Posts tagged “Free Software Foundation Europe

IN/OUTPUTS for 3 to 9 May

Posted on 5 May 2010

In/outputs - a taste plate of stuff that’s passed through my feeds this week Software patents: Stifling innovation with threats and bluster Continuing the responses to Steve Job’s threatened attack on open video standards, Karsten Gerloff, the President of FSF Europe+ has also spoken out, effectively claiming that Job’s is bluffing. Gerloff is unconvinced the matter would get to court because even the big software players don’t check to make sure they aren’t infringing others’ software patents. Any litigation undertaken by a patent pool would be forced to place the patents they are alleging have been infringed in front of a court which will leave them vulnerable to be invalidated given how messy the software/hardware patent environment is. He thinks that Jobs is just attempting to create…

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Is Steve Jobs the self-appointed lifeguard of the patent pool?

Posted on 3 May 2010

A short email reply sent by Steve Jobs to Hugo Roy from FSF Europe+ sends a clear message that Apple and a group of other software and hardware patent holders are gearing up to target the FLOSS+ community. Roy wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs dated 30 April 2010 that discussed open video standards. He also emailed a copy of the letter to Jobs directly. Jobs replied with this: All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source. Looks like it’s a bad time for…

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