Calling all Open Source innovators: showcase your innovative product at the ‘Demo Cup’ and enter it for the ‘Open Innovation Awards’ at the 2010 Open World Forum

Paris, 30 June 2010, for immediate distribution.

The Demo Cup, which will take place on 1 October in Paris at the 2010 Open World Forum, is a ‘demo’ competition, open to all Open Source and free software innovators.

Twelve companies, chosen from written applications, will be nominated and invited to give an eight-minute presentation of their work to the large audience expected to attend the Open World Forum, including decision-makers with a keen interest in Open Source, and a jury of experts in innovation (investors, Open Source integrators and experts).

The Open Innovation Awards 2010 will be awarded to the top best presenters at the Demo Cup. The contest is open to all Open Source projects and solutions getting ready for commercial launch or already on the market. The jury will be looking at those projects and solutions most likely to have a significant impact on society and on the marketplace.

The Open Innovation Demo Cup is about products; it requires timed, live demonstrations; and does not allow slide presentations! In recognition of the difficulty of communicating the power and value of Open Source projects on stage in a short 8 minutes, the Demo Cup will honor outstanding presentations. Chosen for their style, passion, clarity, and sometimes for their sheer fun, these Open Innovation Awards reward a unique ability to deliver a great product and position it in the market, to show off its most compelling features, to differentiate it from other products — and along the way to entertain a tough and critical Open World Forum audience.

So this event is a three-fold opportunity for Open Source entrepreneurs: to present their company at an international event; to make contact with potential customers and partners; and for the winners and finalists, to enjoy the recognition that comes with a prestigious award which reflects the fact that their product has successfully convinced a demanding panel of judges.

Last year’s Open Innovation Awards, organized according to slightly different arrangements, were given to five companies: BonitaSoft, Kaltura, ScaleDB, SonarSource and Ulteo.

To enter the Awards, all you have to do is to submit your entry, before 15 July 2010, in the form of a five to ten-page executive summary (in English, given that this is an international competition) along with an initial draft of the storyboard for the demo that would be presented during the final, to the following address: democup@openworldforum.org.

You can also use this address should you have any other questions about the contest.

The 2010 Demo Cup is organized by the Open World Forum, with operational support provided by the Open Source Software Special Interest Group at the Systematic competitiveness cluster.

For more info, visit: http://www.openworldforum.org/connect/awards/awards

About the Open World Forum

The Open World Forum is the premier global summit meeting bringing together decision-makers from across the world to discuss the technological, financial and social impact of open technologies, and to cross-fertilize ideas and initiatives in these areas. At the hub of the Free/Open Source revolution, the event was first staged in 2008, and takes place every year in Paris with more than 140 speakers from 30 countries, a 1,500-strong international audience and numerous conferences, workshops and think-tanks. The 2010 Open World Forum will be held on 30 September and 1 October, under the banner of “Open is the future: Open Innovation – Open Enterprise – Open Society”. Organized by a unique network of partners including the main Free/Open Source communities and most of the leading IT players worldwide, the Open World Forum is a must-attend event to discover the latest trends in open technology, business and social issues and to explore the future of Free/Open Source initiatives. It also offers a unique opportunity to share insights and best practices with many of the most respected visionaries, entrepreneurs and community leaders, and network with technology gurus, CxOs, analysts, CIOs, researchers, government leaders and investors from six continents.

To request an invitation, please visit http://www.openworldforum.org

About the Open Source Software Special Interest Group

With its stated mission of “developing the open source ecosystem in the Île-de-France”, the Groupe Thématique Logiciel Libre or Open Software Special Interest Group of the Systematic competitiveness cluster now consists of a network of over 90 partners, including 15 major companies, 50 SMEs and 25 research and higher education institutions. Its aim is to encourage co-operation, innovation and value creation around collaborative R&D projects and other activities that support the development of innovative enterprises, following the Open Source principles and values. 17 collaborative R&D projects dedicated to open source software, representing grants to the value of over €15 million, have already been financed with the support of the Group.

More information: http://www.gt-logiciel-libre.org/

[via Stefane Fermigier]

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database. If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project.

Obviously, MySQL users and supporters will have an interest in seeing that Oracle is not able to exert its full influence over MySQL, leaving customers at their mercy, since MySQL has become such a major competitor to Oracle. No surprise that there’s now an online petition campaign to  Save MySQL!

London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux:

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.

Today Microsoft released some GPL driver code for Linux for some hardware. Why? Well, so that the hardware could be better virtualized in a VM running Linux on a Windows host. Yippee. Well I’m sure this will help some people. It does mean that FLOSS is influencing them, and that is a good thing.

In contrast, the FSF made a press release last Thursday, quoted below in its entirety. So Microsoft is trying to win people over, whether it’s with really useful stuff or not, it is Free this time… and the FSF is just yelling at people. Who’s going to make more friends here?

Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it’s safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it’s nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

### Why Worry About C#? ###

Since we published Richard’s article about Mono[1] last week, some people have been asking us why we’re expressing special concern about free software developers relying on C# and Mono, instead of other languages. Sun probably has patents that cover Java. Maybe IBM has patents that cover C compilers. “Shouldn’t we discourage the use of these too?” they ask.

It’s true that all software patents are a threat to developers–but that doesn’t mean that all software patents are equally threatening. Different companies might have patents that *could* be used to attack other languages, but if we worried about every patent that *could* be used against us, we wouldn’t get anything done. Microsoft’s patents are much more dangerous: it’s the only major software company that has declared itself the enemy of GNU/Linux and stated its intention to attack our community with patents. If Microsoft designed a patent trap into C#, that is no more than what it said it would do.

The company has been quite clear about its intentions since late 2006. At a user conference in November that year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, responding to a question about their patent agreement with Novell: … the fact that [GNU/Linux] uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic benefit from our patented innovations. So how do we somehow get the appropriate economic return for our patented innovation…? (Seattle Post-Intellegencer, The Microsoft Blog, “Ballmer on Novell, Linux and patents,” November 16, 2006. “Intellectual property” is a confusing term that should be avoided; to learn more, visit.)

A few days later, an interview with Microsoft President Bob Muglia was published, and he made it clear that they considered C# one of these so-called “patented innovations:” There is a substantive effort in open source [sic] to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property [sic] associated with that is available to Novell customers. (eWeek.com, “Microsofts Muglia Talks Longhorn, Novell and Java”, November 17, 2006.)

They’ve been turning up the heat ever since. In May 2007, Microsoft followed all this up by announcing in a Fortune magazine interview that they believed GNU/Linux infringed 235 Microsoft patents. And recently they made it very clear that these were not idle threats: the company sued TomTom for using the VFAT filesystem implementation in the kernel Linux without buying a license from it.

All of this can’t simply be brushed aside. These are statements and actions made at the highest executive levels of the company. Using patents to divide and conquer the free software community is a fundamental part of their corporate strategy. Because of that, C# represents a unique threat to us. The language was developed inside Microsoft, so it’s likely they have many patents to cover different aspects of its implementation. That would make free software implementations of C#, like Mono, an easy target for attack.

The Community Promise does nothing to change any of this. Microsoft had an opportunity to take action and demonstrate that it meant usnno harm with C#. Instead, they took meaningless half-measures thatnleave them with plenty of opportunities to hurt us.

### Incomplete Standards ###

The ECMA 334 and 335 specifications describe the core C# language, including information about standard libraries that must be available in any compliant implementation. However, there are several libraries that are included with Mono, and commonly used by applications like Tomboy, that are not required by the standard. And just to be clear, we’re not talking about Windows-specific libraries like ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Instead, we’re talking about libraries under then System namespace that provide common functionality programmers expect in modern programming languages: binary object serialization, regular expressions, XPath and XSLT, and more.

Because these libraries are not defined in the ECMA specifications, they are not protected in any way by Microsoft’s Community Promise. If this were the only problem with the promise, it might be safe to use applications that avoid these libraries, and stick to what’s in the standard. But even the code that’s covered by the promise isn’t completely safe.

### Figuring Out What’s Necessary ###

The Community Promise only extends to claims in Microsoft patents that are *necessary* to implement the covered specifications. Judging just by the size of its patent portfolio, it’s likely that Microsoft holds patents which a complete standard implementation probably infringes even if it’s not strictly necessary–maybe the patent covers a straightforward speed optimization, or some common way of performing some task. The Community Promise doesn’t say anything about these patents, and so Microsoft can still use them to threaten standard implementations.

### Moving the Goalposts ###

Let’s say you’ve written an implementation of one of the specifications covered by the Community Promise, and you want to determine whether or not you’ll be sued for infringing a certain Microsoft patent. The necessity question already makes it difficult enough to figure this out. But even if you manage it, you should make sure you check again tomorrow, because the Community Promise might not protect you then.

The Community Promise does not give you any rights to exercise the patented claims. It only says that Microsoft will not sue you over claims in patents that it owns or controls. If Microsoft sells one of those patents, there’s nothing stopping the buyer from suing everyone who uses the software.

### The Solution: A Comprehensive Patent License ###

If Microsoft genuinely wants to reassure free software users that it does not intend to sue them for using Mono, it should grant the public an irrevocable patent license for all of its patents that Mono actually exercises. That would neatly avoid all of the existing problems with the Community Promise: it’s broad enough in scope that we don’t have to figure out what’s covered by the specification or strictly necessary to implement it. And it would still be in force even if Microsoft sold the patents.

This isn’t an unreasonable request, either. GPLv3 requires distributors to provide a similar license when they convey modified versions of covered software, and plenty of companies large and small have had no problem doing that. Certainly one with Microsoft’s resources should be able to manage this, too. If they’re unsure how to go about it, they should get in touch with us; we’d be happy to work with them to make sure it’s satisfactory.

Until that happens, free software developers still should not writesoftware that depends on Mono. C# implementations can still be attacked by Microsoft’s patents: the Community Promise is designed to give the company several outs if it wants them. We don’t want to see developers’ hard work lost to the community if we lose the ability to use Mono, and until we eliminate software patents altogether[2], using another language is the best way to prevent that from happening.

[1] http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
[2] To learn more about our End Soft Patents campaign, visit http://swpat.org/

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FSF And GNU Press mailing list http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-press

Esther Schindler sifts through 25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year which will be of interest to people in various categories from IT Admins to programmers to mobile users: “These open-source browsers, dev tools, mobile apps and more promise that ‘Oooh, cool!’ sense of discovery.”

Royal Pingdom serves up 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened. Some reasons better than others, of course. Interesting to note where the fork surpasses the original project in popularity, and where it doesn’t. Two of the listed forks were in pursuit of Mac support.

Steve Wozniak speaks out, predicting the death of the iPod and suggesting things he doesn’t like about the iPhone, comparing it with Google’s Android platform. Woz is quoted as saying that “the iPod has had a long time as the world’s most popular media player, and that it will fall from grace due to oversupply.” Hmmm. Is it a victim of its own success, then?

Mandriva’s latest release: Mandriva Linux 2009. Get it while it’s hot! Mandriva’s always been a bit of an overlooked distro, imo… but it continues to install easily and work very well. Reviews are appearing now for those who like to read before they download. Time to update my Mandriva systems…

This is amusing: apparently the roots of the iPod’s development are traced back to 1979, when “Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.” He didn’t renew the patent in 1988, so he hasn’t seen a dime from it. “To be honest,” he said, “I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged.”