Stories about: IPR

The obvious thought came to me while writing last week's column, that about the only folk (other than the deluded and amoral management of the SCO Group) that want the SCO Group effort attacking Linux and other open source initiatives to succeed is Microsoft. So I decided to explore that side in this follow-up column, but a bit of reading led me to the conclusion that things are not as simple as they appear.

Sometime before March 2003 The SCO Group decided that making products that people might want to buy was passe and decided to get into the "business" of filing lawsuits instead. Their first target was IBM but they soon expanded their scope to take on the entire open source community and scores of businesses actually trying to do things that benefited society. It's been a long road since then but the end is now in site - the end of The SCO Group that is.

What office document formats will your organization support next year? The answer used to be simple: You'd standardize on Microsoft Office, just like everybody else.

A leaked letter to the European Commission has revealed the extent of lobbying by proprietary software groups to prevent the widespread adoption of open-source software.

Google's revenue almost doubled in its third quarter, ended Sept. 30, 2005, and net income rose more than sevenfold, the Mountain View, California, company reported on Thursday.

Apache officials hope to iron out licensing issues with Microsoft and IBM pertaining to the WS-Security specification so that Apache can add the technology to its open source Axis SOAP stack.

The Debian operating system project will not implement Microsoft's proposed Sender ID anti-spam specification under the current licensing terms, it has announced, because they are not compatible with open-source licences.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is underway with an effort aimed at clearing out internal problems that might be slowing standards work or keeping the organization from dealing with pertinent issues.

I promise. This is not going to be another long tirade about Microsoft's latest FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) assault on free software and the GNU General Public License (GPL). There may be a short screech or two, but by the time this column appears, most of us will have gotten past Craig Mundie's May 3 speech in New York and moved on to the next RAT (Really Annoying Thing).