IBM has joined other big players in the open source community and has expressed that it will use OSS in order to improve the quality of software patents in the United States. The idea is to have a searchable software code repository that will make it easier to detemine if Read more
Greg Aharonian has named the worst software patent of the year in his PATNEWS mailing list, and I must say that I thoroughly agree with his choice. Behold U.S. Patent 6,910,071, which protects a “Surveillance monitoring and automated reporting method for detecting data changes”. Sounds impressive, right? Here is the Read more
Some of the top patent judges in Europe are pleading for a unified first instance European patent court. After all, there is a European Patent Office, but the patents must be enforced in the national jursidictions, which creates a patchy and unneven application of patent rules and produce the wildy Read more
Two stories are highlighting the problem posed by software patents. The first is an article in Groklaw by Marten Mickos, the CEO of the popular open source database software MySQL. Mickos is concerned that there software patents have poisoned the environment for all sorts of developers. He comments that: Many Read more
The UK Patent Office has ruled on the patentability of application number GB 2385686 filed by software giant Oracle. This patent application is for a system that translates a language like SGML into markup language like HTML. The application was denied by the examiner, who had doubts about whether the Read more
After their success in bringing down the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has managed to become one of the best examples of a powerful and influential civil society organisation that has managed to educate and inform the public with regards to a complex Read more
I have been waiting for a full-scale patent war over open source to take place in the near future. Yet, the war has not broken, other than the issuing of cease-and-desist letters to some open source projects, the war has failed to surface. I have been reading this very good Read more
[First seen here] This is a new case from the High Court of England and Wales (Patent Court). The case is Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. v Smith International. The litigation involved two different types of technology, a cone drill to dig for gas and oil, and a software simulation program Read more
It has been more than a week since the Commission text of the Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions was defeated 648 to 14 votes, proving that the Commission’s dodgy strategies have failed. This is already old news in the Blogoshpere, but as I missed the entire round of posts the Read more
(via David M. Berry). This is a report on OSS by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, which is charged with offering a balanced view on key policy issues. The report is well-balanced and measured, and it comes out very strongly in favour of open source, and it even Read more