Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
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legacy html
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Up early, thoroughly dripped on by condensation in the
night: the down-sides of warm, wet ground and no ground-sheet.
Breakfast.
-
Read mail; and news. Wow !
- My optimism around Oracle's general
sanity, and Free software friendliness totally evaporated - or
is my under-slept mind making things up: Oracle
sues Google over Android
- Does this explain James Gosling's departure ? the world
should know. Is it a sign of virility and the promised financials from
the Sun acquisition ?
- Possibly he will be compelled to take the stand to
litigate his patent. IANAL, and have not read the claims, but the
abstract sounds totally obvious in the light of the extensive,
rather similar ELF
.plt relocation scheme (section 5-12
of the System
V ABI spec (by some irony copyright 1990-96 SCO) - 1996 being the
filing date of the 'Method for resolving data references in
generated code' patent.
- Quite apart from the merits of the case, it is an outrage
that Oracle is using Software patents to attack the most complete and
functional Free-Software phone stack out there (yet).
- Then again, perhaps this is non-news: it seems the whole
handset market is in some kind of patent maelstrom with Apple suing
HTC around Android, and Nokia around Symbian & presumably MeeGo,
Nokia counter-suing Apple (at least twice), Microsoft signing a patent
pact with HTC, and now Oracle suing Google.
- Eventually all these suits will have to settle. The -real-
question is - when they do, for the open-source users, will they settle
for everyone ? ( which means by definition, no per-unit cost ), or only
for themselves ? ie. will Google settle for all of Android, or will
Nokia settle for all users of Qt - or just for themselves and the
proprietary version ?
- Amusingly, one of the rumours I have heard is that
Java is not that well protected patent-wise, mostly relying on
copyright - hence aborting the ISO standard just before birth, and
using the unhelpful JCP to protect those rights. Thus I would
imagine the copyright part to be the greater part of the suit.
- Of course, the by now (somehow) socially acceptable way
of grating patent rights only to 100% conformant
implementations should be seen as the dangerous thing it is.
Whether you are suing for 'compatibility' reasons, or not it is
completely un-acceptable to be a software patent aggressor
in my view. Lame arguments about 'defending' standards are just
that.
- It is sad to see MoFo's Michael A. Jacobs - having done
a great job defending us all (for Novell) from SCO's copyright
aggression - to now be representing
Oracle in this business idiocy.
- Full disclosure, I happen to use Google services every
day, and am just beginning to enjoy the Nexus One they recently gave
me to play with. For a more in-depth write-up Miguel's write up
has more grist.
-
Poked at glib for much of the day; with more and more
reading, and discussion with davidz finally understand most of
the concepts; filed misc bugs around the place in glib. Bashed
a nice test case into place for the EAGAIN issue, hopefully we
can come up with something unutterably beautiful in the end.
-
Watched the rain pouring at speed onto the lawn, and
the river beside the house accelerating, it's good to be in
England.
-
Slept in the tent for the final night; less being dripped
on, and more crying of children to punctuate the night.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
