2012 September 01 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for September 1st, 2012

What is Evidence? – Apple v World

Published by Robert Pogson September 1st, 2012 in technology. 16 Comments

Instructions to Jury	What the foreman did
“In reaching your verdict, you may consider only the testimony and exhibits that were received into evidence. Certain things are not evidence, and you may not consider them in deciding what the facts are. I will list them for you:”	The foreman brought forward his personal experience of patents without opportunity for Samsung to cross-examine him: “I took that story back to the jury. Laid it out for ‘em. They understood the points I was talking about.”
“(4) Anything you may have seen or heard when the court was not in session is not evidence. You are to decide the case solely on the evidence received at the trial.”	The foreman planned his defence of Apple outside the court and planned to take sides: “I could defend this if it was my patent…”
“For each party’s patent infringement claims against the other, the first issue you will have to decide is whether the alleged infringer has infringed the claims of the patent holder’s patents and whether those patents are valid. … A utility patent claim is invalid if the claimed invention is not new. For the claim to be invalid because it is not new, all of its requirements must have existed in a single device or method that predates the claimed invention, or must have been described in a single previous publication or patent that predates the claimed invention. In patent law, these previous devices, methods, publications or patents are called “prior art references.”	The foreman ignored the judge’s instruction by inventing a new rule for invalidation by processor, something that makes no sense since both Apple and Samsung used ARM processors: “…whether or not the prior art really did invalidate that patent and so with the moment I had I realized the software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice-versa, and that changed everything”
“If you decide that any infringement was willful, that decision should not affect any damage award you give. I will take willfulness into account later.”	“We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the rist. We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful.”

The more I reflect on the jury’s findings in Apple v Samsung, the more appalled I am that the judge does not recall the court in emergency session to set aside their findings. To let such faulty reasoning to stand until weeks later is a travesty of justice.

- Robert Pogson

The Future is Forever

Published by Robert Pogson September 1st, 2012 in technology. 0 Comments

It’s been a year since Kernel.org was hacked by intruders. Still no report publicly explaining what happened. The last I was told was that an investigation is underway.

“Thanks to all for your patience and understanding during our outage and please bear with us as we bring up the different kernel.org systems over the next few weeks. We will be writing up a report on the incident in the future.”

see The Linux Kernel Archives.

I expect that a report could be issued with carefully chosen words so as not to compromise any investigation. The bad guys know what they did. What harm would openness cause? It could cause a lot of good if there is something that others could do to prevent other such compromises. Was it weak/lost/stolen passwords or something more fundamental? Curious minds want to know.

- Robert Pogson

Open webOS – Promise and Delivery

Published by Robert Pogson September 1st, 2012 in technology. 43 Comments

It was pretty exciting stuff when HP introduced WebOS a while back. Quickly they abandoned WebOS for unknown reasons but promised to open the source code. Now they have delivered:

“It has taken a lot of hard work, long hours and weekend sacrifices by our engineering team to deliver on our promise and we have accomplished this goal.”

“The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community.”

see The Open webOS Project Blog, Open webOS August Edition.

A quick review of the site reveals some principles:
”

Open webOS will accept contributions via a signoff process inspired by Linux Certificate of Origin.

Open webOS will made available under the Apache license, Version 2.0.

Open webOS will use the contributor committal model in use on most open source projects.

Open webOS will be segmented into multiple projects to give developers ample opportunity to join and remain active in the development effort.

The Open webOS project website will host a wiki, a source code repository, a mailing list, and a bug tracking system.

We will use Github or an equivalent tool to as the code repository.

We will use JIRA or an equivalent tool to track issues.

Our plan is to allow multiple committers to branch and merge code in the open to allow multiple development branches to occur at once.

“

That’s good stuff for a FLOSS project but there’s something that bugs me. While they open the source, they allow it to be closed again at whim by using the ASL which does not require source code to be distributed along with the binary code. That’s an arbitrary and unnecessary term which may turn off some contributors who don’t want code they write locked up.

Then, there’s this strangeness:
“At any given moment we would expect relatively few committers.

(As an example, Linux has thousands of users, of whom only 2.5% are developers or contributors and fewer than 100 are committers. So, the project may have many, many users, but it’s the PMC and the committers who determine the project’s baseline.)

All committers report to the PMC of the component they represent. The PMC uses a consensus-based decision making process to determine whether or not to take a contribution from the community and commit it to the code tree.”

A founding principle that code development will be open is incompatible with the idea that committers will be few. Software that is intended to explode and make a huge difference in IT should not be limited by the imaginations of the initiators. Who, in the 21st Century, counts users of Linux in “thousands”? What’s with that? Perhaps its not end-users they write of but developers, distributors or OEMs or such, but it’s strange to think FLOSS of any kind has 2.5% of users being committers. There’s something wrong with this picture yet it’s right their as a principle of the organization.

I hope these are just vestiges of the corporate ethos of HP and that the organization will evolve to a more caring/sharing culture. There’s no reason WebOS should not be as popular as GNU/Linux or Android/Linux and that means many millions of users and possibly thousands of contributors.

In any event, the world is a bit better having yet another good OS to choose for end users.

A brief survey of the repository shows that WebOS is heavily JavaScripted with a nice modular style making it easily portable to any OS using NYX. Chuckle, I guess there was a bit of chaos near the creation of WebOS… A good overview is on this page.

- Robert Pogson