In spite of their public opposition to Microsoft’s attempt to get the ISO standardization nod for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, IBM and Google quietly are supporting OOXML.
Read more »Filtering and Copyright Extension Fail to Find a Home in EU
"The EU's CULT committee voted on the final form of its report on the Cultural Industries in Europe earlier today, and chose to listen to their constituents, not the music industry's lobbyists. Amendments proposing ISP filtering and blocking, as well as a last-minute request for an EU directive extending copyright terms, were all either voted down or withdrawn by their proposers..."
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Microsoft tries to CTRL-W WordPerfect lawsuit again
icrosoft is asking the Supreme Court to strike-out a multi-billion dollar word processing monopoly lawsuit from Novell.
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While you’re waiting, don’t save in OOXML format
While all the drama is unfolding before the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February and the subsequent 30 day period while countries can still change their vote, I thought I would point out something that I assume is fairly obvious to most people: Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably
about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with
long term interoperability.
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HP Unveils Three-Pronged FOSS Governance Initiative
Traditional corporate policies for managing software assets are often inadequate to address the unique characteristics of free and open source software, according to HP officials. During a recent customer engagement, for example, HP discovered three times as many FOSS licenses as the client originally thought it held, totaling 75 versus 25.
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FTC Announces Landmark Settlement in “Patent Hold Up” Action
On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the most important resolution of a standards-related enforcement action since Rambus, and possibly since its landmark settlement with Dell Computer in 1995. At issue was whether a licensing promise made by a patent-owning participant in a standards development process is binding upon someone that later owns the same patent. In a split 3 – 2 decision, the FTC has ruled that it does, when the later owner exploits the “lock in” of the marketplace by dramatically increasing the cost to license the patent in question.
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'Tofu' license pits open source against meat
ExtTLD, for developing components on the open source Ext JS framework, has been released under a license apparently suited only to vegans, vegetarians and animal rights activists.
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Dual License model: Future of open source?
I have noticed a trend developing in the business models of successful open source companies. These companies are implementing a business model that is based on dual licensing their software.
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Battle on Microsoft standard push
A GLOBAL war has broken out over Microsoft's bid to make the XML document format used in Office 2007 an international standard.
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GPL and BSD : impact
One of the many common newcomer questions to Open-Licensed software is why there is such hostility between the supports of Linux, and the supports of the various BSD's.
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What’s going on with Barracuda, Trend Micro, and ClamAV?
It seems like everyone is talking about Barracuda, Trend Micro, ClamAV, and what it has to do with open-source. The whole issue is made complicated mostly because of a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) that the two companies have been throwing at each other. In fact, it is getting hard to tell who is right and who is wrong through all the FUD.
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Microsoft antitrust oversight extended to 2009
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a ruling this evening extending the expiring terms of Microsoft's U.S. antitrust consent decree until Nov. 12, 2009, two years from the previous expiration date. California, New York and other states had been asking for a five-year extension; Microsoft had argued that none was needed.
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Red Hat packagers dance around frivolous music game software patents
Sadly, there’s nothing genuinely new about this story, but a recent discussion on the Fedora Games mailing list demonstrates the sort of chilling effect on innovation and impoverishment of the intellectual commons that occurs today because of a broken, outmoded US patent system and its misapplication to software. I’m at a loss for words to express how absurd these “patents” are.
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Torvalds Blasts Patent Trolls, Microsoft, and Linux Market Share?
Linus Torvalds, Linux creator, came out in a Q&A podcast with the Linux Foundation attacking patent trolls, SUN Microsystems, Microsoft, and More. "[P]atents on software should not be allowed," Torvalds said, "...it just does not work in software....[software] contains so many pieces that nobody could even know whether...different things might be under some completely trivial patent."
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We have submitted AGPL to OSI
f you follow open source, or at least this blog, you remember the debate around GPL and the ASP loophole. In a nutshell, companies using a trick to avoid returning changes to the code back to the community. The last chapter is that AGPL v3 (the GPL version that fixes the ASP loophole) was finalized in November, and we switched the Funambol project to it.
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