InfoQ Homepage Legal Matters Content on InfoQ
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Online Social Networks Face Litigation Risks
Google, Facebook and other companies operating totally 21 Social Networking websites are facing criminal proceedings in an Indian Court, over objectionable content accessible through the websites. A High Court has warned that the sites can face a ban in India unless they screen content. Is the growing flux of regulations surrounding social media a risk for businesses investing in social?
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SOPA, PIPA – Should Engineers Care
On 18th January, wikipedia.or among other estimated 10,000 web sites stopped their service in order to protest against the US legislation planning to endorse SOPA and PIPA. Software engineers might think, that they are not affected by the legislation, especially if they are outside the U.S., but considering Big Data, Cloud Computing and other trends this could be a rather naive perspective.
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Agile Contracts Primer Available for Download
Tom Arbogast, Bas Vodde and Craig Larman have released a sample chapter from their upcoming book on scaling Lean and Agile. The chapter deals with the difficult topic of writing contracts for agile development.
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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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Controversial Opinions on Software Patents - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Patents are quite often in the news these days, most notably the ones related to smart phone vendors like HTC, Samsung, Google and Apple. This also holds for the rather emotional and controversial discussion about software patents which some consider as a means to ensure innovation and others as a kind of weapon. Do software patents cause more harm than good, or vice versa?
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Microsoft / SUSE Linux Deal Extended until 2016
SUSE, formally part of Novell, has renewed its interoperability agreement with Microsoft for five more years. This agreement includes a 100 million investment in “new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates”. And like the last agreement it raises more questions than answers.
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Google and Oracle Case Reduced
The legal case between Google and Oracle has been reduced in scope, just as Oracle subpoenas Apache to provide information about the Harmony project.
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Google Asserts Oracle Patents Invalid
Google has fired back against Oracle in the ongoing JVM dispute, and is now asserting that the Oracle JVM patents are invalid because of obviousness. Things are just about to get interesting.
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Azul Systems To Open Source Significant Technology in Managed Runtime Initiative
Having just announced a record breaking quarter, Azul Systems are open sourcing a considerable part of their intellectual property under GPLV2, as part of a major new initiative to try and improve the performance of managed code on commodity platforms.
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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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Anybody May Legally Implement the C# and CLI Specifications
Microsoft has placed C# and CLI specifications, ECMA 334 and ECMA 335, under the Community Promise which basically protects anybody implementing them in any language and in any way from being sued by Microsoft for infringing corresponding intellectual properties or patents. This is directly related to Mono, the open source .NET implementation, whose legal status was unclear until now.
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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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Can Architects Stop Financial Ruin and Market Meltdowns?
The purported fraud by Jerome Kerviel at Société Générale may bring down a major financial institution and may have caused markets to tumble worldwide. Attention has turned to systems intended to prevent fraud and other illegal activities. What role can software architects play in detecting and avoiding fraud and other suspicious behavior?
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Azul Systems: Next generation Java-based 768 core server released
Azul Systems has announced the release of their third-generation Java-based computing appliance with 768 processing cores. Azul also recently settled a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems. InfoQ caught up with Azul's Gaetan Castelein to discuss these recent events.
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The Legal Boundaries Of Agile
Adopting Agile practices requires a shift in the organisation on many different levels, but can making such a change lead to serious trouble?