Patent Dispute Forces Openmoko Housecleaning
The Openmoko project, developers of an open source mobile phone platform, has recently pulled its download site offline due to a patent dispute.
The claimant in the dispute is Italian company Sisvel that accuses Openmoko of an infringement involving MP3 patents, according to an Openmoko mail thread. Sisvel specializes in patenting and licensing, in particular "the right to grant licenses for the use of several patent families concerning the MPEG Audio standard, the well-known digital processing standard for compressing the audio signal and converting it in a digital form."
Openmoko decided to inactivate its download server to pull all possible relics of MP2 or MP3 technology off the site. In the meantime they provide their software in test versions only. However, the project clarified that their phones never had MP3 playback capabilities. Doing housecleaning on the download site was a precautionary measure. As the Openmoko mail thread states, "For us the important thing is to defend the freedom of our users rather than cripple our phones so that certain things become 'impossible'."
Issue 199/2017
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
Red Hat Announces OpenShift.io
Red Hat takes its IDE online.
-
Microsoft Bakes Linux into Windows Server
Microsoft is slowly becoming a Linux vendor.
-
Fearless Coyote, Linux Kernel 4.11 is Out
The new kernel makes swap implementation more scalable, which will help cloud providers.
-
Docker Appoints Steve Singh CEO
The new CEO comes from a very strong SaaS background.
-
Docker Announces Linux Kit and Moby Project
Both projects help organizations build their own containerized systems.
-
Ubuntu Returns to Gnome as Its Mobile Plans Shatter
Mark Shuttleworth has resumed the position of CEO of Canonical.
-
Microsoft is Shutting Down CodePlex
Microsoft's open source code hosting platform CodePlex will come to an end after a more than 10-year stint.
-
Fedora 26 Alpha Released
Comes with Gnome 3.24
-
Old Linux Kernel Bug Discovered
The bug was introduced back in 2009 and has been lurking around all this time.
-
OpenSSH 7.5 Released
The new release deprecates the sshd_config UsePrivilegeSeparation option.