Another shoe has dropped for the SCO Group -- this makes about a dozen -- but when will this outfit go away? First the SCO Group sues IBM for billions in a case related to alleged intellectual property infringement, and then it starts threatening Linux and Linux users. Then, after Novell says that the SCO Group does not have the rights to Unix that it needs to sue and threaten, it sues Novell.

The Editorial Committee is delighted to announce issue three of the 'International Free and Open Source Software Law Review' (IFOSS L. Rev.) is now available.

SCO's bankruptcy hearing won't take place until next month; SCO deals with pocket money, so Novell is unlikely to be properly compensated

Open source is great. Code is knowledge and knowledge should not be hidden forever. ASAP it should become public for all to use and benefit from. In the past the flow of information was slow, but nowadays is fast, and the faster we share and need information, the greater the need society has for all code, which is knowledge, to become public, with no strings attached.

OIN has just announced a new associate membership program, and Canonical is the first associate member:OIN Associate Members, such as Canonical, demonstrate support and commitment to limiting the effects of patent disputes in Linux.

Which is to say an open source business model that will generate marginal revenue improvement for firms that employ it, at the cost of developer goodwill and participation. And, potentially, distribution. What open core is not is a model that will mitigate the commercial limitations of the model sufficiently to produce outsized returns similar to historical software producers.

Apologists for the lock-in-prone "open core" model try to wrap themselves in the open source flag. Your business could suffer.

Look at this, will you? The first decision from the Board of Patents Appeals and Interferences post-Bilski to reference that US Supreme Court decision, in In Re Proudler [PDF], a ruling rejecting HP's application for a software patent, setting forth a rule stating, as I read it, as saying software is not patentable because it's an abstraction...