Lunatic Platitudes

So Vonage lost their patent dispute with Sprint/Nextel. Another $69.5 billion owed on top of the ~$58 billion + royalties they already owe Verizon. Of course they will appeal, but this is sad. Let’s not mince words here. Sprint and Verizon couldn’t care less about those patents. Instead of trying to work out an amicable deal, they want to take their ball and go home. For them to compete with Vonage would mean they would have to give us consumers a better deal and that’s not what making money is all about. All they care about is keeping us paying by the minute to stay connected, hence the lawsuits against Vonage. Why any court would require such an outrageous sum of money in retribution is beyond me. Those amounts look punitive to me.
I hope Vonage finds a way through this mess.

No Comments »

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

No Comments »

For those who know about the SCO Group’s activities in the recent past, you understand they inexplicably positioned themselves as enemies to the open source movement.  They spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) by threatening and suing people who made use of Linux without paying them huge royalties.  Their argument was based on the thin claim that proprietary code they owned the rights to somehow made it into the Linux code base.

The result for the most part was the generation of negative energy from technologists toward their company.  It was like they stopped developing products and decided their entire approach to business would be to cash in on patent investments by litigating.

 As the title for this blog suggests, they are filing for bankruptcy protection.  Karma?  Probably more like bad decision come to haunt.

No Comments »

I circled the word “Sauce” above. I can only imagine some non-technical person heard someone say “Open Source” with a southern drawl and wrote it down. I didn’t point out how sun “has also expanding its links with the movement’s arch nemesis Microsoft”.

Beyond the grammatical issues with this, what’s the point of this article anyway? My movements are not hindered by Microsoft. If anything they are made much more regular.

No Comments »

ATI has always been such a butthead when it comes to access to specifications to the open source community. Subsequently we who make use of the great Open Source Operating Systems out there have simply avoided ATI hardware like the plague. Many of us have flocked to NVIDIA who at least has produced drivers for Open Source software making hardware 3D acceleration work. Well, now that AMD ownes ATI, the Radeon drivers are about to be open sourced. According to this article, specifications and driver code will be posted to the Internet on September 10th.  Evidently these specs and code are vastly complex and it will probably take a while for the information to be fully disclosed and absorbed by the Open Source community.  I also wonder if there are any current or former ATI developers from ATI who might now be able to speed this absorption.  However another interesting part of this story is the fact that there are parts of the 3D code that does not belong to AMD and therefore cannot be opened up to the community at large.
Everyone do a happy dance with me. I just wish MAC would have used AMD chips in their x86 systems. AMD is especially cool and you should support them by considering their processors during your next computer purchase.

No Comments »