ZDNet has an interesting article on Jon Dudas’ view of the patent system.  Speaking at the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose, Dudas, who is the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), said that the “system is not broken, just not perfect” and that “characterizing the patent system as hurting innovation is a ‘fundamentally wrong’ way to frame the debate.”

The Register reports that “

[s]oftware houses must create a whole new kind of service level agreement (

SLA

) if they start selling their software as a service rather than a product, according to a body which represents software developers.”

CNetNews.com writes that “[a] federal court has ruled that search engines have a First Amendment right to reject ads as part of their protected right to speak or not speak.”

According to Slashdot, Dell today told users “not to expect factory-installed Linux laptops and desktops anytime soon” because “lining up certification, support, and training will ‘take a lot of work.’”  According to the company, its recent note about manufacturing Linux-friendly Dells “was just about certifying the hardware for being ready to work with Novell SUSE Linux, not an announcement that the computers would be loaded and sold with the operating system in the near future.”

The Financial Times claims that “[w]hen it comes to venture capital investing, it pays to think small and boring”.