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Software patents are a bad legacy to leave behind
,----[ Quote ]
| What neither of these gentlemen pointed
| out is that this is exactly what happened
| also with Sun. It wasn't widely mentioned
| in public, although Mr Piana does single
| out patents as his first motivation to
| help Oracle clear the Sun acquisition.
| (Personally his fear that Microsoft would
| be allowed to buy any piece at all of Sun
| was in my opinion always just completely
| unrealistic (for the same reasons Oracle
| was in trouble), but I'm willing to give
| him a point about patent trolls offering
| to buy Sun's patents.) Other than that it
| wasn't spoken about (and journalists
| reporting on the case were mostly nowhere
| near the real issues anyway) but also
| other FOSS personalities who took Oracle's
| side did mention in private conversations
| with me that for FOSS in general and Linux
| in particular, it was absolutely vital to
| make sure that Sun's Unix and other
| patents would not fall into the wrong
| hands.
|
| A personal observation is that it seems
| that particularly the lawyers of our
| community subscribed to that way of
| thought, whereas the "hacker" types like
| Stallman of FSF, Karsten Gerloff of FSFE,
| Alan Cox of the Open Rights Group, etc.
| came out clearly on the side of us where
| we argued that MySQL should not have been
| allowed to be acquired by it's main
| competitor. (I should add that within the
| MySQL community, essentially old MySQL AB
| employees and other external contributors,
| the party lines followed completely
| different logic than in the broader FOSS
| community, and patents played no role
| whatsoever in people's opinions.)
`----
http://openlife.cc/blogs/2010/june/software-patents-are-bad-legacy-leave-behind
Wi-Fi patent has driven CSIRO money mad
,----[ Quote ]
| When that grand old hoarder of
| intellectual property, IBM, promised in
| 2005 that it would make 500 patents in its
| 40,000-strong database freely available to
| anyone working on open source projects, it
| was applauded.
|
| âThis is exciting,â said famed Stanford
| Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who
| is known for his strong opinions on the
| need to reduce copyright and intellectual
| property restrictions. âIt is IBM making
| good on its commitment to encourage a
| different kind of software development and
| recognizing the burden that patents can
| impose.â
|
| [...]
|
| We should be applying the same standards
| to the CSIRO when it comes to patents as
| we did back in 2005 to IBM. To do any less
| will demean us and sully us in the eyes of
| our descendants.
|
| To illustrate my point I encourage you to
| read an article published in the Sydney
| Morning Herald yesterday which details the
| CSIROâs actions in attempting to enforce
| what it claims is its patent on the Wi-Fi
| technology which is used everywhere in
| modern society â from laptops to mobile
| phones to the Nintendo Wii.
`----
http://delimiter.com.au/2010/06/03/wi-fi-patent-has-driven-csiro-money-mad/
Same as below.
Recent:
Wi-Fi patent has turned CSIRO money mad
,----[ Quote ]
| There's a good case to be made that
| Australia's peak science body is turning into
| a patent troll.
`----
http://apcmag.com/wi-fi-patent-has-turned-csiro-money-mad.htm
CSIRO to reap 'lazy billion' from world's biggest tech companies
,----[ Quote ]
| Australia's peak science body stands to reap
| more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi
| patent after already netting about $250
| million from the world's biggest technology
| companies, an intellectual property lawyer
| says.
|
| The CSIRO has spent years battling 14
| technology giants including Dell, HP,
| Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo and Toshiba for
| royalties and made a major breakthrough in
| April last year when the companies opted to
| avoid a jury hearing and settle for an
| estimated $250 million.
`----
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/enterprise/csiro-to-reap-lazy-billion-from-worlds-biggest-tech-companies-20100601-wsu2.html
CSIRO seeking Linux cluster for SKA high performance computer
,----[ Quote ]
| CSIRO will spend up to $5 million on a Linux-
| based high performance computing system to
| help boost research efforts at the Pawsey
| Centre for SKA Science in Perth.
|
| The Pawsey High Performance Computer (HPC)
| will be used in the Square Kilometre Array
| (SKA) project, which will use a telescope 50
| times more sensitive than current instruments
| and about 3600 antennae spread over thousands
| of kilometres to peer into deep space.
`----
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/332789/csiro_seeking_linux_cluster_ska_high_performance_computer/
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