“Novell helps Microsoft spread misconceptions and uses these to market itself.”As Matt Asay repeatedly stresses, consumers did not require Novell's imaginary 'protection', not even if they chose SUSE. It was all just a sales tactic to Novell: create fear out of nothing and then use it to market SUE Linux [sic] while mocking the rest (the competition), along with Microsoft. It's an appalling strategy.
Jason Brooks has just published an article about this issue of indemnification and he concludes by saying that it is hardly necessary.
Considering that open-source software and processes are serving an increasingly prominent role in the IT industry landscape, and that actual lawsuits against open-source end users haven't been materializing, I don't think that companies or individuals running open source without service-fee-based indemnification are in any particular danger.
Maybe I'm wrong--if I get served for running Linux without an annual service contract, I'll be sure to write about it.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office may have a major problem on its hands -- the possibly unconstitutional appointment of nearly two-thirds of its patent appeals judges.
Such a constitutional flaw, if legitimate, could call into question the hundreds of decisions worth billions of dollars in the past eight years. The flaw, discovered by highly regarded intellectual property scholar John Duffy of George Washington University Law School, could also afflict the appointment of nearly half of the agency's trademark appeals judges.
A petition raising the issue has just been filed in the U.S. Supreme Court by a company whose patent was rejected by a three-judge Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences panel. That panel decision was subsequently affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which set aside an $86.5 million infringement verdict won by the company.
--Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab, rediff.com, Apr 2006