I think you are confusing patent protection with copyright protection. Software is still covered by copyright law, and the licensing agreements you choose to put on your software product is still what defines how people can use your software product, and what their access to that software is.

If I write a program and release it under a license that does not allow access to the source code, and does not allow users to distribute it further, that is still perfectly valid. But if someone decides that they want to write their own software that does the same thing, as long as they do not use anything from my product, they are well within their rights to do so.

UNIX platforms have been around for 50 years and the model they use has become essentially a standard. But until recently, UNIX was costly and the licensing was rather prohibitive. So in the 1980s, this man decided that he'd like to write his own version of a UNIX-like platform, and release it freely and openly for everyone to use. That platform was GNU and the man that started it was Richard Stallman. GNU is now one of the most widely used platforms on the market. Even some UNIX vendors use some of the GNU utilities themselves. It also became the system that sits on top of the Linux kernel.

But while GNU replicates a lot of the functionality from UNIX utilities, it uses absolutely none of the code from UNIX. It was written independently to ensure that it was freely available to everyone.

That hasn't stopped UNIX platforms from continuing to be sold, or continuing to be innovative. But it has pushed UNIX vendor to improve their platform significantly to differentiate themselves from the free platforms.

Software Patents would not have allowed GNU to exist at all. Software patents are, without exception, patenting ideas rather than implementation. This means that if one entity holds a patent for an idea, no other entity can come up with an alternate way of achieving the same/similar end result. This gives the patent holder an extended monopoly on an idea and stifles innovation in the software industry.

Software copyrights allow you to release and protect your software from blatant copying, while still allowing people to improve upon and innovate beyond your original idea. Software patents do not.

Completely pedantic of me, but relevant. In New Zealand a Bill is always a draft. There is no difference between a "draft bill" and a "bill." Once the Bill passes its 3rd and final reading in the House, it becomes an Act at which point it is law.

In regards to your comment about "Big Money," New Zealand is very small, but it doesn't really have the same problems with lobbyists that the US or other large nations do. In fact, the majority of lobbyists in New Zealand are Greenies and Climate Change doomsayers trying to save each and every tree, bug or animal. Well, them and media companies trying to get nasty copyright law changes made.

Fortunately, while NZ is based on the Westminster model of Parliament, but with Europe's MMP, its sufficiently different enough that its not quite so easy to game. And with only 120 Members of Parliament, lobbyists tend to have to convince an entire political party rather than just a few members with seats in the Parliament.

The whole reason Sun opened up Solaris in the first place was to try and get it a wider audience and more of a community around it. Linux was encroaching on Solaris as much as it was on any other Unix, if not faster.

Oracle will probably find that the only way they can sell Solaris is to bundle it as a database appliance OS or something stupid like that. Include the cost of Solaris with the cost of whatever software runs on top of it.

Solaris wasn't the healthiest until the OpenSolaris project gave it a significantly greater audience that allowed anyone to use it and get familiar with it. OpenSolaris sold Sun hardware and the proprietary Solaris. It is what kept Solaris from dead ending and stagnating.

Oracle will either realise this soon, or wait till its too late. This is essentially the first nail in the Solaris coffin after Sun managed to get it off life support.

Fare thee well, old friend.

Microsoft do exactly the same. Microsoft's contract with Facebook allows them more access to info than Google's does, so they can flood your bing.com results with even more social crud than Google does at the moment. Both have similar or equivalent access to Twitter's stream. Both have similar access to LinkedIn. Google has slightly better access to MySpace than Microsoft, but no where near AOL in that regard.

But in the end, everyone is doing it. Bing, Google, AOL, Ask.com and anyone else that has products in the search result market. And to my knowledge, Google and Microsoft both allow you to disable live/social results in your search queries quite easily (and I'm guessing the others must also.)

My, how quickly people forget. IE really won because Netscape 4 sucked. Sure, IE stagnated after that and it's hard to forgive MS for that, but let's not pretend that IE6 was an inferior browser that came to dominance simply through underhanded techniques despite superior offerings from competitors.

Hmmm... I think your memory is slightly misleading there. Netscape losing the Browser War had nothing to do with Netscape Navigator being inferior to IE6.

IE4 bundled with Windows 95C was the beginning of the end for Netscape. Up until that point, IE3 had been a separate entity and most people had no idea how to get it installed, let alone that it existed. Windows 95C included IE4 as a "bonus" CD on OEM distributions and if you wanted a lot of the new features tht made 95C "better" you needed to install it. If an OEM left it off, their version of Windows 95C was seen as being "inferior" when compared with those that did install it.

It was at this point that Microsoft started releasing builds if Memphis (later known Windows 98) that had IE built into the core of the OS by default. All the new features, such as active desktop, nice looking folder browsers, CHM Help and so on, relied on IE being left on the machine. By the time Windows 98 was released, the browser wars were essentially over. Why? Because people got IE4 for free when they bought a new computer that had Windows 95C on it, and when Windows 98 was available, the OEM didn't even need to make the effort to install it any more.

Netscape lost their browser war, not because their browser sucked (and I agree that it did) but because they could not compete with Microsoft's strategy of tying the browser to the operating system on desktop releases of the Windows platform. This is partly what started the whole anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft. People no longer felt compelled to pay for the shareware Netscape Navigator when they get Internet Explorer and Outlook Express for free with their new computer. Why spend the hour downloading Netscape at dialup speeds (which the majority of the internet user base still had back then) when something just as good was already installed.

The OEM contracts that Microsoft had with the majority of the OEM companies was also another factor, but irrelevant here. Maybe in another BeOS discussion it might prove pertinent.

IE6 wasn't released until 2001, a few months before Windows XP was released in August. It was available for all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. It was a free upgrade. But IE6 in no way had any effect on Netscape. It was all over by then for Netscape. The Mozilla engine had already been released as open source by then and the Phoenix browser project was already in its infancy.

This is a little surprising to me. Why would they go after the end user companies that produce computers rather than the much bigger fish that rely on this technology for their core bread and butter?

Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, F5 and so on all make a lot more sense to go after given that they're less likely to want to risk the chance of losing and more likely to settle the issue out of court.

Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.

Theres not a lot of hope for this suit even at the best of circumstances, but the companies its going after are potentially shielded by the fact they themselves are not likely to produce the chips that handle Ethernet. Merely include chips from someone else (such as Intel) in their products.

Or am I completely missing something?

No more likely to bite you than a bumble bee will bite you. Just don't piss them off and you can handle them without issue. Problem is they look pretty scary to most people. Huge grasshopper type bug with huge thorns over its legs and body that lives in dark places like caves and hollowed trees. Still, as long as you don't piss them off, you can pick them up without fear. Just hope no one before you came along and pissed it off before you got there. ;-)

Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.

NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.

The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.

http://www.newzealandwars.co.nz/ is a good place to find out about the wars that raged in the 19th century.

As a work around, Google has said they are going to release an iPhone Safari specific version to run as a webapp on the iPhone. The different Google Voice apps (across all platforms) are just a significantly improved and platform-native GUI to the service.