Torvalds comes out against EU patent directive
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SAN FRANCISCO - Three prominent open source software developers, including Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, have issued a statement urging the European Union Council to reject proposed legislation that would codify the practice of granting software patents in the E.U.
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Canada's Angiotech Pharmaceuticals Inc.  said on Monday that European regulators upheld a patent related to its drug-coated coronary stents.
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(InfoWorld) - Six months afterÂ U.S. regulators capped royalties that vendors must pay to Rambus, the European Union (EU) is taking a close look at the company's monopoly on the DRAM (dynamic RAM) chip market. On July 30, the European Commission (EC) issued a preliminary "Statement of Objections" finding that the Los Altos, Calif., company violated EU competition law by not disclosing that it owned relevant patents during the development of the DRAM standard. DRAM chips provide the memory in computers. The existence of this Statement of Objections was disclosed Thursday in a Commission press release. "Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard," the statement said. "This type of behavior is known as a 'patent ambush.'" Against this background, the Commission provisionally considers that Rambus breached the EC Treaty's rules on abuse of a dominant market position." "Without its 'patent ambush,' Rambus would not have been able to charge the royalty rates it currently does," the statement said. Rambus now has nine weeks to respond before the Commission will decide whether or not the company is in violation of European law. Earlier this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ordered Rambus to license its DRAM technology to other vendors and put a cap on the royalties it can charge. Rambus's patent claims have also been the subject of numerous lawsuits between Rambus and chip makers who reject the company's patent claims. "These are largely the same issues examined by a number of US courts, the Federal Trade Commission, and currently before the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit," said Thomas Lavelle, Rambus's senior vice president and general counsel, in a statement. "We are studying the Statement of Objections and plan to respond in due course."
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Chip maker slapped with Statement of Objections The European Commission has confirmed formal "patent ambush" charges against US memory chip designer Rambus.â¦
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The French Competition Council will not force Apple to license its FairPlay digital-rights management technology to competitors. The Council rejected an argument by Virgin France, which
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The future of controversial European Union legislation that would allow for some software patents was in doubt Thursday after the Polish government switched sides, saying
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Microsoft&#39;s aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than &quot;a marketing thing,&quot; according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.&quot;They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don&#39;t think they&#39;ve -- not that I&#39;ve gone through any huge amount of law cases -- but I don&#39;t think they&#39;ve generally used patents as a weapon,&quot; Torvalds said. &quot;But they&#39;re perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, &#39;Hey, isn&#39;t this convenient? We can use this as a PR force.&#39;&quot;Torvalds made the comments during the second half of an interview conducted by the Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin on Oct. 16. The foundation is expected to make the rest of the interview publicly available on its Web site Monday. The foundation released the initial portion of the interview in January.&quot;Another reason why I don&#39;t think Microsoft really seriously would go after patents is when you&#39;re a convicted monopolist in the marketplace you really should not be suing your competitors over patents,&quot; Torvalds continued. &quot;I think that most Microsoft lawyers would say, &#39;You know, let&#39;s not do that; that sounds insane&#39;.&quot;Microsoft&#39;s recent work around improving its platform&#39;s interoperability with Linux left Torvalds largely unmoved.&quot;I think there are people inside Microsoft who really want to improve interoperability and I also think there are people inside Microsoft who would much rather just try to stab their competition in the back,&quot; he said. &quot;I think the latter class of people have usually been the one[s] who won out in the end, but -- so I wouldn&#39;t exactly trust them.&quot;Microsoft spokespeople on Friday declined to comment on Torvalds&#39; remarks. The company has said it believes that Linux infringes on its intellectual property, although it has been criticized for not being more precise with its allegations.Torvalds is instead focused on improving Linux, he said. &quot;I work weekdays, I work weekends, I work 52 weeks a year. I don&#39;t want there to be any question of who&#39;s the best maintainer,&quot; he said. &quot;And at the same time, I actually also do want to encourage competition. ... So, I actually enjoy seeing all these other kernel trees happening. All the vendors have their own.&quot;However, the Linux kernel community overall could be more welcoming to new ideas, he suggested. &quot;One of the problems is we have people who have such high criteria for what is acceptable or not that it scares away people who want to do new code and do new experiments,&quot; he said. &quot;We mustn&#39;t set the bar that high. New code, new drivers, there will be problems and I&#39;d rather take them and then improve them.&quot;Even as Linux matures as a technology, it has yet to make a major impact in the mainstream desktop market. &quot;It&#39;s really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows ... There&#39;s just this huge inertia in that market,&quot; he said.In contrast, he said, it was much easier to sell Linux in the context of a server: &quot;There&#39;s just a few loads, they&#39;re fairly simple, they&#39;re fairly well-understood, people have much less inertia in upgrading a server than they have in upgrading their desktop.&quot;At one point, the discussion turned to Sun&#39;s work to create an open-source community around Open Solaris. Torvalds expressed deep skepticism toward the effort.&quot;It&#39;s generally hard to build a community around a commercial entity that also wants to be in control because everybody else around that commercial entity will always feel like they&#39;re at the mercy of Sun,&quot; he said.This dynamic is reflected in Open Office, &quot;where the fact that Sun wants to have copyright assignments and exclusive control over the license ends up being something that actually drives away some developers,&quot; he argued.Overall, Torvalds expressed ambivalence toward Sun, which recently has developed an image as a particularly open-source-friendly company. &quot;In many ways, Sun has done a lot of things right. At the same time, they seem to often have trouble going the full last step,&quot; he said.Ian Murdoch, vice president of Sun&#39;s Connected Developer group, defended Sun&#39;s commitment to the open-source model. &quot;An open-source project has to have coordination, it&#39;s not anarchy,&quot; said Murdoch, who earlier in his career founded the Debian version of Linux.&quot;If you look at the Linux kernel itself, Linus is firmly in control of that, and the only difference is he&#39;s an individual and Sun is a company. ... Some of the most successful open-source projects are being driven by companies, like MySQL for example,&quot; he said.Torvalds also pulled out his crystal ball, offering predictions on how technology will change in the next five years.While hardware will be &quot;hugely better,&quot; software&#39;s power and complexity will grow alongside it, he said. &quot;I suspect things will be about the same speed because the software will have grown and you&#39;ll have more &#39;bling&#39; to just slow the hardware down.&quot;Virtualization is &quot;not that big of a deal,&quot; according to Torvalds. &quot;It&#39;s been all around for decades and it&#39;s very interesting in niche markets -- I think the people who expected to change things radically are just fooling themselves.&quot;Real change will come from entirely new uses of computers, he predicted.(James Niccolai in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
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France, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden are violating European Union law by favoring chips made by Intel over rival AMD when they buy computers, the European Commission said in formal charges filed on Wednesday.
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Three prominent open-source software developers have urged the EU to reject a law that would codify the practice of granting software patents in Europe.
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The European Union alleges the memory chip designer demanded 'âunreasonableâ' royalties for its patents that were fraudulently set as industry standards.
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Nokia, the world&#39;s largest mobile phone maker, took legal action earlier this week against two European manufacturers for allegedly infringing on technology patents and registered designs.
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The Socialist Group in the European Parliament (EP) on Thursday rejected a proposal by incoming European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso designed to defuse a row over
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Final legal whistle blown The House of Lords has rejected Neal Macrossan's application to appeal against a ruling that his software "invention" was not patentable in the UK.â¦
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A top European Union judge  challenged the EU executive's reasoning in its antitrust court  battle with Microsoft Corp. Friday, questioning why it opposed  the U.S. software giant's setting industry standards.
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Akzo Nobel, the Dutch maker of Crown paint, says it has made a bid approach for UK rival ICI, but that it was rejected.
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The documents in question were brought to court during Intel&#39;s legal battle with Intergraph. AMD believes they show its arch-rival to be guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, which is why it wanted the EC to take a look.
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A campaign to raise awareness about software patents has found strong opposition to their introduction in the United Kingdom.