So. Now I know. Now we all know.

Suppose the FOSS community wanted to hire a group to serve as its public relations department -- would the Free Software Foundation be right for the job?

Dropping support for Linux on the PS3 has landed Sony in court. A class-action suit filed Tuesday in a San Francisco court (via IGN) claims that the intentional disablement of Other OS support constitutes a breach of sales contract as well as a breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

A lawsuit recently filed against the RIAA asserts claims, under the "Computer Fraud and Abuse" and "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization" acts, detailing the RIAA's alleged use of "illegal and flawed" methods when investigating people for downloading or swapping copyrighted songs without paying for them.

It's unusual for companies engaged in patent litigation to comment on how the fight is going. But Barracuda Networks CEO Dean Drako has openly sought FOSS community support for his company's defense again a Trend Micro lawsuit that, while filed against his company, is really about ClamAV.

In three years, Krugle, the company behind the code search engine of the same name, has gone from an idea to a company that's starting to produce revenue. CEO Steve Larsen, a veteran of half a dozen startups, attributes this brief time to market as being due largely to free and open source software (FOSS). According to Larsen, FOSS has shaped most aspects of the company, including its hiring practices and relations with business partners and users.

Dave Garrod, a lawyer who leads patent reform group PubPat's initiative against false marking, is now playing the part of the patent troll. He filed a patent infringement lawsuit against a number of tech companies, including a small Texas software company that went out of business years ago.

A lawsuit filed last year by TorrentSpy--a BitTorrent search engine--that accused the movie studios' trade group of intercepting the company's private e-mails, was tossed out of court last week.

When Network Appliance first announced it had filed a lawsuit against Sun Microsystems early in September over alleged patent infringement in ZFS, I didn't know what to make of it.