To the surprise of nobody who was actually familiar with the underlying law and precedent, the judge in the Oracle-vs.-Google mega-lawsuit ruled today that Oracle’s claim of copyright protection on the Java APIs is contrary to law. This means Oracle’s claims against Google are toast. Their best case is now that they’ll get $300K in… Continue reading Oracle becomes SCO redux
Month: May 2012
Beginning of the end for the patent wars?
It’s all over the net today. As I repeatedly predicted, the patent claims in the Oracle-vs.-Java lawsuit over Android have completely fizzled. Oracle’s only shred of hope at this point is that Judge Alsup will rule that APIs can be copyrighted, and given the extent of cluefulness Alsup has displayed (he mentioned in court having… Continue reading Beginning of the end for the patent wars?
giflib 4.2.0 released
First giflib release since I reassumed the lead. Short version: lots of useless old cruft thrown out, everything Coverity-scanned, one minor resource leak found and fixed.
Announcing coverity-submit
My regular readers will know that (a) I’ve recently been pounding bugs out of GPSD with Coverity, and (b) I hate doing stupid clicky-dances on websites when I think I ought to be able to shove them a programmatically-generated job card that tells them what to do. So, here’s a side-effect of my recent work… Continue reading Announcing coverity-submit
Engineering zero-defect software
I’ve been pounding on GPSD with the Coverity static analyzer’s self-build procedure for several days. It is my great pleasure to report that we have just reached zero defect reports in 72.8KLOC. Coverity says this code is clean. And because I think this should be an example unto others, I shall explain how I think… Continue reading Engineering zero-defect software
The “Plain Jane” timing GPS is real
(EDIT, 2019: You can buy one of these here.) The GPS with my magic modification that makes it into a 1ms-accurate time source over USB arrived here last week. And…wow. It works. Not only is it delivering 1PPS where I can see it, it’s the best GPS I’ve ever handled on a couple other axes… Continue reading The “Plain Jane” timing GPS is real
Some figures that make me happy.
I got emailed summaries from a Coverity scan of the repo head version of GPSD today.
Falling through the cracks: why GPSD sometimes bogarts non-GPS devices
In a recent Google+ comment, H. Peter Anvin grumped about GPSD using “braindead heuristics” to determine which USB devices it should sniff as possible GPses when it gets a hotplug notification saying that one has connected. I was going to reply in a comment there, but the explanation ran too long for that. Short version:… Continue reading Falling through the cracks: why GPSD sometimes bogarts non-GPS devices