Patent lockdowns promote open source

Big Blue told the US Supreme Court that software patent lockdowns are actually the secret to open source's success, states The Register.

Open-source advocates talk of vague, badly-written US patents lurking in the system, waiting only to pounce on unsuspecting developers and condemn them to 1 001 years of litigation.

Open sourcers actively fear patent trolls, and many go through great pains to avoid getting jumped by them, but the recent nugget buried in IBM's amicus brief for the Bilski case takes a novel slant on the issue.

European open source vendors are celebrating a decision by the Hungarian government that allows them to compete for a share of public sector contracts, even though half the IT budget is still reserved for Microsoft, reports eWeek Europe.

International software firm Red Hat and Hungarian ULX Open Source Consulting & Distribution have emerged as winners in a tender process organised by the Hungarian state's Central Services Directorate, to achieve a place on the approved list of IT vendors for the Hungarian public sector.

The winning vendors will now be able to deliver open source solutions to public sector organisations, public and higher education institutions for the first time from central list of approved public sector IT vendors and they hope to use this victory to strengthen their case in other EU-area countries including Switzerland.

Facebook is releasing Web server technology as open source because it wants to make it easier for developers to create applications that let users post status updates in real-time - a feature popularised by Twitter, according to PC World.

The Web server framework that Facebook will offer as open source is called Tornado, was written in the Python language, and is designed for quickly processing thousands of simultaneous connections, the company says.

"Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain.” wrote David Recordon, Facebook's open programs manager, in the Facebook Developer blog.