Legal Archive

The Patent Office's recent review of Microsoft's file system could put Linux and other GPL-licensed products at risk warn industry figures.

A patent expert has attacked the Open Source Community's latest initiative to document the provenance of code contributed to the Linux kernel so that proving its origins will be quicker and easier in the face of litigation. The Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.0 asserts that the developer submitting the code which it covers has either written or modified that code according to their rights to do so, or it is being submitted, unchanged, on behalf of someone else who asserts these rights.

Bunker down for a spate of battles over software ownership and patents in the near future, said Usenix Association president Marshall Kirk McKusick.

Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned.

The European Council on Tuesday approved controversial changes to the European Union's Software Patents Directive that will pave the way for widespread patenting of software in Europe.

"Mandrakesoft would like to alert all users and the software community at large about a recent clandestine attack by proprietary interests through covert adoption of EU Software Patent Legislation. In direct contravention of the recent vote by the European Parliament to curtail Software Patents, the Irish Presidency of the European Union has surreptitiously reinstated unlimited software patent language into the text of a statement to be adopted by the European Council of Ministers on Monday, May 17, without further debate!" Read the article here.

The EU commission's decision about Microsoft rose some heated discussion on nearly every part of it. Let's take an accurate look at it and discuss the hows and whys of the act that is going probably to change Europe's technological assets in the near future.

The European Commission's order for Microsoft Corp. to ship a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player could stifle innovation and help Microsoft's rivals instead of promoting fair competition, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust chief said Wednesday.

Microsoft apologized to jurors for its past anticompetitive practices during opening statements Wednesday in a case alleging the company's antitrust violations include word processing and spreadsheet software. "Yes, we acknowledge that and we apologize for it," said David Tulchin, a Microsoft attorney. "The conduct involved competition that went over the line. The question for you is whether or not consumers were overcharged."

In response to Havoc Pennington's post on the future of open source desktop development, GNOME's in particular, two prominent GNOME and Mono Hackers, Miguel de Icaza and Paolo provide their interesting perspective on the subject here and here.

The European Commission is expected (free reg. req.) to declare Microsoft an abusive monopolist, impose a fine of $100 million to $1 billion and order the company to make fundamental changes to the way it sells software in Europe. Such a ruling would be a significant setback for Microsoft after it overcame its most serious legal challenge by settling a sweeping antitrust case in the USA in 2001.

"I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space." A very interesting read from S2's CEO about the legal side of OSes today. And it seems he is not far off the truth at all.

Newsforge & GrokLaw report that "Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) never officially makes public when it investigates an organization, an SEC staff member told NewsForge that complaints and tips about suspected under-the-table funding, stock-kiting, illegal insider trading, and money-laundering involving Microsoft or Microsoft-connected individuals to the financially struggling SCO Group have been coming into the agency with regularity since last August.

Last year Microsoft approached Julian Smart to open discussions about the wxWindows name, in relation to the 'Windows' UK trademark owned by Microsoft. The wxWindows multiplatform toolkit project had to change its name to wxWidgets after both parties' agreement on how to resolve the issue.