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This was argued a long time ago. Find me a (practicing, non-bankrupt) lawyer who says GPLv2 is revocable, and you will have proven the entire FOSS community wrong.

That kind of claim has occurred before. The largest scale of claims were those by SCO, which claimed that core code to Linux was copied from SysV UNIX, for which they owned the copyrights. There were enormous difficulties with their claimss, which were well analyzed at https://www.groklaw.net./ It turned out that they refused to detail which code was copied, samples that they claimed were copied were from BSD UNIX and copied with permission, and SCO had been contributing to the UNIX kernel themselves. It also turned out they didn't own SysV UNIX, that was still owned by Novell, and SCO had not been paying their licensing fees.

If SCO had copied in any of the SysV code, or if anyone else had, the Linux developers would have had to negotiate that with Novell, the owners of SysV UNIX. Since Novell was suing SCO for their fraudulent lawsuits against the Linux community, I think there would have been no licensing difficulty for modest contributions.

Like a lot of other real innovaton, Microsoft tried to strangle BeOS at birth. In this case by leaning on Hitachi to remove BeOS from the boot sequence.

Microsoft Settles Anti-Trust Charges with Be

Microsoft Litigation

Microsoft was never a legend, despite how billg would like to rewrite history.

Microsoft Litigation

seriously, folks, why do business at all with these guys?

you should read these sites first:

http://www.groklaw.net/
http://techrights.org/

Found the article on Groklaw. What I was thinking of was the SCO Linux Kernel Personality.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090304032134127

As others have pointed out Groklaw provided ongoing coverage of SCO vs the universe matters until August, 2013. At that point PJ gave up the ghost and quit running Groklaw. Groklaw's SCO vs IBM timeline continued to be updated with documents, including the summary judgement decision that was just overturned and returned to the district court for trial. That opinion has a decent history of the case with regards to SCO's only remaining claim against IBM.

As others have pointed out Groklaw provided ongoing coverage of SCO vs the universe matters until August, 2013. At that point PJ gave up the ghost and quit running Groklaw. Groklaw's SCO vs IBM timeline continued to be updated with documents, including the summary judgement decision that was just overturned and returned to the district court for trial. That opinion has a decent history of the case with regards to SCO's only remaining claim against IBM.

As others have pointed out Groklaw provided ongoing coverage of SCO vs the universe matters until August, 2013. At that point PJ gave up the ghost and quit running Groklaw. Groklaw's SCO vs IBM timeline continued to be updated with documents, including the summary judgement decision that was just overturned and returned to the district court for trial. That opinion has a decent history of the case with regards to SCO's only remaining claim against IBM.

As others have pointed out Groklaw provided ongoing coverage of SCO vs the universe matters until August, 2013. At that point PJ gave up the ghost and quit running Groklaw. Groklaw's SCO vs IBM timeline continued to be updated with documents, including the summary judgement decision that was just overturned and returned to the district court for trial. That opinion has a decent history of the case with regards to SCO's only remaining claim against IBM.

The point you raise consumed what felt like literally hours of court time during the pre-bankruptcy hearings presided over by Judge Kimball and Magistrate Judge Wells.

There is a helpful article on Groklaw which covers this point:-

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

in which there is discussion of an expression used by Magistrate Judge Wells during an evidentiary hearing. The analogy she used was that The SCO Group were essentially trying to perform the equivalent of accusing a shoplifter from stealing from Neiman Marcus [a US catalogue-based retailer, for non-US readers]. The Magistrate Judge basically told The SCO Group that what they were trying to do was (in accusing IBM of being the "shoplifter") say, "This thing we claim you stole. It's in the catalogue. You figure it out."

The two legal Teams (BSF for The SCO Group and CSM - Cravath, Swaine and Moore - for IBM) duelled on this point during the hearing, with IBM actually using the BSF/TSG cited cases against them, showing that the cases proved the opposite of what BSF/TSG were claiming. Even this wasn't enough to have the claims thrown out by the Magistrate Judge.

I would venture that the only reason that these claims remain and that this entire fiasco is still underway is simply because the original TSG filed for Chapter 11 literally just before a definitive ruling from Judge Kimball that would have blown their case out of the water. I'll go further: TSG filed for bankruptcy when they did precisely because they knew that the ruling would go against them and would sink their case. Their hope was that they could file for Chapter 11, swim along beneath the surface for a bit, then return with a new argument or new case when Judge Kimball got re-assigned. What they hadn't banked on was Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross deciding that the reason that The SCO Group got in such a mess was because of mis-management and deciding to appoint a Trustee. In some cases, after all, the Chapter 11 company is allowed to continue under existing management but simply with a protection-from-creditors shield in place long enough for them to be able to dig themselves out from under their troubles. Useful for legitimate Chapter 11 claimants, after all...

I'm bound to mention, as an aside, that in the view of this observer there was something decidedly fishy about the appointment of the Trustee, Cahn. During one of the bankruptcy hearings, Judge Gross made a comment on his decision to appoint a Trustee along the lines of: "Given the nature of the circumstances of this applicant - and the legal nature of their worries - it would be nice if we could find a Trustee with, I don't know, some form of legal background..."

And then, as if by magic, along comes (retired) Judge Cahn to save the day...

What followed - and again, in the view of this observer - was a relationship between Gross and Cahn which stretched the boundaries of due process. It would be an exaggeration for me to say that Judge Gross was fawning over the opinions of Judge Cahn, but it was abundantly clear that the former held the latter in the highest of regard and was entirely willing to let Judge Cahn do pretty much whatever he asked for - the rulings were getting signed off thick and fast and every bit as quickly as they were made.

In a situation like this it is true to say that there were losers all round, but the one thing I found most egregious were the "incidental" victims. For example, I recall that one of the creditors [who didn't get a dime, all the while Judge Cahn paid his own company to conduct legal research into the court case] was a small Mom-and-Pop pizzeria, not far from TSGs offices, who had provided the company with "pizzas on account". I just came away with this vision of Darl McBride and Co all sat round a meeting room table, with open pizza boxes piled high while they filled their faces, only to have them chortling

Years of this litigation were documented at https://www.groklaw.net/. The trustee is Edward Cahn.

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

And how fitting that his last name is pronounced "Con" because that's what this whole thing is.

In the very first paragraph of this most recent filing by SCO we see The Big Lie repeated:

The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (Santa Cruz) entered into a business arrangement with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) to develop a new operating system that would run on a more advanced processor manufactured by Intel Corporation (Intel). The parties signed an agreement memorializing this collaborative effort and called it Project Monterey. Another technology company, The SCO Group, Inc. (SCO), then acquired Santa Cruz’s intellectual property assets and now brings this lawsuit for IBM’s alleged misconduct during and immediately after Project Monterey.

The original SCO, The Santa Cruz Operation, sold their Unix business to Caldera. After the sale, Santa Cruz, the original SCO, changed their name to Taligent. It wasn't until a few years later, just before filing their original lawsuit against IBM, that Caldera changed their name to The SCO Group.

The name change was done for the sole purpose of facilitating this lawsuit and creating confusion -- pretending that The SCO Group is the original SCO. An example of this was seen in 2004 when The SCO Group announced on their website the 25th anniversary of the company. The problem is, Caldera, the predecessor to The SCO Group, was only founded in the early 90s. 2004 was the 25th anniversary of the original SCO not the current phoney, pretend SCO.

Years of this litigation were documented at https://www.groklaw.net/. The trustee is Edward Cahn.

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

And how fitting that his last name is pronounced "Con" because that's what this whole thing is.

In the very first paragraph of this most recent filing by SCO we see The Big Lie repeated:

The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (Santa Cruz) entered into a business arrangement with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) to develop a new operating system that would run on a more advanced processor manufactured by Intel Corporation (Intel). The parties signed an agreement memorializing this collaborative effort and called it Project Monterey. Another technology company, The SCO Group, Inc. (SCO), then acquired Santa Cruz’s intellectual property assets and now brings this lawsuit for IBM’s alleged misconduct during and immediately after Project Monterey.

The original SCO, The Santa Cruz Operation, sold their Unix business to Caldera. After the sale, Santa Cruz, the original SCO, changed their name to Taligent. It wasn't until a few years later, just before filing their original lawsuit against IBM, that Caldera changed their name to The SCO Group.

The name change was done for the sole purpose of facilitating this lawsuit and creating confusion -- pretending that The SCO Group is the original SCO. An example of this was seen in 2004 when The SCO Group announced on their website the 25th anniversary of the company. The problem is, Caldera, the predecessor to The SCO Group, was only founded in the early 90s. 2004 was the 25th anniversary of the original SCO not the current phoney, pretend SCO.

Years of this litigation were documented at https://www.groklaw.net/. The trustee is Edward Cahn.

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

Years of this litigation were documented at https://www.groklaw.net/. The trustee is Edward Cahn.

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

@GerryGilmore: 'There was NO "UNIX API" as MS had, hence their subsequent success' .. That and sabotaging Windows to not run other peoples software and keeping the API calls undocumented.

Microsoft's Allegedly Undocumented APIs - Comes v. Microsoft

'The demos of OS/2 were excellent, crashing the system had the intended effect'

That would be an interesting Time Article .. ref

If the patent trolls have retreated under their bridges and judges and juries are more awake about patent abuse and IP extortion then I think we all owe a great dept of thanks to pj and Groklaw - http://www.groklaw.net/

Way back in 2003, Darl McBride thought that his company SCO (pretending to be the defunct Santa Cruz Operation) decided on a scan to monetize Linux, through some disputed Novell IP.

pj, a paralegal, aided by a growing cohort of assistants, tracked down and followed every slimy twist and turn of the multiple cases brought by SCO against Novell, IBM and several others. They dug up so much forgotten information, case-law and witnesses that even the lawyers admitted to using Groklaw as a source.

Eventually it was decided that Novell did in fact own the IP in question, and "millions of lines of :copied code" turned out to be a couple of headers of no consequence.

Finally Darl's dreams of wealth beyond belief collapsed and SCO went into bankruptcy.

The whole saga, and SCO's ultimate ignominious collapse, was a big wake-up call for patent/IP trolls and Groklaw played no small part in it.

Groklaw stopped in 2013 because their messenger anonymizer was forced to close, but their archives are still online.

We owe a big dept of thanks to pj and Groklaw

Mac

http://www.groklaw.net/ There you go

Their monopoly really took off around 1996. Before then there were plenty of magazines for Atari/Amiga and all the other home computers of the time. By 1995, it was all Windows 95/Windows NT and Internet Explorer with Microsoft walking around everywhere banging a big drum and shouting "UNIX is legacy, Windows NT is the future". They even went as far as demanding that companies assign their brightest staff to their projects. Microsoft and Intel covered each others back so they were known as Wintel. That was the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer legal battle or the Browser Wars. Then for another decade there was SCO UNIX vs. Linux
Groklaw

Read this Groklaw article

In particular this section:
"So when you read people say that the GPL is perhaps not enforceable because you don't sign it or click on a form, or because of a lack of privity, or because there is a lack of consideration, or some such, you'll understand that the person misunderstood and thought in terms of contract law."

That is exactly what happened in your example case.

One of my favorite is PX00307. Notice that it is about "PM vs. Windows" as it was about API calls only, which was the wrong way to make the decision.

We're talking about a children's museum. The relatively subtle difference between a Turing Machine and a RAM based CPU is not actually at a level where I think they are suitable for a children's museum.
Christopher was not a Turing machine and nobody claimed it was - but then, it wasn't a computer either. It wasn't programmable, let alone reprogrammable. It was essentially a mathematical pattern matching machine that was used to brute force the code-breaking. There are elements of it's architecture which later computers replicated but the key design was very different and it was a single-purpose machine. Even Turing wouldn't have called it a version of his idealized mathematical concept known as the Turing Machine.
A CPU with memory and instructions however, are about as close as we could get to building something which is meant to contain an infinite length piece of paper.

Random Access Memory was, to my mind, really just a major optimization over his sequential access model.

http://www.groklaw.net/article... This article explains the point better than I can.

Education is a skill known as a lies-to-children. You start with simple, but flagrantly untrue, explanations - which makes more complicated lies understandable and you don't get to anything resembling 'true' explanations until grad school.
For children - a Turing machine is the concept that was realized in CPUs. That allows you to then go on and explain Turing-completeness and finally RAM designs with people who now understand the basic principles of computing.

Von Neumann's architecture differs from Turing machines in being about something fundamentally different. Turing was developing the early stages of computing theory (though he had set out to do something very different - attempt to create a new language for expressing mathematical proofs in) while Von Neumann's was an engineering design - the seperation of data and instruction while both are in the same basic format (and possibly even on the same medium) was a way to practically put Turing's pencil-holder into the machine itself, but it was an engineering concept.
Both are still fundamental to how computers work to this day - and for children's level education that's all you can or OUGHT TO try and teach. You can't possibly teach the next level to somebody who hasn't first heard this lie. That's not how education works or ever can work because it isn't how human brains learn things.

Anonymous coward: 'How the fuck is this bullshit modded "insightful"?'

Because this bullshit happens to be true as unlike the windows API, it has been fully documented elsewhere. Here's billg and the rest of the crew in their own words, reads like something out of the Sopranos.

Comes vs Microsoft

Microsoft's dirty tricks archive vanishes

Microsoft Litigation

> If fair use is hindering their business, how would free use weigh in? Take open source, for example. Microsoft could easily argue Linux is making it difficult to sell their OS for server use. In fact, I'd imagine that if they somehow managed to eliminate fair use,

They did, using SCO as a disposable legal proxy. Please review the legal history of the SCO copyright cases, captured in the archives of https://www.groklaw.net/. Microsoft's fiscal support of SCO was established pretty early in the process: SCO could not have continued to confuse the intellectual property rights of Linux without the clear Microsoft support throughout most of the case.

"You've got a long memory. I'd nearly forgotten about those episodes."

I found references to these emails on Groklaw in regards to the Comes v. Microsoft case . I understand that ever since Microsoft's policy is to wipe overtones email once a month :)

This seems to be the Notice of Appeal

It all sounds so familiar. Why would that be? Oh yes. Oracle is a purveyor of databases software. The SCO Group used to be a purveyor of operating system software. However, it eventually upped its claims against IBM to at least $5 billion. Not far short of Oracle's demand for $9.3 billion. Where is SCO now?

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf4/IB...
"Today SCO is, as the Court is aware, in a LIQUIDATION process ... It started out as a Chapter 11, became a Chapter 7 going back to 2007. These claims are the last, really the only asset remaining of SCO."

Oracle is threatening to become the new SCO.

Would you recommend a product from a company that is on a path to Chapter 7?

The judge released another summary judgement in IBM's favor a few days earlier to this one. This is about the unfair competition claim (Count VI) by SCO against IBM. Specifically this involved Project Monterrey.

Back in the day, IBM and SCO both jointly worked on Project Monterrey which would put SCO's Unixware and IBM's AIX on Itanium. The project was doomed by Intel's delays in launching the new chip architecture as well as the poor performance of it. Both parties put out products but IBM eventually threw their support behind Linux instead.

SCO claims unfair competition in that IBM took code from Project Monterrey to put into Linux and that IBM undermined Monterrey by secretly developing Linux and put out "sham" Itanium products without support. The judge ruled in IBM's favor because the Joint Development Agreement (JDA) signed by both parties clearly allowed IBM to use any code as it saw fit. Secondly if IBM violated the JDA it would be considered a breach of contract and not unfair competition. Lastly the JDA also clearly stated that IBM had no obligations to do more than release their Itanium product.

Damn it is that what happened? I had no idea.

Yes, it happened (though the investigators found the wrong Pamela Jones). The reason PJ closed down Groklaw was because of NSA spying. The general supposition, based on her final Groklaw article, is that she received an NSA demand to spy on her users, but her conscience would not allow her to do so. So she stopped doing Groklaw so she wouldn't have anything to spy on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM...

'It's weird and a little introverted to be fixated on a little niche like software.'

Microsoft Litigation

Alacritech Inc. v. Microsoft, Amado v. Microsoft, American Video Graphics v. Microsoft, AOL Time-Warner v. Microsoft, Apple v. Microsoft, Arendi Holdings v. Microsoft, AT&T v. Microsoft, Avary v. Microsoft, Be, Inc. v. Microsoft, Blue Mountain Arts v. Microsoft, Borland sues Microsoft over brain drain, Bristol Technology v. Microsoft Corp., BTG International et al. [UK] v. Microsoft, Burst v. Microsoft, Caldera v. Microsoft, Eolas Technologies v. Microsoft, E-Pass v. Microsoft, Go Corporation v. Microsoft, Goldtouch v. Microsoft, Hyperphrase v. Microsoft, Inner Workings v. Microsoft, Intertrust Technologies v. Microsoft, Lindows v. Microsoft, Macia v. Microsoft, Netscape v. Microsoft, Priceline v. Microsoft, Sendo v. Microsoft, Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. (1997), Ticketmaster v. Microsoft, US v. MS, No. 98-1232(CKK) Tunney Act, Visto v. Microsoft, Wang Labs v. Microsoft ..

They succeeded by ripped stuff mostly from Lotus, and creating undocumentated APIs that would give Excel an advantage under Windows and giving MS developers preferential access to OCX APIs and paying people to destroy their Lotus 123 System Disks :)

They succeeded by ripped stuff mostly from Lotus, and creating undocumentated APIs that would give Excel an advantage under Windows and giving MS developers preferential access to OCX APIs and paying people to destroy their Lotus 123 System Disks :)

Examples of systemd breaking the kernel include the "debug" logging option, and the inevitable failures of such a complex weave of components killing PID 1.

              https://bugs.freedesktop.org/s...
              http://ewontfix.com/14/

Unfortunately, "running syslogd in parallel" doesn't work well as new daemons or services are compiled for one or the other. And I'm afraid the code to integrate with systemd logging is a tar-baby: it becomes very difficult, very quickly, to maintain separate logging, but the logging is not portable to UNIX based operating systems. And that change is breaking portability for new projects even as I write. If you're willing, take a good look at the latest httpd source code to see what's happening to logging there.

And yes, systemd is trying to replace "su". See the comments by systemd's core author, Leonart Pottering, at:

              https://github.com/systemd/sys...

It's particularly amusing in those comments that Lennart Potteroing thinks that Linux is UNIX. UNIX is trademarked, licensed, and applies only to systems that follow various POSIX standards, and there's a fascinating history of lawsuits about this involving the SCO Group, which tried to claim that Linux was a UNIX descendant. Old material on this is at:

              https://www.groklaw.net/

I can understand why hearing these issues voiced again could be tiresome, and not all concerned developers are well informed. But rejecting all concerns as being "information from trolls" ignores the very real and often unnecessary problems systemd is creating.

I am not, in fact, a lawyer, but I do know how to use Google (unlike so many here). For instance, I can, without any adult help, open up my web browser, and type in http://www.google.com/ and go to a convenient search engine. In the search box for that search engine, I can type in "eula struck down as unconscionable" and click on the button labeled "Search." And get results such as

this, which talks about Bragg v. Linden Research, Inc., in which Linden's TOS (specifically, the arbitration clause) is struck down as unconscionable not once, not twice, but at least three or four different times and ways ("procedural unconscionability" and "substantive unconscionability" in two different ways, and then again on the latter after Linden amended it).

Wired also covers Gatton v. T-Mobile, again on an arbitration clause, and ruled unconscionable both procedurally and substantively. Also unconscionable for prohibiting class action lawsuits, because "that form of litigation is often the only means of stopping and punishing corporate wrongdoing." It also discusses Douglas v. U.S. District Court, which is about changing the terms of a contact after it has been signed, and which was ruled unconscionable. Gatton is often cited as recognizing that all click-wrap license have an element of unconscionability that must be considered by the court.

This has a link to this", which is a ruling on McKee v. AT&T, ruing their arbitration clause unconscionable.

Note that these are the first three results on the search, and the fourth is on McKee v. AT&T again.

Also note that these are all different courts, state and federal, all over the country.

Unconscionability is an affirmative defense - the defendant has to demonstrate why the contract is unconscionable, but it does, in fact, happen, and more importantly, it took me, literally, less than ten seconds to find example (and five of that was waiting for the browser to open.)

To quote the third link, you may now feed my cats for a week.

> And if the proprietary software is declared as such but is *better than* the free software, that's not OK?

We ran into this with SCO OpenServer . SCO OpenServer was a pretty good closed source UNIX. The company casually published freeware, open source, and proprietary tools. They then turned on the free software community with fraudulent claims of copyright violation in the Linux kernel, claims made against both other software companies but also against those companies' clients. Much of the legal history of the event is available at http://www.groklaw.net/: one of the problems that extended the lawsuits was SCO's unwillingness to specify, or document, their claims. One of the factors that helped Red Hat in the resulting legal mess was the clear provenance and licensing of every bit of Red Hat code, and Red Hat's very clear careful licensing and segregation of proprietary, closed source tools, and of open source tools for which they could publish the source code and their modifications.

Yea, it is frustrating to watch DRAM manufacturers profiting while MS had to fit Win95 into 4MB. Of course, this is not the only unethical tactics MS used to attack OS/2 later on. PX00307 mentioned "32-bit Windows extenders" while ignoring the problems.

“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!” ref

These details all used to show on www.groklaw.net, whose thoughtful legal analyses and detailed reporting are missed by many

I too missed the insightful analysis of Groklaw a lot

Unfortunately, we have only ourselves to blame because it is us who keep on funding nefarious cabals such as that motherfucking NSA with our tax monies

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

'Tonight Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, delivered the “footnote” address at the Open Source Business Conference 2008. I asked Brad to speak because I figured it was the shortest path to getting clarity from Microsoft vis-a-vis open source and the nettlesome legal issues that have plagued Microsoft’s relationship with open source' ref.

"I understand that Microsoft may be using the OSI's license approval process to its own ends, and potentially ends that may be anti-open source. I'm still not sure, however, that it's appropriate to treat an incoming license from Microsoft any differently than one that comes from Linus Torvalds ref"

A mystery man or woman updated the SCO timeline on Groklaw:

http://www.groklaw.net/staticp...

Unfortunately, no update of the legendary PJ comments. But the timeline shows that the judge granted partially and dismissed partially an IBM request for summary judgement in Dec. 2014.

Appeal to jurists with Pacer access: please report on SCO-IBM fight of the last two years. The case was revived (with IBM's consent) the same day Groklaw shut down.

I hope they kept everything, SCO was going to start destroying stuff in 2013.

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

You claim you can "just encrypt" your email, but it was the creator of lavabit, the "secure" email system that Snowden used, who stated essentially that email can NOT be made secure. It's not just a technology problem. When Secret Courts tell citizens they can't talk about Secret Orders, "encryption" isn't the solution. It's not just what you're saying, but with whom your talking to (e.g. metadata).

You may not agree with that, but you can't declare that no one else can believe it. You can read PJ's statement for yourself. You may not believe her, but you can't look into her heart and know that the reason she gave wasn't sincere:

My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I've always been a private person. That's why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours.

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.

There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

That is NOT why she folded up groklaw. See more at http://www.groklaw.net/article...

If the CEO lacks a moral compass and is prepared to do anything, screw over friends, colleges and business rivals then that would promote the interests of the company. Unfortunately in the process he'll do immeasurable damage to the rest of the industry. Take the case of Bill Gates, or the rail-and-oil robber barons from a previous century.

Microsoft Sues Samsung

Microsoft Litigation

Those "standards bodies" allow that to happen

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about. They didn't "allow" it to happen. They were taken over by Microsoft - a hostile organisation which exploited their membership rules.

Even if microsoft doesnt do it you dont think somebody else will?

Nobody else did.

Read this:

Summary: "The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting 'standardization by corporation', something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees," wrote Martin Bryan.

Martin Bryan, ISO Governor, JTC 1/SC 34 WG1, Microsoft's strong-arming of the ISO process regarding Open XML, the proprietary format of Microsoft Office, may be destroying its legitimacy.

In a memo sent following his last meeting as head of the working group on WG1, which is handling Microsoft's application to make the Word format an ISO standard as ECMA 376, outgoing Governor Martin Bryan (above), an expert on SGML and XML, accused the company of stacking his group.

At issue is a sudden influx of so-called P members to the body, "whose only interest is the fast-tracking of ECMA 376," Bryan wrote. The P members are not voting on anything else, preventing it from moving on any other work.

Bryan suggested that unless the ISO tightens its membership rules to eliminate the abuse its work should be passed on to OASIS, and he closed with this:

The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”, something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees. I am glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible.

Is making Microsoft's Open XML format a standard so important that Microsoft is willing to destroy the ISO process to win it?

http://www.groklaw.net/staticp...

See other posts about links to many groklaw.net posts which are about why they think you are wrong. There are many posts dealing with you... E.g. http://www.groklaw.net/article... [groklaw.net]

While Groklaw mentioned me many times, I'd need to see a list of cases in which Groklaw made a prediction that turned out true and I made one on the same issue that didn't. The one you linked to is from the spring of 2010 and it's about the IBM mainframe antitrust matter. Stuff like that is obviously not decided by an online community (or the open source community). The way to look at complaints about allegedly anticompetitive behavior is not binary. It's a question of whether someone had a reasonable basis for being concerned. In this case, the basis was clearly reasonable given that the European Commission opened formal investigations (a few months later) and IBM ultimately made commitments (the following year).

Also maybe Oracle can win that API copyrightability dispute, but that is because the Judges have no clue (except Alsup) (Cooperations are people and such, yeah right).

Judge Alsup's non-copyrightability ruling was flawed even from a purely technical point of view (for example, the way he conflated the Java language and the APIs). I know that a lot of people here (and on Groklaw, for that matter) liked the outcome (sort of like 'the end justifies the means') but I doubt that they even cared to read the decision from a critical perspective. There was an unjustified apotheosis on the Internet after his decision (an apotheosis that the judge himself presumably didn't even want to happen). Then the Federal Circuit, which enjoys a great reputation around the world for its IP expertise, determined that he had confused even basic principles of copyright law (for example, by importing fair use considerations into the copyrightability analysis). Those who hated that outcome concluded, like the post I just quoted, that the Fed. Cir. must have gotten it all wrong. Again, they substituted their belief as to the proper outcome for an analysis of the actual reasoning. Just like I thing people missed the weak aspects (even in purely technical regards) of Judge Alsup's ruling, the same crowd missed the strong ones of the Fed. Cir. opinion. I recommend to those who disagree with the Fed. Cir. to read the actual opinion, including the footnotes (some of the best stuff is found in them). The Fed. Cir.'s description of the Java language-API relationship makes a whole lot more sense than what the district judge wrote.

That still does not change that you talked about billion dollars, and come on, even if they lose you don't really believe it will be in this order of magnitude finally, are you?

To answer your question (before explaining why the first part is based on a misunderstanding), my refresher Q&A on this case says in its headline that while there was a billion-dollar damages claim, this case is about something more strategic. The commercial value of what's at stake far exceeds a billion dollars, and the key to the kingdom for Oracle is to prevail on the merits and obtain an injunction, not for the sake of harming Android but for the purpose of bringing Android back into the Java fold (as Oracle's lawyers described it in a court filing).

The fact that Oracle brought a billion-dollar damages claim came to light in mid-June 2011. I merelyquoted from a court filing and explained that this was the (financial) risk (of course, as always provided that the plaintiff p

Groklaw never made any prediction whatsoever

See other posts about links to many groklaw.net posts which are about why they think you are wrong. There are many posts dealing with you... E.g. http://www.groklaw.net/article...

Also maybe Oracle can win that API copyrightability dispute, but that is because the Judges have no clue (except Alsup) (Cooperations are people and such, yeah right).

That still does not change that you talked about billion dollars, and come on, even if they lose you don't really believe it will be in this order of magnitude finally, are you?