InfoQ Homepage Licensing Content on InfoQ
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Java APIs Take Centre Stage in Oracle vs. Google Trial
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.
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Is The Patent System Broken?
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.
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Ruby 1.9.3: Improved Performance and Stability and BSD Licensed
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.
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Sonatype Offers Insight Into Enterprise Open Source Usage
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.
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VMware Announces vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5, Simplifies Licensing and Deployment
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.
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Android Java Copyright Infringements?
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?
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Apple Relaxes iPhone Development Tool and Data Sharing Restrictions
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."
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New PHP Licensing Option for Cloud Computing
Zend recently announced an 'unlimited subscription' licensing option for its PHP products, in support of cloud computing. Virtualization and Cloud Computing challenge traditional concepts of software licensing, e.g. one license per user, one license per server, because of the dynamism and variability of running instances inherent in both concepts. Zend offers one way to solve this problem.
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Reactions and Consequences of the iPhone Developer License Change
There is a report saying that Apple has changed the iPhone Developer License to prohibit applications written in other languages than Objective-C, C or C++ or accessing the API “through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool”. Reactions abound and this change is likely to have rippling effects across the industry.
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Google Has a Problem with Some Android Developers
Google has issued lately a cease and desist order against Steve Kondik, a well known Android developer who has created CyanogenMod, a free custom Android firmware, bundling some non open source applications like Maps, GMail, Talk, YouTube, and Market. Some see this as the first friction between Google and developers.
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Web Services as an Alternative to Copy-Protected Software
Microsoft has released an API for generating Tags, their new barcode technology. But unlike most commercial libraries, there are no attempts at copy-protection. Instead, the library is only available as a web service.
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Microsoft Is Contributing 20,000 Lines of Code to the Linux Kernel
Microsoft is contributing 3 Linux device drivers, 20,000 lines of code, to the Linux kernel 2.6.32 under GPLv2 license.
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23 .NET Open Source Projects
Eric Nelson, a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and Technical Editor of MSDN UK Flash, has compiled a list of 23 .NET open source projects mostly based on recommendations sent by UK developers. Other great projects did not make it into the list, while Microsoft’s contribution include: ASP.NET MVC, DLR, IronRuby, IronPython, MEF.
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OpenMoko Faces MP3 Patent Dispute
The Linux-based phone, OpenMoko is currently in a patent dispute with Sisvel, the Italian patent holding firm known for its aggressive enforcement of MPEG patents.
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IcedTea: The First 100% Compliant Open-Source Java
The IcedTea project has passed the Java Test Compatibility Kit, becoming the first 100% open-source licensed Java implementation to be completely verified as Java-compliant.