For anyone wanting a translation from lawyer-speak re patents, this article cuts through the legal jargon and gives you the meat of the discussion, as it were.

This week Mark Webbink, former Red Hat General Counsel discusses software patents, their absurdity and the business climate and “judicial activism” that helped create them.

If you aren't happy with the performance of your software, the solution should be simple: Switch to different software. In practice, however, jumping ship is seldom that easy, and vendor lock-in is a reality with which most IT departments are far too familiar.

The fallout from the events leading up to the recent vote on whether or not to approve Microsoft's Office Open XML documents format as an ISO standard continues unabated, more than a month after the software maker conceded it had lost that vote.

It’s become an annual event. Steve Ballmer shoots his yap about how Linux and open source violate Microsoft patents. The open-source community says, “OK, show us your cards, your patents,” and Ballmer shuts up for six months or so.

Having been a Linux user for a number of years, weathering immense criticism for thinking like a normal person rather than an engineer, you might think that articles like this one would have me moving in to agree with such statements. But me being me, I choose to rebel.

I wanted to share with you a conversation I've been having with a retired EU patent attorney with hands-on experience with the US patent system as well. He was in the pharmaceutical field, where patents are All, of course, and so he presented me with a wonderful opportunity to learn. I asked him if I could please share what I'm learning with you, and he said I could.

When Novell and Microsoft aren't busy making their products interoperable, they're busy suing each other. A federal appeals court has decided that Novell's antitrust claims against Microsoft may continue. The Linux vendor argues that Microsoft used its market muscle to weaken sales of word processing program WordPerfect and spreadsheet app Quattro Pro.