“AppleInsider is reporting that an Illinois-based company and its Nevada partner have filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging that Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ infringes an interface patent relating to the OS’s nearly universal use of tabs. The suit was filed in the patent troll’s and forum shopper’s favorite venue: Marshall, TX. The patent in question is 5072412, which was originally issued to Xerox in 1987, but is now owned or licensed to IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation. ‘Category dividers triggered by Spotlight searches, as well as page tabs in the Safari web browser, bear the closest similarity to the now 20-year-old description’ of the patent, according to the article. IP Innovation is requesting damages in excess of $20 million and an injunction against future sales and distribution of Mac OS X 10.4. Software patent reform can’t come soon enough!”

The patent filing dates back from 1987 and if you take a look at it, clearly describes something which isn’t exactly considered amazingly innovative nowadays. I’m struggling to think of a single graphical application that doesn’t make use of some form of multiple ‘workspaces’ as they are referred to in the filing. IP Innovation simply bought the intellectual property rights from Xerox, who pretty much invented most of the concepts of the graphical user interface as we know it today.

AppleInsider has a nice description of exactly where the ‘infringement’ is happening:

The disputed section refers to the technique of creating a window on a computer’s screen with controls that switch between views of multiple associated display objects within the window, erasing one view as the user selects another while still giving a spatial frame of reference and the same general interface during the switch.

The point is, software patents desperately need reforming. The amount of time they are valid for is far longer than necessary. Within the fast-changing world of technology, this type of patent needs to have a much shorter validity period.

The whole point of the patenting system was to help promote innovation by offering a limited monopoly on novel ideas for a reasonable amount of time. Instead, all we’ve got is patent hoarding companies like ‘IP Innovation’ that make all their money by acquiring patents and then suing and/or settling disputes.

Which, in my eyes, is abuse of the system.

Not only that, but instead of promoting innovation, abuse like this stifles it, because it means people aren’t free to use even the most basic and obvious concepts and ideas in their programs without risking litigation.

So this is my official recommendation – we either need to seriously reform the whole patent scheme with regards to technology, or scrap software patents entirely. And we need to do it soon.

IMified, an instant messenging bot which allows you to easily control various different third party web services through their APIs (see explainer post) has risen to popularity over the past couple of weeks.

It’s easy to see why – with IMified you can currently post to WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type and Typepad blog, keep yourself organised with Remember the Milk, Google or 30boxes calendar and Backpack and collaborate with Basecamp. That’s on top of their own Todo, Reminder and Notes apps, all of which work very nicely.

The three services I’m making use of are IMified’s own Reminders and Todo list functions, as well as using it to post to my personal blog. At first I was a little sceptical as to whether it was a gimmick or a genuinely useful product, but I have actually found it the latter.

IMified represents one of the good things about Web 2.0 – open architecture. It would be brilliant if this could be expanded so that over my IM I can have notifications of new email, updates on selected feeds and maybe even TV listings.

I’m particularly keen to see IMified and Twitter integration. A post about Twitter, a ‘nano blogging’ service which allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates from your friends via IM, text message and web interface, is coming soon on Gizbuzz. Despite the fact that Twitter already uses IM, it would be nice to be able to use it from one bot which does everything.

Over time I would hope that more and more services would be added. At the moment, services must be added by the IMified team, and so perhaps they should look at developing an IMified API that would allow third party developers to integrate their systems into IMified without any help from IMified.

IMified is a service I’m really excited about, and I think it could do extremely well in time. On a sidenote, as far as I can tell, IMified is a side project for its developers and unfunded. I think it’s an excellent example of how far a good idea can come without needing to enter the private equity game.

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft are pushing out a new update via Windows Update to their controversial anti-piracy software, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA).

WGA is a tool which runs on the user’s system and verifies whether Microsoft thinks the user is running and genuine, or pirated version of Windows. If it finds you’re not running what it thinks to be an illegally acquired version of Windows, it nags you via the system tray to do something about it (i.e. buy a licence). You also can’t install certain applications and updates without having successfully validated your Windows installation.

It sounds simple enough, but WGA has come under fire for privacy issues (it phones home to perform the validation) and because it kept producing a lot of false positives.

This update is supposed to reduce the number of false positives and apparently there’s a new category called ‘Not Sure’, which, as the name suggests, is the category you get put in if Microsoft have doubts about your copy’s authenticity.

While Microsoft has not responded to requests for comment, it’s quite obvious what is going on here: Microsoft has added “not sure” as a way of cutting down on the number of false positives associated with WGA. As many as one in five PCs were failing WGA checks, but this new setting should both reduce this and give Microsoft the chance to investigate further the kinds of things that are landing folks in the “not sure” category.

I think part of the problem here is that a lot of OEM copies of Windows, that is, copies bundled with and usually pre-installed on PCs, use one activation code for each batch of computers (or even a whole model). That meant that if that one key got leaked, many users would find themselves being told about their illegal copies.

Clearly, piracy is something that Microsoft have to address, but the way they are going about it in recent times has not made them many friends. This move looks to be them toning down the severity of WGA.

One thing strikes me though – how easy it would be for malware to emulate WGA’s notifications and perhaps extort sums of cash from unsuspecting users to ‘fix’ the problem. Or maybe that’s just me.

Have you been falsely marked as a pirate by WGA? What are Gizbuzz readers’ thoughts on the issue? Let us know in comments.

CES is upon us, and Microsoft have apparently been busy and Bill Gates himself demonstrated a new product – Windows Home Server.

The idea behind Home Server is to provide a central location to allow sharing between all the Windows machines in a household and also to provide bridging functionality to other Microsoft products (like the Xbox 360 and the Zune), so that all of your Microsoft-equipped devices in the house can talk to each other.

It also has additional features such as backup capabilities and there is likely to be room for Microsoft to add new features to tightly integrate with Windows Vista (which, in case you’ve forgotten has a public launch on the 30th of January).

But Microsoft won’t be selling the Windows Home Server software – they’re going about it slightly differently. Hardware vendors are invited to build machines based on Microsoft’s reference design for Home Server, and then they can resell Home Server as OEM with their machines. It’s unlikely that the Home Server OS, a cut-down version of Windows Server 2003, will be sold separately – at least not for a while.

The Home Server can be administered via a web-based interface and a ‘Windows Home Server Console’ client application for Windows.

Leaving aside my personal opinions on Microsoft pushing towards domination in yet more spaces, this is an innovative idea and will provide features that maybe even non-geeky households might consider. I think now it’s up to Microsoft to ensure the success of this product by getting third-party software and hardware vendors warmed up to the idea, so they can make their products interoperate and share seamlessly with the presence of a Home Server. If you could bring home any new gadget and instantly connect to it by Wifi from all the computers in your house, then Home Server will become a very attractive package for anyone with a home network and sufficient machines to warrant one.

Among the features are neat charts displaying how many items you read on a daily basis, monthly basis, or weekly basis. In addition, there is a chart showing how many items from specific blogs you have read (determining the most read blog in your feed readers) as well as a chart describing subscription trends.

This is a great way of unlocking all the great information that’s available in Google’s vast archive of data. Of course, it begs the question as to whether we’re secure with Google knowing this much about us. The issue has been debated mercilessly, and I’m one who tends to give my undying support to Google (they do host my email, calendar, RSS feeds, and provide my search), however as they slowly offer more ways for users to see their data I’m sure they’ll also need to ensure that this data is as secure as ever.

Interestingly, according to the blog post they got help from the people behind MeasureMap to make Trends. Google acquired the blog analytics service from Adaptive Path last year, and since then it MeasureMap has been closed (apparently to be improved and then re-opened, though my guess is that it will be rolled into the more used Google Analytics, a.k.a. Urchin). Adaptive Path are well known for their ability to design nice web user interfaces (and coincidentally are the folks who coined the term AJAX, really starting Web 2.0), and whilst the help of their former employees have ensured that Reader Trends works well and looks good, I would really like to have a look round MeasureMap.

It’s a nice feature – I didn’t know before, for example, that over the past month I have read 1,250 items from my 27 subscriptions, or that Scoble posted, on average, 6 items per day. By no means will this prove a killer feature for Reader, but it is something that other feed readers don’t have. To differentiate itself, a feed reader must have innovative features to add to the central functionality which it shares with all of the competition. This is such an innovative feature.

A screenshot of the new trends interface is after the jump.

The features include easier replying, new message notification, chatting online, forward-to-all, and a native Mobile Gmail. Several of these features are features that are “why didn’t I think of that” type features. They’re all deceptively simple, yet effective and incredibly useful additions to Gmail. Hopefully other webmail providers will follow suit.

After the jump: summaries and screenshots of the new features.

Reply on Top
In the past, when you had long conversations and needed to reply, you had to scroll endlessly until you reached the bottom and could press the reply button.

Fortunately – our days of scrolling are done thanks to “Reply on top”. Every message in a conversation now has a Reply button, with a small drop-down icon next to it allowing you to easily access other features such as “Reply to all”, Forward, Print, and others (see screenshot).

New Message Notification
I was lead to notice Reply on top because of this future. As part of Oratos Media, Huw, Jacob, Peter, and I maintain a mailing list for easy communication. Often someone sends a reply to a conversation, while someone else is just typing their own reply, invalidating it! Then we’ll have to add another reply, and clutter up the list even more.

It’s a bit frustrating sometimes, but Gmail has fixed this problem. If, while you’re viewing or typing message, someone adds a new reply, you’re notified, and you’re offered the option to update the conversation with the new message. If you’re typing a reply, you won’t lose your reply (I tried). This is a wonderfully simple yet brilliant feature that shows why Gmail stays on top in terms of features.

Forward All
Forward your entire conversation instead of just the most recent message.

Chat offline
Traditionally, chat worked simply, when people were online, you typed your message to them and they typed back – in real time. Google has thrown this to the wind with Chat offline. As they say, “if you’re chatting with a friend who goes offline, your friend will be able to see whatever you were typing the next time he or she goes online.”

This doesn’t just apply to the ‘newly offline’ though, any offline chatter, no matter how long, will receive a message a next sign-on. This can be useful if you don’t want to launch Gmail but have Gtalk open – just pop open a chat window and send your message.

Gmail for your Mobile
Gmail is now available as a native mobile application, instead of a pared-down web interface. It’s been blogged into submission so I don’t have much more to add.

OSNews is reporting that Microsoft have apparently finished finalising the code for Office 2007 and are now at the stage of release to manufacturing (RTM), where the code gets shipped out to be pressed onto nice, new, shiny discs.

Unlike Windows Vista, the development cycle of Office 2007 has been fairly away from the public eye, considering how important a release it will be for Microsoft, and how popular a software product Microsoft Office is.

Office 2007 is apparently going to be released to businesses on the 30th of November, that’s the same date that Vista will be available.

Now, a lot has changed in Office 2007 since we last looked at it here on Gizbuzz, and unfortunately we can’t get our hands on the RTM, but Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows has screenshots of the RTM build that you can take a look at.

As yet, Windows Vista has not been RTM’ed, so presumably they are still fixing the final reported bugs and optimising everything before they ship.

As part of the deal, all future litigation against Novell will be halted, including patent infringement disputes. Microsoft will begin offering sales support and technical support for Novell SuSE Linux, an open source operating system available in several versions, including OpenSuSE (community developed) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (Novell developed, includes proprietary applications).

The deal is not final, and may be changed at any time. This appears, however, to dent the plans that business software giant Oracle has had to begin support for Novell competitor Red Hat. Both Oracle and Red Hat stock was down at the time of this writing.

A press conference is slated for 5:00pm EST (now) and more details may be announced. As always, GizBuzz will keep you updated.

————–

The press conference has begun. Updates follow:

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft:

• Microsoft & Novell are working to collaborate and bridge the gap on the differences with Open Source and the Closed Source models.
• Working on “raising the bar” with interoperability, in areas like moving documents cross-platform, virtualization, distributed systems management, etc.
• Microsoft is putting their marketing behind SuSE – Ballmer says that Microsoft wants Linux users to choose Novell!
• Both companies will continue to compete! “I’m gonna say ‘Windows, Windows, Windows!’”

Ron Hovsepian, CEO of Novell:

• Came down to the customer and what we needed to do for the customer. The drive of the new relationship.
• “This allows our customers to focus on accelerating growth…”
• Very impressed with Microsoft’s integrity and deep commitment in creating this relationship for the customers.
• Aligning sales teams, engineers, marketing, etc. so that the issue is heard.
• Microsoft is distributing approx. 70,000 units of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, as always – for the customer

Dr. Jeff Jaffe:

• Discussing tech collaboration and (most important) how this will strengthen Open Source
• Interoperability between Windows and Linux – key (“Today takes it to a new level”)
• Microsoft will not assert patent infringement claims against individual Open Source developers
• Collaborating on FOSS related projects like management, documents, etc. Looking forward to collaborating with Microsoft’s engineers.
• Working on a joint solution for virtualization – “Para-Virtualization”, the heart of their marketing and sales
• Web services management, customer focused, and better eDdirectory and Active Directory interoperability
• Developing software to convert OASIS and MS Office documents
• Mixed source

Brad Smith, Microsoft Lawyer:

• Complex patent issues, had to address proprietary issues, and how to bridge proprietary and OSS issues
• Tried to maintain creative ways to building an Intellectual Property “bridge”, did so successfully; Fixing the Intellectual Property rights so Novell customer’s don’t have to
• There were times where they wondered “how?!” Had to maintain the ‘patent portfolios’ of both companies
• Needed to respect both business models in a way that was compatible with all other license agreements
• Any subscriptions for SLED will get a Microsoft Patent Covenant
• Patents are continually referenced! Novell is “Only company to provide a Covenant for patents from Microsoft”
• Economic commitment, with royalties to Novell on Open Source software
• “We’re not getting into the Linux code distribution business.”
• Won’t assert patents against individual, non-commercial Open Source developers

A general comment – the WordPerfect patent infringement dispute is still ongoing. As one person said, they were able to get “99″ of the patent issues covered but not this one. Undoubtedly though, this is an issue that will be a bit easier to work through thanks to this new partnership. WordPerfect is no longer Novell owned, but they still use portions of the codebase for Novell Groupwise.

The original post made some quite strong claims that Vista would “cost between $3,250 and $5,000″ for each user that upgraded. These numbers do seem quite abnormally high and the Ars Technica article called the ITworld post “so deeply flawed and sensationalistic that I’m reticent to even address it”.

What this throws up is that while the figures in the ITworld article are quite high, I thought it was still worth pointing out that the Vista upgrade will cost businesses quite a lot. But it will probably take quite a while for businesses to actually make the move.

Businesses don’t like upgrading, because, as I mentioned, it’s expensive, it’s a long process and they don’t like upgrading to new software before it’s been fully tested. Certainly over here in the UK, most businesses and organisations have only quite recently made the move to Windows XP.

My point here is that it’s going to be very difficult to make accurate estimates about the cost of moving, because by the time most businesses consider doing it, hardware will likely have been replaced and we can’t really guess about the costs yet.

We won’t really know the impact of Vista in the enterprise sector for a few years yet, so there’s not much point in guessing at it.

In this review, I’m going to take a brief look at SLED and what it brings to the table, what it does for Linux and the Linux desktop and how viable it is as a desktop solution within a business environment.

Installation

The installation procedure is very similar to openSUSE’s; it uses the same installer. For the benefit of people who haven’t installed openSUSE, it basically involves inserting the disc, choosing Installation and then being taken directly to a graphical installer.

The installer then asks you the normal questions – licence agreement, where to install and what to install, before getting on with installation itself. One reboot later, you are asked to set up users and passwords etc., before you are allowed to login for the first time.

First Boot

After logging in, you are greeted with a desktop with a few icons on the top left (Home folder – My Documents equivalent, floppy drive, DVD/CD drive, Recycle Bin equivalent and a link to a Quick Start thing).

SLED10 Blank Desktop Hosted on Zooomr

If you’ve used Linux before, you might be wondering exactly what the ‘Computer’ button at the bottom left does. SLED10 uses the Gnome desktop, and usually Gnome gives you three menus at the top of the screen (Applications, Places and System).

Novell have changed the standard layout and made the Computer menu so it is roughly the equivalent of Windows’ Start button. Under the Computer menu is a list of items, which by default is set to show ‘Favourite Applications’, but can be set to show recent items and programs.

SLED10 Computer Menu Hosted on Zooomr

This is clearly made to resemble the look and functionality of Windows XP’s Start button, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing in this case. In fact, a lot of the Linux community were very unhappy with Novell’s ‘meddlings’ with the Gnome menu, with some developers criticising Novell for not involving the Gnome team with the modifications they were going to make.

Desktop Search

The Search box on the Computer menu is a very good addition to SLED10 and the integration of desktop search within the operating system is formidable in SLED10 (but more on that later). My only complaint about the Search box in the Computer menu is that it’s not clear how to actually perform your search. There’s no Search button and you have to press Enter (it’s not very clear what you have to do).

In my opinion, ‘live search’ would be put to very good use here. When the user typed text into the search box, the Favourite Applications area could switch to Search Results, and update the results as you type. The More Applications button could then update to say ‘More Results’, which would take you to a search window.

SLED10 Search Results Hosted on Zooomr

The Search results window is well laid-out and displays the results according to the category (document, website etc.) I can’t comment on how relevant the results are, as I haven’t had enough time to load a lot of data on my SLED10 test system, but the Search capabilities use Beagle Search, the standard Linux desktop search tool.

SLED10 File Browser Search Hosted on Zooomr

Search is also integrated into Gnome’s file browser. Clicking on the Search button toggles a text box where you type (but unfortunately still have to guess to press Enter) to perform a search.

The search functionality isn’t quite as slick as that in Windows Vista, namely due to the fact that the searching isn’t done ‘live’, so you have to press Enter to actually run the query, rather than the query updating as you type. Still, the desktop search integration is a very important selling point for SLED10.

Xgl – Desktop Effects

SLED10 also comes pre-loaded with Xgl and Compiz, the tools on Linux which bring 3D effects (such as the cube) to the desktop. Now SLED10 doesn’t automatically enable them for you, and for a long time it’s been quite difficult to set up and use Xgl and Compiz because you have to download and install proprietary video drivers.

SLED10 Desktop Effects control window Hosted on Zooomr

SLED10 includes a tool which automatically downloads, installs and configures the correct drivers to enable the new effects. I really would have liked to test this out, but unfortunately, the machine I was testing SLED10 on doesn’t have the graphical capability to run the effects (and I’m not willing to install it on my main machine just yet).

While I’m not sure Xgl and Compiz are important for corporate users, it’s nice to have the features there and if any home users decide to make a purchase of SLED, desktop effects might be important (especially when Vista has come out).

Business Interoperability

SLED10, is funnily enough, aimed at the enterprise market. If SLED10 is going to survive in a corporate setting, it will have to interoperate with systems already in place. By far, the most common technology used to administer and deploy desktop systems (and manage things like authentication) is Microsoft’s Active Directory technology.

In a recent episode of Novell Open Audio (the Novell user’s podcast), host Ted Haeger discussed SLED’s Active Directory integration and apparently it is possible to login via Active Directory, be managed within Active Directory and more. Unfortunately, again I don’t have the ability to test this functionality myself, but apparently the AD integration is getting better all the time and using SLED10 within a ‘Windows shop’ is, according to Novell, a lot more of a oractical solution than it used to be.

It’s a question of infrastructure and as Linux slowly gains the ability to seamlessly work with existing Windows infrastructure, then will we have the chance to see more businesses adopting desktop Linux.

Conclusion

Overall, SLED 10 is very promising in my eyes. Novell have put a lot of work into toaking the open source components, integrating them together and adding enough spit and polish that SLED10 really feels like one operating system, one product, rather than feeling like a lot of discrete pieces of software shoved together into a system.

I like the new UI enhancements and I think they give SLED a more familiar look and feel to Windows users, without looking like a complete carbon copy of the Windows environment.

The only concern I have is that although Novell are sponsoring some really good work into Windows Active Directory integration, there are bits of AD functionality that haven’t been implemented, and this might hold off businesses from giving desktop Linux a try.

Regrettably, I’m going to have to say it’s unlikely we’ll see even a moderate take-up of SLED10 in the enterprise desktop space. SLED10 isn’t a bad product by any standards, and as a Linux desktop OS it is slick, polished and very, very good. Unfortunately, I can’t see it breaking through the Windows barrier in a big way yet. Novell have done some awesome work on getting the integration with a Windows infrastructure working, and with a bit more work on that, SLED11 could well be killer.

[See the whole SLED10 screenshot pool here]