Archive for category Patent System
RMS on .NET and Mono
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Linux, Novell, Patent System on July 15, 2010
Glyn Moody has up a short email interview with RMS on the topic of .NET and Mono (and dotGNU). Here is my favorite bit from RMS: RMS: You shouldn’t write software to use .NET. No exceptions. The basic point is that Microsoft has patents over features in .NET, and its patent promise regarding free software [...]
Attention to Detail: Ed Bott attacks the FSF
Posted by Jason in Patent System on May 3, 2010
Oof. ZDNet’s Ed Bott attacks the FSF hard in “Ogg versus the world: don’t fall for open-source FUD“. One issue Mr. Bott calls out some of the points made on the PlayOgg FAQ as being “FUD”, “outright lies”, “technically absurd”, “factually dead wrong”, and maybe even downright anti-kittens-with-funny-captions-underneath. Let’s look at one of his examples [...]
Patent Absurdity
Posted by Jason in Patent System on April 18, 2010
Patent Absurdity is a short film (about 1/2 hour) breaking down exactly how “software patents broke the system”. The Film Patent Absurdity provides an easy-to-understand walk through the legal and historical development of software patents, and also takes care to point out the severe flaws in the results. The eHarmony patent is devastatingly illustrative if [...]
Google to Open Source VP8?
Posted by Jason in Patent System, Propriatery Technology on April 13, 2010
NewTeeVee has up a posting announcing they have “learned from multiple sources” that Google will indeed be Open Source-ing the VP8 video codec. Furthermore, the announcement asserts that Mozilla Firefox will support VP8 for HTML5 video (along with Google Chrome, naturally). I mentioned in passing before the FSF request to Google to take this action, and if this news turns out [...]
Matt Asay On IBM Patents
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Patent System on April 8, 2010
Wow. I don’t often agree with the Canonical COO, Matt Asay, on many things and even when I do in general, I often find myself in disagreement with details. In Mr. Asay’s recent piece “IBM patent claims show open source has arrived“, that’s not a problem – because I disagree with everything, filled as it is with inaccuracies [...]
Just Another Zealot
Posted by Jason in Patent System, Propriatery Technology on April 5, 2010
From the Prospect Magazine article “Mash the State“: Much government work is done by civil servants emailing Word documents back and forth. Yet Berners-Lee refuses, on principle, to use Word, which is a proprietary rather than an open source format. On one occasion, one official recalled, Berners-Lee received an urgent document in Word from one [...]
The Disappearing Article Mystery
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Microsoft, Novell, Patent System on March 24, 2010
This is strange. The Treasure I ran across some interesting quotes allegedly from Miguel de Icaza: Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem [...] Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine [...]
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