U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a ruling this evening extending the expiring terms of Microsoft's U.S. antitrust consent decree until Nov. 12, 2009, two years from the previous expiration date. California, New York and other states had been asking for a five-year extension; Microsoft had argued that none was needed.

One of the many common newcomer questions to Open-Licensed software is why there is such hostility between the supports of Linux, and the supports of the various BSD's.

I have noticed a trend developing in the business models of successful open source companies. These companies are implementing a business model that is based on dual licensing their software.

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the most important resolution of a standards-related enforcement action since Rambus, and possibly since its landmark settlement with Dell Computer in 1995. At issue was whether a licensing promise made by a patent-owning participant in a standards development process is binding upon someone that later owns the same patent. In a split 3 – 2 decision, the FTC has ruled that it does, when the later owner exploits the “lock in” of the marketplace by dramatically increasing the cost to license the patent in question.

While all the drama is unfolding before the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February and the subsequent 30 day period while countries can still change their vote, I thought I would point out something that I assume is fairly obvious to most people: Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably
about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with
long term interoperability.

"The EU's CULT committee voted on the final form of its report on the Cultural Industries in Europe earlier today, and chose to listen to their constituents, not the music industry's lobbyists. Amendments proposing ISP filtering and blocking, as well as a last-minute request for an EU directive extending copyright terms, were all either voted down or withdrawn by their proposers..."

Nanjing University and a company in Nanjing filed a patent at SIPO for Method to boot Linux operating system from mobile harddisk

The $250 million Vonage burned through as a result of the patent lawsuit brought by Verizon et al provides yet another example of why patents for business processes implemented on computers (a.k.a. software patents) deserve to die. Verizon’s two successful “name translation” patents negate an open standard assembled by Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Vocaltec via the VoIP Forum during 1996.