Microsoft is claiming that open source software violates 235 patents that it holds. The article claims that Microsoft is seeking royalties from end users of open source software, but I suspect that what Microsoft really wants is to discourage people from adopting open source software entirely. I don’t think that will work.

Everybody knows that SCO has been a stalking horse for Microsoft in its lawsuit against IBM, and that case hasn’t had any appreciable effect on the market for Linux or other open source tools. Now Microsoft is taking the direct approach to shaking down users of open source software.

The patent article is worth reading, just to catch up on the legal machinations both Microsoft and the Free Software Foundation have employed to try to gain an advantage in this dispute.

The blogger behind Pro Football Reference on the possible downsides of the NFL expanding its regular season schedule to 17 games, with every team playing one game overseas:

Now, apart from the international aspect of it, there is the issue of the 17th regular season game itself. Many fans seem to object to this, and I’m not sure I see why. The cost/benefit analysis must start with the observation that regular season NFL football is superior to preseason NFL football. Therefore, replacing one game of the latter with one of the former must be good unless there is some particular reason to think otherwise. What might that reason (or reasons) be?

Skipping down to reason four:

My database must now have three categories (home/road/neutral) instead of just two, and that’s going to cause me to have to do a lot of programming, and put a disclaimer into every single article I write? Now that I can see.

Will the British army be responsible for covering the inevitable eventual withdrawal of US troops? One retired British officer thinks so:

“We’ll be the last men out”, he said. “We hold the country that the Americans will have to pull out through; and it will be our job to cover their retreat.”

As convinced I am that it’s time for the US (and British) occupation of Iraq to end, the actual mechanics of a withdrawal are awful to contemplate.

Yesterday, Dick Cheney said, “They see Iraq as the center of a new caliphate, from which they can stir extremism and violence throughout the region, and eventually carry out devastating attacks against the United States and others.” They, of course, being al Qaeda. Isn’t it high past the time that use the word “caliphate” is self-discrediting?

Al Qaeda isn’t a threat to America. It is a threat to Americans, particularly to Americans who we’ve sent to occupy Iraq. Because al Qaeda is obviously insufficient to give us the clash of civilizations that Cheney and his ideological fellow travelers so desperately crave, they have to market the “new caliphate” to justify their ongoing plans. Al Qaeda has never captured a bit of territory, or governed anything. The closest they’ve come is affiliating with groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and now separatist tribesmen in Pakistan who can make use of their money, guns, and supply of people willing to blow themselves up for the cause. Yet there are those who would have us believe that they are on the verge of establishing some kind of pan-Middle Eastern empire that could challenge the United States for supremacy on the global stage.

And they justify these insane assertions by quoting Osama bin Laden and others. Bin Laden is essentially a cult leader trying to recruit adherents to a perverse and lost cause. Like most cult leaders, he appeals to the misguided and fanatical by promising a piece of some deity’s new kingdom on earth. Our vice president professes to buy into bin Laden’s fantasies. The rest of us need not do the same.

If you don’t like to fly, you’ll probably want to skip this video of an evacuation test for the Airbus A380, where 873 people try to leave the plane as quickly as possible in total darkness.

Courtesy of Lawrence Wilkerson, former State Department official from the Bush administration:

There is a building body of evidence that this leadership team — principally Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, but the president, who ultimately bears responsibility, too — have done things that would make a reasonable separate and equal body of government consider impeachment. . . .

I would start my investigation into the detainee abuse issue, which constitutes, I think, a defilement of everything America stands for, and has done irreparable damage to our reputation, and thus to our power around the world. If that doesn’t rate a ‘high crime’ definition, I don’t know what does.

Mike Shaver comments on the recent spate of tool announcements that seek to lure developers to abandon open Web technologies in favor of proprietary platforms. As he notes, these platforms are about selling tools. He dismisses that with a wave:

I don’t think you should need to buy, or even use-for-free, any given tool to build the web, and by using and helping to drive open web technologies Mozilla lets people choose the tools they want to use.

Couldn’t agree more. And more importantly, here’s the bottom line:

The web can eat toolchain bait like this for breakfast.

These latest announcements are a continuation of the great history of vendors trying to get people to abandon HTML in favor of the proprietary flavor of the month. The most successful attempt has been Flash, but it hasn’t made significant inroads against HTML. Most Web sites built using Flash are derided as useless and idiotic. Java Applets, ActiveX controls, and all other attempts along those lines have been failures. The title of this post refers to one of the original threats to the Web — Microsoft Blackbird. Back in 1995, everybody was talking about it as a richer, more powerful platform to replace HTML. (Check out this Byte article for a breathless preview that contrasts it with Java.)

Needless to say, I’m still betting on the web. I imagine the latest generation of proprietary web-based platforms will wither on the vine just like their ancestors.

If there’s one blog post you should read about the Paul Wolfowitz scandal at the World Bank, it’s this one from Brad DeLong. I thought I had been following the scandal closely and I still learned four or five things from it. I don’t think it’s unfair to Wolfowitz or to his critics. The short answer: resignation is the proper course for Wolfowitz.

We hear a lot of bad news from Iraq, but the refugee crisis actually seems underreported. Fred Clark posts on the latest count of displaced Iraqis, along with the news that well-known Iraqi blogger Riverbend and her family have decided to leave Iraq. Their destination remains unknown. They’re going to try to head to Syria or Jordan en route to somewhere that isn’t already full of Iraqi refugees. America will probably not be her ultimate destination, as the US has issued only 466 visas to Iraqis to Iraqis since the invasion.

Eric Burke illustrates why JavaFX doesn’t look like it will successfully compete with Microsoft’s Silverlight or Adoble Flash (and Flex). Good thing Java works well on the server, because it seems like Sun is as hamstrung as ever when it comes to interesting client software.