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Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.

Comment give Canonical a chance for changing things up (Score 1) 272

( sorry for repeat, did not mean to post as anon ) I consider myself to be a power user ( been running Ubuntu since dapper, installed and run it on many desktops, laptops, netbooks and even a few servers ), and am a developer by trade. I was highly skeptical at first, ready to switch to Mint when I first heard that Unity was going to be the default, but just like the "window buttons on the left-gate" of the previous version I was willing to give Canonical a chance. I'll admit the first hours were an exercise in frustration, mostly due to having to unlearn many old habits. The one thing I did to alleviate that frustration was to prevent the launcher from auto-hiding. After a couple of days of daily use I realised that it had clicked for me, and now I wouldn't go back. Looking forward to see more possibilities of customisation in the future, but as is, I find that Unity really works.
KDE

KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released 249

Posted by Zonk from the and-they-are-just-giving-it-away-this-time dept.
dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."

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