-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Red Hat CEO Whitehurst Blasts Software Patents
,----[ Quote ]
| Red Hat is the biggest open source
| software company, but itâs got a long way
| to go, says the companyâs chief executive
| Jim Whitehurst.
|
| On a visit to London he criticised
| software patents, spoke on the difficulty
| of changing public sector practices, and
| repeated a goal to make Red Hat a Â1
| billion company next year - after re-
| affirming the companyâs strategy.
|
| [...]
|
| As is well known, Red Hat contributes to
| the fast-moving Linux development process,
| but ships releases which are âfrozenâ
| every three years and which are controlled
| and supported for ten years. âIf you donât
| control the code, how can you provide SLAs
| [service level agreements]?â
|
| Red Hat spends millions of dollars per
| release, which allows it to make it solid
| enough for people to build trading
| applications on top of it. And of course,
| as he is fond of pointing out, âover half
| the worldâs equity trades happen on top of
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux,â because it is -
| he believes - the worldâs most secure and
| stable operating system.
|
| âBits are free and functionality is free,â
| he said. What the company sells is
| innovation and stability - and itâs never
| raised the price of the product.
`----
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/interview/red-hat-ceo-whitehurst-blasts-software-patents-7489
Fortinet Picks Up the Baton From Barracuda - Pick Your Brain (Another Call for Prior Art)
,----[ Quote ]
| Do you remember a couple of years ago
| Barracuda Networks asked us to help find
| prior art to help deal with a Trend Micro
| patent on, believe it or not, blocking
| viruses at the gateway, of all obvious
| things?
|
| You did find some, the ITC then said the
| patent, #5,623,600, was invalid, and you'd
| think that would be the end of that.
|
| But no, software patents live in their own
| illogical alternate universe, and because
| Trend Micro and Barracuda settled instead
| of getting a court ruling of invalidity,
| Trend Micro was free to threaten others
| and to continue to take in royalties on
| that patent.
`----
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100603011319457
Groklaw: TrendMicro uses invalid patent to sue. Fortinet asks for help in prior art search
http://www.digitalmajority.org/forum/t-245858
Will We Allow Patents To Lock Up Synthetic Biology?
,----[ Quote ]
| This is a very real threat. Venter has
| long been a strong advocate for patenting
| genes, so it wouldn't be surprising to see
| him try to limit this market quite a bit
| himself. History has shown time and time
| again that real innovation happens when
| there's real competition in the market, as
| players work hard to one-up each other.
| Giving the basic building blocks of
| synthetic biology to one company can lead
| to a vast decrease in research and
| development into this emerging field --
| exactly the opposite of what the patent
| system intended.
`----
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100528/1834209630.shtml
Proof that science works
,----[ Quote ]
| Publicly-funded science, on the other
| hand, devoid of the conflict of interest
| generated by the corporate need for
| profits, works. The work on the breast
| cancer vaccine is showing just how. I
| could find no patent, either, registered
| for the work on the vaccine. Perhaps, like
| Jonas Salk, Dr. Vincent Tuohy would view
| such a patent as the equivalent of
| patenting the sun. Let's hope. Meanwhile,
| this story illustrates how science can
| work, and why the arguments regarding the
| necessity of patents to fuel medical
| breakthroughs is bunk.
`----
http://whoownsyou-drkoepsell.blogspot.com/2010/06/proof-that-science-works.html
Recent:
Monopolists of the Genetic Code?
,----[ Quote ]
| Last week, Craig Venter created a media
| frenzy â and a frenzy of bioethical hand-
| wringing â when he announced the creation
| of the first âsynthetic cell.â In reality,
| his team of researchers had created the
| first synthetic genome, the operating
| system of the cell. They had, in effect,
| switched the operating system of a
| particular cell to a new operating system
| that they had synthesized and edited.
|
| Though many of the headlines talked of
| Venter being God and having created life in
| the lab, that is not an accurate way to
| describe it. Venter started with a
| particular naturally occurring cell and
| effectively, de-compiled, analysed and then
| painstaking edited and reassembled that
| cellâs genome to create a version of the
| cell never found in nature. Researchers had
| already synthesized the genome of the polio
| virus, creating a genome that would
| actually âproduceâ a live virus that
| infected mice in the lab, but the size of
| that initiative was several orders of
| magnitude smaller. The significance of what
| Venterâs team did lay in the scale of the
| enterprise and the mastery of the code that
| it demonstrated. It is as if I took your
| computer, copied the operating system,
| figured out what each part of that system
| did, pruned, cut and edited its functions,
| and then reloaded a substantially edited
| system back into the computer â a version
| which actually proved capable of running
| it.
`----
http://www.thepublicdomain.org/2010/05/28/monopolists-of-the-genetic-code/
Monopolists of the Genetic Code?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4883637c-69d7-11df-8432-00144feab49a,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F4883637c-69d7-11df-8432-00144feab49a.html&_i_referer=
Scientists create first version of synthetic cell
http://asia.cnet.com/crave/2010/05/27/scientists-create-first-version-of-synthetic-cell/
Lab to be first 'open-source' for genetic parts
,----[ Quote ]
| Bioengineers from Stanford and UC-Berkeley
| are ramping up efforts to characterize
| thousands of molecular players and processes
| critical to the engineering of microbes.
|
| With seed money from the National Science
| Foundation, bioengineers from Stanford and
| UC-Berkeley, are ramping up efforts to
| characterize thousands of molecular players
| and processes critical to the engineering of
| microbes, so that eventually researchers can
| mix and match these âDNA partsâ in synthetic
| organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or
| chemicals. Theyâll do this in a lab in
| Emeryville, Calif., called BIOFAB.
`----
http://www.physorg.com/wire-news/25889659/lab-to-be-first-open-source-for-genetic-parts.html
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEARECAAYFAkwKi1kACgkQU4xAY3RXLo4cawCeOUx2NDtahi8abmIaZwelgXzw
5coAnjVapqni5aKXYeBAoUoMhLBLQzUl
=Cz2e
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
|
|
