joabj writes "Last week, Oracle announced that it is decommissioning the Sun.com site, which it acquired as part of the $7 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems. So what will Oracle do with the domain name, which is the 12th oldest .com site on the Internet? Domain brokers speculate Oracle could sell it for $1 million or more, if it chose to do so."

jfruhlinger writes "Yesterday, news broke that Android might have a Linux copyright problem, which would be big trouble for Google, already locked in an IP struggle with Oracle over the mobile platform. Blogger Brian Proffitt looks deeper into the alleged violations. He notes that, while it's possible that Google's on shaky ground, the motivations behind the news release are murky: the lawyer who outlined the violation is an ex-Microsoft hand, and the news was widely propagated by gadfly Florian Mueller, who's tangled with Google over patent issues in the past. Moreover, the alleged violations are in header files, and it's not clear that those are copyrightable; if they are, no actual copyright holders have come forward to complain."

An anonymous reader writes "Ars is reporting that the CCIA, a trade group representing companies like AMD, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, is calling the copyright wiretaps requested by the IP Czar 'Hollywood's PATRIOT Act.' For those who don't remember, IP Czar Victoria Espinel recently wrote a report calling for more charges of felony copyright infringement under the NET Act, as well as felony charges for illegal web streaming, authorization for the use of wiretaps in going after copyright infringement cases, and several other measures. In short, this means that the copyright cops are coming online."

snydeq writes "MySQL fork Drizzle has been released for general availability, giving companies a viable alternative to Oracle-owned MySQL, InfoWorld reports. 'Organizations that have been seeking a less-expensive alternative to Oracle's brand of MySQL — or a variant devoid of feature bloat — now have an option that Drizzle's creators deem ready to package in Linux distributions.'"

mvar writes to point out a report from h-online about the Red Hat kernel source controversy. From the article: "Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat's source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Although targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for distributions such as CentOS."

linuxwrangler writes "It's used in Java. It's used in nearly every flavor of UNIX/Linux. In PostgreSQL, Oracle and other databases. Several RFCs refer to it. But where does the timezone database come from? I never gave it much thought but would have assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not. Since the inception of the database Arthur David Olson has maintained the database, coordinated the mailing list and volunteers and provided a release platform and now he is retiring. IANA is developing a transition strategy. Jon Udell has an interesting literary appreciation of the timezone database."

jfruhlinger writes "Despite the fact that Oracle is suing Google over claims that Android violates Java IP, Android is roaring ahead in the marketplace. Still, some groups are wondering if they can implement Android without incurring Oracle's current or future wrath by avoiding the Dalvik VM. A project called IcedRobot aims to create a GNU-compatible version of Android, and rumors abound that RIM is planning on putting an OpenJDK-version of Android on its upcoming PlayBook tablets."

darthcamaro writes "Oracle trashed a lot of former Sun technologies — not the least of which is Sun's open source identity platform which included OpenSSO and OpenDS. Now open source startup ForgeRock has taken those castoffs and created a business that has been running successfully for year. 'My personal goal here is to prove that you can have an open source business that is profitable,' said Simon Phipps, former chief open source officer at Sun and now chief strategy officer at ForgeRock. 'Having principles and having profit are not mutually exclusive.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Document Foundation, the group responsible for forking the OpenOffice.org project away from Oracle's control and into the shiny new LibreOffice suite, has announced a drive to raise €50,000 to set up as a legal entity. The Foundation, formed by numerous OpenOffice.org community members tired of the overbearing hand of Oracle preventing them from progressing the development of the popular open source productivity suite, has passed several recent milestones. It's released a full feature-complete version of its LibreOffice productivity suite, and announced deals with companies including Canonical to have LibreOffice replace OpenOffice.org as the default productivity suite in several Linux distributions."

An anonymous reader writes "Google leaves no stone unturned in its defense against Oracle's patent and copyright infringement allegations. eWEEK reports on the latest development: Google has asked the USPTO to reexamine four of the seven patents asserted by Oracle. Patent watcher and skeptic Florian Mueller believes 'the world would be a better place without those virtual machine patents,' which he considers excessively broad and not really technical inventions. He also reports on a Google letter to the court, asking for permission to file a motion to throw out Oracle's copyright infringement allegations as soon as possible, without further discovery."

CWmike writes "About eight out of every 10 Web browsers run by consumers are vulnerable to attack by exploits of already-patched bugs, a security expert said Thursday. The poor state of browser patching stunned Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, which presented data from the company's free BrowserCheck service Wednesday at RSA. 'I really thought it would be lower,' Kandek said. BrowserCheck scans Windows, Mac and Linux machines for vulnerable browsers, as well as up to 18 browser plug-ins, from Adobe's Flash to Windows Media Player. When browsers and plug-ins are tabulated together, between 90% and 65% of all consumer systems scanned with BrowserCheck since June 2010 reported at least one out-of-date component. In January 2011, about 80% of the machines were vulnerable. The most likely plug-in to require a patch: same as last year, Oracle's Java."

GMGruman writes "Oracle's imposition of fees for some OpenOffice capabilities caused some of the venerable open source office suite's creators to head out on their own and create LibreOffice as a truly free OSS tool. InfoWorld's Neil McAllister reviews the two OSS productivity tools side by side to figure out where they differ, and whether you can jettison Oracle's OpenOffice safely for the fully free LibreOffice."

angry tapir writes "Google is developing a set of extensions for Java that should aid in better securing Java programs against buffer overflow attacks. Google has announced that it open sourced a project that its engineers were working on to add a new functionality into Java called Contracts, or Design-By-Contract. 'Contracts exist to check for programmer error, not for user error or environment failures. Any difference between execution with and without runtime contract checking (apart from performance) is by definition a bug. Contracts must never have side effects.'"

GMGruman writes "Oracle has steadily provoked the open source community since its acquisition of Sun, raising the question of whether the move will simply destroy Sun. But as Paul Krill observes, Oracle has been steadfast in upgrading Sun-derived technologies — and making them profitable, which should mean they will stick around a long time."

An anonymous reader writes "Here we go again: Just like the recently-reported PHP Floating Point Bug causes servers to go into infinite loops when parsing certain double-precision floating-point numbers, Sun/Oracle's JVM does it, too. It gets better: you can lock up a thread on most servers just by sending a particular header value. Sun/Oracle has known about the bug for something like 10 years, but it's still not fixed. Java Servlet containers are patching to avoid the problem, but application code will still be vulnerable to user input."

An anonymous reader writes "Ruby/RoR in NetBeans made headlines three years ago, but after Sun was acquired by Oracle there where fears that support for dynamic languages would suffer, as this IDE would be downsized. This has become a reality, since as of version 7, NetBeans will no longer support Ruby."

mikejuk writes "Only four months after the formation of the Document Foundation by leading members of the OpenOffice.org community, it has launched LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of its alternative Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Since the fork was announced at the end of September the number of developers 'hacking' LibreOffice has gone from fewer than twenty to well over one hundred, allowing the Document Foundation to make its first release ahead of schedule The split of a large open source office suite comes at a time when it isn't even clear if there is a long term future for office suites at all. What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

storagedude writes "Although it may have gone unnoticed by most IT industry watchers, this week's announcement from Microsoft and HP that the two have combined on integrated appliances for corporate business intelligence and email could be the start of a closer relationship between the two IT giants as they seek to counteract the growing hardware and software dominance of IBM and Oracle. From the article: 'Combine Microsoft and HP — call it MicroHP — and what do you have? A full Windows-plus-Linux scale-out hardware and software lineup, with an exceptionally strong position both in SaaS/public cloud and data centers, and a huge presence on the business desktop. This would allow such a combined entity to produce well-tuned appliances for such hot areas as BI/analytics — as Microsoft and HP have just done.'"

RedK writes "In a follow up to yesterday's news about Google apparently relicensing confidential Oracle code found in Java under the ASL, it seems that the blogger who initially reported the issue was plain wrong, as the files he indicated were in breach of Oracle's copyright do not actually ship with Android. Google has also deleted many of these files, which were mostly used as unit tests."

An anonymous reader writes "Florian Mueller claims to have produced new evidence that he believes supports Oracle's case against Google on the copyright side of the lawsuit. Oracle originally presented one example to the court, and that file was found to have been part of older Android distributions, with an Apache license header. Mueller has just published six more files of that kind and believes the Apache Software Foundation will disown those just like the first one because those were never part of the Apache Harmony code base. Furthermore, various source files from the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit were found in the Android codebase, containing a total of 38 copyright notices that mark them as proprietary and confidential, but Google apparently published their source code regardless."