OSNews

And thus, our true colours reveal. Since Obama was the young newcomer, technically savvy, many of us were hoping that he might support patent and/or copyright reform. In case our story earlier on this subject didn't already tip you off, this certainly will: Obama has sided squarely with the RIAA/MPAA lobby, and backs ACTA. No copyright and/or patent reform for you, American citizens!

It's been quiet about the Google-China dispute for a while now, but today, the silence was broken by China's minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, who stated that Google must either obey Chinese law or "pay the consequences", leaving no room for a compromise. With more and more western countries building their own internet filters and internet monitoring schemes, it becomes ever harder to make a strong fist against China.

While we are all busy discussing Apple suing HTC for patent infringement, we're almost forgetting that Nokia and Apple are also embroiled in about ten million lawsuits going either way. The most recent move comes from Nokia, who seeks to dismiss Apple's antritrust claims using pretty much the same arguments Apple used to counter Psystar's antitrust claims.

As most of you will know, Microsoft lost the patent lawsuit filed against the Redmond giant by i4i, while also losing the first appeal. Microsoft was forced to remove the infringing functionality from Word for US customers, but they also filed a second appeal. This appeal, too, has been lost.

Common wisdom has it that Flash is a resource hog, and that HTML5 will prevent your processor from having to work really, really hard to show animations of videos. Well, a number of people have conducted benchmarks with the latest browsers and Flash betas, and common wisdom is starting to show serious signs of crackage.

Earlier this week, it was time for the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, to announce the winner of the 2009 Turing Award, one of the more prestigious prices in the computing industry. The award was awarded to Charles P. Thacker; a name you might not recognise, but certainly one that has influenced the world of computing a great deal.

If you thought the growing criticism directed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office would force them to rethink their strategies in granting patents, you're most likely wrong. After a re-examination that took more than four years, the USPTO has reconfirmed Amazon's ominous one-click patent.

All Mozilla projects (the major ones at least, I didn't check them all up) are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. It's already over a decade old, and the Mozilla Foundation believes it is time to overhaul the license, with a focus on modernising what they believe to be outdated wording.

One of the things I love about software, particularly open source software, is innovation can come from anywhere. Sometimes it appears out of large tech companies such as Red Hat, IBM or Sun and other times it can come from one person writing code on a second hand computer in their college dorm. Software is really the expression of ideas and concepts, which can come from anyone. So I really enjoy seeing small open source projects try new things. Some will succeed and be adopted and some will fade away, but the amazing thing is to see people put their idea out there and present it to the world. Which is why I was thrilled when a few people directed me to Paldo and suggested it was worth a look.

In response to Apple's lawsuit against HTC, Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, has written a very intriguing blog post providing an insight into how major companies like Apple and Microsoft treat patents. He recounts two occasions on which Apple and Microsoft threatened to sue Sun - and how Sun retorted.