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Posts tagged as “samsung”

FOSS Talks UEFI, Shuttleworth On M$ & More…

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Google drops open Talk for closed Hangouts

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth going on now that Google has announced intentions to replace Talk, the open standards supporting instant messaging service, with proprietary Hangouts. While Talk works with the XMPP industry standard which allows cross-platform use, Hangouts will be completely closed and proprietary. In other words, if you want to talk to someone on Hangouts, that person must be using Hangouts as well.

Google’s Nexus Tablet; Maddog’s Blog; Patent News & More

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Lot’s of stories of interest in the FOSS world this week. Patent issues, of course, dominated the news. In addition, however, a travel site got outed for a OS bias and a hardware manufacturer discovered the hard way that ignoring open source can be costly.

We’ll start with the patent news…

The Patent Wars Continue

I don’t know what we’re going to do about the patent situation. The sensible thing would be to simply change the law and make software unpatentable, but there are plenty of reasons why that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Banning patents wouldn’t only effect the trolls, those snakes that don’t make anything but monetize their patent portfolios through the courts. If it did, we could probably get it done tonight.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Android’s Patent Wars – A Checklist

It’s not looking good for Android. Congress could fix this in a heartbeat by doing away with software patents, the only solution that makes sense, but they’re otherwise engaged right now and not likely to be much help. In the meantime, Android is involved in so many patent disputes it’s hard to keep count. Oracle’s suing Google, Apple’s suing HTC, and Microsoft is suing, or threatening to sue, anyone who makes a handset with the Android brand. Even with Groklaw doing their best to supply legal ammunition for Android’s defenders, it’s not looking like Android is going to get out of this unscathed, which will only cost consumers and enrich the trolls

Here’s a quick rundown on Android’s patent ills, just to help you sort out the players. The game is changing daily, so I may have left something or someone out. If so, please forgive me.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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