Oracle

The year 2012 had many important FOSS legal developments which reflects the continued increase in FOSS use. FOSS projects have increased from 600,000 in 2010 to 900,000 by December 2012. In addition, a Dr. Dobbs' survey in the third quarter of 2012 stated that more than 90% of developers are using FOSS in two of the most rapidly growing areas, cloud computing and mobile computing.

Continuing the tradition of looking back over the top ten legal developments in FOSS, my selection of the top ten issues for 2012 are as follows.

» Read more

On May 23rd the jury in the closely-watched Oracle v. Google case returned a verdict for the patent phase of the trial in Google's favor. The jury unanimously found that Oracle failed to meet its burden of proving direct patent infringement by Google through Android and the Android SDK.

By the time of the trial, the set of patent claims asserted by Oracle had been reduced to » Read more

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

True confessions: I’ve been using OpenOffice since 2002 (since I started working at Red Hat, where it was mandated) and… I don’t like it (*gasp* – did he just say that?).  Yep, it’s true.  OpenOffice is just not that great of a user experience.  Microsoft Office, with all it’s bloat, is better.  Apple iWork is even better – that is -  from the perspective of an end user.  But you know what?  It doesn’t matter what I think. That’s because the real value of OpenOffice is not the end-user experience – it’s the fact that OpenOffice is a powerful, open content creation platform. » Read more