Microsoft patent peace--or patent war?

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 3, 2006, 2:04 PM PST

 

news analysis Microsoft on Thursday declared a "patent peace" with Novell, the No. 2 Linux seller. But did the company in fact just declare a patent war with the open-source realm?

Microsoft and Novell announced the deal under which Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop customers need not fear Microsoft will assert patent rights against them. In addition, Microsoft pledged not to assert patents against unpaid open-source programmers or against any open-source programmers contributing to Novell's OpenSuse.

The companies said they struck the partnership--which also includes technical cooperation to ensure various products interoperate--at the behest of customers. But the extent to which customers are reassured by the deal correlates directly with the extent to which they're worried about the absence of anything similar with Red Hat or any number of other open-source software companies.

In other words, the partnership can be interpreted as an attempt to inject Microsoft's patent values into the open-source world. That move is an affront to open-source businesses that generally share intellectual property, an approach anathema to the proprietary ways of Microsoft.

"I think it elevates the level of fear," said Raven Zachary, an analyst with The 451 Group, and gives new prominence to legal protection. "Indemnification was a hot issue a few years ago, and now it seems to be back."

Microsoft has expressed a fondness for software patents and a desire to profit from licensing them. That patent-centric approach has caused indigestion in the open-source realm at times. For example, Red Hat has forsworn using an open-source version of the Windows NT File System (NTFS) that could ease lives for those whose computers run both Windows and Linux.

To be sure, Microsoft's relationship with the open-source movement today is less adversarial and more sophisticated than in the past. The Novell partnership acknowledges that Linux is a force to be reckoned with. Microsoft's Shared Source plan involves some elements of the open-source philosophy. The company this week announced a partnership with Zend, developer of the open-source PHP Web site software. Microsoft has pledged not to sue anyone over a variety of patents involved with Web services.

And representatives of some open-source interests don't think Microsoft's move portends a further attack.

"Is this all things to all people? No. But it's a great first step," said Stuart Cohen, CEO of a multi-company Linux consortium, the Open Source Development Labs. "Obviously we're fairly comfortable that there aren't any IP risks (in using Linux), but it's been something standing over everyone's head."

But that doesn't mean Microsoft suddenly has an urge to help out open-source competitors. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Thursday's agreement essentially provides a way to ensure the company's intellectual property preferences have teeth in the open-source world.

"We don't license our intellectual property to Linux--because of the way the Linux licensing, the GPL (General Public License) framework works, that's not really a possibility," Ballmer said. "The cleverness was, how do we get protection and respect for our intellectual property in a world in which that license agreement works?"

For its part, Novell argues that the partnership allays, not heightens, any intellectual-property worries.

"The reality is that the patent concerns are out there. We didn't invent them. This deal actually removes patent concerns for customers wanting to use Linux," said spokesman Bruce Lowry. "And it protects developers from patent challenge by Microsoft . This is good for the community. There's nothing that would stop Red Hat from doing something similar."

Alliance against Red Hat?

But Red Hat--already on the defensive after Oracle's plan to try to undercut the company's Linux support business--has a pessimistic interpretation.

"For Microsoft, it's the opportunity to try to take their whispering campaign about intellectual property and bring it out front," said Mark Webbink, Red Hat deputy general counsel.

It won't work, Webbink argued: "They should have learned a lesson from SCO"--a company that sued Linux companies and users regarding assertions that proprietary Unix technology was improperly used in open-source Linux--"that putting your customer in the middle of the squeeze play is not a good idea for business."

Zachary, though, believes that ultimately Microsoft isn't likely to go after Red Hat for patent infringement. "It would be a mistake," he said. "The public relations nightmare isn't worth the benefit, and it would make the open-source community even more hostile to Microsoft's overtures. It would also likely be a fast track to overturning software patents in the European Union."

Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with DLA Piper, sees the move as a straightforward alliance against Red Hat.

"I think that they are picking out a Linux vendor who is weak and trying to drive companies to them, so that the stronger vendors such as Red Hat become less competitive," he said.

Red Hat adds new Linux legal protection

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 3, 2006, 4:40 PM PST

Faced with new competitive challenges from Novell, Microsoft and Oracle, Linux seller Red Hat has begun promising protection against intellectual-property lawsuits.

The leading Linux seller quietly slipped the indemnification provision into a question-and-answer page on their Web site after Novell and Microsoft announced a technical and patent partnership on Thursday.

"As with any indemnification provision, if (a customer) were to get sued for intellectual-property infringement over code they got from us, the provision of the indemnification language kicks in. At that point, we step into their shoes" to handle the legal attack, said Mark Webbink, Red Hat's deputy general counsel.

Indemnification of open-source software rose to prominence after the SCO Group sued IBM, arguing that it copied proprietary SCO Unix code into open-source Linux against the terms of IBM's Unix license. Then the issue died down--until recently.

Last week, Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison bragged that his company would provide legal indemnification along with a higher-cost option for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux support subscription. And Thursday, Novell boasted that its partnership with Microsoft means customers need not fear patent lawsuits from Microsoft, an expansion of an earlier promise to counterattack in patent lawsuits regarding open-source software it sells.

The indemnification is a new element to Red Hat's Open Source Assurance program, which guarantees customers that the company will rewrite code found to violate another's intellectual property. Webbink said he believes that earlier pledge is more significant than the indemnification.

"We still think the earlier version of the Open Source Assurance was the far more critical thing, and we'll continue to stand behind that," Webbink said.

But the company decided adding indemnification was worthwhile.

"Our management and board looked at it and said, 'Look, this isn't worth a hill of beans, but if saying it will make people feel better, we'll say it.' We've added it to the program," Webbink said.

AOL, Microsoft seek indie-rock cred

By Reuters

Published: November 4, 2006, 2:46 PM PST

 

AOL and Microsoft are wooing indie-rock fans to help solidify their digital music strategies.

Corporations seeking indie cred are nothing new. But both bids come at critical times for the technology giants.

AOL, in the midst of shifting from an Internet service provider model to an advertising-driven business, aims to expand its audience at the margins by stretching beyond the pop crowd with new programming aimed at hipsters.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is trying to make inroads with its new Zune digital media player by winning over the same group of tastemakers that first embraced Apple Computer's iPod.

As part of AOL's indie strategy, the portal on Oct. 26 launched a weekly Web-only video show called "The DL," hosted by Sara Schaefer of the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade. It also plans to launch a revived version of its Spinner radio brand with special channels dedicated to indie music. Additionally, the company is already up and running with a new weekly podcast series called "The Interface," which focuses on acts like Spoon.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is targeting the indie community with heavy promotional activity around music festivals like CMJ, which runs through Nov. 4. CMJ is working with Microsoft to identify as many as 300 music-savvy students ages 18-22 to assist with on-campus and online promotions as well as feedback for the Zune, which is expected to hit stores Nov. 14.

The company already has been courting the blogger community. Microsoft made headlines this summer for flying big-name music bloggers including Coolfer and Stereogum out to its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to test the Zune on a first-look basis. It's also running Zune ads across leading blogs, and the device will come preloaded with music and video from Sub Pop Records, Astralwerks, V2, Ninja Tune and Quango Music Group.

Bill Wilson, senior vice president of programing for AOL, says the indie-rock community is a natural fit given its strong involvement with digital music.

But corporate brands may not resonate with more discriminating rock fans, which is in part why both companies are cultivating new brands that can be promoted.

Story Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

U.S. analysts had flagged atomic data on Web site

By William Broad
The New York Times

Published: November 4, 2006, 11:07 AM PST

 

Two weeks before the government shut down a Web site holding an archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war, scientists at an American weapons laboratory complained that papers on the site contained sensitive nuclear information, federal officials said yesterday. Two documents were quickly removed.

The Bush administration set up the Web site last March at the urging of Congressional Republicans, who said giving public access to materials from the 48,000 boxes of documents found in Iraq could increase the understanding of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

But among the documents posted were roughly a dozen that nuclear weapons experts said constituted a basic guide to building an atom bomb. They were accounts of Hussein's nuclear program, which United Nations inspectors dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

The site was shut down on Thursday night after The New York Times asked questions about the disclosure of nuclear information and complaints that experts had raised. Yesterday, federal officials said they were conducting a review to understand better how and when the warnings had originated and how the bureaucracy had responded.

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, called the posting of the weapons information "a serious security breach," and other Democrats called for an investigation. The Republican congressman who had led the campaign for the creation of the Web site, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, questioned whether the government had received any serious warnings about the site, and said he had always stressed the need to "take whatever steps necessary to withhold sensitive documents."

The complaints two weeks ago by the American weapons scientists, as outlined by federal officials yesterday, indicated for the first time that warnings about the site had come from the government's arms experts, as well as from international weapons inspectors.

A senior federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California last month had protested some of the weapons papers on the site to the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that runs the nation's nuclear arms laboratories. The objections "never perked up to senior management," the official said. "They stayed at the midlevels."

Managers at the security administration passed the warning to their counterparts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversaw the Web site, the official said. As a result, a nuclear weapons expert said, the government pulled two nuclear papers from the Web site last month. He said the dangers of the documents had been recognized at Livermore and in the wider community of government arms experts. "Those two documents were on everybody's list," he said.

The first known protest about the site came last April, when United Nations weapons inspectors lodged an objection with the United States mission to the United Nations over a chemical weapons document, diplomats said. It was removed. After the site started posting nuclear documents in September, concern arose among United Nations weapons inspectors in Vienna and New York.

Earlier this week, two European diplomats said that weapons experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that they should warn the United States government of the dangers of posting the documents. They said that Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the agency, conveyed those concerns last week to the American ambassador to the agency, Gregory L. Schulte.

But Matthew Boland, Schulte's spokesman, said yesterday that the ambassador had received no warnings. Asked about that, one of the two European diplomats raised questions about whether Heinonen had followed through. Even so, intelligence officials in Washington said they were exploring whether the government had received warnings from United Nations inspectors.

An official of National Nuclear Security Administration said his agency would review the documents. To the best of his knowledge, he added, none of them had been reviewed by his agency, which is the government's expert on nuclear secrets.

Entire contents, Copyright © 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

Woz highlights celebration of Apple's history

By Daniel Terdiman
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 5, 2006, 10:20 AM PST

 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If there's one machine that more than other shaped the future of the computer business, it almost surely is the Apple I.

And what do you get when you bring together four of the team,--including Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak--behind that groundbreaking computer? A lovefest.

That's what was on display Saturday at the Computer History Museum here as several hundred longtime Silicon Valley veterans and youngsters alike showed up for a panel discussion called "Apple in the Garage" celebrating Apple's 30th anniversary.

To be sure, that anniversary was really in April, but as part of the ninth annual Vintage Computer Festival, Wozniak, Apple employee No. 6 Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 8 Chris Espinosa, and longtime Apple employee and original Macintosh team member Daniel Kottke got together for an afternoon of storytelling about the earliest days of Apple and its seminal computers.

Last year, festival organizers, including Bruce Damer, founder of the DigiBarn computer museum in California's Santa Cruz mountains, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak appeared at the event as well, and to some, Saturday's event was a suitable bookend for a historical look back at the birth of personal computing.

And on Saturday, many of those in attendance were happy just to hear the four panelists tell stories about the creation of the Apple I in 1976, and its successor, the Apple II in 1977.

"We thought it would be a shame if we didn't have a birthday party for Apple with a cake," Damer said at the beginning of the discussion. And indeed, he had brought along a birthday cake adorned with a digital print of Apple's original logo.

But before anyone could eat the cake, the panelists took the audience down a memory lane of poignant Apple history.

Espinosa, for example, recalled how he had begun working for Apple while still in high school, and that he still counts himself lucky--he still works at Apple today--to have gotten to work alongside such technology luminaries.

"It was really interesting being 14 and 15 years old and having my hobby being hanging out with guys who were" changing the face of technology, Espinosa said. "I didn't really know that this wasn't the way 14-year-olds spent their high school year."

Apple's roots
Kottke recalled how he had become friends with Steve Jobs--who was not present at Saturday's event to the dismay of some in attendance--when both were college students at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He said the two had bonded over Eastern philosophies and that Jobs had not talked about his computer work.

But upon being invited to Silicon Valley, Kottke said he visited Jobs' house--the home of the famous garage where Jobs and Wozniak started Apple--and the first thing he found was Jobs' sister watching "The Gong Show" on TV and plugging chips into Apple Is.

Wozniak said that the early Apple team didn't have a telephone, and that Jobs was essentially running the entire business form his bedroom.

"It was a nice, warm place to meet people," Wozniak said of the Jobs' garage.

Wigginton remembered that in those days, many of today's computer industry luminaries hung out at the Homebrew Computer Club because it was a way to have access to working computers.

"Nobody could afford their own computer," Wigginton said. "It's amazing to me that owning your own computer was considered impossible."

For his part, Espinsoa joked about why he had gone to work for Apple rather than for another computer company.

"Scott Computer was too far away to work because I only had a bicycle," Espinosa said. "So Apple was much better for me because it was much closer."

He also said that when Apple began working on the Apple II, the team got its own building, though it didn't have any furniture beyond some telephones.

"When you're in a building with nothing but telephones and Steve Wozniak," Espinosa said, alluding to Wozniak's storied history building blue boxes, "you know you're going to have some fun."

But he also said the carpeting in the building was a constant source of static electricity, and that anytime someone was walking over the carpet and touched an open Apple II case, "you fried the keyboard chip."

"So we spent an incredible amount of time," Espinosa said, "replacing keyboard chips."

Before co-founding Apple, Wozniak was working for Hewlett-Packard, and he said that in order to protect himself from claims by HP that he was profiting off work that the computer giant owned, he got the company's legal team to run the Apple I plans by every department. They all turned the project down, he said.

And while HP was interested in the machine, Wozniak said that ultimately, the company was afraid it wasn't polished enough to be an HP computer. Later, he added that if HP had wanted it, it probably would have been a commercial failure and might have set the personal computer business back significantly.

In the early days, Apple was putting software on cassettes, but that the company didn't have automated tape duplication machines.

So, someone rigged up a system in which a rack of Panasonic tape machines were linked together off an Apple II and in order to copy as many tapes at a time as possible, the team would have to simultaneously press play and record on all the tape machines and hit the return key on the Apple II to begin the process.

"Any time someone would come in and talk about something like a $25 million Bank of America credit line," Espinosa said, an Apple employee might have to "stop the meeting and go over and switch out the cassettes and put in new ones and then come back and say, 'So what were we talking about?' That's the kind of place it was."

But of course, Apple is now one of the most important technology companies in the world, and its hallmark, despite Wozniak's long-ago departure, is elegant design. And he hopes to lay claim to that legacy.

"I don't want credit for designing the first (personal) computer," Wozniak said. "I just want credit for designing the first good one. (And for) publicizing the fact that a computer could be attractive."

Web tool splices filmmakers' global divide

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 3, 2006, 4:00 AM PST

 

Behind the making of the upcoming animated film "Happy Feet" is a tale of two film producers struggling to work together from different continents.

Like most global team efforts, the story features off-hour conference calls and a lot of e-mail trickling in overnight. But for a small digital-effects house like San Francisco's Giant Killer Robots, it also meant sending large, bandwith-hogging digital video files to the director's company, Animal Logic, in Sydney, Australia.

That's not an easy task when you're a little company that can't afford fiber-optic lines into the office. But if an innovative joint university-government project pans out, global movie-making teams like the one behind "Happy Feet"--due in theaters Nov. 17--could have an easier time getting their jobs done.

A small group of engineers in San Francisco is developing a Web browsing tool for use over a high-speed fiber network that would allow animation and film producers to co-produce a movie in real time. The application, called Sebastian, would work over a dedicated, point-to-point Internet connection, or so-called dedicated light paths, and would let remotely located artists accomplish tasks like marking up frames, editing video and changing color palates as if they were in the same room.

It would make a huge difference to smaller outfits like Giant Killer Robots. When the two "Happy Feet" teams were collaborating over broadband from different time zones, using a QuickTime video editing tool called CineSync, the video clips were more like watching a YouTube clip than a high-resolution wide-screen shot, which made it hard for the director to form an educated opinion on the fly. That sometimes painful process, suffice to say, slowed the movie-making process.

"It's a two-cans-and-a-string-in-between-them kind of problem. You're really trying to break down the walls of globalization. And it all depends on really wide pipe," said Pete Oberdorfer, co-owner of Giant Killer Robots.

Sebastian is under development at the Digital Sister Cities lab, a research and development team that's part of San Francisco-based Digital Sister Cities Initiative (DSCI). DSCI is focused on connecting cities and promoting economic development through advanced technologies.

One of the major goals of the organization is to get high-speed fiber connections beyond universities and big companies--right now about the only entities that can afford them. By first working with data-intensive businesses like movie outfits, DSCI hopes to begin seeding a market and sparking demand that will eventually convince big telecommunications companies to decrease their sometimes dizzyingly high fiber-line rates.

In other words, build the market, and just maybe the carriers will come. Of course, it won't be easy, but DSCI researchers see their project in two parts: First, give filmmakers the tools to collaborate remotely. Second, and likely more difficult, give them the high-speed network to make real-time collaboration possible.

Companies such as Cisco Systems and Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic "can burn thousands of dollars to create infrastructure themselves," Oberdorfer said. "Companies (like ours) don't have that option. As this progresses, we see it scaling so that anyone can get access to it."

A key to this project is the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), which operates the state's high-speed fiber network for education and research purposes.

Since DSCI has access to the network, Sebastian's developers can work on it in a high-speed environment. For companies to participate in the Sebastian development process, however, they also need access to a fiber-optic network. That's where's CENIC comes in. Sebastian's core team hopes to extend the network to small production houses, have them come to a California university campus to try it out, or acquire their own fiber network.

Fiber doesn't come cheap

There's little question that fiber connections are making modern movie making easier.

For example, Lucasfilm's San Francisco office has a 10-gigabit-per-second fiber network, which they use on some movie making projects, according to Joaquin Alvarado, director of DSCI. Of course, the studio behind the "Star Wars" movies isn't exactly a little company, and therein lies the challenge--getting small outfits access to fiber.

That's a problem, because it isn't cheap. Large telecommunications carriers typically charge between $15,000 and $20,000 per month for these services.

Michael Mages, former lead developer of Apple Computer's Final Cut Pro, is heading up the development of Sebastian, which is named after one of Mages' favorite musicians, John Sebastian.

"We're developing a product to enable the next-generation Internet...That's available in a research capacity right now, but we have early access to it, so we can build one of the first working tools for creative professionals," Mages said.

Alvarado said he believes that DSCI needs to develop compelling applications for business collaboration. Hence, the work with filmmakers.

"Filmmakers want to collaborate with people directly, and either you buy a dedicated line, which is mostly not accessible to low and mid-level production houses, or you don't. We're going to build a ubiquitous tool that's inexpensive, runs on standard platforms and allows people to preview video and film content remotely and interactive with each other," Alvarado said.

Sebastian will work like a Mosaic or Safari browser with a secure IP connection, according to Mages. The tool might offer the user a selection of production houses to link to from a list of menu options, and then once selected, it would connect the two companies in real time, with about an eighth of a second latency, Mages said.

An editor in San Francisco, for example, might select a video clip for review, and the director in Paris, could mark it up with suggestions. The two sides will also be able to talk over separate pipes designated for voice conferencing and over-the-shoulder video conferencing. With the tool, producers can also record the connected session for later review. Sebastian's player engine will support the film-editing tools Apple Final Cut Pro and QuickTime.

Mages said the lab plans to complete a prototype within the next year, developing it in partnership with production houses from San Francisco and international cities like Paris. Ultimately, he said, DSCI hopes to license the technology or sell it as software for around $149.

So far, several film and animation producers in San Francisco have agreed in principle to test the software. Giant Killer Robots' Oberdorfer said he hopes to eventually work with the technology. Wild Brain, another San Francisco digital-effects company, said it is in preliminary discussions with DSCI about using the technology, according to company representative. And according to Alvarado, engineers from Lucasfilm and several animation companies in Paris have signed on to the project.

"This is our pilot project," Alvarado said of Sebastian. "Our focus is this network and what kind of intellectual property we can build on top of this that incubates the students' and the city's relationship with all these other tech centers and companies. It's the next level of globalization."

 

MySpace to launch in Japan with Softbank

By Reuters

Published: November 5, 2006, 7:20 PM PST

 

News Corp.'s MySpace.com online service will be launched in Japan in a joint venture with Japanese Internet and telecoms group Softbank, the Nihon Keizai business daily reported on Monday. The 50-50 venture, to be called MySpace Japan, will first offer services for personal computers and later allow users to post photos and write blogs via cell phones, the paper said.

The firms are expected to announce the deal as early as this week after a meeting between News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, it said. A Softbank spokesman declined to comment on the report.