Patented! - Credit: adulau on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

In a 9-3 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has declared that software-only inventions are not patentable. In addition, the Court of Appeals has declared business methods are no longer patentable either. The case is headed to the Supreme Court.

In a ruling with huge implications for the technology sector, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said Oct. 30 pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable.

In a 9-3 decision, the court upheld a 1997 U.S. Patent Office refusal to issue a patent to Bernard Bilski for a method of managing the risk of bad weather through commodities trading. The court ruled that processes can be patented only if they are implemented by a machine or transform something into a new or different thing.

The case is now likely headed to the Supreme Court for what would be a landmark decision about the scope of patents in the United States.

The Federal Circuit said software and business methods are still patentable but rejected standards set in a 1998 decision that allowed patents on “methods” of doing business so long as the methods involved use of a computer and produced a “useful, concrete and tangible result.” That decision opened the door for patents that had no connection to technological innovation.

This is big news, but don’t get too excited. It still has to go through the Supreme Court, and this won’t completely get rid of software patents, as one could try to tie down their patent to hardware to make it patentable.

• eWeek
• Slashdot
• Gizmodo

5euro - Credit: pythonide.blogspot.com (CC BY)

The new 5 euro has been designed completely with free software

The whole design was done for 100% with free software. The biggest part consists of custom software in Python, of course within the SPE editor. For the visual power I used PIL and pyCairo. From time to time also Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch helped quite a bit. All the developing and processing was done on GNU/Linux machines which were running Ubuntu/Debian. In the end I had to collaborate closely on location together with the technicians of the Royal Dutch Mint (coin factory). So all the last bits were done on my Asus Eee PC. (I am still wondering why Asus doesn’t offer Ubuntu on its netbooks.) The Eee laptop took a bit longer (30 seconds instead of 3 seconds to generate a whole coin), but did the job just fine. For looking up the number of hits on the internet, I rediscovered Yahoo, which provides a much better api for automatic querying than its competitors. Of course the jury judged only the design and not the software used as others used Maya, Illustrator, …

So…he was probably using non-free drivers on his Eee PC (I do on mine), but that’s great! I love his title: “Making money with free software”.

• SPE IDE

Image made with Hugin - Credit: gadl on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Hugin, a panoramic photo editor licensed under the GPLv2 has reached version 0.7.0.

The developers of the free panoramic photo editor Hugin released version 0.7 this month, culminating a two-year development cycle. The new release incorporates key new technical abilities and usability improvements to help demystify the panorama creation process for the average shooter.

It’s not really huge news, but I think it’s fun to learn about cool projects in free culture…this looks like it could be a lot of fun to mess with.  The pictures that people make with this are fantastic!  Here’s a bunch of Flickr images under free licenses that are tagged with Hugin.

• Linux.com
• Hugin

Ibex - Credit: lightmatter on Flickr (CC BY)

Ubuntu 8.10 has been released.

Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition delivers the features you need for an increasingly mobile digital life, including 3G wireless support and guest sessions that lets users temporarily share computers without compromising security. Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition consolidates its support for virtualization with an integrated Virtual Machine builder, and brings with it a fully-supported Java stack and support for per-user directory encryption.

I’ve decided that we can call these Ubuntu distros any <adjective animal> by a given letter, without harm to communication, kind of like in Someone Comes to Town how the main character may be called  by any name that begins with A.  So, don’t be surprised when you hear me refering to this one as Itchy Iguana.

• Ubuntu

Google - Credit: google.com

Google has decided to become an OpenID provider, only instead of using the standard OpenID protocol, they are forking it and making one that is not backwards compatible.

Basically, Google has rewritten OpenID. Not only is it not exactly the same as the current OpenID protocol, it’s so different that existing OpenID relying parties won’t be able to use it. Only a handful of “partner sites” have been updated to understand Google’s perverted version of the OpenID standard, and anyone else hoping to authenticate via “OpenID” to Google’s servers will need to do the same.

But OpenID is an open, community-based standard. Stabbing them in the back by creating an incompatible standard “based on” the same technology and masquerading under the same name isn’t the way to go. Google may have the best interests of decentralized authentication in mind, and perhaps even the better protocol to boot; but this is no way to prove a point.

You can keep loving Google, sheeple, but this is just further evidence that their motto is really “Don’t (appear to) be evil.”

• Neosmart
• Google Code Blog
• Slashdot

DRM - Credit: jbonnain on Flickr (CC BY)

Today is the 10th anniversary of the DMCA.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998. EFF is marking the occasion with the release of a 19-page report that focuses on the most notorious part of the law: the ban on “circumventing” digital rights management (DRM) and other “technological protection measures.” The report, entitled Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA, collects reported cases where the DMCA was used not against copyright infringers, but instead against consumers, scientists and legitimate competitors.

The collected stories are like a trip down memory lane for those who have followed digital freedom issues over the past decade. Here are a few examples of DMCA abuse in the report that you might remember:

• In 1999, Sony sues Connectix over the Virtual Game Station, which let you play your legit Playstation games on your Macintosh.
• In 2001, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) threatens Princeton Professor Ed Felten’s research team over disclosure of vulnerabilities in audio watermarking technology.
• In 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov is arrested after speaking at Defcon, accused of building software for his employer, ElcomSoft, that converted Adobe e-books to PDF.
• In 2002, Blizzard sues a group of hobbyist open source developers over bnetd, server software that allows people to play Blizzard games against each other over the Internet.
• In 2003, Lexmark uses the DMCA to block distribution of chips that allow refilling of laser toner cartridges.
• In 2004, Hollywood succeeds in shutting down 321 Studios’ DVD X Copy software, which allowed people to make backup copies of their own DVDs.
• In 2006, computer security researchers at Princeton delay disclosure of the Sony-BMG “rootkit” based on fears of DMCA liability.
• In 2008, Hollywood targets Real Networks over RealDVD, software that allows you to copy DVDs to a hard drive for later viewing.

Happy birthday DMCA.  You have made our lives much more interesting.

• EFF

Facebook - Credit: facebook.com

Facebook has released Scribe, its core code under a free license, Apache License version 2.

Here at Facebook, we’re constantly facing scaling challanges because of our enormous growth. One particular problem we encountered a couple of years ago was collection of data from our servers. We were collecting a few billion messages a day (which seemed like a lot at the time) for everything from access logs to performance statistics to actions that went to News Feed. We used a variety of different technologies for the different use cases, and all of them were bursting at the seams. We decided to build a unified system (called Scribe) to handle all of these cases, and do it in a way that would scale with Facebook’s growth. The system we built turned out to be enormously useful, handling over 100 use cases and tens of billions of messages a day. It has also been battle tested by just about anything that can go wrong, so I encourage you to take a look at the newly opened Scribe source and see if it might be useful for you. To give the code some context, I’m going to go through the major design decisions we made to allow the system to scale.

Yay for Facebook, sorta. It’d be nice if they did this before they felt the assurance of having people totally bought, but this is good regardless. I think this is a nice quote from the Open Enterprise Blog: “But in one other respect, there’s something big going on here. The fact that Facebook tosses out its code as open source without making a big ballyhoo about it, and without even bothering to justify the move shows just how mundane – in the best possible sense – free software has become for a modern software company. The benefits of opening up your main code are so obvious, they don’t even need to be enumerated anymore: it’s just the way the Facebook generation of coders does things.”

• Facebook
• Open Enterprise

PC World reports that OpenOffice.org’s new 3.0 release has been downloaded 3 million times in the past week, with 80% of these downloads coming from Windows users.

The successful introduction of the open source office suite came despite the group’s download servers being temporarily overwhelmed by demand for the new software last week.

Only 221,000 downloads by Linux users were recorded, leading John McCreesh, head of marketing for OpenOffice.org, to suggest a massive undercount. McCreesh said 90% of Linux users traditionally receive OpenOffice.org updates straight from their Linux distribution’s vendor, which would explain the relatively low Linux count.

Many non-English versions of OpenOffice.org are also distributed by alternate Web sites, and OpenOffice.org is still widely distributed via free CD-ROMs in magazines, said McCreesh.

I think it’s good that more users of proprietary systems are using free software. It reduces the learning curve to switching to fully free systems.

• PC World [Print Version]
• Meall Dubh
• Slashdot

UPDATE: Meall Dubh’s new post (which is PC World’s source) says that that number has climbed to 5 million.

ComputerworldUK reports that Russia has mandated that all schools are to use free software.

This isn’t just an option for those brave souls who might want to try something different: this is now the official approach. If schools want to use proprietary software, they have to pay for it themselves:

Министр также отметил, что к 2010 г., как ожидается, число используемых в школах компьютеров достигнет миллиона. По словам Щеголева, по истечении трех лет школы смогут сделать выбор: использовать платные лицензионные программные продукты, приобретая их за свой счет, или перейти на отечественное свободное ПО.

[Via Google Translate: The Minister also noted that by 2010 it is expected that the number of computers in schools will reach a million. According to Schegoleva, after three years of school will be able to make a choice: pay royalties to use software products, buying them at their own expense, or go to the domestic free software.]

I hope this doesn’t result in a new wave of free software-communism comparisons.

• ComputerworldUK
• Slashdot

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is India’s largest political party, with around 20 million Ordinary Members and about 4 million Active Members. In June, BJP announced its goal to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the next two years, and free and open source software (FOSS) will play an essential role in this project.

…………..

How will all this happen? Prodyut Bora, national convenor of BJP information technology cell, says, “We have found that it is possible to create an entire enterprise IT ecosystem using only FOSS.” He says BJP plans to use CentOS as its server operating system and Ubuntu on desktops, along with many enterprise and infrastructure applications (see table). ePrints, for example, is used as internal document library, to build a BJP version of the MSDN Library. The choice of Qmail as mail transport agent is due to the fact that the IT cell staff believe in core competency and, as Bora says after a nine-month trial without any problem, “Qmail does exceedingly well what it is supposed to do: transfer mails”.

Its really a big step from a major political party like BJP (who was in power in last parliament session, and has good chance of coming to power in the coming elections). I could have never imagined a political party in India to take such steps for themselves.

Linux.com