Unprecedented levels of change caused by the pace of innovation are stretching traditional contract models to the breaking point. As more organizations adopt Agile and Lean for the development of innovative/complex products and services, new contract models are needed that accommodate change. The Evolutionary Contract Model, based on Agile / Lean principles, offers promise as a possible solution.
The traditional Waterfall model fits nicely with the way companies buy things: requirements are drawn up, a supplier quotes a price, and everyone signs a legally binding agreement. Contracts written this way seldom offer the freedom to work using an Agile approach. This article examines four separate models available to suppliers and customers for establishing contracts for Agile work.
With the recent legal battle between Google and Oracle there is a renewed focus on the patent issues for Java and .NET. Tim Smith introduces the licenses offered by Oracle/Sun and Microsoft, with a focus on how they may affect third party implementation. Possible motivations for Google Android’s unique implementation are also covered.
Google would have paid Sun's asking price of $30-$50 million to license Java, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt stated at the Oracle vs. Google trial. Google didn't object to the amount of money Sun wanted, but it didn't want to give up too much control over Android. J
Last week saw the beginning of the Oracle vs. Google trial. Oracle's main complaint, involving a damages claim of $1bn, is that Android's use of 37 Java APIs infringes its copyright in the Java programming language. Google maintains APIs cannot be copyrighted, and has tried to frame the case as Oracle's response to its own failure to build a Java-based smartphone platform.
In a recent interview with The San Francisco Chronicle the patent counsel of Google, Tim Porter, claims the patent system itself is broken. Patent offices worldwide have been increasingly granting protection to “innovations” that are not innovative. The IT Industry is currently facing a series of patent trials which some large corporates seem to leverage as weapons for attacking competitors.
The latest Ruby release 1.9.3 further improves the stability and performance of the 1.9 series and brings only few new features. Ruby's license changed to 2-clause BSD + Ruby License instead of GPLv2 + Ruby License.
Sonatype, the main company which drives Maven development, has joined a growing list of companies which aim to help organisations understand and audit their open source software usage, with the announcement of the Sonatype Insight software suite.
VMware has today announced that the next version of its vFabric cloud application platform, which it expects to ship later in the summer, will see a licensing change to a per VM model. The platform gains elastic memory for Java applications running in Spring tc Server, and a new performance monitoring tool for Spring applications running in production, based on Spring Insight.
A post on Friday claimed that the Android source tree contained more proprietary or decompiled code. What impact will this have to the Oracle vs Google case?
Apple announced today that they "listened to our developers" and "we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code." They also announced that "for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps."
