Open-source software companies are missing out on a relatively inexpensive way to fight concerns about patent liability, according to an attorney who spoke at an open-source conference in San Francisco this week.

I asked Sam Ramji senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft about TomTom the other day and he claimed that patent issues aren't causing any chilling effect on his part of Microsoft's open source plans.

WE HAVE BEEN AWARE for a couple of years now that Red Hat too was discussing patents with Microsoft but no deal was ever signed other than the recent virtualisation collaboration. It involves no patents at all. This issue is entirely off the table, so what came to fruition is inherently different.

The automatic disclosure of a Red Hat patent application has kicked off chain of events which has dented some peoples trust of the company and its patent policies. The H looks at what is going on and how it impacts the wider open source community.

FSF, with Ray Beckerman serving of counsel, have asked to file an amicus brief in the Sony v. Tenenbaum case. I thought you'd like to read it. The plaintiffs oppose the motion, and Tenenbaum supports it. So that means the court will decide if the amicus will be accepted or not. The purpose of the brief is this...

I have a bit more on Caldera, now calling itself SCO Group, releasing SysV init, with the source, in more products, beyond just OpenLinux Lite which I wrote about the other day.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), one of the principal advocacy organisations on open source software, has unanimously approved the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) version 1.1 as an open source licence, on 4 March.

In connection with completing our records on Groklaw, we've set up a permanent page for our coverage of Project Monterey, a major theme in the SCO v. IBM litigation. \