Red Hat, Inc. announced that today a jury in federal court in Marshall, Texas, returned a verdict in favor of Red Hat, Inc. and Novell, Inc. in a case alleging patent infringement brought by IP Innovation LLC, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation and Technology Licensing Corporation.

While researching the recent battle over H.264 as the default HTML5 media format, I’ve discovered that open-source advocates are just as capable of spreading FUD as those mega-corporations. And the single worst offender is the Free Software Foundation.

Does having an open license for a software project, have all the advantages negated if the development process is basically closed to the outside world?

Software licensing in general, and open source licensing in particular, is poorly understood. I was reminded of this last week when speaking on a panel to a group of investors and entrepreneurs, the value of whose companies depends on protection of their intellectual property.

Now here's the really scary part:

I'm not just talking about TVs and set-top boxes here. This stuff is targetted squarely at operating system vendors.

In the aftermath of the Acacia case it is important to point out that SUSE is still encumbered with unjustified patent tax (Microsoft's racket)

SCO has filed its monthly operating reports for March. This the month they did the deal with Ralph Yarro, so we find out what they did first with that loan money. Pay themselves, of course, and their lawyers. And one of their experts.

And so the suing continues. Apple and Nokia aren't particularly friendly towards one another as of late, with both companies accusing each other of infringing upon one another's patents.