Copyleft Currents

Microsoft announced that it had extended its SUSE Linux deal by four years.  The first deal, in 2007, derailed the writing of GPL version 3 for six months as free software advocates tried to draft around the structure that Microsoft and Novell implemented to avoid conflicts between limited patent licenses and GPL — only to grandfather in the deal at the eleventh hour.  Since 2007, Novell’s assets were sold to Attachmate.

This week, Mozilla announced its Boot to Gecko project.  It is self- described as “a complete, standalone operating system for the open web.”  The project is in early stages, but expected to include new web APIs, booting (a low-level substrate for Android-compatible devices) and applications.
 

IBM said it will “donate” the standalone version of Lotus Symphonyto Apache’s new OpenOffice.org.  The “donation” is actually a contribution under an Apache 2.0 license.  Symphony was IBM’s free product based on Open Office.  The contribution was described in an email from Rob Weir, and also mentions an effort to remove GPL/LGPL dependencies (which might restrict the licensing of the Apache 2.0 material).  The contribution is about 3 million lines of code.  It remains to be seen whether this is the first broadside in a licensing (and attendant philosophical) battle between the Apache 2.0 code (based on Oracle’s and IBM’s contributions) and the newly forked Libre Office, under GPL.

In the tradition of holding forth about open source everything — which is usually misleading and sometimes just silly — ZDNet posted an article called “The Open-Source Car.”  (What style despot is responsible for that hyphen?  My friends know me as the Cliff Clavin of grammar, and even I don’t go that far.)  The impetus of the article was Toyota joining the Free Software Foundation.  But unlike most headlines touting a new open source phenomenon, the article does mention an interesting trend, which is that automobiles today contain a great deal of software.  Where there is software, there is open source, so that places us one step closer to the Linux toaster.  As of now, open source in cars is primarily confined to entertainment consoles, where open source audiovisual and web surfing packages are handy and abundant.  When open source moves to the computers with no user interface, we get to ponder once again how to deliver notices to the user behind the wheel.  An industry that is moving away from long paper manuals may have to take a step backward to deliver them.

Oracle announced that it would contribute its current version of the software for Open Office to the Apache Software Foundation’s Incubator.  Apache Foundation Incubator projects start as “podlings” that can graduate to Apache projects if they demonstrate sufficient robustness and community support, in which case they are released under the Apache 2.0 license.  As reported by ZDnet, The code contribution was made using the standard Apache contribution agreement (similar to Apache 2.0), but Oracle also assigned its rights in the trademark openoffice.org and related goodwill to the Foundation. 

Open Office had recently been forked by the Document Foundation as Libre Office.  That code is currently  licensed under GPLv3.  Re-uniting the two will require some licensing adjustment…stay tuned.

The Open Vitualization Alliance was announced last week, promoted by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Novell, BMC, and Eucalyptus Systems.  The Alliance was formed to promote an open source virtualization stack built on the KVM hypervisor.  KVM is currently part of the mainstream Linux kernel project.  It is built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, supplanting Xen, the open-source hypervisor stewarded by Citrix.  The alliance was perceived as a shot across the bow of VMWare, which is the market leader in virtualization.  

A complaint was filed against Red Hat in the Northern District of California on May 6, 2011, alleging various claims, including a request to cancel a trademark registration.

According to the complaint, the facts are as follows.  Alex Karasulu, founder of the Apache Directory Server Project, set up a domain at http://www.safehaus.org to provide an ecosystem for open source software components related to directory and security infrastructure.  Karasulu was approached by Jim Yang about the development of open source virtual directory software and Karasulu offered to develop the software as a project for Safehaus.  Karasulu used the name “Penrose”  for the virtual directory software project.  The initial version of the Penrose software was released on May 23, 2005. 

On March 13, 2008, Yang filed an application to register the trademark Penrose for software through a company he owned called Identyx, Inc. Yang subsequently sold Indentyx to Red Hat.  The complaint alleges that in the trademark application, Yang misrepresented the facts underlying the first use of the mark and failed to acknowledge prior use and ownership by Safehaus, and that Red Hat knew statements made in the trademark application by Identyx were false because of information received by Red Hat in the due diligence process for the acquisition. 

Based on the above allegations, the complaint alleges various claims and asks the court to declare the trademark registration invalid.



The ED Texas strikes again.   A jury verdict was handed up awarding $5 million in patent infringement damages by Google to Bedrock Computer, a patent troll that had sued Google and many other defendants relating to the Linux kernel.  The patent (U.S. patent 5,893,120) covers a “garbage collection” hashing method allowing outdated records to be removed on the fly from search results.  Bedrock originally sued not only Google but Yahoo!, Amazon.com, PayPal, AOL, Match.com, and (thrown in for good measure with the bigger defendants, probably for venue) Softlayer.  Google had separated its case from the other defendants.   Meanwhile Red Hat had filed a declaratory judgment action against Bedrock to have the patent declared invalid, but Red Hat was not allowed to intervene in Bedrock’s case. Most commentators appear to think the patent vulnerable to prior art claims.  The ruling against Google can be appealed in the ordinary course.

As one commentator quipped, “if I were a Linux detractor, I definitely wouldn’t get too excited: if somehow proven valid, the methods described in patent 5,893,120 are found in nearly every operating system. Look out Windows and OS X users, you’ll be next.”

The DOJ issued a press release about the modification of the Novell sale, previously reported in this blog.  The sale had theatened to divorce ownership of Novell’s patent portfolio from the company that succeeded to its Linux business.  The DOJ required Microsoft to “sell back to Attachmate all of the Novell patents that Microsoft would have otherwise acquired,” leaving Microsoft only with a license, and unwound the sale to EMC of 33 patents and patent applications related to virtualization.  The DOJ’s press release said, “All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2…and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License.”  It is unclear exactly what the release meant by the GPL reference, given GPLv2 has no express patent grant (perhaps referring to an implied license, perhaps merely a misstatement?) but the statement clarifies that the  patents will remain subject to OIN license terms.  (This seemed likely in any case, as previously reported in this blog.)  The DOJ also said, “CPTN does not have the right to limit which of the patents, if any, are available under the OIN license,” suggesting that the limiting elections possible under the OIN license Cannot be made in the short term by CPTN.  The full documents do not appear yet to be public, but should be available when the settlement is filed with the Court as a part of the the Tunney Act approval process.  The Tunney Act is a US antitrust law that, among other things, requires that the government and an antitrust defendant disclose  communications related to the settlement process.

Facebook announced this week its Open Compute project, under which it has released the specifications for its energy-efficient server and data center designs.  The specifications are made available under the Open Web Foundation Agreement.  The licensing details are here.