Guest blogger Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on intellectual property, cyberlaw, and information privacy, and she has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes. A version of this material is scheduled to appear in the November 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM.

Two-thirds of the approximately 700 software entrepreneurs who participated in the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey report that they neither have nor are seeking patents for innovations embodied in their products and services. These entrepreneurs rate patents as the least important mechanism among seven options for attaining competitive advantage in the marketplace. Even software startups that hold patents regard …

In response to the IEEE's report on Patent Power, which lists the top companies ranked by number of patents, Ari Shahdadi and Brad Burnham made trenchant comments in email that I thought were worth sharing (with their permission):

Ari wrote:

The main article is sad to read, with choice quotes like this: "Clearly, the global recession seriously hampered innovation in the United States." If I'd like to do anything, it's end the use of patenting statistics as a metric for innovative activity, especially by groups like the IEEE.

Brad responded:
…

On Thursday the 8th, we delivered the most successful italian MySQL webinar ever. We had about 350 registrations, thanks for your support and constant participation!
We also awarded a wonderful MySQL t-shirt to the one who first answered correctly to a trivia question, congratulations to the winner.

Looking into the story of italian webinars, here is the ranking in terms of registrations:

1. Getting Started with MySQL on Windows
2. Scalable MySQL High Availability Architectures
3. A guide to Scaling MySQL
4. MySQL Performance Tuning - Top 5 Tips
5. Introducing MySQL 5.0

If you were unable to participate you can click here and listen to the on-demand …

The big news to kick off this week was Oracle’s announced acquisition of Sun Microsystems. There is already a lot of discussion of the integration challenges, how Oracle is getting into hardware (or as Matt Asay describes it, having an ‘iPod moment’) and of course, the implications for open source software. What stands out to me is the fact that the world’s biggest proprietary database player — one of few software giants that still sells and supports primarily proprietary software — will own the world’s most popular open source database, MySQL. It is unclear how significantly MySQL figures into the deal, but given Sun spent $1b acquiring it and further invested in its enterprise readiness and use, …

There are some basic, golden rules when it comes to having a vibrant community of contributors.

The following are rules I have extracted and learned based on my experience managing and working with engineers actively involved and participating in the Apache/Derby, PostgreSQL and MySQL open-source communities. These rules are also based on extensive discussions with many folks involved with the MySQL community, with the PostgreSQL community and with the Apache/Derby (Java DB) community, over many years.

Before I go through these rules, I would like to thank Marten Mickos for having suggested some of the headings for these rules. (I originally had much longer headings for all of them.) I would also like to thank many of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB colleagues, as well as to many other colleagues involved in open-source development, for having contributed to the ideas and practices behind these rules.

A) …

There are some basic, golden rules when it comes to having a vibrant community of contributors.

The following are rules I have extracted and learned based on my experience managing and working with engineers actively involved and participating in the Apache/Derby, PostgreSQL and MySQL open-source communities. These rules are also based on extensive discussions with many folks involved with the MySQL community, with the PostgreSQL community and with the Apache/Derby (Java DB) community, over many years.

Before I go through these rules, I would like to thank Marten Mickos for having suggested some of the headings for these rules. (I originally had much longer headings for all of them.) I would also like to thank many of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB colleagues, as well as to many other colleagues involved in open-source development, for having contributed to the ideas and practices behind these rules.

A) …

There are some basic, golden rules when it comes to having a vibrant community of contributors.

The following are rules I have extracted and learned based on my experience managing and working with engineers actively involved and participating in the Apache/Derby, PostgreSQL and MySQL open-source communities. These rules are also based on extensive discussions with many folks involved with the MySQL community, with the PostgreSQL community and with the Apache/Derby (Java DB) community, over many years.

Before I go through these rules, I would like to thank Marten Mickos for having suggested some of the headings for these rules. (I originally had much longer headings for all of them.) I would also like to thank many of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB colleagues, as well as to many other colleagues involved in open-source development, for having contributed to the ideas and practices behind these rules.

A) …

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from December 29th, 2008 to January 4th, 2009.

Overview

Another week of the Christmas and New Year holidays with many of my Mozilla colleagues unavailable. As with the previous week, I focused on 2009 program development and engagement.

The program development work was in the form of brainstorming, planning and research for upcoming 2009 Mozilla activities.

The engagement work focused on participating in the Mozilla blogorama. I kept up with Planet Mozilla, commented on blog posts I found interesting and continued a series of lightweight blog posts.

More details on both activities follow:

Program Development

I finished drafting a new statement of work and sent this to …

Reminders work. At least on me. I try to Get Things Done (TM) efficiently, but slips do happen. And when they do, reminding me has a good chance to influence my priorities. I hope I’m not alone in this fallibility.

And therefore I want to remind you that you’ve still got two weeks to reply to our Call for Participation in the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California on 20-23 April 2009.

A few items to remember:

• We have plenty already, but we’re looking for more proposals. It does make our selection process harder (that’s when the Program Committee sits down and asks itself “what’s right for the conference and its participants”), but that’s a task that we are happy to work on.
• The theme of the conference is “Innovation …

You may recall that I was enthusiast about a Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL at the MySQL Users Conference 2008, and with reason. The engineers at Stanford have a plan of storing petabytes of data into a cluster of MySQL databases.
The technical …