Oracle becomes SCO redux

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

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.

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