Archive for category Patent System
Patents and Change: More on Novell-Attachmate
Posted by Jason in Novell, Patent System on December 1, 2010
More brilliant, unique and rainbow-creating analysis on the Novell-Attachmate deal. Answering Questions First, you may want to read my stunningly well-written post “What Patents is Novell Selling?” Make sure you have a pencil in both hands. The main conclusion I draw patent-wise is that we can easily find Novell has a little over 800 patents, and we [...]
What Patents is Novell Selling?
Posted by Jason in Linux, Microsoft, Novell, Patent System on November 26, 2010
Happy Turkey Day! According to my (on-going and slip-shod) research, here’s some speculation on exactly what patents Novell is selling to Microsoft. What patents are for sell? Only a number (882) is given in the SEC filing, so we don’t know for sure. But, we can look at patents assigned to (and applied for by) [...]
Microsoft becoming the next SCO
Posted by admin in Microsoft, Patent System on October 5, 2010
Steve Ballmer tells it best in his own words: Android has a patent fee. It’s not like Android’s free. You do have to license patents. HTC’s signed a license with us and you’re going to see license fees clearly for Android as well as for Windows. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/03/ballmer-android-aint-free-microsoft-gets-paid/ And some desillusioned people still believe Mono/Moonlight would [...]
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 [...]
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