Below is my talk from the International Federation of Computer Law Associations conference banquet that took place in Helsinki last week. (It is post-edited to match what was actually said.)

I have to say I was quite honored to be asked to speak. I was preceded by Finlands Minister of Justice Tuija Brax and later in the evening followed by imho Finlands funniest magician Martti Vannas. The dinner was set in the old stock market building of Helsinki, an exquisite restaurant now. I'm happy to say the talk was well received and many of the lawyers came to thank me afterwards.

read more

Glyn Moody has an interesting piece on Why Patents are Like Black Holes where he looks at the situation when a large patent holder goes bankrupt - or is about to. His point is that even if a company otherwise can go out of business cleanly, the patents often remain as a piece of "IPR" that can come back and haunt us like a zombie.

Also Matt Asay recently weighed in on the subject:

read more

Or: “Don’t be a Cnut.”

Yesterday I had a look at the response of the Joomla! community to the news that Microsoft had signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement and was contributing code to the content management project.

You probably won’t be surprised to find that some people don’t like the idea. The speed and vehemence of their rejection of Microsoft’s involvement in the project is entirely predictable, but none the less depressing for that.

The usual complaints were rolled out:

when Microsoft contributes a major product to open source, we’ll listen Microsoft is only doing this to sell more proprietary software

.
Taking those in reverse order: yes Microsoft is doing this to encourage Joomla developers to use Windows. Just as IBM supports Linux to …

Perspectives on the IBM patent hoo-ha. Karmasphere lands funding. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# IBM denied breaking its open source patent promise, claimed TurboHercules a member of organizations founded and funded by Microsoft, other competitors. Perspectives on the IBM patent hoo-ha: Florian Mueller, Simon Phipps, Matt Asay, Jim Zemlin, Eric Raymond.

# Oracle will …

1. ZeroMQ -- bold claim of "Fastest. Messaging. Ever." LGPL, C++ with bindings for many languages, past version 2 already. (via edd on Twitter)
2. Prediction Market News (David Pennock) -- HSX is going to be a real marketplace with real $. The real HSX will of course say goodbye to the virtual specialist and the opening weekend adjust, two facets of the game that make it fun to play, but that create significant amounts of (virtual) wealth out of thin air. The Cantor Gaming group is engaged in other interesting initiatives. They are taking over a sportsbook in Las Vegas and turning it into more of a derivatives exchange with live in-game betting, a step toward my dream of a geek-friendly casino. …

In response to the IEEE's report on Patent Power, which lists the top companies ranked by number of patents, Ari Shahdadi and Brad Burnham made trenchant comments in email that I thought were worth sharing (with their permission):

Ari wrote:

The main article is sad to read, with choice quotes like this: "Clearly, the global recession seriously hampered innovation in the United States." If I'd like to do anything, it's end the use of patenting statistics as a metric for innovative activity, especially by groups like the IEEE.

Brad responded:
…

Patents. M&A. Adoption. Business strategies. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

This bumper edition of 451 CAOS Links is brought to you courtesy of the Open World Forum’s temperamental wireless connection.

Patents
# Red Hat urged the Supreme Court to to make clear that it excludes software from patentability, while the SFLC and the FSF also filed briefs with the US Supreme Court arguing against software patents.

Investment and M&A
# The WSJ …

Monty Widenius dissects MySQL’s dual license. Intuit moves to the EPL. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Monty Widenius blogged about the apparent changes to the dual licensing of MySQL.

# Intuit announced that its code.intuit.com will be moving from CPL to EPL.

# Matt Asay asked whether Google’s open source advocacy might be a scheme to lower the value of patents.

# Vision Mobile’s Andreas Constantinou explained the differences between open source …

Microsoft has announced that it is to contribute code to the Linux kernel development effort under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. What on earth does it all mean? Here’s our take on the situation. With thanks to Jay Lyman for his contribution to the following:

Q. This is a joke, right?

A. Not at all, although if any announcement is better suited to the image above, we can’t think of one. Microsoft has announced that it is going to contribute code to Linux under the GPLv2.

Q. What code is Microsoft contributing?

A. Microsoft is offering 20,000 lines of its own device drivers to the Linux kernel that will enable Linux to run as a guest …

Cloudera debuts Hadoop support with $5m in funding. The financial value of open source. More patent problems for Red Hat. Government open source projects on both sides of the pond. Symbian’s release plan. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera makes it official
We previously reported the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects back in October. The company made its official debut in not-so polite open source society with the launch of its distribution for Hadoop and …