Oral arguments on IBM's motion to compel discovery in the Utah SCO suit are today; stay tuned to groklaw for details...

] More and more people are becoming aware that the reading and/or
] writing of GIF images requires a license to use Unisys patented
] Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW) data compression and decompression
] technology, including United States Patent No. 4,558,302, Japanese
] Patent Numbers 2,123,602 and 2,610,084, and patents in Canada,
] France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. Since January of
] 1995, Unisys has entered into almost three thousand license
] agreements for use of GIF and other LZW-based technology.

Info on the LZW patent from Unisys

Laughing Boy wrote:

] I'm sorry... my BS-O-METER is buried in the red. This reminds
] me of the Unisys claim that they were suddenly owed royalties
] by every company that sold software supporting .GIF image
] files a couple years back. There really need to be laws in

Recall that this was a big deal at the time; e.g. open-source software couldn't support (creating) gif files without buying an LZW license from Unisys. The patent expired in the US in June and expires elsewhere next year; I'll blog details in a minute.

RE: FAT File System Technology and Patent License

] Republican lawmakers steamed over an unflattering television movie
] about Ronald Reagan are pushing to get his image on the dime in
] place of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's.

In the latest phase of the Canonization of Ronald Reagan....

GOP to put Reagan on the Dime?!

] But the key move in the McBride-FUD is his claim that
] proponents of free software and open source software are
] somehow against copyright.
]
] He claims that "GPL is exactly opposite in its effect
] from the 'copyright' laws adopted by the US Congress and
] the European Union"; that "Red Hat has aggressively
] lobbied Congress to eliminate software patents and
] copyrights"; that "the issue is clear: do you support
] copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as
] envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the
] European Union, or do you support "free" - as in free
] from ownership - intellectual property envisioned by the
] Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others?"; that "SCO
] argues that the authority of Congress under the U.S.
] Constitution to "promote the Progress of Science and the
] useful arts" inherently includes a profit motive, and
] that protection for this profit motive includes a
] Constitutional dimension"; and that "We believe that the
] "progress of science" is best advanced by vigorously
] protecting the right of authors and inventors to earn a
] profit from their work."
]
] Let's take each of these claims in turn:

Lawrence Lessig -- attacking darl's 12/4 open letter

] A tiny fossil of a creature that lived some 425 million
] years ago has entered the record books as the oldest
] unequivocally male animal. The organism, which resembles
] a cross between a shrimp and a clam, sports a large penis
] which has been perfectly preserved in three dimensions.

News

If M$ pushes this too hard, it will make a big mess. Ideally, we'd end up with any of the open-source FSes (or a new lightweight one) except that you need a Windows driver for said FS. I know some people who've been involved in porting AFS to windows and at the time, it sounded like the license terms on the Windows FS SDK (which costs $10K or something) were essentially such that you couldn't redistribute code that you wrote against the API.

RE: FAT File System Technology and Patent License

] If you really want the solution, it's that the US government
] should mandate that all PLANT be owned by the people. The
] services which run above layer 1 can be anybody. This is no
] different than how we manage other key infrastructure (roads,
] pipelines, spacecraft, etc). It would totally eliminate the
] grid lock we face with the RBOCs, re-energize competition and
] consumer choice, and you could have a FTTH network cross
] country in a few short years rather than waiting decades in
] playing cat and mouse. Alas, this will never happen.

I've said this before. Have a big colo facility that the fiber comes back to that anyone can lease access to.

RE: Fiber to the People

Don't know if this is evil or not but the acronym is hilarious:
SHIELD -- Securing the Homeland by Integrating Existing Local Databases. Its being deployed in the northeast to integrate local law-enforcement info.

] There are always defining moments in anything’s lifetime and the
] Internet is no exception.
]
] A meeting in Geneva on 10-12 December promises to be one of them -
] to define what is, what was and what shall become of the global
] electronic medium known as the Internet.

Pick your poison: ICANN or ITU...

The Register