one could argue that Microsoft – once blessed with the open source label – will only abuse its status. The company could claim to be a huge open source supporter, derailing critics' arguments by displaying nothing more than the OSI logo when needed.
Chris DiBona, Google's open source manager, seems to fall into this cynical camp.
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Matt Asay writes that he can't understand why Microsoft's submission of its Microsoft Permissive License is not being welcomed by one and all with open arms at OSI. So I thought I'd try to explain it.
Read more »California-based IP gurus Palamida emailed me this week with some intriguing GPLv3 information that I thought I’d share with everyone this morning. Apparently all the GPLv3 haters can go to lunch, because the little license that could is seeing adoption rates of approximately 14% week-over-week.
Read more »The domination of two legal research services over the publication of federal and state court decisions is being challenged by an Internet gadfly who has embarked on an ambitious project to make more than 10 million pages of case law available free online.
Read more »The New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) has grave concerns about the draft Office Open XML (OOXML) standard currently being 'fast tracked' through the ISO.
Read more »You may have read about the unusual case where a law firm was sued for going to the Internet Archive and printing out some pages it found there, to use as evidence in a case. They won the case, but then they were accused by the loser of copyright infringement, "hacking" or a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and violating the DMCA by bypassing a robots.txt file.
Read more »I really, really don't understand this. I understand that Microsoft has a history of aggression against open source, as Chris DiBona wrote recently on the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) license-discuss e-mail list. I compete with Microsoft and have for many years. I get that Microsoft has been bad.
Read more »The SCO Group’s $5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. On Friday, Aug. 10, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled that SCO doesn’t actually own the copyrights that it was using to threaten — and in some cases, sue — Linux users.
Read more »This paper examines whether OOXML can be fully implemented by vendors other than Microsoft and concludes that a number of application specific and undisclosed behaviours (as well as a number of other technical flaws) in the proposed standard make this impossible.
Read more »Polish Technical Committee no 171 has just voted 80% against the adoption OOXML as an ISO standard [PL]. It’s not the end of the game though, since committee 171 which was first planned to make the decision does not make the final decision anymore. Another committee 182 — will be voting on the same issue soon!
Read more »GNU Classpath hacker Mark Wielaard wrote about Sun's announcement to release an early access version of NetBeans 6.0 under a dual licensing scheme of CDDL and GPL v2 with Classpath exception.
Read more »The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval.
Read more »Few events have created more fodder for the blogosphere, more fuel for Microsoft critics and more emotional responses than the Microsoft patent deals with Novell, Linspire and Xandros. While putting together a list of things people hate about these deals is easy, generating a list of positive aspects is much harder.
Read more »Official objections regarding the way matters were handled in Switzerland at the recent vote over whether or not to approve MS-OOXML as an ISO standard have just been filed [PDF] by Free Software Foundation Europe.
Read more »Anyone who was surprised by this week’s court decision (Another nail in SCO’s Linux lawsuit coffin) has not been following the history-turned-saga of UNIX all that long.
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