What has everyone beside themselves with either joy or panic is an article on Patently-O provocatively titled, The Death of Google's Patents?, by Professor John Duffy, which argues that the USPTO's position in some recent patent cases will, if adopted, cause the sky to fall on software patents unless they are tied to a particular computer -- and then The End Will Come for patent law as we know it:

The logic of the PTO's positions in Nuijten, Comiskey and Bilski has always threatened to destabilize whole fields of patenting, most especially in the field of software patents. If the PTO's test is followed, the crucial question for the vitality of patents on computer implemented inventions is whether a general purpose computer qualifies as a "particular" machine within the meaning of the agency's test. In two recent decisions announced after the oral arguments in the Bilski case, Ex parte Langemyr [PDF] (May 28, 2008) and Ex parte Wasynczuk [PDF] (June 2, 2008), the PTO Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has now supplied an answer to that question: A general purpose computer is not a particular machine, and thus innovative software processes are unpatentable if they are tied only to a general purpose computer.

I wish. But as I'll show you, this is advocacy, not current truth. Might I suggest you read the first two comments under the article? Professor Duffy, the author of the article about Google's patents, represents Regulatory Datacorp, one of the amici in the Bilski case. There were zillions of them filed, including one by Red Hat explaining the FOSS point of view. Here's Duffy's brief [PDF].

Professor Duffy was asked by the court to present oral arguments. You can hear him speak at the en banc hearing, because we posted the link in our article that included Groklaw's report. Remember Webster attended for us? Go to this page, then search by the keyword Bilski in the top box, marked Captions. The results page is set up so you have to scroll down to find the audio.

I believe the author chose Google's patents to galvanize patent lawyers and patent owners in large corporations to get on the ball and try to change what he views as a horrific future. Lawyers do write articles sometimes because they know judges can be influenced by what they read. It's one lawyer's opinion and analysis, in other words, one with a stake in the outcome. Would you like to see what another lawyer says about the subject, in contrast?

Your friendly neighborhood Linux systems admin here with a post about the Linux Foundation web infrastructure. The web site has grown organically one piece at a time. The existing main application for www.linuxfoundation.org is Mediawiki. This was put together as a temporary web site when the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs were in the process of merging into the Linux Foundation. That was in December of 2006.

Since this time many other needs have come up. We added Wordpress MU for our blogs. We added a Phorum installation for OpenPrinting discussions, forums.openprinting.org. Our events site is run on Drupal and CiviCRM.

The issue has always been how to meet all the technological needs with a bare minimum of staff. Many of you out there could code solutions in place to glue the applications together. Since, I am not a strong developer I have focused on staying with the stock applications for ease of upgrades.

How do you put together a cohesive infrastructure completely based on open source applications that work together seamlessly without coding highly customized solutions?

We are trying to answer that question.

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During the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit back in April we had many of the keynote and panel sessions as well as several interviews filmed with the intention of posting them online.

We had asked the third party company we were working with to provide both completely open OGG and mostly open Flash FLV formats as the final product. Unfortunately, they did not have the in house skills to produce the open OGG format.

In the interest of getting the video's out to the public sooner rather than later we went ahead and published the FLV files in the LF Video Gallery. Youtube for better or worse has mad FLV the de facto standard for online video. Needless to say we have gotten many complaints about our lack of an open codec version of the videos like here and here.

First, let me say that audio and video codecs are not my area of expertise. So before you flame me for my ignorance I have beaten you to the punch. Based on a few posts like this one: Open Codecs it looks like OGG with the Theora video codec and the Vorbis audio codec is the standard open video format to work with.

The obvious next step is to convert the files to OGG our selves, even though video is not an area of expertise. The LWN posts helpfully pointed out:

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Linux Plumbers Conference
17-19 September 2008
Portland, Oregon USA
http://linuxplumbersconf.org/

The deadline for Linux Plumbers Conference speaker proposals has been extended to July 31st. We are looking for proposals from knowledgeable speakers on timely technical topics related to core Linux software - kernel, utilities, graphics, libraries, etc. The ideal proposal will address a specific technical problem or opportunity and suggest solutions.

Proposals targeting issues which cross sub-system boundaries - such as power management and suspend/resume - are especially encouraged. Talks will be 25 minutes or less and serve as a starting point for round-table discussion.

LPC is an opportunity to work on technical problems face-to-face with other developers, especially between developers who seldom attend the same conference or summit. The conference is organized into small working groups - microconferences - focusing on specific topics, such
as storage, power management, and graphics. One conference track is reserved for talks not part of microconferences and new microconferences, created as needed by popular demand.

Submissions are encouraged for all Linux "plumbing" related topics, not just the topics of the microconferences. Example topics:

* Networking architecture
* Wireless utilities and infrastructure
* Tools for optimizing embedded Linux applications
* Integration of system libraries, window managers, and the kernel
* Network file systems and utilities
* Support for upcoming hardware features
* Real-time/low latency

Current microconference topics include:

* The future of Linux storage
* Video input infrastructure and V4L2
* Power management and tools for efficient resource usage
* Future displays and input devices
* Dbus for desktop integration
* Linux server management
* XCB and graphics
* Audio
* Kernel/userspace interfaces
* Debugging, tuning, tracing, and profiling

If in doubt about the appropriateness of your topic for LPC, please submit anyway.

Speakers will receive free registration to the conference, which includes access to all technical sessions, the joint Kernel Summit and LPC party on Tuesday night, and an evening reception sponsored by Intel.

For details on submission format, see our call for speakers:
http://linuxplumbersconf.org/cfp/

Sponsors

Major sponsors of the Linux Plumbers Conference include Intel, IBM and NetApp. The LPC is underwritten by the Linux Foundation. LPC is a revenue-neutral event.

Novell has issued a statement, as reported by the Daily Herald in Utah about the recent decision in the SCO v. Novell case:

"We think this is great news for Novell and for the open source community. We're very pleased this ruling reaffirms and strengthens Novell's ownership of the UNIX SVRX copyrights and vindicates Novell's continuing efforts to protect the open source community from SCO's claims," Novell said in Monday's statement.

"This ruling underlines the court's earlier decision, issued in August 2007, which found that Novell, not SCO, owns the copyrights to UNIX SVRX code, and further undermines SCO's claims against Linux users," according to the statement. "We see a pattern in the legal judgments made in this case: Decision after decision makes it clearer and clearer that SCO's legal claims against Linux have no merit."

The statement is up on Novell's site now too.

UNIX licensees often distributed and used binary products that included code from multiple releases of System V. Novell and its successors required and allowed such licensees to pay only one set of royalties for the use or distribution of such a product. To identify the proper license under which such a product could be used or distributed and to calculate the appropriate royalty payments required for using or distributing such a product, Novell and its successors employed the "one line of code" rule.

Under the "one line of code" rule, Novell and then SCO determined whether there was as little as one line of code from the latest release of System V (including UnixWare) contained in a binary product and then calculated royalty payments for the entire product under that latest license. Novell and then SCO prohibited licensees from parsing out the relative amounts of code from different releases of System V and paying portions of the requisite royalties under multiple System V licenses.

Now let me show you what I found regarding how SCO, Santa Cruz, billed in complex situations, according to what it told the SEC.

Long time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF - for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002. Last summer, UOF was adopted as a Chinese National Standard, and on Friday the first complete office suite based upon UOF was released. It’s called Evermore Integrated Office 2009 (EIOffice 2009 for short).

How successful could this new entrant be in China? For starters, Evermore Software Co. Ltd., its developer, is reportedly the largest software vendor to the Chinese government. And then there’s price: Evermore’s professional edition is less than a quarter of the price of the comparable version of Office 2007. And finally, it’s clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for the China’s new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days’ time. Whether Shen is speaking to, or for, the government remains to be seen.

Read the whole story

05/02/2008 - 535 - Trial Witness List. (kmj) (Entered: 05/08/2008)

05/02/2008 - 536 - Trial Exhibit List of Novell exhibits. (kmj) (Entered: 05/08/2008)

05/02/2008 - 537 - Trial Exhibit List of SCO exhibits. (kmj) (Entered: 05/08/2008)

It's worth going through them with a fine toothed comb, actually, because all of them together make up what the judge based his Order upon, and it's what the appeals court can consider, also, so if you spot anything that contradicts any factual conclusions, it's of interest. As you'll notice, the judge got to see more than we did, so if you find something online that matches the exhibit, it might be good to mention it. If any heroic soul can OCR it to get a text version ready, that would be wonderful.

I can't believe that we have to think about UnixWare and OpenServer again, but we do. So it's a good idea, if you spot anything of value, to keep a copy of the original, so it will be possible to prove things down the road. SCO doesn't allow Wayback to keep a record of its site, so that workaround doesn't work. That leaves you and me. If someday SCO sues someone over UnixWare or Open Server, we'll be glad we did the squirrel work. I have my first contribution to that effort.

Although I’m a little late doing so, I’d like to add my voice to Amanda McPherson’s in welcoming Brian Proffitt to the Linux Foundation. Amanda is the Linux Foundation’s Vice President, Marketing and Developer Programs, and posted the official welcome on Thursday at the Linux Foundation Web site here.

As I expect just about every reader of this blog knows, Brian has been the Managing Editor of LinuxToday for quite a few years (as well as Managing Editor of various other Jupiter Media properties: LinuxPlanet, Enterprise Linux Today, AllLinuxDevices, LinuxPR, and JustLinux). If you missed it, you can find Brian’s farewell column at LinuxToday here. As he disclosed there, his new role will be to help launch the Linux Foundation’s new Linux Developer Network site and project, which Amanda has been already been working on for some time. When it launches, Brian will be its Community Manager and Editor.

I’m particularly happy that I’ll be able to continue to work with Brian, as he has been a great friend to me here, linking to hundreds of my blog entries over the last several years. It’s fair to say that many of you would never have learned of this blog but for Brian’s deciding that what I was writing here might be of interest to the Linux community. I am quite appropriately grateful for his willingness to pull what I had to say out of the fire hose of information that he had to deal with on a daily basis.

Read the rest here

Thank you to everyone for helping. Erwan has pulled it all together for us, a massive job, and he's created an index also, so you can quickly find what you are looking for, all in one place. I'll make this a permanent page, after we finish one other part of the effort, to insert links to materials referenced. Update: The permanent page is available now here.

Meanwhile, some rather odd things have been happening in OOXML/ODF land. First, Alex Brown, the convenor of the BRM, has put out a * press release* entitled OOXML will take second place following Microsoft's announcement to support ODF, says Dr Alex Brown. He says this:

According to Dr Brown, OOXML will now represent the "legacy" of MS Office documents that the world has accumulated to date, following Microsoft's announcement that its Office suite will add native support for ODF.

I’m very pleased to welcome Brian Proffitt to the Linux Foundation. Brian will be serving as the community manager and editor for the Linux Developer Network. We’re extremely lucky to lure Brian away from Jupiter Media, where he built a thriving community and reported on Linux for such publications as Linux Today and Linux Planet.

Adding a community manager for the Linux Developer Network is an  important move for us. The LDN, while not launched yet, we hope will become a central place for the community to collaborate. As Brian mentions in this excellent article in OSstatic, the LDN will be the public-facing manifestation of all things LSB, meaning it will assist developers in writing portable applications for Linux.

But that’s certainly not all it will be. We want to make it easier for application developers to target Linux in general. We have designed the LDN  to hopefully provide a central place for collaboration and problem solving across the application development community. We also hope that other Linux loving folks may join the conversation on the site. This could evolve to include driver development, embedded, mobile, Cloud computing, general Linux documentation and so on. It’s a community site, and just like Linux, its direction will be set by those who use and participate in it.

As you can see from Brian’s response on OSstatic he holds a passion and vision for LDN:

How many thousands of developers work with free and open source software? And how much excellent documentation is out there now? I look at the efforts of the volunteers on JustLinux, or Jeremy Garcia and his team on LinuxQuestions, and I think just the answers they provide end-users are great. Now imagine the same energy from volunteers for developer-oriented content, all channeling their efforts into a centralized LDN site.

Watch this space for the launch of the LDN in the coming months. We expect great things from Brian in his new role.

• Information Week: "In a decision Wednesday, Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball, who had previously ruled that Novell, and not SCO, owns the rights to Unix, found that SCO improperly collected Unix royalties that rightfully belonged to Novell. Kimball ordered SCO to pay Novell $2.5 million in restitution....SCO may have gotten off lightly...."
• The Inquirer: "However, Judge Kimball's ruling granted Novell only a fraction of the amount it sought at trial, which was more than $20 million. He accepted SCO's argument that its licence deal with Microsoft and its SCOsource licence sales were primarily about Unixware, although those necessarily implicated SVRX licences as well."

Remember when SCO began its media blitz? Stories everywhere. The world thought it was exciting to imagine Linux on the ropes. Now, when SCO is told it behaved improperly and must pay millions, only a few even note it. No one cares about SCO in failure, except for some who feel disgust, like Matt Asay.

What a strange ride it's been. You'd think the folks that wrote all those stories about SCO eating Linux's lunch would at least place a notice on their Corrections Page: "Um. About that lunch stuff, we were totally duped by SCO. They haven't won anything. The best they can do is not lose as big as they could have."

Wait. Hold the presses. Todd Weiss reports the SCO loss as a loss in an article titled SCO loses another round in Unix fight, must pay $2.55M to Novell in ComputerWorld:

At the beginning of its massive legal fight against Linux in 2003, The SCO Group Inc. imagined a day when companies like IBM, Novell Inc. and others would pay it large amounts of cash for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code.

Instead, even as those legal fights meander through U.S. courts, the tables were turned and SCO yesterday was ordered to pay $2.55 million to Novell for collecting Unix licensing revenue from Sun Microsystems Inc. that it wasn't entitled to collect.

That is what just happened. The company that told the world they couldn't wait for their day in court got it, and they lost. And there's more to come.

Anyway, we're still here, and we're not going anywhere. I know SCO is not over yet. Don't forget, the Novell litigation was a sideshow. Covering SCO is a marathon, not a sprint. The main event is IBM, still to come. And I expect SCO to have to pay through the nose to them for what turned out to be frivolous litigation, since the Order yesterday said that SCO has made no claims about UnixWare against IBM, and it doesn't own the copyrights to what it did sue IBM over.

I see everyone notices SCO got off light, and no word yet from Novell.