Via Groklaw: Judge Kimball argues:

“The court finds that SCO failed to comply with the courtâ

I spent the weekend in Germany where we had a family come-together as my grandma (92), my uncle Stefan and I all have birthday in November. It was nice to meet all of the family, although there is never enough time to talk to all of them. The place, the Naturfreundehaus Meissner, is a youth-hostel style place situated on top of the This entry was posted in Uncategorized on 2006/11/27 by Sebastian Spaeth.

I tried not to comment on Novell’s pact with the, err with Microsoft. There have been enough unfounded speculations and conspiracy theories already. However, just shortly after that patent license deal heise online quotes Steve Ballmer saying that Linux “uses our IP” (german article). I thought MS would not act just like those bad conspiracy theories predicted. They do, which I find quite boorish and clumsy.

I am not afraid that Linux (or open source) is in danger. However, I am very interested in what the consequences will be for Novell. *If* MS asserts specific patent claims against open source packages, Novell will, according to many interpretations, not be allowed to distribute these packages any longer at all under the GPL license. And that will hurt them more then the additional mio $ they have on their balance sheet.

Bill says:

“They’ve appropriately compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property, which is important to us. In a sense you could say anybody who has got Linux in their data center today sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability, because it’s not just Microsoft patents. Because of the way open-source works, there’s nobody who’s been able to do patent coverage or patent indemnification behind that.
…we want Suse Linux to have the highest percent share of that, because only a customer who has Suse Linux actually has paid properly for the use of intellectual property from Microsoft…”

He!
Forsooth, he serves you most peculiarly.
Unearthly are the fool's drink and his food;
The ferment drives him forth afar.
Though half aware of his insensate mood,
He asks of heaven every fairest star
And of the earth each highest zest,
And all things near and all things far
Can not appease his deeply troubled breast.

Good opinion here.

This guy bought the new Zune music player, the latest innovative product from Microsoft. If you think you have seen product rip-offs, look again. It tries hard to look like an ipod, it includes a “zune” sticker in the box (just like the ipod sticker) and instead of Apple’s “Designed in California” they have printed “Hello from Seattle” on the back of each device (Update: Even their wording is an Apple rip-off: In Apple Mail.app’s icon it actually says “Hello from Cupertino”). Zune only connects to and only plays songs from the Microsoft-owned, propriatory zune marketplace.

However, they suceeded to differentiate themselves in one Microsoft-specific way! The software install will abort with errors:

That photo is part of the official installer. I wonder… no I better don’t….

Continue reading →

You might look like this when you try to install zune.

von Krogh, G.; Spaeth, S. & Lakhani, K. (2003), ‘Community, Joining, and Specialization in Open Source Software Innovation: A Case Study’, Research Policy 32(7), 1217-1241.

von Krogh, G.; Haefliger, S. & Spaeth, S. (2006),The Practice of Knowledge Reuse in Open Source Software: “Shifting the Creative Effort”, in ‘2006 Annual Meeting Best Paper Proceedings’, pp. TIM N1-N4.

von Krogh, G.; Haefliger, S. & Spaeth, S. (2003),’Collective Action and Innovation in Open Source Software Development: The Case of Freenet’, presented at Academy of Management 2003, Seattle.

von Krogh, G.; Spaeth, S. & Haefliger, S. (2005),Knowledge Reuse in open source software: An exploratory Study of 15 open source projects, in ‘Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences’, pp. 198–207.

von Krogh, G.; Spaeth, S. & Lakhani, K. (2005), ‘Letters to the Editor: Collaboration Rules’, Harvard Business Review 83(10), 150–151.

Haefliger, S. & Spaeth, S. (2003),’Free Ridership in Open Source’, unpublished working paper.

Kugler, P. & Spaeth, S. (2001), ‘The Best Things in the Net are Free?’, Mitteilungen – St.Galler Zentrum für Zukunftsforschung 26(3), 1-11.

Spaeth, S. (2005),’Coordination in Open Source Projects: A Social Network Analysis Using CVS Data’, doctoral dissertation.

Spaeth, S. (2003),’Logistics at NCC’, Master’s thesis, Technical University Linköping, Sweden.

Spaeth, S. (2003),’Decision-Making in Open Source Projects’, proposal for the Doctoral thesis.

Spaeth, S.; Haefliger, S.; von Krogh, G. & Birgit, R. (2006),’Communal Resources in Open Source Software Development, ”EGOS Colloquium 2006′, Bergen, Norway.

Spaeth, S.; Stuermer, M.; Haefliger, S. & Kroghvon Krogh, G. (2007),’Sampling in Open Source Software Development: The case for using the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution, ”HAWAII INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SYSTEM SCIENCES’, Hawaii.

Hey, they finally managed it. Java (the original implementation) is going to be opensourced under the GPL v2 license. Nice to see them moving. The only question is whether this is too late in the game to stop .NET/mono or [add other languages of your choice here] from doing what Java was supposed to do.