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Let's keep our eye on the ball
,----[ Quote ]
| The point is that the current Commission is going to
| step down in a few weeks, and Commissioner Kroes â
| who has an incredibly good track record on the
| Microsoft case â might feel the urgency to close
| everything behind her, leaving the office empty and
| her case teams without a case. But at which
| conditions?
|
| [...]
|
| The single biggest issue is patents. The current WSPP
| agreement does not contain any meaningful provision
| or license or promise or non-assertion pledge or
| anything that is useful to Free Software projects.
| Without that clearance, once everything is over, who
| is going to stop the patents to be asserted or,
| worse, merely threatened (call it FUD, patent
| rattling, whatever)? Microsoft has been very clear to
| reserve this right. If it is home free with a broad
| undertaking, there will not be any real pressure
| against the assertion of the patents, apart the
| reaction of some friendlier companies and of the OIN.
| We have seen just a small preview with the TomTom
| case.
|
| [...]
|
| And the future will bring Silverlight. And the future
| will bring OOXML mandated by public authorities as if
| it was an open standard. And by the way, I am still
| awaiting the first attempted implementation of
| ISO/IEC IS 29500 (what the standard is called)
| because Microsoft Office's file format is not even
| close to be that, and it is not even ECMA 376. It is
| a proprietary, undisclosed file format. To add insult
| to the damage, I start hearing that even those
| corrections that were hurried in during the Ballot
| Resolution Meeting to pass the standard like a square
| pin into a round hole are now rolled back very
| quietly in JTC1 SC34 â hijacked by Microsoft â
| because of lack of interoperability with MS Office.
| Which incidentally confirms my assessment that the
| implementation is the standard and the standard is
| the implementation. The process we underwent to
| approve or disapprove an international standard was
| merely a sham.
`----
http://piana.eu/en/ms_undertaking
Facebook Sued Over Social Networking Patent
,----[ Quote ]
| Facebook has been sued by a software company in
| Baltimore that claims the social-networking site is
| violating a two-year-old patent.
`----
http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2009/09/22/22idg-facebook-sued-over-social-networking-patent-53684.html
Baltimore firm sues Facebook for patent infringement
,----[ Quote ]
| WhoGlue Inc., a Canton company with fewer than five
| employees, filed the lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District
| Court for Delaware, where Facebook is incorporated.
|
| [...]
|
| It's unclear whether the patent infringement case that
| WhoGlue is trying to make against Facebook can be
| applied to a host of similar social networking sites
| that use similar technologies for helping their users
| manage online interactions.
`----
http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-bz.facebook24sep24,0,5315456.story
Recent:
The SMB Blues
,----[ Quote ]
| SMB (Server Message Block) is the network protocol glue
| that binds many file and print servers and clients for
| Windows and Linux, but it's recently been running into some
| trouble. First, Microsoft's proprietary take on it, SMB2,
| has real security problems. Next, Likewise has released a
| new open-source SMB/CIFS (Common Internet File System) file
| server software stack to share files among Linux, Mac, Unix
| and Windows computers, which, in the past, had been based
| on Samba, the popular open-source SMB server. Samba's
| leadership is not happy with this.
|
| [...]
|
| Meanwhile, back at traditional SMB, which works just fine,
| Likewise recently released Likewise-CIFS and its commercial
| brother, Likewise Open 5.3, under the GPLv2. The company
| claims it is the only commercially supported CIFS/SMB file
| server for storage vendors and enterprises. Likewise-CIFS
| supports both SMB1 and SMB2.
|
| So what's the problem? As Krishna Ganugapat, VP of
| engineering at Likewise, said in a recent interview, "We
| came to realize that most successful open-source companies
| must be in a position where they control their own
| technology destiny." Later, he said, "We now owned our own
| intellectual property; we held the copyright to all our
| source code."
`----
http://blogs.computerworld.com/14783/the_smb_blues
Tony OBryan - Subject: Translation
,----[ Quote ]
| The story deserves an executive summary:
|
| "Microsoft writes new software, and the software sucks. A
| Microsoft-funded organization once again tries to kill a
| Microsoft competitor (Samba, therefore Linux)."
|
| That's the entire gist of the story.
`----
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-09-22-026-35-NW-SV-NT-0000
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