Among all the Free Software and Open Standards posts on this blog, here’s a personal announcement.On Sunday a week ago, I had a sports accident that left me with a broken foot. During a game of capoeira, my partner’s shin ended up on top of my foot, and I ended up on top of his Read more »
Today is a good day for Free Software companies in the UK. The UK government is certainly taking a long and winding road towards Free Software and Open Standards. The UK’s public sector doesn’t use a lot of Free Software, and many smaller Free Software companies have found it comparatively hard to get public sector Read more »
On Tuesday, I went to Amsterdam to talk about “How Software Patents Are Delaying The Future” (pdf, 79kB), on a discussion panel organised by the European Patent Office. The other people on the panel were patent attorney Simon Davies and Ioannis Bozas, a patent examiner at the EPO. The panel was moderated by James Nurton Read more »
We have learned that the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee has taken the unitary patent off the agenda for its meeting today and tomorrow. We expect that the discussion will take place later in the fall of this year. This means that there is more time for you to discuss software patents and the unitary Read more »
Glyn Moody pointed me to a recent draft paper (.pdf) by economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It’s an interesting read. Here are the notes I made while reading. I’m posting them in order to make the arguments in the paper accessible to more people. I or FSFE don’t necessarily share these views. There Read more »
Now that software patents are back on the table, it’s important to understand how the European patent system actually works. You need to know this in order to discuss the unitary patent and FSFE’s demands with the MEPs you call and ask for support. The most surprising point is that the European patent system isn’t Read more »
Last week’s verdict in Apple vs Samsung involves some big numbers – hey, more than a billion US dollars in damages for Apple -, but it’s hardly as earth-shattering as some commentators claim. There will be an appeal, and then perhaps another one. We may see those damages shrivel from enormous to minimal (or even Read more »
Microsoft recently announced that the next edition of the company’s office suite, called Office 2013, will support the OOXML document standard in its file formats. That’s a little surprising if you consider that Microsoft pulled out all the stops and opened its bag of dirty tricks to get OOXML adopted as a standard, first by Read more »
Originally published on opensource.com For the first time, the European Parliament is about to release one of its own programs as Free Software. The program in question is called AT4AM, short for “Automatic Tool for Amendments”. The Parliament is in the business of making laws, and AT4AM automates a lot of the formal stuff associated Read more »
I’m busy getting a new laptop operational, with all the little tweaks that I’ve come to rely on over the years. One of those is Gtimelog. It’s a small and simple Python program that lets me track my working time. I’ve been using it pretty much every working day since 2006 or so. Over the Read more »