Barracuda plays the hippie card in Trend Micro patent row
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Fight with us, soldiers of open source Barracuda Networks has called on open source advocates to help fight its patent dust-up with Trend Micro over the Clam AntiVirus software package. Specifically, the provider of network-based security products for email and websites is asking for help in dredging up old technologies that were developed prior to the filing of the patent in 1995.â¦
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Plans to provide umbrella from patent-infringement suits to outsiders using or developing the OS--a move to counter Linux.
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Sectors of the Internet world are still buzzing over the release of a Microsoft patent application that appears to claim rights to the underlying method proposed by companies to better determine
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A new technique for tracking endangered species' genes borrows concepts from electrical engineering. Commentary by Carl Zimmer.
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It's part of the company's effort to beat back Linux and piracy efforts in developing technology markets.
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SAN FRANCISCO - CosmoCom Inc., a software vendor that holds a pair of U.S. patents on IP (Internet Protocol) contact center technology, is now considering moves to defend those patents, company officials said Monday.
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Company is prolific filer of patent applications, including those for exotic technologies such as a washable keyboard and software that responds to your emotions.
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(InfoWorld) - Barracuda Networks is getting into the Web application security business. The security vendor has acquired Santa Clara, California's NetContinuum, a vendor of Web firewall appliances. Barracuda already sellsÂ Web filtering devicesÂ that prevent Web surfers from visiting malicious sites, but the NetContinuum products can be used to protect Web sites themselves. With about 80 employees, NetContinuum had been in business since 1999 selling pre-configured security servers, or appliances, that help protect sites from Web-based threats such as cross site scripting or SQL injection attacks. Barracuda, which is best known for its spam filtering products, had actually concluded the purchase in mid-August, but it was not publicly disclosed at the time, said Dean Drako, the company's president and CEO. Drako would not say what Barracuda paid for NetContinuum. The deal gives Barracuda a new type of appliance to sell along side its existing lines of appliances, Drako said. "We believe there's an opportunity to bring Web site protection to a very broad audience of our customer base," he said. Barracuda plans to improve the NetContinuum user interface and eventually sell the appliances as the Barracuda Web App Controller, he said. "We are investing really heavily in making this a really great product." NetContinuum had offices in Santa Clara and India, but the Santa Clara team has already been moved to Barracuda's Campbell, California, headquarters. Barracuda is expanding the team in India and expects to make only "one or two" layoffs as a result of the acquisition, he said. The Web App Controller line will cost the same as NetContinuum's existing products, which sell in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, depending on capabilities.
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Aruba Networks&#160;countersued two divisions of Motorola&#160;Wednesday, adding a new twist to a wireless LAN (local area network) patent-infringement case that affects some of the biggest vendors in the business.Symbol Technologies and Wireless Valley Communications, both of which are now&#160;owned by&#160;Motorola, sued Aruba&#160;in August. They claimed Aruba knowingly used technology covered by several patents they own, and are seeking an injunction and damages.But in its response to their complaint, filed Wednesday, Aruba claimed Symbol knew enough about Aruba&#39;s products in 2003 to say they might be infringing Symbol&#39;s pending patents. Aruba also argues both Symbol and Wireless Valley withheld information they were required to give to patent examiners. As a result, the patents are invalid and Symbol and Wireless Valley&#39;s complaints should be dismissed, the company said.Aruba also countersued, seeking declaratory judgments that it didn&#39;t infringe and that the patents are invalid and unenforceable. Aruba wants Symbol and Wireless Valley to pay the costs of the suit and its attorney fees.In 2003, when Symbol was an independent company, it came close to buying Aruba, according to the filing. Throughout the first half of that year, as the companies discussed the proposed deal, Symbol had &quot;essentially unfettered access&quot; to information about how Aruba&#39;s products were designed and made, Aruba said. Among the engineers inspecting its technology was the inventor on two of the patents involved in the suit, they said. The talks eventually broke off because the companies couldn&#39;t agree on terms, the filing said.Aruba argued that Symbol never warned it might sue over the patents, leading Aruba to infer that it didn&#39;t intend to enforce any patent rights. The company waited for four years after that inspection and then sued without warning on the eve of an Aruba quarterly earnings announcement, Aruba said. In addition, both Symbol and Wireless Valley knew about Aruba&#39;s business for years and should have known about the activities it sued over, yet only sued after Aruba had invested tens of millions of dollars in designing and testing its products, the company said.&#160;
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Settling in with Azul Sun Microsystems and start-up Azul Systems have settled their patent spat. Neither company will say squat about the settlement, leaving you wondering who came out the victor in this exercise.â¦
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Second time in less than a month AMD has been accused of patent infringement for the second time in less than a month. Having found itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from intellectual property holder Opti earlier this month, AMD was this week threatened by MicroUnity Systems Engineering.â¦
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The Software Freedom Law Center says the "junk patent" threatens open-source projects. The holder says it's willing to deal--but the group asks too much.
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Six patents topped with a slice of avocado Sun Microsystems has spanked Network Appliance with another lawsuit, as relations between the two vendor continue to deteriorate at speed.â¦
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From production plant to pharmacy, some of the most sought-after drugs will now be tracked by the technology in tiny microchips. It&#39;s already getting the green light from law enforcement.
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Almost everything that can be said has been said about the latest moves by Microsoft to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about Linux. Countless pundits and analysts have pointed out that Microsoft threats are toothless. Some have noted that Microsoft has singled out Linux and OpenOffice, the biggest threats to its monopoly on operating systems and office suites. Surely Microsoft could claim that the *BSDs infringe on similar patents if not the same ones. But the *BSDs do not pose as great a threat to the company. Others have pointed out that Microsoft would be insane to pull an SCO and sue its own customers. Still others have noted that IBM and/or OIN could respond to a patent war with a massive retaliation in patent infringement claims. I have no doubt that Microsoft has lifted a lot of GPL code (more likely algorithms) for Windows, which would prevent Microsoft from following through with its threats. To do so would require that Microsoft open its own code to scrutiny. The list goes on, and others have covered the angles very well. There is one perspective I haven't yet seen, at least not the way I propose to deal with it. This perspective follows below.
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c58099)  has announced the addition of "Future Trends  in Microelectronics: Up the Nano Creek" to  their offering.
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(InfoWorld) - A patent-infringementÂ lawsuitÂ filed by Network Appliance against Sun Microsystems on Wednesday could escalate beyond the storage arena to become this decade's major test case for open-source software, according to storage analysts. NetApp contends that Sun's ZFS file-system technology, which wasÂ donatedÂ to the OpenSolaris.org open-source community earlier this year, infringes on seven NetApp patents. Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, said that NetApp's effort to stop Sun from developing or distributing the file-system technology could catapult the sticky issue of open-source software ownership squarely onto the public stage. "This will be a banner case to test the viability of open-source storage software, which Sun has been touting for some time," said Reichman. Sun, he added, "is too committed to the idea of providing storage technology to users without charge via the open-source community" -- a process that "the likes of NetApp and EMC are very hostile to." The other companies, he noted, fear that open-source storage technology would cut them off from significant sources of revenue. "I think [the legal scuffle] will drag on for a long time and likely become the major test case for open-source software this decade," he said. Reichman also noted that NetApp may have difficulty convincing a judge to force Sun to pay for using the patents, given what he called Sun's convoluted revenue stream from a system that provides users with some intellectual property without charge. Mike Karp, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo., said that issues being raised by NetApp over ZFS in many ways mirrors theÂ legal battleÂ between Novell and The SCO Group over Unix ownership. "This is not the sort of thing that is likely to be resolved overnight. My guess is that this is going to be a very expensive suit for both sides to prosecute," said Karp. "Neither side can afford to lose this thing." Given what he calls a fragmented approach by Sun toward its StorageTek technology and reseller relationships, Reichman said he perceives ZFS as the company's "make or break" storage technology. Whether by design or not, NetApp's lawsuit will likely distract Sun's fledgling storage effort, he added. "[Sun] already has significant challenges in productizing ZFS-based storage offerings and emerging as a force in storage, and [the lawsuit] will only compound that," Reichman remarked. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.