Apple buys asset management company Proximity
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| According to a note on the Proximity Web site all technology and
| intellectual property, including artbox workgroup and artbox
| enterprise have been acquired by Apple. Details of the purchase
| were not made public.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/macworld/20061204/tc_macworld/proximity20061204
Related:
Apple's Billion Dollar Patent Bluster
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| In our existing world of patent law, open source ideas can also come
| under threat by moneyed interests who hold patents. The accomplishments
| of free and open source collaborations often can't afford to license
| ideas that are patented, or wade through the complicated and expensive
| legal bureaucracy created to manage patents. Patented ideas are
| proprietary by definition: proprietary simply means owned, and patents
| are granted to an owner. This creates contention and problems in the
| world of open source development, where the ownership of ideas is
| intentionally shared using licenses such as the GPL, which are
| designed to prevent exclusive control. Open source projects aren't
| the only casualties of patent warfare. Whenever a patent portfolio
| falls into the hands of attorneys hoping to fully exploit its
| potential value, the interests of both businesses and consumers
| are threatened....In such attacks, the most vulnerable are the
| unarmed: open source developers who don't even like the idea of
| software patents. Patent terror attacks on collaborative resources
| that benefit society present a major problem.
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http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/F68E528C-DC9A-4B12-A064-143924EBD3F1.html
Big businesses boast of patent benefits, for small businesses
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| Jean-Pierre Laisne, of ObjectWeb, an open source software community,
| said that he found the report useless: participants were told that
| all their contributions would be recorded but at the end only
| those of Business Software Alliance and Microsoft were used.
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http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/99155/big-businesses-boast-of-patent-benefits-for-small-businesses.html
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