An attorney insists he wasn't acting as a "shill" for Microsoft in bringing the new breed of lawsuits to greater light.

The Open Invention Network (OIN) has placed three of the patents involved in the recently settled legal dispute between Microsoft and TomTom, the GPS navigator manufacturer, on the Linux Defenders portal, to throw them open to public investigation for prior art.

Remember Open Office XML – a name chosen to be as confusingly close to OpenOffice XML as possible – better known as OOXML? Remember how just over a year ago this and many other blogs and news outlets were full of sound and fury, as OOXML slouched its way through the ISO standardisation process?

The community is at work, I see. Not only is there a prior art search going on regarding three Microsoft patents asserted against TomTom, but now Andrew Tridgell has posted some code on LKML. You'll never guess what it does?

Enlarged Board
The reason this has now come to a head in Europe is because the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office has been debating whether software patents should be enforceable in EU counties. The battleground is Article 52 of the European Patent Convention, which specifically states what's excluded from patent protection.

SCO has filed its response to the proposed amicus brief by Wayne Gray, and it agrees with Novell on it -- they don't want Wayne Gray butting in to this appeal either. Novell said it was irrelevant, and SCO agrees...

Here it is, the moment many of you have been waiting for: the U.S. Trustee's office, through its counsel, has filed a motion in the SCO bankruptcy proceeding to convert the SCO's Chapter 11 to Chapter 7. And I think this will be your favorite sentence...