It is common currency in open source to say that patents are an American problem.

That’s not true. Software patents, or patents on what is expressed in software, are a global problem.

(Picture from our Apple Core blog, co-starring Jason O’Grady and David Morganstern. Always filled with Apple-flavored bloggy goodness.)

This is especially true in the case of Apple, which has sued HTC (and by extension Google) for violating its claimed rights to multitouch technology.

As Florian Mueller explained recently, Apple filed international patent applications for how it operates its touchscreen display in early 2007, and how you unlock the device with gestures on the locked image, in late 2006. It applied for patents on its touch screen interface late last year.

From this it’s clear Apple thinks it has a worldwide monopoly on how the iPhone works, one that could last until late in the next decade. The questions courts must ask are:

1. Does this cover any portable touch screen system, as Apple contends, or just this particular system?
2. Should the patents be considered valid, since Google asserts it was working on its own Android system before the iPhone patents were filed.

There is another important question. Does it respect and reward innovation to give Apple control of all portable touch screen devices, for as long as touch screens may be an interface of choice? Would society have benefited if Microsoft had to wait until the 21st century to deliver Windows, or something like it?

Patent suits are most commonly filed in the U.S., Mueller writes, because this is still the largest technology market, because lawyers are comfortable with the legal system here and because victory usually leads to quick negotiations on global rights.

This leads me to two further questions:

1. If China creates a reasonable patent law framework, will its market eventually draw patent litigation there?
2. If U.S. legislators do return to patent reform, how will that impact technology markets worldwide?

Before Israel was founded in 1948 it made sense to conclude a Passover seder with the words “Next year in Jerusalem.” With Israel a reality the arguments over the phrase have changed. Yet they endure.

Desktop Linux is the same sort of deal. Linux believers always assume that next year will be the year of desktop Linux. Windows followers often chide those who seek Linux with that belief, both here and elsewhere.

Before anyone starts thinking this Catholic boy has changed his stripes, my point is simply that, in the case of desktop Linux, Jerusalem is here.

This is the year.

This is also the year where the definition of a desktop has changed. Apple changed it with the iPhone and, now, the iPad. Microsoft has failed to deliver in both these key areas. Linux has not.

Google gets the credit for that. As I noted yesterday Google Android has soaked up the excess demand for Internet hand-held devices that the iPhone left on the floor. My guess is that, once Chromium comes out, you’ll have the same experience there.

Linux has broken through because Google has the size to go toe-to-toe with either Microsoft or Apple, and push product through distribution. (Remember, there is a price lower than free.)

It’s the compatibility between Chromium and Android, based on Linux, which I think gives the old mouse-and-keyboard upright posture desktop Linux yet-another chance.

Linux Mint and Ubuntu are building the kind of simple-then-power relationship that will exist between Android and Chromium, and which existed in the past between Windows and Windows NT.

Mint offers simplicity and a full application suite. It abstracts all the complexity of the command line, much as Android and Chromium do. Even our own Jason Perlow likes it (and he is hard to please).

What’s still missing is the financial wherewithal to push this through the distribution channel. But with the success of Google as a patron for hand-held Linux, are Microsoft followers certain one can’t be found for the old-fashioned desktop?

My larger point is it doesn’t matter. Either Mint and Ubuntu will gain desktop traction or Google will simply bypass them.

A friend had trouble with their iPhone yesterday and enlisted me in a trip to the Apple Store.

(The Apple store in Lenox Square Mall, Atlanta, from Apple.com.)

Three hours later I realized that Apple is back in the same box Steve Jobs put it in over 25 years ago.

To continue the morning’s baseball theme, It was deja vu all over again.

My friend’s WiFi was on the fritz. The battery was losing power faster than a politician under indictment. No problem, he said. I have an appointment.

The store was tightly packed with people, even though it was Monday afternoon. We were called at 3:18 for an appointment scheduled for 3. After examining the unit our hyper-friendly Apple geek suggested a reboot. No good. Sadly he suggested reloading the operating system. Some 15 minutes later, still no good.

OK, he said, we can fix it, but it will take time because it’s a hardware problem. Wait, my friend said, that’s my home phone. Can’t I just buy another?

Sure, the geek replied. Just get in this line here. How long is this line here, my friend asked. About an hour-and-a-half to two hours, came the reply from the line monitor.

Some 45 minutes later, while my friend frantically used his AT&T data minutes to try and order a new phone online while standing in the Apple phone ordering line, his girlfriend arrived like cavalry to the rescue. She wasn’t under Apple’s spell. She pulled us out and said my friend could buy something later.

Suddenly, in the mall parking lot, a miracle occurred. There, right across the street, was an AT&T store. A company-owned store, its happy little death star sparkling in the sunlight.

Eureka, my friend said. They sell iPhones. So we went over.

It was night-and-day. By which I mean the AT&T store was nearly empty. The help was not overwhelmed. They were waiting for us. We were taken to a man named Scott, who engaged my friend in earnest conversation while I perused the inventory.

Look, I said, this Samsung CaptivaCaptivate costs just what the iPhone would. It’s an Android phone designed to look just like the iPhone, and it seems to have all the same features as the iPhone. Hint, hint. (Thanks to ITGuy08 for catching the misspelling.)

Well, Scott replied, we don’t have any iPhones in stock, but I can get you into a Captiva right now. A half-hour or so later my friend was a happy Android user, asking me if I wanted an iBrick.

There are some important lessons here:

1. Apple claims to be unworried because it is selling iPhones as fast as it can make them. Even faster.
2. Apple is not scaled to meet demand for its product, and certainly not for its retail services.
3. Alternatives with the same look-and-feel are available now.

Back in the 1980s, PC users had to live through 6 years of FUD, waiting for Microsoft or IBM to get their act together and deliver a graphical user interface similar to the Apple Mac, introduced in 1984. Apple had 5 years to own the market, yet its insistence on complete control meant it couldn’t meet demand. Microsoft won.

It’s happening again, Steve. Only it didn’t take Microsoft 6 years to match you. Open source did it in two. And that’s why Android phones now out-sell the iPhone. They’re not better, they’re just available, and you don’t have to go into the 7th circle of Apple Hell to get one.

2012. The end of the world. Or, maybe, the end of electronics. Or, maybe not. Maybe it’ll be 2013. It could be the end of civilization as we know it. Or, maybe not.

For the record, I’m not making this up. These are the sort of third-hand, reasonably imprecise dire warnings we’re hearing from some sources.

Follow along, because either we’re doomed — or duped.

According to an article in Monday’s issue of New American, an Australian columnist and “lecturer” named Dave Reneke is claiming that 2012 (or maybe 2013) could be the year that the sun flares to a level that it destroys global electronics.

Reneke bases his analysis on interpretations of a $31 research report published by the National Academies Press, based out of Washington, DC.

Another report claims, and I couldn’t make this up if I tried, that a “Sun storm to hit with ‘force of 100m bombs’”.

This one, too, goes on to quote Aussie “lecturer” Reneke, who states that a coming Solar Max storm “will be the most violent in 100 years”.

Sigh.

I got involved in this story when one of my favorite fellow ZDNet bloggers (who shall remain nameless as I’m about to put my mock on) suggested I write about what the American government was going to do about our impending doom.

Okay, okay. Fine. First, the obvious disclaimers. I am not an astronomer. My engineering degree is in computer science, which gives me some technical cred, but I did not take even one course on the subject about which I’m writing today.

That said, I am a darned good researcher. I have not found much credible information that backs up Reneke’s claim. There are a lot of blog spoutings on the topic, one article by an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) affiliate claiming it’s all rubbish, but nothing tangible that supports Reneke’s doom and gloom story, especially as he’s managed to situate it in the middle of 2012.

Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s not right. History is filled with stories of renegade Renekes who warned about impending doom, only to be ignored and later proven correct.

This brings us back to my fellow blogger’s question about what the American government is doing about it. Let’s chunk that question up and ask what the American government is doing about any of our crisis areas?

Are they fixing our roads and bridges? No. Are they really solving our health care crisis? No. Are our politicians able to stand in a room together for even a few hours without making sophomoric outbursts? No.

America is having a focus problem. Right now, the left is fighting with the left. The right is fighting with the right. Neither side is putting America first for problems that are provable, urgent, and tangible right now.

In that light, has American prepared its infrastructure for an influx of solar radiation?

Um, no. Outside of a few structures and systems hardened for any eventuality, if we’re hit by the Mother of All Solar Maxes, we’re probably screwed.

On the other hand, 2012 is an election year, and we could wind up with President Palin.

I guess you just takes your chances no matter how the world turns.

The Great Google is wearing sackcloth and ashes this week, whipping up public resentment against legal rival Oracle by staying away from JavaOne, and quietly encouraging sales of James Gosling’s nifty anti-Oracle t-shirts. (Picture from Cafepress.)

But in publicly portraying itself as the Luke Skywalker of open source (and Larry Ellison as Darth Vader) Google is taking a risk. That’s right, someone might find out Oracle is its father. That would be a real disturbance in the force.

The problem, as Bruce Perens makes clear at his blog, is that this lawsuit isn’t really about open source. Google deliberately violated the patent freedom grant given by Sun, using a user interface toolkit not found in Java ME or Java SE.

Java on the web doesn’t seem to have the problems that Google built into Android, its users can stay within the patent grant without trouble.

Oops. Instead, Android implements the Dalvik Virtual Machine, recompiling the Harmony class libraries on Apache’s version of Java SE. It then targets the new version at the same markets Oracle has identified.

Or, as Charles Nutter notes in his excellent summation of the issues, “Dalvik is not a JVM…it just plays one on TV.” Google made Java better, which is technically a good thing. But it did so in a legally questionable way.

One point even the fiercest open source advocates will insist on is that your rights to change code are not unlimited. They are defined by a license. If Google tweaked a proprietary version of Java it may lack the commercial rights to what it has done.

In other words, as painful as it may be admit this, Oracle may indeed have a case even Richard Stallman is bound to respect.

Google, who’s your daddy?

Red Hat announced a strategy for its cloud stack, now called Cloud Foundations Edition One.

It’s about portability and interoperability. In other words it’s about standards. In line with that, Red Hat has submitted its cloud platform as a potential standard for interoperability.

At the heart of the cloud movement was always this idea that you would abstract the complexity of operating systems through virtualization, thus it wouldn’t matter on what specific piece of hardware your data and programs actually lived.

Of course that’s not how computer rivalries work. There are multiple hypervisors, multiple routes to virtualization, multiple ways to manage clouds, and multiple cloud stacks.

When seen in comparison to the ideal of a fully interoperable environment open source has a distinct advantage. When you can see the code, you can link to it more easily than if you can’t. (Try it at home. Wire up your computer with your eyes open, then do it with your eyes shut.)

The cloud strategy puts Red Hat on a collision course with Microsoft, whose Azure cloud says you should trust its portability, and trust its interoperability. Just to turn things up another notch, Red Hat said it would support its business software a full 10 years, as opposed to Microsoft’s five.

Logically Red Hat’s cloud strategy should work. Red Hat is seeking to be the center of the cloud world, while larger vendors swirl around it, and when all the rushing around is done the center is where you want to be.

But the real world is not the ideal plane. Red Hat marketing is indeed Switzerland, if you want to compare the Swiss army to that of, say, Russia. Yes it’s neutral, but if it comes to a fight I’m betting on the bear. Can Red Hat succeed without being, say, bought by IBM?

That’s the risk. It will take more than winning the Dreamworks account to assure a happy ending.

The Mozilla team released the fourth beta of Firefox 4 today but don’t expect feature freeze code until September.

According to meeting notes posted today, the team aims to release beta 5 this Friday and is aiming to post the feature-frozen beta 6 on September 10.

The project — which held its weekly meeting here today — will consider adding new features until August 27 but the intent is to wrap up work on the three core elements for Firefox 4: delivering high performance, a compelling user experience to drive upgrades and JetPack SDK, which is the SDK that allows developers to use advanced web technologies to create Firefox add-ons.

Those three priorities have been addressed but some of the other code developed since 3.6 may be moved to 4.1 or 4.5 to enable a speedy delivery of version 4.

“Beyond those three things, nothing can make us delay Firefox 4 any longer than we have to,” said one lead Mozilla developer on the call, who added that there are tons of new features in Firefox 4 that will make it a strong rival to forthcoming competitors IE9 and Chrome 5. “It’ll be a huge step for us.”

I’ve been reading breathless and shocking “reports” for several days now explaining that “malware brought down a Spanish jet.” And once again we have a case study in how the Internet echo chamber works to take a single report and distort it beyond recognition. I’ve now read articles from more than 20 online publications repeating this story. Not a single one has done even a shred of research beyond simply quoting a bad translation of the original Spanish-language report.

The reality? Yes, the crash of Spanair flight 5022 at Madrid-Barajas Airport in August 2008 was a tragedy, with the entire crew and 154 passengers losing their lives. But malware did not bring down that plane. The actual cause of this crash has been extensively documented in official reports from the Spanish Civil Aviation Accident and Incident Investigation Commission (CIAIAC). Their website contains a preliminary report published shortly after the accident, an Interim Report released last year at roughly this time, and a Progress Note published just last week. The official English translation of the most recent report does not mention viruses or malware. The actual cause is far more prosaic: the pilots missed a crucial item on their checklist and took off with the flaps in the wrong position:

The investigation has determined that the takeoff was attempted while in an inappropriate and unapproved configuration, since the flaps and slats were fully retracted. The system outfitted on the airplane to warn of an inadequate takeoff configuration (TOWS) also failed to activate.

Was there a problem with the computer on the plane? Not according to the CIAIAC:

[T]he information stored on the computers for the enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGWPS), the advanced flight management (AFMC), central air data (CADC), digital flight guidance (DFGC) and the optical inertial reference units (IRU) has been extracted. The results from the analysis of the data recovered from the ground proximity warning system computer are available and consistent with the data found on the flight data recorder (DFDR) and from the two air data computers, which indicate that both units were functioning normally on the previous flights and at the time of the accident.

In fact, as airline-safety experts noted, the aircraft in question, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-82 (MD-82), is not computerized (its design dates back to 1979 and the last delivery was in 1997). The exact same type of aircraft was involved in the eerily similar fatal crash of Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in Detroit in 1987. The investigators in that crash concluded that the cause was pilot error.

So where did these alarming reports of malware-infested computers come from? The original article, from Spain’s El País newspaper, opens with this paragraph:

El ordenador central de la compañía Spanair en el que se anotaban las averías de los aviones estaba contaminado con programas informáticos maliciosos cuando se produjo, hace hoy dos años, el accidente del vuelo JK 5022. La computadora, situada en la sede de la aerolínea en Palma de Mallorca, emite una señal de alarma en el monitor cuando registra tres problemas técnicos similares en el mismo aparato.

My Spanish is rusty, but it’s good enough to get the gist of the report: A computer at the airline’s maintenance headquarters in Palma de Mallorca was infected with some sort of malware (”troyanos,” or Trojans) at the time of the accident. That same computer is used to record incident reports submitted by mechanics and is programmed to raise an alarm if the same problem occurs three times on the same aircraft. [Update: As a commenter with avionics test experience notes, this "alarm" is probably not a flashing light or a ringing bell. It's more likely a pop-up dialog box or an e-mail alert.]

On the day of the crash, the plane returned to the gate after the crew noticed a problem. The mechanics at the airport identified the issue and cleared the plane for takeoff. They apparently didn’t know that this was the third report of a similar problem in a two-day period. But even if the headquarters office had maintained its PC perfectly, the plane would still have taken off. The mechanics were still entering their report at the time of the crash, and as a May 2010 report in the same newspaper noted, the headquarters office had a custom of entering data 24 hours after it was received. None of those three incidents were recorded on the allegedly infected PC until after the plane had crashed.

There’s no doubt that this accident was a tragedy. It might even have been preventable. But the cause was not a piece of malware on a PC hundreds of miles away. Reports from air safety investigators are written in circumspect language, reflecting the fact that they are the work of engineers and potential expert witnesses in civil and criminal actions. In this case, it’s easy to read between the lines of last week’s Progress Note, in which the investigators note that they are continuing to analyze “the operator’s maintenance structure and organization … specifically, the procedures described in the company’s manuals [and] the degree of compliance by maintenance personnel.”

In fact, two mechanics who checked the plane before take-off and Spanair’s head of maintenance at Barajas were hauled before a judge on manslaughter charges, according to a 2008 BBC report. The fact that a PC used for such a critical function might have been susceptible to infection suggests that the entire maintenance operation was lax and poorly run. In other words, the malware, if it existed, was one symptom among many of a much larger management problem at an unprofitable airline.

Meanwhile, the publications that teased readers with inflammatory headlines need to go back to journalism school. “Malware Contributed to Plane Crash” and “Trojan blamed for Spanish air crash” are simply not accurate. The most disgusting one of all the headlines I read was “Murder by malware: Can computer viruses kill?” The editor and author of that post should hang their heads in shame.

Like a President having to talk about anchor babies or mosques when he would rather talk about education and the economy, Mark Shuttleworth had his launch of Ubuntu 10.10 hijacked by the Oracle suit.

We had a good excuse, however. Ubuntu 10.10 will support multitouch, the technology at the heart of another lawsuit, the one Apple filed against HTC over its inclusion in Android. Software patents are not legal in Europe, where Ubuntu developer Canonical is based.

Shuttleworth may argue now that Ubuntu’s implementation will be far more sophisticated than what Apple uses on the iPhone, a touch language that could resemble computing commands in their complexity.

Apple may claim a patent on its mousetrap, but can it claim to control all methods for catching mice?

On the Canonical blog all this is referenced as uTouch 1.0, a multitouch and gesture “stack” that will include a gesture recognition engine and an API. The post said the work began with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Several prototypes are already being tested.

The move to multitouch, however, brings up other questions:

* What devices is Ubuntu now designed for? Am I supposed to poke my fingers onto a flat screen and use a keyboard at the same time?
* Is the mouse now dead?
* So is Ubuntu abandoning the desktop, or laptop market? Will mine be the last keyboard standing?
* What does this have to do with Ubuntu’s perceived strength, as a server system?

In his blog post Shuttleworth insisted multitouch can be as useful on a desktop as well as on a phone or tablet. The code will be published on Launchpad under the GPLv3 and LGPLv3.

Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated “sentences”. The basic gestures, or primitives, are like individual verbs, and stringing them together allows for richer interactions. It’s not quite the difference between banging rocks together and conducting a symphony orchestra, but it feels like a good step in the right direction

Still, I’m writing this story leaning back in a chair, a screen over a yard from me, two arm lengths away. Unless you can let me make gestures in the air it’s not happening. Unless, of course, I change my relationship to the device.

Alternatively I could replace my mouse with a multitouch pad, connected via a USB port. Even then I would have to match my actions on the pad to what is happening on the screen. This is beginning to feel less like a step up and more like the first requirements of a new skill set.

Open source has officially “crossed the chasm from early adoption to mainstream adoption,” one top analyst announced at LinuxCon.

Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forreseter Research, said he bases his broad conclusion on several surveys peformed in 2010 which indicate that almost 70 percent of corporate customers say they are using Linux at the operating system layer, 65 percent are using open source at the database tier and about 60 percent are now using GPL-based programming languages.

“We’ve moved from a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy into strategic adoption,” Hammond said during his keynote at LinuxCon Wednesday. “Take your victory lap and we’ll move on.”

Ironically, another key indicator of open source’s acceptance is that it slipped on the list of top strategic priorities of IT architects and CIOs.

“We saw it was not quite as important in 2010 as in [our] 2009 survey. It’s not top of list but there’s good reason for that: it’s already happened. We’re there. We asked developers and asked different [users] using open source and its all over the place,” he said, noting, however, that open source still tops the survey in terms of technology deployment for this year.

In one of the surveys aimed at a group composed of quite a few .NET developers, only one in five said they are not using any open source and roughly 20 percent say they are contibuting to at least one open source project, Hammond said.

IT pros remain interested in using open source to reduce costs and integrate disparate technologies, as was indicated in last year’s survey, but two other priorities popped up in the same survey in 2010: “improving the speed of business processes and getting in position to support growth when we come out of the recession,”Hammond said.

Linux advocates should highlight the secondary benefits of open source to address these next gen requirements, namely enhanced speed and flexibility and increased developer engagement, which occurs when customers feel less like curators of proprietary software and more like owners of their infrastructure from “stem to stern,” Hammond said.

The story of how Microsoft killed its chances in mobile telephony by strangling Danger, a company it had bought only a few years ago, turns out to be a symptom of a much larger problem.

Not Invented Here Syndrome (NIHS).

Further evidence is emerging in the demise of its “Iron” projects, IronRuby and IronPython.

The plan had been to offer developers two ways to build dynamic applications — .Net and an embedding API for other languages dubbed Dynamic Language Runtime. Now it seems if you want to build Microsoft stuff, you use Microsoft tools, or go elsewhere.

All this was revealed in a recent blog post by Jimmy Schementi, formerly a key member of the Microsoft IronRuby team. Schementi felt such bad mojo in Redmond he and his wife drove cross-country, back to New York City, where at least you know the muggers by sight.

Schementi said he is going to work for Lab49, and that should sound alarm bells. If Microsoft is losing customers in financial services because of NIHS, it’s going to lose some serious coin.

Sure, projects like this could go to Codeplex, but they should have been there long ago. Had the move been made say, in 2009, with Microsoft employees like Schementi as commiters, a serious team from several companies might be in place now. As it is, the move looks like a code dump.

That’s not the way this works. If you’re interested in sharing, you share up-front. Watch how Eclipse works. If you want to go all-proprietary you keep your mouth shut until your work is done. Watch how Apple works.

Microsoft in the post-Gates era is looking increasingly like IBM in the post-Watson era. But progress won’t wait for the company to get its act together. We can do very well without you, Prof. Ballmer.