]
] NEW YORK, April 2 (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc.
] (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people) and Microsoft Corp.
] (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people) on Friday settled their
] long-running legal battle over patents and unfair
] competition, setting the stage for the arch-rivals to
] enter a new era of cooperation over their competing
] technologies.

Sun, Microsoft settle long-running disputes

] NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dow Jones & Co. (DJ.N: Quote,
] Profile, Research) on Thursday dumped three of America's
] oldest companies from its benchmark Dow Jones industrial
] average, replacing them with firms it said reflected
] growth in the financial and health care sectors.

Whoa...

Dow Index Promotes AIG, Pfizer, Verizon

] In an effort to revive the nuclear reactor construction
] industry, seven major companies plan to announce on
] Wednesday that they will apply for a license to build a
] new commercial power plant. The last time a plant was
] ordered but not later canceled was 1973.

Hopes of Building Nation's First New Nuclear Plant in Decades

] Apple Computer is attempting to patent the user interface
] for its IPod music player with the U.S. government.

Haven't we been through this before ...

Apple Seeks IPod Patent

] VeriSign says it will combine Unimobile technology with
] its own services to offer a new set of short message
] service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS) and
] secure content delivery capabilities. The combination of
] technologies will also enhance messaging
] interoperability, as it will enable connections to more
] than 300 carriers around the world, VeriSign says.

VeriSign acquires Unimobile - 2004-03-22 - Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal

] VeriSign's WCNAM Delivery solution allows wireless
] carriers to deliver to their customers' handsets inbound
] calling parties' names and phone numbers. VeriSign's
] solution mirrors enhanced caller ID that has penetrated
] more than 40 percent of the wireline market at an average
] feature charge in excess of $7.35 per month. The solution
] is a significant advancement over the status quo, whereby
] consumers must program names and numbers into their
] handsets in order to identify callers.

VeriSign Wireless Calling Name (WCNAM) Delivery Solution Approved for Interoperability with Nortel Networks CDMA and TDMA Wireless Infrastructure

] "'The lesson of the Web is that standardization is
] better than differentiation,' Mulholland claims. 'Is
] there a virtue in doing things differently? Is there a
] virtue in doing things the same way as everybody else?'
] As the past decade has shown, standardization with a
] proprietary flavor

GROKLAW

]
] The new CEO of on-demand app-renter Coremetrics says
] fewer companies want to buy big-fee, complex software.

This is a quickie but goes along with the Groklaw post I memed earlier today.

InformationWeek : CRM : PeopleSoft's Ex-CRM Leader Surveys New Licensing World : March 15, 2004

] His argument, boiled down to its essence is: Microsoft
] and/or its proxies will sue over and over and over until
] FOSS cries uncle, and all the largest open source
] software companies go out of business or are forced to
] cross license with Microsoft and their gang. That is what
] they want. The weapon of choice will be patents. Grab as
] close as possible to standards, patent, and then crush
] the opposition by licensing until the other side runs out
] of patents, leaving them vulnerable, at which point
] businesses, they hope, will say, I don't like being
] vulnerable. I'll use Windows instead.

This is an especially good piece despite perhaps excessive optimism.

Anderer's 'Old Think' Tries to Justify A Dying Business Model

] Charles Dickens couldn't come up with a plot like this.
] The legal dispute in many ways underscores one of the
] operative principles of the high-tech industry: Namely,
] that it is really one big junior high school cafeteria.
] Everyone knows one other, but the alliances change all
] the time.

More of the connections between the principals -- McBride, etc -- and Novell, oldSCO, Caldera, etc.

Six Degrees of SCO