Phone Struck by Lightening - Credit: david.nikonvscanon on Flickr (CC BY)

eBay may have to shut down Skype, because parts of its code is still owned by the original owners.

eBay has since been licensing the technology from the founders’ new company, Joltid, but the pair recently decided to revoke the licensing agreement.

The matter is now the subject of a legal battle in the English High Court of Justice, with eBay trying to force Joltid to let it continue using the technology.

In a quarterly report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, eBay said in no uncertain terms that if it lost the right to use the software it would most likely have to shut Skype down.

eBay said it was working on developing ‘‘alternative software’’ to that licensed through Joltid, but this ‘‘may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive’’.

Death to Skype (or at least its proprietary protocol/code).

• The Age
• Slashdot

Waves. Source: "scope" by noii's on Flickr. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Google has released two parts of its Wave protocol under the Apache License version 2.

To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation. The prototype is intended primarily as a simple “hello, world” implementation, to encourage experimentation using the Google Wave Federation Protocol. All of this code — nearly 40,000 lines of Java code — is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and we’ll be open sourcing more code as wave evolves. Check out the source code and get started with the introductory documentation.

Hopefully Google will make good on their promise to release more code in the future.

• Google Wave Developer Blog
• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

Blackboard. Source: shonk on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

The Washington Business Journal reports that all 38 contested claims in Blackboard’s e-learning patent have been invalidated on appeal of the Desire2Learn infringement case.

“Blackboard is obviously disappointed with the Federal Circuit’s decision and will seek further judicial review,” said Matthew Small, chief business officer for Blackboard (NASDAQ:BBBB). “Meanwhile, claims 39-44 of the 138 patent remain valid and enforceable. These claims were not at issue in the appeal.”

Even though Blackboard won just more than $3 million in damages from a jury trial in the U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Texas in February 2008, that court also found 35 of 38 claims of the patent to be invalid.

A good victory against bad patents, even if a number of claims remain valid. Blackboard is still proprietary and still has a horrible UI, so if you are still in the process of ditching it, I would continue to do so.

• Washington Business Journal [Print Version]
• Slashdot

"Shuttle Launch" by oneaustin on Flickr (CC-By-SA-2.0)

Released under the AGPLv3, Launchpad is now Free Open Source Software.

Karl Fogel writes on the Launchpad Blog:

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to for a long time:

Launchpad is now open source!

We released it today under the GNU Affero General Public license, version 3. Note that although we had previously announced that we’d be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds: they are included — all the code is open.

Big congratulations (and thanks) to the Canonical Launchpad team, who worked overtime to make this happen sooner rather than later, and to Mark Shuttleworth, whose decision it was to open source Launchpad in the first place.

I’ve been waiting for this a good deal of time now, and I’m sure many others have been too. I favor the Bazaar VCS over git, so I’ll have no second thoughts using launchpad for any future application development.

• Entry on Launchpad Blog

Press Here - Credit: pressheretv.com

Mike Linksvayer (VP of CC) and John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla) make an appearance on NBCs press:here

Yesterday morning, “Press:Here” – a new technology news TV show produced by NBC in the San Francisco Bay Area – aired an interview with Creative Commons Vice President Mike Linksvayer. The episode serves as a nice primer to CC; in it, Mike gives some of our backstory and talks about how people and organizations are using CC’s copyright licenses to make sharing and collaboration easier. Mozilla CEO John Lilly is one of the episode’s other featured guests. Watch it online.

Wait, isn’t NBC in a league with MS?  How did this happen?

• Creative Commons

"Big Brother....is Watching YOU!" by Chaotic Good01 on Flickr (CC-BY)

David Pogue reports on his blog that Amazon has secretly pulled electronic copies of 1984 and Animal Farm purchased on its Kindle service:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

According to Amazon, the person who let Amazon sell the copies of the books in question didn’t have the rights to them:

“These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in an e-mail. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers.”

Herdener said Amazon won’t handle things the same way in the future. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

It’s understandable for Amazon to be confused as to who holds what rights on these books; most of Orwell’s books are in the public domain in some countries — Australia is one example — but not, for instance, in the US or the UK. Even so, this incident only makes plain, for those who didn’t already know, the pitfalls of investing in closed systems like the Kindle Store and iTunes; there, not only do you have no rights to what you have purchased, but you may have no choice to unpurchase something, should they deem it necessary or desirable.

• New York Times blog entry
• CNet reporting on statement from Amazon

"Google Chrome browser on Linux" by sermoa on Flickr (CC-BY-SA)

Google has announced that Google Chrome, their web browser, will be using a new open-source algorithm for diffing binaries of software updates. The algorithm, called Courgette, produces binary diffs roughly 10% the size of those created by bsdiff, the diffing algorithm they used previously:

Rather than push put a whole new 10MB update, we send out a diff that takes the previous version of Google Chrome and generates the new version.  We tried several binary diff algorithms and have been using bsdiff up until now.  We are big fans of bsdiff – it is small and worked better than anything else we tried.

But bsdiff was still producing diffs that were bigger than we felt were necessary.  So we wrote a new diff algorithm that knows more about the kind of data we are pushing – large files containing compiled executables.

This is great news, especially for those on slower connections. However, even though they’ll be open-sourcing the code for the algorithm, I have to wonder about the patent situation. Does Google have any patents on the algorithm itself and, if so, will they agree not to enforce them?

• Announcement on Chromium Blog
• Chromium Dev article with technical details

stephen_conroy by Dr Ron on Flickr (CC-BY-SA)

Yesterday, Australian Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy unveiled a report that vowed to crack down on illegal filesharing:

“The Government recognises a public policy interest in the resolution of this issue,” the report said. “A number of submissions received during the consultation phase for the development of this paper argued that a role for Government exists in addressing the apparent popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing of music and movies, without the necessary permissions of the relevant copyright owners”.

The report goes on to outline submissions made to the department by various stakeholders.

“One solution proposed by copyright owners is a “three strikes” or “graduated response” proposal under which copyright owners would work together with ISPs to identify the ISP’s customers who are suspected of unauthorised file sharing and the ISP would then send a notice on behalf of the copyright owner to that customer advising of this allegation”.

Why does Conroy hate the Internet so much? First he tries to filter it, now this. One has to wonder if it beat him up and took his lunch money when he was a kid…

• iTnews.com.au article

Google has released a server for the NX remote desktop protocol, called Neatx, under a GPL license:

There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine’s libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.

“FreeNX’s primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain,” according to Google.

“Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries.”

Neatx is written in Python with a time-critical process written in C and some wrappers in bash script.

Good to see Google contributing some code again.

• Neatx’s Google Code page
• TechWorld article

Carthaginian - Credit: wildfiregames.com

Wildfire Games has decided to make their work-in-progress RTS game 0 A.D. free content by releasing the source code under the GPL v2 and putting all of the artwork for it under a CC-BY-SA license. While it is not yet playable, the developers hope to attract new developers to the project:

We’ve been working on this game in some form or another since 2001. We’ve come a long way since then, but making this kind of game is really quite hard. The original team members were largely students, and have now moved on in life and can’t devote much time to the project. Attracting new developers is difficult and time-consuming – few people have the time and skill to learn how to work within our existing code and to make significant contributions. So we want to lower the barriers to entry, making it easy for people to check out our project and see if it interests them, in the hope that some will decide it does.

While Wildfire’s initial contribution is free content, whether or not future contributions will fall under that category is up in the air at the moment:

Licensing of contributions is an open question. On one hand, accepting GPL code would guarantee to contributors that we’re not going to unfairly use their work. On the other hand we’d like to keep our options open by only accepting BSD-licensed code, perhaps to produce a special version linked with proprietary cheat-detection software to discourage multiplayer map hacks that would be trivial to add to an open-source game, or to link with proprietary digital distribution systems to get more widespread distribution. The ideal solution is not clear, so we’d be interested in discussion of this issue.

The cynic in me wants to say that they’re doing this to revive a dying project that lacks developers, but even if that were true, this is a significant contribution to the free content gaming world, especially since the current offering of open content strategy engines don’t look nearly as good as 0 A.D. does. I’m a bit wary of the licensing of future contributions, but they seem open to discussion about keeping it free. Time will tell, I guess.

• Phoronix article
• 0 A.D. open source page