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Following Wednesday's announcement of the formation of the Open Solutions Alliance by a group of 10 vendors, Unisys said it would join the nonprofit consortium. The OSA, which was announced at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York, is dedicated to promoting comprehensive open source busine...

Microsoft's self-proclaimed commitment to open standards became more tangible Thursday when it released the first Open XML translator for Word. Version 1.0 of the translator, which is a free, downloadable add-on to the word processor, allows users to convert Office Open XML documents into the OpenDo...

At the request of the Software Freedom Law Center, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced Thursday that it will re-examine a patent held by e-learning software company Blackboard. The Software Freedom Law Center, an open source software group, made its request in November on behalf of three...

Open source development has always been an international phenomenon. After all, the killer app of the movement -- Linux -- was born in Finland, and the quintessential dual licensing business was started in Sweden with mySQL. Companies like Red Flag have stepped up in Asia to take Linux into double...

Open-source license compliance is a sensitive topic. Lawyers and technicians have devoted endless hours, lengthy blog postings and much mental energy to questions like, "What is a derivative work?" and "What is distribution?" Very interesting stuff indeed, and grist for meaty discussions. However,...

Our system of law in the United States is what is called a "common law" system. When judges make decisions in such a system, they rely on what is called case law -- the written opinions on matters of law that are previously published by other judges. The other legal principal that lucky non-lawyer...

People often ask me how likely it is that an open-source license like the GNU General Public License will ever be enforced. When they ask that, they usually mean: "If I violate it will I get caught?" It's a legitimate question, if one lays aside moral rhetoric, such as the idea that proprietary so...

In the mid 1990s, when I first began running into open source in my practice, I noticed that open source had a very strange effect on intellectual property lawyers. It was a Chicken Little situation, but instead of crying "the sky is falling" they were crying "the code is infringing." Nearly ten ye...

The press reported a few weeks ago that SCO, the UnixWare purveyor famous for bringing Linux-related lawsuits against IBM and others, was in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ. This announcement was surprising because most public companies don't risk delisting for not filing their 10-Ks. But ...

The European Commission recently tolled the death knell for the EU Software Patent Directive, or more precisely, the "Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions." Like most Americans, I am fairly clueless about the EU political process, and I wouldn't presume to write about e...