We often think of Microsoft as being the aggressor in patent lawsuits. Who can forget their efforts to patent smilies or, more recently and seriously, its anti-Android patent lawsuits. But, remember that Microsoft has often been found guilty of violating patents itself in such cases as against Uniloc. Now, Microsoft has made its last moves against i4i in the Supreme Court over its violation of I4I’s XML patents
This is serious stuff. At one time, a U.S. District Court had ruled that Microsoft couldn’t sell any version of Microsoft Word or Office that could create .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM files. Had that injunction been enforced immediately, there would have been a time during the fall of 2009 when you couldn’t have bought Office 2007 or 2010. That’s no longer in the cards because Microsoft removed the offending code in December 2009, but besides wanting its $200-million fine back, Microsoft wants, according to Thomas Hungar, of the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who represented Microsoft before the Supremes. “Microsoft wants the patent system strengthened, and the patent playing field fair and balanced.”
What Microsoft and friends means by this is that the courts should use a lower burden-of-proof bar for patent violations. As it stands now, if you’ve been accused of violating a patent you must show “clear and convincing evidence” that the patent is invalid. Microsoft wants the burden of proof to be lowered to “a preponderance of the evidence.”
This won’t come as any surprise to anyone in the network business, but Arbor Networks has just published a study of “native IPv6 traffic volumes across multiple large carriers” and found “only a small fraction of the Internet has adopted IPv6. ” We are so hosed.
Oh, no one’s going to try to Google “Lady Gaga” tomorrow and find that her YouTube videos are gone. But, if you’re in charge of a business, you’re eventually going to need more Internet addresses and the IPv4 address cupboard is bare. Indeed, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), which is in charge of all Asian Internet addresses, is now down to the last IPv6 crumbs.
The situation isn’t a lot better in North America. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) tells me that, “ARIN has seen a steady, if not, slight decline in the number of IPv4 request since IANA reached depletion of their IPv4 pool in early February 2011. However, ARIN has seen a substantial increase in the number of IPv6 requests since that same time. Currently, ARIN has over 5 /8s of IPv4 address and expects this will last through most of this year and possibly into next year.”
When things get really tight with IPv4 addresses, which at this rate will be in the late fall of 2011, ARIN may start restricting IP [Internet Protocol] allocations. In the meantime, you can try to buy IPv4 addresses, but that’s a short term solution. The bottom line is we’re running out of IPv4 addresses and we must start switching over.
I don’t say this very often, but some days Google is stupid. Until recently, Google’s biggest blunder was Google Wave. But now Google has announced that it won’t release Android 3.0, the tablet version of its mobile operating system, until it has made it “better.”
In a statement, Andy Rubin, head of Google’s Android group, said, “Android 3.0, Honeycomb, was designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes and improves on Android favorites. … While we’re excited to offer these new features to Android tablets, we have more work to do before we can deliver them to other device types, including phones.” In other words, Google will release the Honeycomb source code as soon as it’s ready. Just don’t ask when that will be.
This has ticked off pretty much every open-source professional out there. Android is under the open-source Apache Software License 2.0, which requires that the source code be released when the executable programs are released. That usually means they’re released together. But the license doesn’t insist on that.
Historically, Google has played games with the ASL’s terms by letting big hardware manufacturers, such as HTC, Motorola and Sony, have an early look at Android source code. Smaller vendors, developers and open-source purists have been unhappy with that “some animals are more equal than others” approach in the past, and now Google is stretching the gap between private release and an open-source release even further. Some would say it has stretched the gap to the breaking point.
I know Google doesn’t want vendors rushing half-baked Honeycomb tablets out to the public. But you know what? I’d rather see tiny companies trying to make a fast buck by selling not-ready-for-public-consumption tablets than a big company playing games with open-source licensing.
What really troubles me, though, isn’t Google playing fast and loose with the ASL. No, what bugs me about this, and what makes it one of Google’s all-time dumb moves, is that the whole point of open source is that you might make your life easier by sharing the code. Right now, all of Honeycomb’s development rests on a relative handful of in-house Honeycomb developers. The big OEM developers will be spending their time adding gewgaws to the base code. They’re not going to help get Honeycomb out the door.
By turning its back on open source, Google is not only harming and annoying other Android developers. It’s also hurting its own operating system, and its own future.
I don’t know who came up with this idea at Google, but I do know he was an idiot. In 2011, even Microsoft, enemy of all things open, has realized the worth of open source as a development method. Google itself rests on Linux. To decide that turning the developer clock back 20 years is the right move strikes me as foolish beyond belief.
Even so, since Apple has shown no interest in the low-end or midrange tablet markets, and since no one else is really ready to enter them, I’m sure Honeycomb will be a success. I’m also sure it will be filled with more bugs than it would have been if Google had kept the code open. If Google continues on this path, Android may eventually face real challenges from webOS, Windows Phone 8 or even Windows 8. I can only hope Google realizes the error of its ways — for its own sake, if not for the sake of its smaller developer partners and customers — in time to keep Android a top mobile operating system.
In 2011, you may not “see” Linux, but it’s everywhere. Do you use Google, Facebook or Twitter? If so, you’re using Linux. That Android phone in your pocket? Linux. DVRs? Your network attached storage (NAS) device? Your stock-exchange? Linux, Linux, Linux.
And, to think it all started with an e-mail from a smart graduate student, Linus Torvalds, to the comp.os.minix Usenet newsgroup:
I’ve been using the Internet since the late 1970s. So I already knew it well in 1991, when ZDNet was getting its start on CompuServe and it looked nothing like the Internet you know, love, and use every day.
Many of you know that the Web will turn 20 this year. I certainly do since, back in the day, I was the first person to write about this new thing called the WEB that would change everything about the Internet.
Of course, I had no clue about how much it would change everything. Indeed, I thought at the time that Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), one of the first public Internet search services would be more important than the Web itself. Looking back, I see I was already thinking about how important search would be to the Internet. I may have been more on to something. Today, we talk about “Googling” for everything from the latest news from Libya to our date tonight.
The pre-Web Internet was an almost entirely text-based world. There were ASCII-based end-user programs such as gopher, which let you use a menu to search through organized collections of files. You might think of this as a predecessor to Yahoo!, and you wouldn’t be far wrong.
Much more typical though were command line driven programs such as Archie, which we used to try to find particular files. If this makes the pre-Web sound like a place that was only welcoming to techies in those days, you’re right, it was.
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It was 1991, and only academics, researchers, and the military were on the Internet. For most people, going online meant connecting with a v.32 modem, at the blazing speed of 9,600-BPS (bits per second) to a Bulletin Board System (BBS) or an online service. The most popular of these services was CompuServe and so it was that Ziff Davis, them the publishing company parent of ZDNet, decided to start its own mini-online service, ZiffNet, on CompuServe, and I was there.
Under the CompuServe/ZiffNet ID, 72441,464 and then, as now, one of ZDNet’s most prolific writers, I was writing on the online discussion forums, helping to manage them as a “sysop,” and doing some trouble-shooting. You, if you’ve come to the online world since the Web arose a few years later, would barely recognize 1991’s ZiffNet.
For starters, everything was text-based. Oh, someone might post a message with ASCII-art from time to time, but that was it. That isn’t to say though that you could read stories on CompuServe/ZiffNet. At first, you couldn’t. All you could do is “talk” with each other and Ziff writers and editors on the various publication forums, such as Computer Shopper, PC Week (later eWEEK), and PC Magazine. These publications live on but no longer have any direct connection with ZDNet.
We also boasted an online forum for executives, Executives Online, or in CompuServe terms: ZNT: EXEC. There, Esther Schindler, noted writer, editor and sysop supreme, would host technology industry movers and shakers as they would ‘talk’ to forum members.
