Google

Oracle v. Google has all the ingredients of an epic, high-stakes courtroom battle: a damages claim of up to $1 billion over the use of Java in the popular Android operating system, testimony by both Larrys (CEOs Page and Ellison) in the first week alone, and, of course, the disposition of some interesting legal issues, not the least of them whether APIs can be copyrighted.

But, more than all of that, the case serves as an important teaching moment, illustrating much of what doesn’t work in our patent system. » Read more

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently announced one of the most progressive open source policies in the US government. They reiterated the current OMB and DOD guidance by making open source commercial software, but they also went one step further: code they write is open by default. I am totally impressed. » Read more

This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed and on O'Reilly Radar.

This tweet by Steve Case (@stevecase) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that matters most. » Read more

Solar technology is exploding, despite what the cynics say. And so is progress. Companies like Solyndra, which looked like a good bet because it claimed a 30% gain in price-performance, crashed before take-off this year because price-performance improved 50%.

In such an environment, the benefits of keeping a new technology proprietary far outweigh the benefits of crowdsourcing. There are a host of companies at various places in the solar power business process, from planning commercial roll-outs to scaling production to delivering prototypes to researching new solutions. Each is going in a different direction.

Which is not to say open source has no place in solar. It does. In niches. » Read more

What is the state of the open data movement? During my opening keynote at the Open Government Data Camp (held this year in Warsaw, Poland) I sought to follow up on my talk from last year's conference. Here's my take of where we are today. » Read more

If you look at the evolution of the IT landscape over the past 30 years, you see two distinct trends: the continued growth of the IT dinosaurs (mainframe computing and mainframe wannabes like Sun) and the emergence of highly modular, adaptable systems, which, by their very process of evolution, not only best suit the current needs, but plant the seeds for the next computer revolution. In the 1980s, modular UNIX systems sowed the seeds for Linux, which in the 1990s sowed the seeds for the rapid spread and adoption of the World Wide Web, which in the 2000s, sowed the seeds for companies like Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, and Twitter to aggregate and disseminate content as never before. » Read more

Google is making its Dart system open source.

This is very important, not just for open source.

Dart is a structured language for web programming. That means you can actually build a website as you would write a little Javascript. In fact, Dart can be run on a Java Virtual Machine, or compiled into Javascript. » Read more

Almost every time I’ve turned on the television in the past week, I've seen an ad for Google Chrome. What started earlier this year as a sprinkling of ads here in the United States has become a torrential downpour.

For me, Google has long been one of the poster children for a new breed of company born in the age of the Internet that doesn’t need to rely on traditional advertising to build its brand. » Read more

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