1910
submission
savio13 writes:
The EFF has asked the US Supreme Court to overturn a patent law ruling that could pose a serious threat to Free and Open Source Software projects. A recent Federal Circuit Court of Appeals decision required that even the most obvious incremental advances can be patented unless it can be proved that someone else suggested it prior to the patent being filed. As such, many 'bad patents' are being used as roadblocks for legitimate innovators, especially those working for FOSS projects (who have better things to do then search through thousands of technical papers for some mention of the obvious).
Read the full breif here or the story at the EFF website.
1125
submission
savio13 writes:
Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of its Open Source Software Lab has invited 4 Mozilla developers to spend 4 days with Microsoft's Vista Readiness ISV team. The invite can be found here mozilla.dev.planning and was posted on Saturday (Aug. 19).
Schroepfer replied by indicating that Microsoft and the Moz guys are already in contact via email and will follow up on the offer there.
This is interesting because Sam posted the offer in a public forum (and indicated that he'd sent a PM, but was posting in case they had an @microsoft.com email filter). Sam also made a point of stating that the Vista ISV Readiness offer is typically only for commercial ISVs.
868
submission
savio13 writes:
A BusinessWeek article about GPLv3 starts to shed some light on where things are in the process and what the hold up is. While the article is very high level, ( a la the non-tech audience BW reaches), it's important because it'll mean more C-level execs have open source licensing on their minds, to some degree at least.
