Slashback: OSS, Lawsuits, History

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including Record Label civil war, more big-business software getting tossed into open source, US Government says 2008 IPv6 still on track, EU Warned Microsoft source code not enough, RIM celebrates a victory in Germany, 10th planet a reality, and looking forward to the year 2001 -- Read on for details.

Record Label Supports Accused File-Sharer. arabagast writes "The Nettwerk Music Group has said it will pay for the defense of David Greubel. Greubel is the defendant in a complaint filed by the RIAA in a U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas accusing him of having 600 illegally downloaded music files on his home computer."

Qluster's OpenQRM goes OSS. Decibel writes "While Microsoft, Oracle and now IBM have made news by releasing free versions of their databases, other companies have gone one better and released versions of their products as OSS. Qlusters is one example, in that they just released OpenQRM. The CTO's previous company (Symbiot) also made a similar play, releasing OpenSIMS. Could this be the start of a change to where commercial software starts melding more and more into OSS?"

US Government says 2008 IPv6 still on track. DrkShadow writes to tell us that the Government is holding fast to their 2008 IPv6 switch commitment. From the article: "The White House Office of Management and Budget said it would issue a policy memorandum dictating full federal 'IPv6' compliance in an effort to spur its deployment throughout government agencies."

EU Warned Microsoft source code not enough. Joe Barr writes "According to WindowsITPro, the Wall Street Journal has obtained a copy of a confidential memo sent from the EU to Microsoft last month which warned Microsoft that an offer of the source code would not be enough to satisfy the EU's requirements for interoperability. Open source advocates have blasted the offer because it lacks the knowledge required to interoperate with Windows behind its IP licensing, thus making it unusable."

RIM celebrates a victory in Germany. PDG writes "Looks like not everything is going bad for RIM as they have recently won another patent based lawsuit, but this time in Germany. At least they don't have all their legal eggs in one basket."

10th planet a reality. smooth wombat writes "After measuring twice and cutting once, a team of German astrophysicists at the University of Bonn led by Frank Bertoldi have concluded that the object located beyond the orbit of Pluto and named 2003 UB313, is 435 miles larger in diameter than Pluto. As a result, there will be increasing pressure on the IAU (International Astronomical Union) to classify this object as the 10th planet. From the article: '"It is now increasingly hard to justify calling Pluto a planet if UB313 is not also given this status," Bertoldi said.'"

Looking forward to the year 2001. ChristianNerds writes "Atari Magazine is serving up an article written in 1989 concerning what the next century would be like. From the article: 'A typical morning in the year 2001: You wake up, scan the custom newspaper that's spilling from your fax, walk into the living room. There you speak to a giant screen on the wall, part of which instantly becomes a high-quality TV monitor. When you leave for work, you carry a smart wallet, a computer the size of a credit card. When you come home, you slip on special eyeglasses and stroll through a completely artificial world.' They got a great deal right, like the spread of optical disk usage, the internet (ISDN), and parallel processing."

NTP just lost a BIG one.

[Anonymous Coward]

U.S. patent office rules in RIM's favour again
http://www.cbc.ca/story/business/national/2006/02/ 01/rim-060201.html [www.cbc.ca]

NTP has 30 days to respond to the non-final rejection of its 5 critical patents against RIM. There is a court date on February 24, 2006 to start the shutdown of the RIM network in the U.S. It is going to be an interesting court case.

Re:If by 2008 we'll be finally using IPv6

[Luban Doyle]

Actually the Chinese are using IPv6 in quite a few places already. We aren't because od CIDRing and keeping machines behind firewalls and routers which allow you to use addresses that aren't used/routable on the Internet (10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x to 172.32.x.x and 192.168.x.x)

Is OSS documentation any better?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft had previously turned over 12,000 pages of technical information describing software protocols that developers could use to interact with Windows Server products. But the EU says that its technical experts spent over 42 hours working on very simple applications that interact with those protocols, and they couldn't get anything to work. The experts called Microsoft's documentation "totally unusable" and complained that it lacks an index, illustrations, or even section headings. Developers at companies such as IBM, Novell, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems also all complained that the documentation was unusable, the report notes."

Is Open Source documnetation any better?

Re:10th planet

[kfg]

How does Pluto compare to Phobos and Deimos?

How would you like to walk around an equator in less than an hour?

Don't walk too fast though, you might achieve orbital velocity, or even escape if you tried to jog.

KFG

Re:Looking forward to the Year 2000 slashback

[Detritus]

ISDN was a worthwhile technology, putting a low-latency multiplexed digital communications link on existing copper wiring. The problem, at least in the USA, was how it was marketed, priced, and promoted by the telephone companies. The telephone companies wanted to push centrex and the "intelligent" circuit-switched network. They had no interest in selling cheap packet-switched data links to individuals and small businesses. They hate the concept of the dumb network. There's no great profit to be made running a dumb network.

Re:NTP just lost a BIG one.

[SpaceLifeForm]

USDOJ gets involved, Stout promises reversal [bloomberg.com].

My problems aren't technical

[numbski]

My problem with IPv6 is fiscal. I go to ARIN and want to deploy a community wireless network using all IPv6. They want to charge me just as much for IPv6 addresses as they're charging for IPv4. What's worse, is that if I do use IPv6, I still have to pay for IPv4 addresses so that I can translate for the rest of the world, as IPv6 addresses can easily go to a IPv4 subnet, but the reverse is not true, I have to do some form of translation. :\

So basically ICANN is causing the slowed adoption themselves. It's either $1200/yr for IPv4, or $2400/yr for IPv6. Take a wild guess what I'll wind up doing despite wanting to use IPv6. :(

Re:My problems aren't technical

[schon]

I go to ARIN and want to deploy a community wireless network using all IPv6. They want to charge me just as much for IPv6 addresses as they're charging for IPv4.

I call bullshit. [arin.net]

From the link:

Organizations that are General Members in good standing prior to requesting an initial IPv6 allocation are not charged IPv6 registration fees. Annual renewal fees for IPv6 allocations are also waived for General Members in good standing. ARIN will continue to waive these fees as long as the organization remains a General Member in good standing at the time of renewal, up until Dec. 31, 2006.

Also, if you do have to pay, that page shows that IPV6 addresses are less expensive than IPV4, because the blocks are larger. An IPV4 /21 (2048 addresses) costs the same amount as an IPV6 /48 (1.2e24 addresses)

Re:2001, information, and IP

[Guspaz]

They DID get a surprising amount correct, though. The big thing they missed out on is the internet (and the ubiquity of it). It supplants a lot of their other predictions.

Their pridictions about optical storage going up 50x in size from 656MB was a bit off. By 2001, I think we only had DVD-RW, a mere ~15x increase. By 2006, though, we've got 50GB BluRay rewritables, a 78x increase. So they were just off by a few years.

Another interesting thing they got right was CD-ROMs being able to store higher quality sound than audio CDs. A CD-ROM today can store 24-bit 96khz 5.1 audio with a greater playing time than a similar audio CD. So the quality increase is there too (~1.2 megabits is a LOT of bits to work with for compressed digital audio), and the technology to do so was around in 2001 (DVDs, for example, use compressed 24-bit audio).

eyedb

[lovebyte]

On the subject of open sourcing database management system, I would like to mention that eyedb [eyedb.org], an OODBMS, has just been released under the LGPL. (I know the main author).