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 224/2019
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
Raspberry Pi 4 Is Here
A new operating system has been released to support the new device.
-
Ubuntu Takes A U-Turn with 32-Bit Support
Canonical will continue to support legacy applications and libraries.
-
Chromium-Based Browsers Will Ignore Google’s Ad-Blocking Ban
Brave Opera and Vivaldi will not implement Google’s changes that will cripple ad-blockers.
-
Zorin OS 15 Released
The new release is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
-
Ubuntu to Package Proprietary Nvidia Driver
Canonical is making it easier for users to install proprietary Nvidia drivers.
-
openSUSE Leap 15.1 Released
Better hardware support.
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Available
An OS redesigned for the hybrid cloud era.
-
Google Brings Linux to Chromebook
All new Chromebooks will be capable of running Linux.
-
Fedora Project Announces Fedora 30
The latest version comes with new tools and a new alignment of the various Fedora editions.
-
The Apache Software Foundation Completes Migration To GitHub
The foundation has decommissioned its own Git service.