Judge William Alsup Wednesday refused to decide whether Google had fairly used the Java IP a jury found Android infringed Monday. There are, you see, circumstances that allow copyrighted work to be copied without the owner’s consent such as creating something new that advances the public interest but the jury deadlocked on that issue and returned only a partial verdict. Oracle hoped the judge would intervene and hand down a judgment in its favor as a matter of law since Google’s liability depends on it but he refused. He reportedly said, “I don’t think it would be right to rule in favor of Oracle” at a hearing Wednesday. His decision suggests that Google will get the new trial it’s asked for. “I hate to even contemplate the idea of another trial,” the judge was quoted as saying, “but if it comes to that, that’s the way it will have to be.” It’s unclear whether a new jury would be asked to decide infringement as well as fair use like Google wants. Judge Alsup also reportedly refused to throw out the jury verdict that Google cribbed nine lines of Java code. He is expected to rule on the copyrightability of APIs and of course he has to rule on Google’s motion for a mistrial. The existing jury is currently hearing the patent infringement phase of the case and has heard from folks like Android creator Andy Rubin as well as other engineers.
Google, as expected, has put in its papers asking the court to declare a mistrial because the jury only decided it infringed 37 Java APIs in building Android and didn’t decide whether that infringement constituted so-called “fair use” of the code. So it wants a whole new trial “as to both infringement and fair use as to Oracle’s claim that Google is liable for infringement of its copyright on the structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 API packages.” Google claims the two issues – infringement and fair use – are “opposite sides of the same coin” and “indivisible.” It’s standing on its Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury and a unanimous decision on liability, using its “indivisible” contention to oppose a partial retrial in front of a new jury. Oracle has yet to reply to Google’s “indivisible” argument but it wants the judge to decide the fair use question in one of those handy judgments as a matter of law (JMOLs) that both Google and Oracle asked for before.
One of the most challenging things about being an advocate for a broad horizontally applicable technology is that it does not solve a particular business problem. Instead, it solves about 100,000 business problems. That means that everyone is impacted by it, yet nobody is particularly interested in it. What's the solution? Perhaps it's to reframe the discussion around specific business or technology problems that people face - like Legacy Application Modernization, Quote to Cash automation, the Recruit to Retire process or Procure to Pay.
Apple has just released iOS 5.1.1 update for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. This update fixes a number of bugs, including a particular annoying one affecting the iPad 3 which resulted users losing access to their cellular data connection until they rebooted their tablet. Read the full story at ZDNet
After days of deliberating, a San Francisco jury Monday found that Google and its Android operating system infringed the Java copyrights now held by Oracle. However, the jury remained as deadlocked as it was last Friday over the issue of whether Google made so-called “fair use” of the IP. It couldn’t come to a unanimous decision on that question. Google denied all the allegations and claimed it developed Android from scratch and that the parts of Java it did use aren’t covered by copyright. After the verdict was read Google moved for a mistrial – which would mean a whole new trial and possibly new evidence – while the judge accepted the partial verdict and forged ahead. The partial verdict says Google infringed the sequence, structure and organization of 37 Java APIs by using those APIs in Android. FOSS Patents figures that was the most important decision the jury made. The blog also figures there’s really no “fair use” case here and is critical of the instructions given to the jury about fair use.
Apple has made an offer to resolve the imbroglio over the Chinese iPad trademark according to Roger Xie, a lawyer representing the Proview Technology (Shenzhen), the bankrupt company that claims the mark wasn’t included in the rights Apple acquired from a sister company in 2009. Whatever amount Apple’s offered it apparently isn’t enough to satisfy Proview, which owes $400 million to Chinese banks. Apple has been under pressure from a Chinese appeals court to settle but has been reluctant to sit down. It is believed the court could uphold a lower court’s decision that Proview owns the trademark.
The US Department of the Interior has moved its e-mail business to Google, which sued when the agency gave Microsoft a five-year $59.3 million cloud-based e-mail contract in 2010 claiming the department’s research was “stale” and Microsoft’s security wasn’t certified for government use. It’s going with Google Apps for Government and Gmail instead. It will cover upwards of 90,000 seats. The agency’s been reconsidering its original decision since late last year. The deal is worth $34.9 million over seven years to Google and its reseller Onix Networking. Microsoft said it “will engage with our partners and DOI to review and understand the reasons for this decision.”
The great Facebook IPO is supposed to happen on Friday May 18. The company's big investor-pitching pre-IPO roadshow is supposed to kick off this Monday and only see some appearances by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, according to the Wall Street Journal. CFO David Ebersman and COO Sheryl Sandberg will reportedly handle the bulk of the meetings. Initial East Coast meetings are supposed to be stuffed to the gills. But you can see the video now (http://facebook.retailroadshow.com/launch.html). Real pricing never happens until the night before an IPO. But it claimed in a regulatory filing late Thursday that it's shooting for $28-$35 a share, a relatively broad range that values the joint at $96 billion under the magical $100 billion, leading the smart money to think it and its underwriters are aiming for a pop. There'll be at least 337.4 million shares on offer. And there might be an overallotment. There will be class A and B stock after the IPO.
Developers behind the open source massively scalable distributed storage system known as Ceph have started a company called Inktank to commercialize the stuff. It’s supposed to be the first company to offer enterprise-level support and services for Ceph. They claim Ceph is the “future of storage,” a self-managing, highly scalable, open source distributed storage system that delivers object storage, block storage and POSIX-compatible file storage in a unified platform that runs on commodity hardware. Sage Weil, who created the Ceph project for his doctoral dissertation at UC Santa Cruz in 2004, will be Inktank’s CEO and chief architect.
As much as the trial judge in the case between HP and Oracle over Itanium would like them to settle, Reuters reported an Oracle lawyer saying it wouldn’t happen. No surprise there. The judge the other day refused to settle the matter himself by finding for one side or another. Probably a smart move considering it would only set off an appeal. His 20-page decision the other day not to decide suggests that Intel may ultimately be forced to divulge financial information about the Itanium it’s refused to turn over for discovery; and allows that Oracle may have a case given the “puffery” of HP’s public statements about Itanium’s roadmap extending until 2017 – Oracle claims it lost $120 million in service and support profits to HP’s “deceptive scheme” – and HP, which has apparently provided some secret sealed documents about Oracle private assurances to continue to support Itanium, may have a point about relying on such promises. HP claims damages of $4 billion in lost profits.
A growing throng of Open Compute Project (OCP) disciples converged on Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, this week to overturn the established sixty-year-old EIA 310-D rack standard inherited from railroad signaling relays and telephone switching and in its place substitute Open Rack, the very first standard for data centers, especially big hyper-scale data centers like Facebook’s. Facebook set Open Compute in train a year ago to solve problems it was having trying to shoehorn the compute, storage and networking density it needed into the traditional server rack, a form factor its hardware master calls “blades gone bad.” Blades supposedly go bad because of what OCP founding board member Andy Bechtolsheim calls “gratuitous differentiation” on the part of vendors and their lock-in-seeking proprietary designs that sacrifice interoperability.
In my last post, I discussed how 2012 is the golden year for apps. And how many missed the boat when the Internet was the hot spot, and how many are seeing the opportunity that mobile apps are presenting now. I shared the prediction that I made in December 2011 that ‘by the end of 2012, app users will start to become app creators,’ and well, it’s already happening. It’s easy, fun, and profitable for almost anyone to make an app. Today, I would like to go beyond the app prediction that’s coming true as we speak, and discuss a theory with you. A theory that could be referred to as 3D Internet that follows what we could call ‘the deep then wide method.’
Elemental Design Patterns are the underlying core concepts of programming and software design that have remained described. This book is a book I wish I had 15 years ago to help me put the basics of programming into their proper context. Learning how to make use of patterns over the years would have been much simpler had I read this book first. I have listed the chapters of the book below along with the patterns in the catalog. Take a look at he names of the patterns and you can see how low level these patterns are.
Two weeks after the trial started, the first part of the three-part Oracle case against Google went to the jury mid-day Monday. Among other things the poor jury – one of whom reportedly didn’t want to continue but the judge persuaded her to – has to struggle with are the judge’s 19 pages of instructions, instructions neither side appreciated. A pity judges aren’t required to make instructions comprehensible to the average juror instead of an eventual appeals court. This jury has to decide if Google infringed Oracle’s Java copyrights, or rather parts of Java, to wit, the structure, sequence and organization of 37 Java APIs – as the judge instructed them – in developing Android and then whether Google made “fair use” of the widgetry and thereby advanced the public interest by adding something new and different to the whole megillah – and not necessarily something profitable – two separate decisions.
Mobile management and security vendor Good released its quarterly device activations report. The report states that iOS dominate Android four to one in the enterprise. This is in spite of Android devices having an equal or slightly larger market share compared to iPhone. Is it because iPhone is much better tailored for enterprise need? That is not a likely reason. If you do a feature comparison between iOS and Android the difference will only be marginal, not enough to account for such a large difference. To understand why it is so, we need to understand how enterprise manages new technology.
After Sun’s ex-CEOs Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz testified for and against Oracle, respectively, last week at the Oracle v Google infringement trial, Java creator James Gosling, who hasn’t been able to hold a job at either Oracle or Google for more than a few months, waded into the discussion over the weekend on Oracle’s side. “Just because Sun didn’t have patent suits in our genetic code doesn’t mean we didn’t feel wronged,” he wrote on his web site. “While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.”
Judge Alsup – who really wishes Oracle and Google had settled so he wouldn’t have to hear the Java trial – is proposing to decide whether APIs are copyrightable himself and not have the jury wade into that legal brier patch. However, he is also proposing to instruct the jury that the structure, sequence and organization of the asserted Java APIs are copyrightable, which between you, me and those angels dancing on the head of a pin over there is the same as saying the APIs are copyrighted. The good judge is going to wait for the jury to come home with a verdict on whether Google infringed the Java APIs – and the overwhelming evidence presented at trial suggests it did – before he says whether or not they are copyrightable and springs that tiger out of its cage.
Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, testified for Oracle Thursday in its infringement suit against Google and Android. His surprise appearance – in the middle of Google’s laying out its copyright defense – was used to scotch testimony given minutes before by his pony-tailed successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who testified for Google. (It’s just so utterly Sun.) As in all jury trials the decision could come down to personalities. From the industry’s point-of-view it’s the first – and long-overdue – time McNealy has publicly butted heads with Schwartz whose appointment as Sun CEO is at least as unfathomable as why HP ever let Mark Hurd go.
This is one cool book. If you are starting to use Scrum, read it. If you are using Scrum, read it. If you are just wondering what Scrum is all about, read it. It gives the best insight into the workings of Scrum I have seen in a book. The chapters are laid out in a really nice to read format. Each one contains sections titled The Story, The Model (or The Practices in some chapters), Keys to Success, References, and sometimes Works Consulted (although I never figured out what the difference between these and references where?). The story is literally a story that comes from the author's field experience that introduces the topic the chapter covers and brings to light problems being solved by the next section, The Model.
The Guangdong High Court in southern China that heard Apple’s appeal of a lower court decision awarding ownership of the iPad trademark in China to Proview Technology (Shenzhen), the financially desperate Chinese display maker that ostensibly sold Apple the trademark, is now reportedly trying to mediate a settlement between the two. Despite claims to the contrary, it’s unclear whether Apple is actually considering settling knowing full well it’s expected to buy its way out of a predicament it believes it’s on the right side of for some sky-high sum. Apple won’t say anything about it while Proview booster Ma Dongxiao, its chatty public-facing lawyer, claimed last week that “I don’t know if Apple has changed its attitude, but I believe that the key point now is the price.” (Yes, well then Apple’s attitude would have to have changed now wouldn’t it.)
“While there is still a lot of interest in Big Data Analytics, we see an increasing focus on Big Unstructured Data,” observed Tom Leyden, Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. And, Leyden continued, “Object storage is the new paradigm to store those massive amounts of Big Unstructured Data.” Agree or disagree? – "While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility."
“JReport 11 continues our mission to deliver data visualization, discovery, and self-service tools to our users on all modern platforms,” noted Dr. Bing Yao, President of Jinfonet Software, on the release of JReport 11. The new release, which provides advanced data visualization with a powerful dashboard system and a mobile solution, features 40+ chart types and styles now enhanced with live charting including motion, real-time, and scrollable charts. Motion charts allow users to dynamically view data trends by auto-playing chart parameters. For example, you can put a chart in motion to show month-by-month changes over the course of a year. Real-time charts enable any web services data feed to be displayed and refreshed automatically. It can be used for monitoring applications, including system performance, stock charts, and real time applications. Scrollable charts let users easily zoom in and out on the chart axis for inspection of details.
Google finally introduced its long-trumpeted cloud-based Google Drive Tuesday hours before Apple released its Q2 results. Drive happens to compete with iCloud and Apple’s results, which could have been, shall we say, edgy, turned out to be over-the-top. Drive also competes with Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and SugarSync. Google says Drive users will get 5GB of free online storage for videos, photos, songs, files and PDFs that they can upload, create, edit, view, sync, share by way of different rights, collaborate on, get notifications, recognize scanned files, store, search (by word, owner, even some images to a point) and access from anywhere from PCs, Macs and Android devices (Gmail, iPhones, iPads, Chrome OS and Linux to come).
The Guangdong High Court in southern China that heard Apple’s appeal of a lower court decision awarding ownership of the iPad trademark in China to Proview Technology (Shenzhen), the financially desperate Chinese display maker that ostensibly sold Apple the trademark, is now reportedly trying to mediate a settlement between the two. Despite claims to the contrary, it’s unclear whether Apple is actually considering settling knowing full well it’s expected to buy its way out of a predicament it believes it’s on the right side of for some sky-high sum. Apple won’t say anything about it while Proview booster Ma Dongxiao, its chatty public-facing lawyer, claimed last week that “I don’t know if Apple has changed its attitude, but I believe that the key point now is the price.” (Yes, well then Apple’s attitude would have to have changed now wouldn’t it.)
One of the really nice features we released in Tiggzi Mobile App Builder in April is the option to get iOS binary file for your app (similar to PhoneGap Build). Now you can create your mobile app in Tiggzi and instantly build the iOS binary file (or Android).