open...

One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a glo...

Open source lies at the heart of Google – it runs a modified form of Linux on its vast server farms, and uses many other free software pr...

There's an important conference taking place in Brussels next week: "Tensions between Intellectual Property Rights and the ICT sta...

We tend to think of free software as (mostly) new, so the fact that Apache celebrated its 15th birthday yesterday seems pretty extraordinary...

I'm struck by the almost unanimous chorus of indifference that has greeted the news that a court has reversed one part of an ealier rul...

One of the perennial teasers in the world of computing concerns IBM. On the one hand, you have a company that has embraced open source wide...

As long-suffering readers of this blog will know, I refer to patents and copyrights as intellectual monopolies because, well, that's wha...

I've often written about particular instances where Microsoft has bullied competitors; it's a pretty sorry tale. But that story bec...

News that TomTom is joining the Open Invention Network (OIN) reminded me that the latter is an example of a patent commons, where patents a...

The 2003 SCO lawsuit, for those of you too young to recall, began as a modest request for $1 billion from IBM for allegedly “misusing and mi...

Remember SCO? It's a once-important company that developed a death-wish by suing IBM in 2003. As Wikipedia explains... On Open Enterpris...

A name that I don't know as well as I should is Grady Booch: chief scientist at IBM's Rational Software unit and an IBM fellow who a...

Bad IBM : IBM today announced that it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patent...

The announcement last week of a “Microsoft-free” desktop solution from IBM has naturally been garnering headlines, in part because it's ...

Good news: Irving Wladawsky-Berger , the person who essentially steered IBM toward GNU/Linux - with huge knock-on effects - has joined one o...

If the prospect of another week stretching out before you is getting you down, I've got good news. There's a post about GNU/Linux th...

Well, that gives an idea of the importance of this move for the world of open access: Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired ...

A little while back I noted a provocative call from IBM for standards bodies to do better – a clear reference to the ISO's handling of O...

Last week I chatted to the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale. He was telling me how happy he was that he'd found a new CEO to take...

I've written before about the parlous state into which the once-irreproachable ISO has fallen, particularly with its flagrant disregard ...