Three years ago, I blog about the situation with Software Patents and noted: Dealing with ‘non-bogus’ patent are tough, especially if it is held by non-OSS-friendly company, like Microsoft. (Microsoft have huge patent portfolios btw, but so far, they have not use it aggressive against competition yet). This is where we need a ‘Cold War’ […]
Tag: Open Source
FOSS Primers by APDIP
e-Primer on Free/Open Source Software: Network Infrastructure and Security authored by a friend of mine Gaurab Raj Upadhaya. Working via information networks such as the Internet, intranet and LANs has increased the possibilities of communicating with a wide range of individuals and communities across long distances. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement is […]
mplayer tricks
Several months ago, I mentioned I was looking for mplayer documention. My wife has a bunch of wma files which she ripped using Windows Media Player but can’t play on iPod or iTunes now. We could probably rip again but being OSS geek, we like to inflict pain upon ourselves to look for the most […]
Fun with Panorama
Took some photos of Louvre Museum and had some fun making paronomic view of it, using Open Source Software of course! Tools used (1) Hugin to align the photos and (2) Enblend to stitch the align photos together and optionally (3) Autopan-SIFT to generate control points for Hugin. Bob Park has an excellent instruction on […]
Singapore Open Source Alliance
A group of major companies, IBM, HP, Oracle, Apple, Intel led by Resolvo got together to form a Singapore Open Source Alliance. See ZDNet article: Spearheaded by Resolvo Systems, a Singapore-based Linux solutions provider, the Singapore Open Source Alliance (Sosa) will also converse with chief information officers in government bodies as well as small- and […]
MPlayer Shutdown
I was looking around for mplayer doc today to use an obscure function but imaging my surprise when I get to mplayer homepage: This site has been shut down because of numerous patent violations in MPlayer. The other free software multimedia players are next. Multimedia is a patent minefield. All important techniques and formats are […]
More on Software Patents
Remember my rant about Software Patent few months back? Dealing with ‘non-bogus’ patent are tough, especially if it is held by non-OSS-friendly company, like Microsoft. (Microsoft have huge patent portfolios btw, but so far, they have not use it aggressive against competition yet). This is where we need a ‘Cold War’ in software patents – […]
Interesting day…
Blogging was slow these days. Other then suffering from this intolerable cough that refuse to go away, day work has not been kind to me either. Anyway, I have two interesting meeting today. 1) Richard Stallman who is in town to give a talk on Free Software (he refuses to use the term Open Source) […]
Software Patents
The news that Linux potentially infringes 283 patents initiate a strong reaction from the OSS community. Actually, just look at some examples of software patents and you will see the most common algorithms like Quicksort (#5,175,857) and Random Number Generator (#5,251,165). So pardon me while I marvel : “Only 283 patents?” Some folks, like Richard […]
Microsoft and Open Source
I was sitting with a Microsoft PR lady over dinner yesterday and I commented how sad Microsoft has alienated the Open Source community. I mean, it is one thing for Microsoft would see Linux as a competitor and react strongly towards it as they would against any other competitors, it is another to go against […]