Licensing

Microsoft's interoperability documentation: A lesson in foot-dragging

For all its endless talk about really, really wanting to open up its documentation to enable interoperability with its products, Microsoft is still dragging its feet on delivery of this documentation, according to a US judge as reported by Ars Technica yesterday.

Today saw Kollar-Kotelly hold the latest hearing on the status of the consent agreements, and a number of reports suggest that there still seem to be problems there (no legal documents arising from the hearing have been filed yet). Although the Dow Jones Newswire seems to think everything is fine, other reports seem to contradict this.

Reuters, however, … Read more

Netherlands Patent Office makes nation safe for open source

The U.S. patent system is increasingly broken, a point argued persuasively on ReadWriteWeb, but there is a huge array of factors working against successful patent reform.

In the meantime, both proprietary and open-source software is constantly threatened, making intellectual property indemnification the No. 1 issue lawyers negotiate when working through software contracts here in the U.S. (This is, incidentally, very different from the issues my company and others face when negotiating contracts in Europe--just one of many differences between open source in the U.S. and in Europe.)

Open-source savvy patent reformers can take heart, however, from this … Read more

Canonical chooses convenience in codecs, and rightly so

OStatic provides an excellent analysis of the dilemma facing Canonical and its Ubuntu distribution: to facilitate adoption of proprietary media codecs and, if so, how?

I have (incorrectly) criticized Canonical for including proprietary codecs in Ubuntu before, but others in the open-source world have been far more derogatory about any possible hint of proprietary software making its way into Ubuntu.

While I am sympathetic with the intent of such commentary, OStatic is absolutely correct to suggest that Canonical's decision to set up a for-fee way to add proprietary media codecs to Ubuntu is spot-on:

They could have taken the … Read more

EA seeks to remedy its 'Spore' DRM mistake

Applying a Band-Aid to a gaping head wound, Electronic Arts has decided to apply more liberal protections to its hit game Spore.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the game maker plans to expand the number of machines allowed under its digital rights management plan:

In a statement, Frank Gibeau, EA game label president, said the company was "disappointed" by the misunderstanding around its digital rights management software and that it would expand the installation limit from three machines to five. He added that EA is also expediting the development of a system that will allow customers … Read more

Intellectual Ventures: A massive patent pyramid scheme?

Techdirt goes into depth on ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, adding a slew of new reasons to consider the patent-hoarding company the ultimate in creepiness. Intellectual Ventures is out on the fund-raising trail (again - it just raised $1 billion in late 2007), despite the fact that it appears to have demonstrated little ability to generate cash for anyone other than Myhrvold, even despite his amassed 20,000 patents.

I'm not a fan of any patent troll, but the manner in which Intellectual Ventures spends and raises money takes the practice to new lows. Indeed, the Seattle … Read more

VMware: A "significant portion" of our technology may include open source

VMware has been publicly chastised for allegedly violating the GPL in its proprietary vmkernel technology. Now, in VMware's most recent quarterly report, the company calls out widespread use of open-source software in its products.

It is customary for public companies to overstate risks to their businesses in an effort to forestall shareholder lawsuits. Better safe than sorry, seems to be the thinking.

Even so, I find it fascinating to see the extent of VMware's admission to using open-source software in its products, especially in light of the criticism noted above. Here is the relevant section of VMware's 10-Q in its (near-) entirety:

Our use of "open source" software could negatively affect our ability to sell our products and subject us to possible litigation.

A significant portion of the products or technologies acquired, licensed or developed by us may incorporate so-called "open source" software, and we may incorporate open source software into other products in the future....We monitor our use of open source software in an effort to avoid subjecting our products to conditions we do not intend.

Although we believe that we have complied with our obligations under the various applicable licenses for open source software that we use such that we have not triggered any such conditions, there is little or no legal precedent governing the interpretation of many of the terms of certain of these licenses, and therefore the potential impact of these terms on our business is somewhat unknown and may result in unanticipated obligations regarding our products and technologies.… Read more

CSI open source's the TriSano public health application under AGPLv3

The GNU General Public License (GPL), unlike Apache-style licensing, offers perhaps the best way to prevent a community from forking. It's therefore not surprising to see the Collaborative Software Initiative turning to the Affero GPL Version 3 to help foster and protect its budding TriSano community.

Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center and co-author of the AGPLv3, agrees:

By offering the code under the widely used AGPLv3 license, Collaborative Software Initiative gives the user community the assurance of knowing that the code can be modified, customized, and shared in a low-friction way to suit their very … Read more

In acquiring Merrill Lynch, must Bank of America open source its software?

Lost in the rubble of the teetering titans of finance is an open question: what will happen to the open-source software that they have heavily modified and upon which many have built core business applications?

It's a nontrivial question. Bank of America just acquired Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch was a heavy adopter of and modifier of open-source software. Because it never distributed that software, it was able to keep its modifications private.

Does acquisition by an outside party constitute a distribution? In conversations I've had with enterprise CTOs and the Free Software Foundation, the answer is an unequivocal "maybe."… Read more

Codeweaver's Chromium a trademark lawsuit waiting to happen? CORRECTION

Correction: Jeremy White of Codeweavers emailed me to let me know that I'm very confused on this.:

Chromium isn't my name; it's Googles, and it's their open source project. They distribute bundles with explicit permission to use both source and binaries in those bundles. (In an irony, in fact, they accidentally messed up and included Chrome trademarks in a bundle that they gave permission to use, so we had to strip those out and replace them with Chromium branding).

Based on a range of posts I saw on the web this morning, which conflated Chromium with Codeweavers that it's not surprising that I was confused. Mea culpa, and sincere apologies to Jeremy and the Codeweaver gang.

Codeweavers, the company behind WINE which enables Windows applications to run on Linux, has done it again. WINE was voted a finalist in Sourceforge's Community Awards earlier this year, earning the dubious distinction of one of the open-source projects "Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation."

This may be true where patents are concerned, but I think Google would have a pretty good trademark claim against Codeweavers right now.

In this case, Codeweavers has made it possible to run the Google Chrome browser on Mac OS X and Linux, and called it "Chromium." As Codeweavers founder and CEO, Jeremy White, notes on his blog, Codeweavers was "looking for a way to show off Wine's new maturity, particularly for porting applications."

Great, right? Yes, except for the name. Chromium has the potential to confuse would-be users as to the source of this cross-platform instantiation of Google Chrome.

United States trademark law is pretty clear on this point:… Read more