Microsoft yesterday overturned a $1.5bn ruling made against it for patent infringement.
Back in January a jury ruled that Microsoft had infringed two patents owned by Alcatel-Lucent relating to MP3 standards. It made the record award of $1.5bn.
We recently published an article on the advantages of evolutionary database design (EDBD), a process which has its roots in the agile/extreme programming world. To provide a little balance, some yang for the yin, we asked Mark Whitehorn to comment on the article and give his views on EDBD vs. the more traditional database design approach.
Virtualization has become somewhat of a Wild West for the data center market, promising streets paved with gold for IT groups - and endless riches for the vendors hawking this new-age server slicing technology.
But as the virtualization frontier swells with shops and vendors staking claims to their real estate, it's clear that something in the data center needs to take charge of it all. Something needs to be the central point for monitoring and managing virtual machines and applications.
But there's only room for one sheriff in this town.
Evolutionary Database Design (EDD, aka database refactoring) is a controversial topic in the software development world. It’s a sore point among some DBAs because it promotes the making of changes to schemas that contain live customer data, sometimes with more than one application using the same database.
Given this controversy, and the resistance to iterative techniques among many database specialists, it seemed fair to pitch some of the commonest criticisms to Scott Ambler, co-author with Pramod Sadalage, of the book Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design.
New head of the European Patent Office (EPO), Alison Brimelow, has signalled her intentions early, calling a public meeting to discuss the policy vacuum left by the rejection of the Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions.
After months of pre-launch wrangling, legal jousting and clause tweaking, the Free Software Foundation is ready to launch the final version of the GNU GPL version 3. The champagne corks will officially pop at 12 noon, EDT, tomorrow, Friday June 29.
In the West, litigation is so last century. These days, intellectual property is all about the value and the strategy.
So says a new report from consultants at Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC). But in the emerging economies, protecting intellectual property is a battle on the most basic levels: warehouses are being raided to supply the black market.
Interview In the bad old days we used to progress from "current physical" to "current logical" models. We then used to transform the "current logical" to the "new logical" – and about then the deadline cut in and we scurried about hacking the code for the new system which is about as "new physical" as you can get. No wonder the agile people noticed that it made more sense to devote your time and intelligence to the "new physical", which wasn't going to be thrown away soon after you finished.
And yet, I remember that modelling the current physical and logical models of, in particular, the data we were processing was how I convinced my business users that I understood their needs. And I found many potential errors in the process of modelling the new logical, which could be addressed relatively cheaply just by redrawing the model.
So, was the implementation of process back then wrong, rather than the process itself? Do physical and logical models – and, specifically, physical and logical data models – have a place in development today?
Over the last few columns we have looked at how Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based systems can be built using the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO).
European Patent Office (EPO) staff have "worryingly low" levels of trust in the organisation's highest governing bodies, according to a leaked internal document entitled Governance of the EPO: a staff perspective.
The US patent system is set for a thorough review, according to reports, with the aim of improving the quality of patents awarded, and thus reducing the number of patent lawsuits.
The New York Times says the Bush administration wants better information from applicants, and is considering opening patent applications to public scrutiny.
Microsoft is getting another chance to prove to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that the disputed Eolas patent for browser plug-ins is invalid.
Xandros has become the latest Linux distro to hop into bed with Microsoft, announcing a five-year deal for joint development.
The oddball duo will collaborate on systems management, office suite, and server interoperability. Xandros will get protection from Redmond's legal high command, and support for its sales and marketing efforts, Novell-style.
A group of small British businesses has mounted a challenge to changes made by the Intellectual Property Office's (formerly known as the Patent Office) to the scope of the monopoly a patent holder can be granted for a software patent.
Telelogic is updating its model-driven development suite for SOA, as part of a move to meet requirements of more "mainstream" IT users.
The company today announced Telelogic Systems Architect for SOA, a "major update" to version 10.7 of its Systems Architect product, along with Tau 3.1, an update to its system design and development environment packing support for the latest Java and XML specifications to describe network services.
Computer dealers in Gujarat, India held a one-day strike to protest ongoing anti-piracy raids from Microsoft.
India news portals itVARnews and CIOL report about 350 dealers joined in a statewide bandh (that's a general strike) initiated by Surat-based South Gujarat Information Technologists Association (SITA).
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has blunted whatever public niceties existed between his company and Microsoft with a revealing attack on Redmond's lawsuit threats around open source software.
In his post, Schwartz recounts struggles to deal with defectors from Sun's Solaris operating system to the open source Linux. "Our computer business had failed to keep pace with the rest of the industry - which meant our volume systems looked expensive," he writes. "In combination, and with a poor track record of supporting Solaris off of Sun hardware, we gave customers one choice - leave Sun. Many did. Those were the dark days."
The Supreme Court has sided with Microsoft today, in a patent infringement case filed by AT&T over international copyright liability.
The 7-1 ruling, which relieves Microsoft of US legal responsibility of infringing software sent overseas will give many other software companies a sigh of relief.
I make no secret of the fact that I think requirements management and analysis are just about the most important parts of the development process. If you understand the business requirements, producing a system that can be shown to satisfy them (or miss some out) is comparatively trivial. In fact, it’s programmable – the process can be automated (although producing a usable, maintainable, well-performing system is less trivial, without skilled manual intervention, of course).
Many people in IT are scared of managing requirements, especially in smaller companies, according to Andy Gurd, director of product marketing at Telelogic (which sells the excellent DOORS requirements management tool).
Comment For many companies, software compliance is just about making sure that all copies of a particular application in use have a valid vendor licence.
There's plenty of software around to try and ensure that all licences are valid and all users covered, to stop organisations like the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) from claiming damages on behalf of its members for fraudulent use.
Open source luminary Bruce Perens has come out fighting in defence of the latest draft of GPLv3.
The draft, which seeks to prevent patent protection deals like that struck late last year by Microsoft and Novell, has come under heavy fire from proprietary software advocates such as the ACT (Association for Competitive Technology).
SCO Group has asked a US court to reel in the reclusive legal blogger Pamela Jones of Groklaw fame in its arcane Linux intellectual property prosecutions of Novell and IBM.
In a filing that draws heavily on press articles - including one from your very own El Reg, SCO said Jones's testimony is relevant to its case.
Business Objects may have to shell out at least $25m to data integration specialist Informatica, after losing a long-running patent infringement battle.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been accused of working to prevent co-operation between the free and proprietary software sectors, thanks to new terms in the latest draft version of the GNU GPL.
Get it while you can, folks: everything you need to install a pirated version of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional on your Windows-based PC.
The package, complete with a serial number, comes - wait for it - courtesy of the home page of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California's Irvine campus.
SAP today hit back at a lawsuit filed Thursday by rival Oracle alleging SAP employees stole proprietary Oracle support material online by posing as Oracle customers.
Oracle sued SAP, alleging employees with the German firm passed themselves off as Oracle customers so they could engage in the wholesale theft of proprietary Oracle support materials.
Over a five-month period starting last September, the employees allegedly gained access to Oracle's password-protected support site by using the log-in credentials of Oracle customers whose service contracts had, or were about to, expire, according to the complaint (PDF). Once inside, they made more than 10,000 unauthorized downloads of documents relating to hundreds of different Oracle programs. Oracle said there are "indications that this number may go significantly higher if traced further back in time."
The Mount Everest of evidence proving IBM's Linux contributions infringed SCO's intellectual-property rights amount to little more than a mole hill, according to a lawyer for Big Blue, who recently told a federal judge SCO has identified only 326 lines of offending code, compared with more than 700,000 lines of IBM's GPL'd code in the Linux kernel. (Note: an earlier version incorrectly said out of a base of 700,000 lines.)
The SCO Group's revenue kept on sliding during the first quarter, although the company did reduce losses.
SCO pulled in $6m last quarter – down from $7.3m in the same period last year. Thankfully for the IP defender, SCO's legal costs fell, helping it to a tidy $1m loss – an improvement over last year's $4.6m loss. Shrinking Unix software sales remain the primary cause for SCO's revenue dip, according to officials.
Microsoft lawyers who believed they'd buried the most embarrassing collection of documents about the company's murky past for good, without any one noticing, were in for a surprise this weekend. The archive has become a mainstay of the Bittorrent P2P file sharing networks.
A healthy 20+ seeds have been distributing the files for the past few days, at any one time.
In an interesting twist in the battle against software piracy, Microsoft UK is promoting the benefits of Software Asset Management (SAM) under a scheme which rewards honesty - richly. It says the voluntary self-start SAM programme it introduced last November can save businesses a significant sum on licensing fees - in addition to giving them peace of mind.
Last week Microsoft settled its only outstanding anti-trust case, a class action lawsuit brought in Iowa.
Comes vs Microsoft was resolved seven weeks into trial, and the terms of the settlement will not be revealed until April.
However, the settlement has already had one fortunate outcome for Redmond. The plaintiffs' evidence, which constitutes the largest and most comprehensive archive of Microsoft's dirty tricks ever amassed, has disappeared from the web.
Find out how Trolltech has made it easy for developers to implement web content directly into their native applciations through the integration of the WebKit rendering engine.
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