I have just read this article on the Register and it makes me proud to be British!

A patent for the handling of gratuities in card payments has been revoked by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) for being a business method implemented by a computer program. The decision follows recently-revised guidance on patentability.

One of the inventors told OUT-LAW today that his company spent more than £100,000 trying to enforce and defend the patent before passing the rights to another company, which he described as a “patent troll”. He believes that company will appeal this month’s ruling.

If you read the full story, there isn’t anything remotely “patentable” about this idea at all.

Their patent described a process of generating and handling an electronic online authorisation and uploading request relating to a payment transaction. The customer would be offered the chance to add a gratuity and a request for authorisation of the total would be constructed. A request would then be made over a telecoms network and a receipt generated for the customer.

Yes. That’s it. It’s an idea about how to charge for a tip and the main bill at the same time! Pretty new and innovative huh? Good grief… How on earth does anyone think this is patentable?

Patents are to protect INVENTIONS. That is new things, things that haven’t been thought of before or that are not just evolution to the status quo.

Over here we have some tests that a patent application must pass.

A landmark ruling in 2006 in the cases of Aerotel and Macrossan changed the way the UK-IPO assesses whether inventions are patentable. A new four-step test was introduced for the assessment of patentability:

1. Properly construe the claim;
2. Identify the actual contribution;
3. Ask whether it falls solely within the excluded matter;
4. Check whether the contribution is actually technical in nature.

Step 3 caused the patent to fall. The patent can cut fraud and enable gratuities to be paid by card at the same time as the principal sum; but the Hearing Officer wrote: “while they may be advantages of the invention, they are not achieved by technical means… They are achieved by changing the business process – i.e. changing the sequence of steps – in which the terminals are used. The claim is to how a business uses a known system.”

“The contribution falls squarely within the business method exclusion. It also falls within the computer program exclusion given its implementation by means of a computer program,” he concluded.

Ho hum. That sounds quite sensible to me. Although - as the title of this piece suggests - if you replace the K in UK with an S. Guess what? Yep. It’s protected by patent law.

There are some cracking comments on this post too. Well worth a read if you find the whole US/EU patent differences interesting. Especially when it comes to software and computing.

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Here’s an interesting post from Matt Assay - blogger extrodinnaire - it seems the US public offices are starting to grok what Open Source is all about. Apart from a few stalwarts in our opposition parties it seems as though Tony B’s legacy lives on…

• 71% of all US federal respondents believe that their agency can benefit from open source (with 88% within the intelligence community holding this view because of advanced security within open source);
• 55% of all respondents have been or are involved in an open-source implementation (and 90% of those that have implemented believe they have benefited from it - talk about killer approval ratings - which may be why 29% of those who have not implemented are planning to do so in the next 12 months…)

Nice one Matt.

 It’s a very good time to be in open source.

My sentiments exactly…

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I found this link via a post on the OO.o marketing mailing list this morning.

The figures that follow are probably nowhere near complete either. We know that in Holland they are moving the whole of the Amsterdam administration over to Open Source and I’m certain that there will be many more companies and public bodies that either: haven’t seen this list and know that they can contribute, or are simply not allowed to. If you know of any one using OO.o in their business, public agency or wherever else, encourage them to get it on this list!

There are some pretty amazing numbers on there, showing some very large installations of OpenOffce.org. But what really grabbed my attention was some of the European statistics:

• Austria: 18,000 seats.
• Belgium: 4,000 seats.
• Finland: 10,000 seats.
• France: 490,750 seats!
• Germany: 25,900 seats.
• Spain: 388,000 seats!
• UK: 5000 seats (One entry only, for Bristol City Council)

Now something is surely very wrong here… France and Spain are using, close to, a million (878,750) copies of Open Office. That’s got to be several hundred million pounds worth of license fees they aren’t paying to M$. And not just once, either. That’ll be every three years or so I guess.

If our government wasn’t so in bed with M$ we could probably have built a couple of new hospitals, or a dozen or so new schools with that kind of money… Jeeez, this makes me really angry.

What a WOFM. (Waste Of [insert famous anglo-saxon adjective here] Money)

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This old story gets even more ridiculous. The fact that the head of the national library is a co-chair and obvious supporter of M$’s OOXML specification, led our National Archive to spend yet more money with Microsoft for a solution that will actually NOT fix the problem. More documents will be stored in a, as yet non-standardised and closed, document format. That will, eventually require us to spend even more money yet again just to get access to old electronic documents.

It seems our antipodean partners have come up with a solution: It’s called Xena. And it’s Open Source and uses the GPL.

Xena is free and open source software developed by the National Archives of Australia to aid in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena is an acronym meaning ‘Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives’.

Xena software aids digital preservation by performing two important tasks:

• Detecting the file formats of digital objects
• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Now this sounds like a very decent solution. Read that last bullet once more:

• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Adam Farquhar and the National Archive of Great Britain please take note…

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“Ignoring open source is costing us [the UK] dear”

The headline is from the Guardian on-line this morning. In a piece written by Victor Keegan, he explains how we [UK PLC] are suffering from our pathetic use of Open Source, especially in terms of leadership from our Government.

You would have thought that a Labour government, struggling to marry the success of market forces with the socialist endowment of its founding fathers, would have latched on to this new cooperativism which brings people together for a common purpose with a burning zeal. In fact, its wanton neglect could damage our economic prospects.

Well yes, apart from the fact that our previous leader was a bosom buddy of Bill Gates (And there are lots more. Just Google for their two names…) and so our Government was highly unlikely to shun M$’s approaches.

The depth of its neglect was made plain by speakers at a seminar last week hosted by Westminster eForum, which tries to make parliament aware of IT issues. It turns out, in contrast to what other governments are doing, that most departments - including Health, Work and the Foreign Office - are so risk-averse they have virtually no open source in their IT infrastructures. The Treasury runs less than 1% of its operations with open source. The Conservatives, who rightly believe Labour is vulnerable in this area, claim that nearly £700m could be saved by switching to open source. This is disputed by others who point to the high initial cost of switching from an embedded system and retraining everyone. But in the long run, low maintenance costs plus the absence of licence fees and upgrade charges must give open source the edge and, even if it didn’t, there is still a strong case for encouraging it because a workforce skilled in open source would be well placed to exploit the enormous opportunities opening up for the future.

See this piece from Glyn Moody for a transcript of the presentation he gave at the eForum meeting. (According to one commenter he received a standing ovation!). If the Government would actually take a look at the big Enterprises, they would discover that Open Source is very much in-place and gaining ground at a rapid pace. Why would Yahoo just spend $350m on an Open Source business with revenues of less than $10m? Why is Redhat so successful? Why are there more and more Open Source companies springing up? Why do IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and even Oracle to a lesser extent, get Open Source? Because their customers (Big Corporates) demand it.

Schools are not much better, a double tragedy because they not only don’t benefit from savings but also lose the opportunity to train children in the skills of the future.

And this is nothing short of scandalous… As I have mentioned before, our schools have been completely sold out to M$. They are locked in to very expensive subscription licensing deals that mean they (we via our TAX) end up paying for software that they can’t use. And there are heinous penalties for cancelling contracts. In terms of the skills gap and the value of Open Source in “learning” I agree and would emphasise this point much, much more. This is the nature of Open Source, one of the Four Freedoms is the ability to investigate and learn. You can’t do that with M$, and other proprietary, products.

There is one other major issue that Victor failed to mention in his otherwise interesting article. Open Standards.

We have seen recently how Microsoft has bullied, bribed and threatened their way through the ISO to try and get a proprietary document specification, the sole aim of which is to continue to lock-in customers and make your data belong to M$ for the indefinite future, passed as an International Open Standard. And now we learn that they don’t intend to implement it themselves anyway!

Open Source software is built on true Open Standards and as such, your data belongs to you and you will always be able to get access to it because the formats are “open” and publicly available. Try opening an old MS Office document with your shiny, new and very expensive Office suite. Oooops. Guess what; you can’t. You have to go back to M$, cap-in-hand, and buy more of their software just to access your own materials. Just as the National Archive has recently discovered.

And finally, on Monday of this week, the EU has upheld the anti-trust decision made several years ago. Microsoft are a bunch of crooks and have been caught. They use their dominant position to smother and throttle competition. Nice. And don’t forget the ridiculous goings on in the BBC where their new iPlayer is Microsoft only (good for the licence payer, that one!) and they are employing ex, Microsoft people to promote and develop the platform.

Please, please, please. Everyone wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late.

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Blimey… Here’s a snippet of news out today that I almost missed!

Parliamentarians to discuss Open Source software
The economic impact of Open Source software will be discussed with parliamentarians and senior government officials on Wednesday 12th September at the Westminster eForum, held at the Palace of Westminster. Open Source community leaders Alan Cox, developer of the Linux Kernel, and Mark Taylor, President of the Open Source Consortium, will contrast the popularity of Open Source technologies in industry and with its limited adoption in the public sector.

The article goes on to mention that there will be a Microsoft employee present to support the cause of proprietary software. So that would be:

• It costs LOADS,
• You get “locked-in” to one vendor
• We own your data, not you,
• We get to sell you more licenses and support contracts than you’ll ever really need or use…

It would be great to be fly on the wall… I’d love to hear what Alan Cox and Mark Taylor could suggest instead of spending approx. £10b on NHS IT systems that never work, or deliver what was expected.

I’d really love to know why it costs SO much to build a big database and a front end? eBay did it with Java, Google did it with MySQL and Linux, it can’t be THAT fucking hard now can it?

About Westminster eForum

The Westminster eForum aims to provide the premier environment where parliamentarians, senior policy advisors, regulators and other decision makers can discuss critical issues, and exchange ideas and information with leaders from industry, responsible interest groups, analysts, academics, journalists and others.

For more information visit the Westminster eForum website.

Sounds like a “Real Gas” that does - - - - Not.

I had a quick look at the website and found the item listed and a link to a page where you can book tickets! Ooooh I thought - that would be fun. However, I think Microsoft must be sponsoring it:

Tickets are £190 plus VAT (£223.25) and include:

• One delegate place including delegate materials and refreshments; and
• One PDF copy of the briefing document (including transcripts of the speeches, comments and questions, as well as extra articles submitted by delegates, which is distributed to all attendees approximately seven days after the seminar).

If it was even mildly affordable, I’d have booked it but 200 quid is ridiculous, for a couple of cups of coffee and a pdf of the transcript. Maybe the Government haven’t quite got the idea of Open Source yet.

If anyone knows anyone who does go, or a journalist or someone (Glyn Moody?) gets a concession, please give us a report after the event. I’d love to know how it went and what was discussed.

Update: Just had an confirmation from Glyn - he is on one of the panels so I’m sure there’ll be a good summary of the proceedings on his blog shortly afterwards.

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It’s official. Dell have just announced that are now supplying Ubuntu Linux on products into the UK, France and Germany!

Here’s the story as issued on Dell’s Linux blog. And here’s the announcement on Ubuntu’s site with links to Dell’s store pages in France, Germany and the UK. This isn’t a marketing pre-announcement either; according to Ubuntu’s site you can order the PCs from tomorrow (8th August 2007).

Fantastic news. Now, where did I put my credit card…

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The UK’s adoption of Open Source technology is lagging the US and the rest of Europe, according to a new survey published today by one of the leading new generation Open Source companies Alfresco.

The report called the Open Source Barometer should be an absolutely fasciniating tool as Alfresco plan to issue it every six months. This should give a great insight into trends which are otherwise hard to identify.

The survey was carried out between April and June this year (2007) and the information was garnered from approximately 10,000 new members joining the Alfresco community.

Among the highlights revealed by the Open Source Barometer Report are:

• Operating systems: Surprisingly, users evaluated Alfresco as much on Windows as they did on different flavors of Linux, but they strongly preferred to deploy production systems on Linux. Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops.
• Application servers: Users strongly preferred open source Tomcat or JBoss over the leading proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in production environments.
• Databases: Overwhelmingly, users test and deploy on MySQL with PostgreSQL a surprisingly close second for both evaluations and production deployment. Oracle was the most popular proprietary choice among the proprietary databases.
• Browsers and portals: To access the Alfresco ECM repository, users preferred browsers over portals. And Firefox was the most popular choice among different browsers. When users selected a portal preference, 80 percent chose Liferay or JBoss Portal.

Also, another very interesting result from this survey seems to suggest that Novell’s alliance with Microsoft has done them no favours whatsoever… In fact whilst use of Red Hat Linux has more than doubled, Novell’s Suse Linux has remained flat.

For me one of the key findings is that while the report shows Windows is a popular evaluation platform for open-source software, most enterprises use Linux when they go into production. That says it all really

A fascinating and excellent report from a very high quality company.

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