We have already written about the agreement between Microsoft and Novell, in which the open source developer has obtained a patent infringement “get out of jail free” card from the Redmond company. As expected, this has now created several replies from the free and open source community. Firstly, Samba developers Read more…
The GPL does not contravene American antitrust law, according to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeal case is Wallace v IBM, Red Hat and Novell, in which one Mr Daniel Wallace claimed that he would like to compete against the Linux operating system by selling derivatives or writing Read more…
(Thanks to Amy Terry Sheehan for link) Microsoft and Novell have signed an agreement by which the software giant will not assert its software patent rights for technology that can be used in SuSE Linux distributions. The agreement also provides Microsoft users with the possibility of obtaining support for dual-boot Read more…
IceWeasel is a GNU browser (new, GNU, geddit?) based on Firefox distributed with Debian and Ubuntu Linux. Why does Ubuntu need a new browser, you may ask? As with so many things that have to do with the Free Software Foundation, it all comes down to their definition of free Read more…
Ars Technica has a summary of the visit from a group of brave Hobbits (Firefox developers) who visited Mordor (Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond) to have a look at potential interoperability issues between The One Ring (Windows Vista) and Narya, one of the three Elf rings (Firefox). You can also find Read more…
Groklaw has the story of yet another court victory for the GPL in Germany. This is the second such court ruling in Germany, which I find ironic as I was once involved in a heated argument with a German law professor who assured me that open source licensing in general, Read more…
Some news from LinuxWorld, which is taking place in San Francisco. When Larry Lessig began by calling open source to arms, the tone for the meeting was set as a defining event for the community. One of the goals of open source developers has been to produce a user-friendly Linux Read more…
The second draft of the GNU General Public License version 3 is now available to the public. I have spent some time this weekend reading through the new draft and comparing it with the original. You can find some of my earlier opinions about the first draft in this SCRIPTed Read more…
For those who think that software patents are not a threat to open source, read this interesting article on Patently-O about a patent suit against RedHat. The dispute is generated by US Patent 6,101,502, a patent for an ” Object model mapping and runtime engine for employing relational database with Read more…
Some interesting papers from the 2nd day: – Institutional Entrepreneurs and the Bricolage of Intellectual Property DiscoursesAnn Westenholz – Open Source and e-JusticeCuno Tarfusser Unfortunately the papers are not available online, which is rather strange from an “open” conference. Why not release them under Creative Commons? I am participating in Read more…