has special support for ActiveX: embedded objects will be stored as binary dump in middle of XML documents. (E.g. all pictures and files inserted from outside in M$ universe are ActiveX objects.) I'm not sure who ODF pares with embedded content, I can only hope OASIS - unlike M$ - have put XML to good use. After all, unlike M$, ODF includes vector and raster graphics too.

(*) http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511251 44611543

Here is this story.

It goes like this.
MS has a recipe with marzipan as an ingredient.
MS allows us to use this recipe for free.
But MS does not tell us what kind of marzipan is used for this specific recipe.

==> We are allowed to use this recipe but can not use this recipe because we don't have all the details about all ingredients.

• TFA says WiMedia hope the IEEE will back off UWB standard setting
• ECMA has rubberstamped one company's technology, to the possible exclusion of other worthy efforts
• ECMA's fast track to ISO means international standards may mandate technology protected by US patent law

What does microsoft's lobbying, back-room deals, and threatening of India have to do with capitalalism and freedom in India?

And for those not paying attention, this is microsoft's follow through to their threat to shift their investments from Ireland and the EU to the more patent friendly (at least so far) India.

IBM's being persuasive in an indirect manner. (but affectively)

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200512051 61942401/

Not much in "lines changed" but oh boy how those few bytes change the meaning.
Look through the clause-by-clause comparison and you'll notice that the entire "Intellectual Property Matters" clause (3.4 of the mozilla license) is missing. That clause basically permits patent-time-bombs.

Not only do MS not promise to extend the covenant past Office 11, but they limit the covenant to "patent claims necessary to conform" without defining what constitures conformance or necessity in this context.

This means that they can still sue if they allege that there was another way you could have implemented the spec without infringing on their patents (since it wasn't necessary) or they can sue if you don't implement every last detail on the spec (since your implementation isn't conformant).

Between those two, and the fact that MS have not committed not to change the spec at some future time, they can sue just about anyone they like.

PJ also points out that the EMCA doesn't require a free licence, just Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND). However they explicity decline to offer a definition of RAND and simply presume that all submissions will be offered under RAND terms. Which means MS can pretty much do as they see fit.

All in all, typical Microsoft smoke and mirrors.

That's why I'm glad the EFF is suing - they're unlikely to want to settle on the usual bullshit "here's a tonne of vouchers for the sheeple to buy more of our products" that MS normally seem to get off with. And they seem to want to make a point of contesting the applicability of the EULA.

See Groklaw's new Sony page to keep up with the details.

There appears to be proprietary licensed sub-components.

It seems like they are making the documentation for the top layer of their document format available, but you will probably need a license from Microsoft to create the .MSxml document package and/or interact with the version of Office this is supposed to ship with.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511251 44611543 It's the same link another post provided, but go to the very bottom and get the big surprise.

So, they can plausibly say, "Here's a document format for anyone to read/write." But it's not available to all and proprietary in many ways.

Very confusing, I doubt a PHB will care once they get the deal they want from Microsoft.

Given the history of M$, this means nothing. As usual, Groklaw says it well:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511281 91449853

MS XML
<w:r> <w:rPr> <w:b /> </w:rPr> <w:t>this is bold</w:t> </w:r>

OpenDocument
<text:span text:style-name="Strong_20_Emphasis"> this is bold </text:span>

XHTML
<b>this is bold</b>

Take a look at Groklaw's comparison of XML formats and tell me if you think MS's XML is human-readable! :o)

See Groklaw's comments at:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511261 63314567

Peter J. Quinn is the CIO for Massachusetts. He's the guy ultimately responsible for picking ODF over Microsoft, which then resulted in MS making their XML-based document formats for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint "open".

Groklaw already has an article on it basically exonerating Mr. Quinn.

You need to pay attention. It's impossible to install Windows, and nearly impossible to get the Microsoft published updates for their terribly secure OS, without Internet Explorer. It's also nearly impossible to take Internet Explorer out. And any hardware vendor that tried to install Netscape or now Firefox as their default browser or even include it on the desktop as an alternate to Internet Explorer suddenly finds its OEM license prices raised, and threatened by lawsuit if they reveal the predatory pricing. MS got caught repeatedly doing this sort of stunt.

The same sort of monopoly predation just got revealed in court, if OEM vendors produced systems with the Real multi-media software installed instead of or even in addition to the Windows Media players. It's nasty, and it's illegal in most country's anti-monopoly or anti-trust laws. The difficulty is in getting Microsoft all the way through the courts: actually pressing suit against a company the size of Microsoft is no small feat. Unfortunately, judges like Judge White in the most recent US anti-trust case against them are far too willing to ignore blatant criminatlity, even revealed in their own court room, in the interests of "promoting competition".

I urge you to go investigate the courtroom dealings of companies like this over at http://www.groklaw.net./ The behavior is quite scary.

This is covered in details over at Groklaw

Read http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511131 64717817

The creator of the rootkit (First 4 Internet) apparently worked with Symantec and other major antivirus companies to make sure that it would neither be detected nor removed by their software according to CNET.

This is a very damning accusation.

You seem to be misinformed about exactly what this policy entails and when it is to take place. MS office will not be banned, but it cannot be used to generate new documents after January 2007 - That's more than a year from now. There are several projects already tackling the accessability issues for ODF. There are also several programs that will allow you to convert ODF to a MS compatible format should that be necessary. For more information, try reading these articles on groklaw for starters (the first one should address your issues quite adequately):

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510292 12458555
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511141 03034350
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510150 42041410

As a concerned citizen of Massachusetts myself, I find the position of locking all Mass citizens into the use of MS office to be quite unfair.

You seem to be misinformed about exactly what this policy entails and when it is to take place. MS office will not be banned, but it cannot be used to generate new documents after January 2007 - That's more than a year from now. There are several projects already tackling the accessability issues for ODF. There are also several programs that will allow you to convert ODF to a MS compatible format should that be necessary. For more information, try reading these articles on groklaw for starters (the first one should address your issues quite adequately):

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510292 12458555
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511141 03034350
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510150 42041410

As a concerned citizen of Massachusetts myself, I find the position of locking all Mass citizens into the use of MS office to be quite unfair.

You seem to be misinformed about exactly what this policy entails and when it is to take place. MS office will not be banned, but it cannot be used to generate new documents after January 2007 - That's more than a year from now. There are several projects already tackling the accessability issues for ODF. There are also several programs that will allow you to convert ODF to a MS compatible format should that be necessary. For more information, try reading these articles on groklaw for starters (the first one should address your issues quite adequately):

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510292 12458555
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511141 03034350
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510150 42041410

As a concerned citizen of Massachusetts myself, I find the position of locking all Mass citizens into the use of MS office to be quite unfair.

Interestingly this comment, over at groklaw, suggests that the Sony EULA restrictions on disassembly/reverse engineering may be incompatible with them distributing (L)GPL software in there.

Hmm... According to the following two, the company has played sock puppet for our favorite *nix hater:

http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalCon tent/0,289142,sid39_gci1079064,00.html?bucket=NEWS
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2005 0823081138438

Now why would MS want to cloud the issues around VoIP. Could it be that they plan on entering the market?

My guess is that it is the same old tired out horse shit that they've been peddling for the past few years. I think they filed it all under seal so that the Linux community can't instantly debunk their claims as we've done in the past every time SCO showed any specific "infringing" code.

On the other hand, I think the 2.7 mess may end up being a big deal. Not that SCO made a mistake on the Linux version numbers, but because they are implicitly claiming IBM contributed infringing code to a non-existent version of Linux. The obvious lack of due diligence may go a long way in proving criminal intent and could be instrumental in putting some of these criminal behind bars.

--Court Transcript--

"The Court finds that based upon what's before me, the memorandums, the review of the transcripts, the affidavits, the correspondence, I find from that as well as from the argument of counsel that IBM did not agree as argued by SCO to provide the information related to Linux."

"Further, I find that the issue of discovery as SCO now argues should be included in the order as it relates to Linux was not raised before the Court. It was not understood by the Court as part of the request. It was not contemplated in the orders that have been prepared by the Court. And IBM has appropriately interpreted the Court's orders. And that I find specifically that SCO's interpretation of the orders takes out of context the Court's what I believe to be clear meaning."

"And I also find that Mr. Shaugnessy's affidavits are sufficiently in compliance with the requirements of the Court to explain those efforts made and those documents not produced."

"So I find that IBM has, in fact, complied with the orders of the court and I would deny except as has been now acknowledged will be provided SCO's motion to compel."

Of course, don't forget the deadline for closure of fact discovery is rapidly looming (27th Jan 2006 according to Groklaw's timeline of the IBM case) and since SCO doesn't have anything they need to manufacture a delay somehow. I would be very surprised if they get it though.

In this new motion, SCO is not only saying that she really did order IBM to produce Linux code, but adds a new version (which they also have not previously mentioned) to the list. They're telling Kimball that Wells misunderstood her own orders.

With the cajones on these guys, it's a wonder they can walk.