28 November – Five Stories You Need to Read

According to CNET News, the U.S. Appeals Court for the Seventh Circuit recently declared that the “GPL and open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws”.  The court’s verdict came in response to a federal complaint charging IBM, Red Hat and Novell with conspiring to thwart competition in the operating-system market by providing Linux free of charge under the GNU General Public License. 

In an unrelated story, CNET News writes that the Supreme Court is to examine the "obviousness" of patents. In their third major patent case this year, the justices are scheduled to hear arguments about what courts should consider when deciding whether an invention is too "obvious" to warrant protection.             

Slashdot reports that the OpenSUSE team held to answer a few questions about the controversial deal between Novell and Microsoft at a recent IRC meeting.  Nat Friedman, chief technical and strategy officer for open source at Novell, fielded most of the questions, with assistance from Andreas Jaeger, openSUSE project manager, and others.

According to an article in the Register, the European Union this week announced plans to pump €9bn into research on information and communications technologies.  Through the research grants, EU ministers hope to close the research gap between Europe and its global competitors, such as the US.

ZDNet News asks whether Google CEO Eric Schmidt is getting too cocky. In a recent interview with the Economist, Schmidt made comments that can be interpreted as a frontal assault on Microsoft, leading observers to wonder whether Schmidt “honestly believe[s] that running into Microsoft head-on is the best business move”.