Because people asked…
Q: will you be doing a Q&A on the Red Hat and Novell patents suits?
A: Are you crazy? :) I’ve worked for both companies and managed a team that may well have written or implemented the code at issue. I’m not touching that in public with a ten foot pole. :)
Q: but! but!
A: [...]
Monthly Archives: October 2007
red hat/novell patent Q&A
13-Oct-07Today I got a lecture on the virtue of TeX. (Not making this up.) (No prizes for guessing which professor gave that lecture.) (The point was that Word is not good in large part because of lack of choice.)
‘retiring.’ Hah.
10-Oct-07Good to see that Mark Webbink (my summer boss) hasn’t completely left the fray yet. (He’s also teaching at Duke- I’m jealous; Columbia offers no comparable course, to the best of my knowledge.) I look forward to seeing him tomorrow.
From the press release:
“[D]evelopers perform their best work when sound legal advice is available to them,” [...]
on joe on patents
10-Oct-07Some comments on joe’s post on Microsoft’s patents:
they’re unlikely to come after Linux distributors for the well-known “mutually assured destruction” reasons
Which is why they are going after Linux users, most of whom have no patents of their own to retaliate with. Besides the original Fortune article, check out this latest Ballmer quote, where he carefully [...]
two addendums to the radiohead post
09-Oct-07Two quick notes on the radiohead post:
I forgot to mention that as part of the purchase process (buried in the terms of service, no opt-out possible!) you give Radiohead the right to email you. Being smart, I doubt they’ll abuse it much, but that is a cost to you which you may want to factor [...]
SFLC legal summit
09-Oct-07I’ll be there. Drop me a note if you’ll be there and would like to meet up.
some free/open services links
07-Oct-07I’ve been a little too swamped with school and interviews to do much openservice thinking of late, but it has not been far from my mind. Some links to prove I’m at least reading if not writing:
Matt Asay hits on the crux of the issue- GPL, in a web context, is just like BSD. Some [...]
some quick notes on Fedora 8 test 3
07-Oct-07Having had a good week, I’m playing with toys a little bit today. (Sadly, not enough free time to make it to GNOME Summit.)1 Some notes, forthwith, from Fedora 8 test 3, with a few supplements as well from a month old Ubuntu Tribe CD.2
There is no F8 test3 version in bugzilla. Oops.
thinkpad volume keys [...]
hypothetical copyright exam question
02-Oct-07[picture: 'Unsolved Mystery', by ButterflySha, used under a CC-BY license.]
Hypothetical copyright exam question for your late-night pondering: If a poem is derived from statistical analysis of 22 books, but contains no actual direct sequences from those books longer than 2-3 words, is it a derivative work of those 22 books?
Thou shalt be I. . .
Thou [...]
Radiohead is experimenting with allowing you to pay whatever you want for the new Radiohead album, apparently on the theory that you’ll download it anyway, of which they get zero, or buy a CD from a label, of which they get very little.
My friend Iain waiting patiently for a Radiohead concert a long time ago [...]