Friday 10th August, 2007
Groklaw has the news which we already really knew in the SCO vs Novell case:
The court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.
It's not quite over yet, but a big chunk of decisions which are due to be made depended on the outcome of this ruling. As Groklaw's PJ says:
That's Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". That's the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses.
That's good news. Well done, Novell.
Thursday 28th June, 2007
According to WatchMouse, a Dutch firm that monitors server performance, Linux-based websites perform better. The ZDNet article states that WatchMouse surveyed over 1500 European websites.
... although the websites it surveyed were more frequently based on Microsoft's IIS web server platform running Windows than on Apache running Linux, the latter option performed better in terms of both uptime and load time.
No surprise to me, really. The comparative complexity of the two systems will affect performance as well as security.
"Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows they would be better off using Linux/Apache-based websites," said WatchMouse's chief technology officer, Mark Pors.
Tuesday 19th June, 2007
Canonical, the corporate sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, has rejected an intellectual property deal with Microsoft because it refuses to reveal details of the patents that it claims are being violated in open source software. To quote Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical:
"A promise by Microsoft not to sue for infringement of unspecified patents has no value at all and is not worth paying for."
This makes previous signees Novell, Xandros and (more recently) Linspire appear to be a little hasty, and it must be said, somewhat lacking in courage and foresight.
Friday 8th June, 2007
Microsoft, after having struck a deal with Novell, have also been busy making Linux/patent-related deals with Samsung, Fuji Xerox, Xandros, and most recently LG Electronics.
The Novell deal has been in the news for months now, and has been commented on to death.
I'm not quite sure what Xandros thinks it's going to gain from this. Perhaps some extra corporate business? Certainly, it's lost a lot of face in the Linux/FLOSS community. For a company with such a community-driven base product, can it afford to do that, long-term? Time will tell.
The other three, Samsung, Fuji Xerox, and LG Electronics, have rather more transparent motives. They were bullied. They spend lots of money on Microsoft products, and probably get huge discounts. If they agree to simply sign a bit paper which indemnifies them from being sued by Microsoft for something which Microsoft could never sue them for anyway, then the big discounts continue. Some Open Source enthusiasts might boycott their products, but it's small change compared to what they would lose.
A comment on the Computer Business Review Open Source Weblog seems to hit the nail on the head:
The suggestion is that Microsoft is not so much protecting its intellectual property as it is its business model. By creating a group of ‘patent-approved’ Linux vendors and discouraging enterprise adoption of alternatives via the threat of litigation the company would be able to stifle disruptive business models and innovation – all without ever proving any intellectual property infringement.
I think we can expect a lot more of these types of deals to appear.
Thursday 24th May, 2007
There is a very interesting and useful review of Optical Character Recognition software over at the groundstate.ca website.
The quality of the packages tested varies, and the author recognises the usefulness of software having command-line capabilities (for running batches of conversions, for instance). Along with accuracy, ease of use is also tested, with many usage and build examples demonstrated. Well worth a read if you are interested in using OCR software on Linux.