Lots of patent news with direct impact on Free software

On June 15, the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), launched the Peer-to-Patent community patent review pilot program.

Patent lawyers and software giants whom they are representing (also lawyers that become patent trolls) jeopardise emerging companies, almost all of which do not want software to be patentable

There has been so much talk in the last two weeks that Microsoft has changed with regard to its patent policy toward Free Software. We fool ourselves if we trust any of the window-dressing that Microsoft has put forward to convince us that we can trust them in this regard.

For the past few releases, Canonical has put quite a bit of energy into making Ubuntu a first-class OS for use in the cloud. Ubuntu now has cloud support for Amazon’s EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (a “private cloud” system based on Eucalyptus).

Red Hat has settled patent suits with Firestar Software, Inc., Amphion, and Datatern related to the jBoss Hibernate package on a patent covering the Object-Relational Database Model which Red Hat contested was not in Red Hat Linux. The settlement is said to protect upstream developers and derivative works of the upstream software, thus protecting the overall Open Source community.

New head of the European Patent Office (EPO), Alison Brimelow, has signalled her intentions early, calling a public meeting to discuss the policy vacuum left by the rejection of the Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions.

So, this is what we have been leveled to: patent wars. Earlier this week, I learned that the Linux Foundation has a portfolio of patents they own themselves and are quite willing to take Microsoft on in a patent war. And while I support the Linux Foundation fighting the good fight, I believe there are some issues that had better be considered.

Canonical is touting private cloud capabilities in an upgrade to its Ubuntu Linux OS being announced on Tuesday. Available for free download on Oct. 29, Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition introduces UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud), an open-source cloud computing environment based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Businesses can take advantage of private clouds, Canonical said.