Nokiasoft: Who are the Open Source Winners and Losers?

The dust has barely settled on the announcement of the major deal between Nokia and Microsoft, weird possibilities have been and gone, and we are all still pondering the implications. One of the key concerns for readers of this blog will be: what are the effects on free software? And: who will be the open source losers - and winners? What follows is just a first sketch of what the eventual answers may be: expect them to be refined and possibly reversed as more details and reactions emerge.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Symbian's Patently Terrible “Triumph”

Although I've written elsewhere about the recent court case of Symbian v Comptroller General of Patents, noting that it was bad news, I hadn't realised quite how bad the news was until I went through the complete judgment. It's plain that the judges in question, who to their credit tried their level best to understand this mysterious stuff called software, failed to grasp the central issue of what software is. As a result, they have passed down a judgment that is so seriously wrong it will cause a huge amount of damage in the future unless it is revoked by a higher court....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Bad News on the UK Software Patent Front

Why is there always this Jesuitical casuistry when it comes to software?

We have the following:

what goes on inside a computer can be said to be closer to a mathematical method (which is, of course, not patentable by virtue of art 52(2)(a)) than what goes on inside other machines.

But before that the same judge has said:

It can also be said in favour of Symbian's case that it would be somewhat arbitrary and unfair to discriminate against people who invent programs which improve the performance of computers against those who invent programs which improve the performance of other machines.

Well, no more unfair than not allowing physicists to patent the laws they discover, or the theorems that mathematicians prove. The point is, software is not "closer to a mathematical method", it *is* a mathematical method, or rather a concatenation of them.

All this juridical "on the one hand" and "on the other" in the interests of "balance" does not change this. The current decision is seriously bad news, because it opens the door to even more weaselly patent applications that contort themselves into the magic position to gain the favour of whichever Jesuit is on duty that day.

As a result of which, new software becomes much *harder* and more expensive to write - even to the point of impossibility, if patent thickets get too thick. Hardly what the great and glorious patent system is supposed to do, is it...?

The Android With No Brain

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source Mobile Telephony Platforms Are Like Buses...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Opening up Symbian – Good or Bad for Linux?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Court Backslides on UK Software Patents

On Open Enterprise blog.

Will Google's Android Lead to HAL 9000?

Google's Android platform remains something of an unknown quantity: until real-life applications of it start to come through, it is hard to know whether it will be fab or a flop. But in one respect it is clearly a breakthrough, in that its openness allows people to try out new ideas that were difficult or even impossible with closed systems:

Nikita Ivanov and his 14 employees are working on an application that would harness the processing power within millions of cell phones to create one big supercomputer. The idea is to enable companies and government agencies to exploit all the idle computing power in their employees' mobile phones and perhaps even handsets belonging to non-employees who have agreed to lease that spare capacity.

To create this "grid" computing application, Ivanov's startup firm has chosen a mobile software platform that doesn't yet run on a single commercially available phone. Rather than Windows Mobile or the Symbian operating system, GridGain is using Android, a platform spearheaded by Google that has drawn scores of software developers with its promise of flexibility to create unusual applications.

GridGain is one of thousands of Android-based projects in the works. Another would enable users to record and share audio tours of museums or galleries. One is a music player that can connect a cell-phone user with people who have similar musical tastes and happen to be nearby. All underscore the ways that developers hope to use Android to take phones in new directions with greater ease than today's prominent wireless platforms.

Mobile Linux Goes East

There's an interesting graphic in this story, which shows how very different the smartphone market is around the world - and how big Linux is in China and Japan.