Here are the facts of the case. Some folks made a movie, a documentary, and they got sued for using 15 seconds of the John Lennon song "Imagine" without permission. The case is Lennon v. Premise Media. That's Lennon as in Yoko Ono Lennon, joined by John's two sons and EMI Records. EMI sued in state court, and the Lennons in federal, both for copyright infringement and they threw in some trademark infringement claims too. I think that was mainly insurance, though. Lawyers do that. And there was a dispute as to who had the right to the copyrights.

The plaintiffs in both cases had asked the courts to issue a preliminary injunction to shut down the movie, which had already been released, and pull back previously released copies off the market, so the 15-second clip could be cut out. And they wanted the usual bucket of money. But it wasn't just about money; it was also about control, about having a say in how a work is used. The district court denied their motion.

Over the weekend, I converted my laptop to use the ext4 filesystem.  So far so good!  So far I’ve found one bug as a result of my using ext4 in production (if delayed allocation is enabled, i_blocks doesn’t get updated until the block allocation takes place, so files can appear to have 0k blocksize right after they are created, which is confusing/unfortunate), but nothing super serious yet.  I will be doing backups a bit more frequently until I’m absolutely sure things are rock solid, though!

I am using the latest ext4 patches and the tip of the e2fsprogs git repository.  Hopefully when we get the bulk of the patches merged into the mainline kernel after the 2.6.26 ships and the 2.6.27 merge window opens, and after I ship out e2fsprogs 1.41 (I have one work-in-progress pre-release, with another coming soon), it’ll be ready for much more wide-spread testing.

In addition to the excellent crew of ext4 developers, I’d like to call out for special thanks Gary Howco and Holger Kiehl, two early users/benchmarkers of ext4 who tried our latest code, and reported bugs that had previously escaped attention by developers (who had been mostly testing the code via the same old test suites); their additional workloads and benchmarks flushed out a few additional bugs.   Thanks, guys!!

Hopefully after a few weeks of my using ext4 for real-live work, I’ll find a few last few bugs to be fixed, and/or feel much more confident it’s ready for me to recommend to others for their production data.

It seems the EU Commission has a kind of news aggregator of its own, which it calls European Media Monitor, with several different services, and Copiepresse filed a lawsuit against the EU Commission for copyright infringement for linking to its members' Most Holy IP in the aggregation without asking for permission first.

Well, the Court of Seizures, which is a fine name for a court, threw out the Copiepresse complaint on jurisdictional grounds. Copiepresse says it won't appeal "for strategic reasons", but it will move the case to the civil court. I don't know how much that will help them. The Court of Seizures was persuaded by the EU Commission that its news search engine services are perfectly legal.

I fell a little behind on the weather forecast pages, sorry for that. I plead that I was vacationing with the in-laws and would have gotten into serious trouble had I gone too near a keyboard. Anyway, things are caught up now.

The current prepatch is 2.6.26-rc8; when he posted it, Linus said that it might just be the last one. Given that this development cycle is smaller (in terms of the amount of code merged), I had thought that it would come together a little quicker; thus the “late June” prediction which had appeared on the forecast pages. Well, it’s late June, and we’re not there yet. More worryingly, the length of the regression list is about the same as it has been for the last month or so. My guess is that there will be an -rc9 before it’s all done, but I’ve been wrong before.

I added a few entries to the pages while I was there. HP donated AdvFS, which is a welcome body of code even if it will never be shipped in the mainline kernel in anything close to its current form. The GEM memory manager is interesting: it looks like it will displace TTM as the presumptive memory management code for 3D graphical processing units. That’s a classic example of how the kernel development process can work: TTM embodies a great deal of work, but that work can be quickly pushed aside if somebody comes up with a better way to get things done. This can be hard on individual developers, but it’s good for the resulting kernel. Finally, I couldn’t resist putting in a thing about the BKL-removal work, which is a project I’ve somehow gotten pulled into.

Look for more change once the 2.6.27 merge window opens. I’ll be cleaning out a bunch of older stuff then as well.

And indeed, he speaketh truth, yea verily. SCO *is* unique, happily. But that is also the problem. It's harder to spot a problem you've never confronted before. And this judge certainly doesn't seem to realize what he's dealing with. Or if he does, he doesn't care. That may be in part because in bankruptcy court, one gets used to less than noblemen, I suppose. His job is to get them back on their feet, if possible. But I don't honestly think that's all that is going on.

But he certainly got an earful at this hearing, this judge, and not only from Novell. The US Trustee also speaks plainly enough that SCO's lawyer protests, calling it a broadside attack on his client. You and I would just call it truth, and in fact the judge deflects the criticism.

Regular readers will notice that I’ve been woefully silent the last few weeks, at first due to having too many irons in the fire, and for the last ten days due to being on a family vacation abroad, returning not till July 2. As a result, I’ve been not only behind on blogging, but also on keeping up with the news while limited primarily to Blackberry access since I left. But I thought that it might be useful to take a break and share the “Huh?!?” I experienced when I stumbled across this article by Andrew Donoghue at ZDNet while briefly enjoying an island of laptop connectivity in a hotel lobby in Florence. The article is titled, “Microsoft admits to standards ignorance pre-OOMXL” and is based on remarks by Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee. Even more incredibly, it bears the following subtitle:

Microsoft has admitted that, despite being one of the dominant names in IT for over 30 years, it had little or no experience or expertise around software standards until the company was mid-way through the process of getting Office Open XML approved by the International Organization for Standardization.

Why “Huh?” Because Microsoft has been playing the standards game, butting heads over prior technologies such as ActiveX, Java and much, much more with the best of them for decades as a member of hundreds of standards organizations. Moreover, it has held many board seats along the way, and has had a staff of attorneys for some time dedicated to standards matters. That staff includes the former General Counsel of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Still, while McKee has over-spun the point by a few hundred RPMs, there is an important point to be made on the subject of Microsoft’s standards-related capabilities, as I’ll explain in greater detail below.

Read the rest

Also the transcript of the June 17 hearing is now available. And Dorsey & Whitney have submitted another bill going back to April.

From the transcript, we see the first words out of the judge's mouth, after "good morning", is about the quarterly fees: "Yes, I'm prepared to approve those." And then, after all the lawyers on the phone for the fee applications decide to leave since there is nothing for them to say, the court turns to Arthur Spector to present SCO's need for an extension of time to file a reorganization plan. "It's a pleasure to be back," Spector says, as he begins. "Good to have you back," Judge Gross responds. I believe that captures the tone of the day perfectly. I'll comment more on the transcript when we post it as text.

After NetApp sued Sun, we responded with six reexamination requests on the patents asserted by NetApp. Reexamination is a procedure in which a party submits documents (prior art) relating to a patent to the US Patent Office (PTO) and asks that it reconsider whether that patent should have ever been issued. If the PTO agrees and determines there is a "substantial new question of patentability" (SNQP) it will grant the request and reopen the patent examination process on that patent. Included in our requests was a significant amount of highly relevant prior art that was not considered by the PTO when it first granted the NetApp patents. (By the way, to those of you who submitted prior art - "thank you!")

Over the last two months, the PTO has granted the first five of our reexamination requests, finding in all the cases that multiple "SNQP" exist for each patent (one request filed in June is still pending).

That would include you guys, prominently so, and I wanted you to know your efforts were effective and appreciated. But there's another part I wanted to highlight. It has to do with ethics.

It's primarily because of what I learned from this testimony that I took a long time to write an analysis of the trial. I was, frankly, too angry to trust myself to write about it until I had some time to cool off some.

We learn two primary things from Jones' testimony: first, what a cynical role Sun played in the SCO saga, and second, that all the time SCO was calling on the world, the courts, the Congress -- nay heaven itself, if I may say so -- to sympathize with it over the ruination of its Most Holy Intellectual Property by it being improperly open sourced into Linux, not that it turned out to be true, it had already secretly given Sun the right to open source it in OpenSolaris. Remember all that falderol about SCO being contractually unable to show us the code, much as it so desired to do so, because of being bound to confidentiality requirements? What a farce. SCO had already secretly given Sun the right to open source Solaris, with all the UNIX System V you can eat right in there.

The simple fact is, I gather from Jones' testimony, Sun could have prevented the harm SCO sought to cause by simply telling us what rights it had negotiated and received from SCO prior to SCO launching its assault on Linux. Yet it remained silent. When I consider all folks were put through, all the unnecessary litigation, and all the fear and the threats and the harmful smears, including of me at the hands of SCO and all the dark little helper dwarves in SCO's workshop, I feel an intense indignation like a tsunami toward Sun for remaining silent.

It has been years since we have seen a full scale operating system war. Today’s announcement by Nokia that they will be open sourcing Symbian and making it available royalty free is the opening of yet another front in the blossoming mobile OS conflagration.

Mobile computing is a complex market with intricate relationships between the mobile carriers, device manufacturers, regulators, and their various suppliers. The best way to think about this is to see its similarity to the early days of the personal computer. In fact, mobile devices are getting to look a lot more like personal computers every day as Moore’s law continues to drive down the size and price of mobile device components while increasing their power. Most of today’s low end smart phones are far more powerful than a laptop from even just a few years ago. Think about a device that is priced at $199, has a web browser, e-mail client, word processor, calendar, video, audio, camera, etc. Sounds a heck of a lot like a laptop only it is cheaper and fits in your pocket.

So who are the early winners and losers in this war? More importantly how does today’s announcement impact other Linux mobile platform efforts out there such the Google’s Android, the Limo Foundation, ACCESS, and others? Finally how will this impact the proprietary hold outs in the mobile computing world such as Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry OS, and Microsoft Mobile? Answering these questions requires a little bit of history.

History repeats.

Just like the early days of the PC, we are seeing a scramble from a variety of operating system vendors to become the mobile platform of the future. Back then it was PC/DOS, MS/DOS, Apple, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, IBM. OS/2. The winner of that war was clearly Microsoft and the reward was greater than anyone could have imagined. At around the same time we saw the Unix Wars with Sun, IBM, Novell, HP, DEC, Silicon Graphics and others all forming various “open” alliances (sound familiar?) such as the Open Software Foundation, Unix International, the Open Group and others which ended in Sun dominating the Unix market, the SCO Group descending into oblivion and Linux eating the Unix markets lunch. In server computing two winners are emerging from that war: Linux and once again Microsoft.

What is each side competing for?

Developer mind share. Becoming the defacto application development platform for mobile is the goal here. The more applications that are available on a phone platform the more interesting things you can do with it. With applications you can automate your sales force, track your friends locations, calculate currency rates, keep up with people on facebook, listen to music, watch a movie, etc. The more applications on a platform, the more people want to use it, the more people who use a platform, the more developers want to build applications for that expanding market, and so on and so forth. For Microsoft winning the PC war enabled them to become the defacto application platform for desktop computing locking users who had applications that only ran on Windows into their platform for years.

Wars generally produce one or two winners

Have you ever played three way tennis? It doesn’t work very well because eventually two players gang up on the third and eliminate him or her from the game. This is the basic rule of alliances; when the stakes are big enough alliances are formed in order to eliminate other players from the game. This is going on in the mobile industry right now. All the players know that they must form alliances out of necessity. Competing firms generally don’t join together unless they have to do it. When a rival threatens to dominate the world and lock others out often firms will join together to combat this threat. Combinations of alliances ebb and flow until the market reaches a reasonable equilibrium or until a single winner takes all.

Who are the players? How does this impact them?

Microsoft: Windows mobile has large and growing market share in the smart phone world. They got there by providing a experience on a mobile device similar to the one people are comfortable with on their desktop PC. Which means they leveraged their desktop monopoly in order to attempt to dominate the mobile computing world. This is their sole advantage in this war. Their problem is that they are using an outdated development model which requires a massive internal R&D effort, slows innovation, and requires every other player in the industry to pay licensing fees to Microsoft. Simply put; this boat is not going to float for long. In the cut throat, low margin, high volume world of mobile computing, device makers are simply not going to cede the high margin...

The Linux kernel development community has joined together to release a strong statement about the need for open source device drivers.

While the vast majority of devices now have open source drivers, there are a few holdouts. The kernel community wants to send a clear signal to these vendors as well as prevent any future vendors from following the closed source path and preventing their uses from getting all the benefits of Linux’s open development model.

More than 135 people have signed the statement, which can be read here

I love this company. They take on patent trolls and win. What do they sell? "Machine vision sensors and systems"? Whatever that is, I'll take ten.

To begin, since AP asserts therein a fee for 5 words or more, let's see what 4 words look like, shall we? Remember, they claim you have to pay $12.50 for 5-25 words, so you can only safely quote 4, if I've understood the 'AP Personal Version Fair Use Copyright Act'. So let's try to stay safe, using some articles from Google News Sci/Tech as a base instead of any AP articles. I'm fairly sure Google won't sue me.

And the judge OK'd all the quarterly bills [PDF], listed in an Exhibit A [PDF]. So let's see. That's $71,982.79 for Pachulski Stang; $414,074.83 for Berger Singerman [zowie]; $125,930.70 for Mesirow; $161,608.00 for Tanner; and $100,292.62 for Dorsey & Whitney. They don't total it all up, so I will. SCO has received bills in the period from January 1-March 31, 2008 totaling $873,888.94, unless I zoned out while doing the adding. That is just for one quarter. The bills are still being filed. Not for business. Just for legal stuff. Lawyers and financial analysts and accountants for the bankruptcy.

Oh. I almost forgot. $0 for Novell.

This is an interim report, meaning it is only about recent activities. To read the whole story, go here and read at least the last six-month report from back in February. The November 2006 joint report is also part of the picture, in that Microsoft said it had thrown some 260 employees into the task of coming up with suitable documentation. But if you read them all, each joint report, one by one, you'll get the full effect and I predict you'll surely laugh.

It appears from that record that no matter what Microsoft tries or how diligently they work at it or how many employees they assign to this noble task of providing interoperability documentation, it just can't be done. Microsoft is like Sisyphus of old, working every day with all its might to get that boulder to the top of the hill, only to see it fall back down again, throughout eternity. Of course, you might point out that his troubles are a myth. Microsoft's are real. You think? You might also recall the API issue that surfaced in the Comes v. Microsoft litigation.

The big picture, to me, is this: Microsoft is *still* not in full compliance with its obligations to provide documentation. That was the issue the DOJ raised two full years ago, and I was teasing Microsoft about it then. Two years later, it's nowhere near as funny. The difficulties resulted in a new plan and with the court deciding to extend oversight for two more years.

But here we are, with the same problem, and, worse, Microsoft has been changing protocols without notice to the technical committee working on compliance in this matter, the Justice Department tells us in this report, despite last year promising not to do that *any more*.

If the same misconduct continues forever and a day, with nothing but promises that for one reason or another are never kept, then what?

No. Really. Then what?