Poland delays discussion of EU software patents again

The European Union's determination to push through the software patent directive received another setback at the hands of the Polish government yesterday. The Directive was due to be discussed by Council of Agriculture and Fisheries yesterday but has been delayed yet again The Polish European Committee of the Council of Ministers (Komitet Europejski Rady Ministrow or KERM, item in the Agenda of the EU Council Meeting. Poland has asked for postponement until the end of the `necessary analyses` being conducted by Poland. ...more

Adobe takes Flex open source

Adobe will be making its Flex web application development technology open source, the company announced today. The source code to key elements of the Flex platform is already available in its SDK, and Adobe plans to have a full open source site complete with project planning, bug tracking and source code management tools available by the end of 2007. Part of Adobe's developer friendly approach, Flex's new open source development process is intended to build on existing developer community relations. ...more

PlusNet unveils pay as you go pricing model for services up to 8Mbps

PlusNet has announced a significant overhaul of its broadband services, offering speeds up to 8Mbps and a new usage-based payment system. The ISPs Premier customers will be able to choose the speed of their connection but will be charged purely on the basis of the amount of downstream peak-time capacity they use; broadband usage between 1am and 8am will be entirely unrestricted. Monthly charges are as follows: ?21. ...more

'Spam king' pays $7m damages to Microsoft

Microsoft, along with the New York Attorney General, had filed a lawsuit against Richter back in December 2003 as part of an effort to fight spam. He was, according to Microsoft, ranked one of the top spammers in the world. In the lawsuit, Richter was accused of violating federal laws by sending email that contained forged sender names, false subject lines, fake server names, inaccurate and misrepresented sender addresses and obscured transmission paths. ...more

PalmSource invites Linux developers `come and join us`.

PalmSource has bought mobile phone software developer China MobileSoft with a view to developing a version of Palm OS Cobalt that will run on Linux in mobile devices. Mike Kelly, the Vice President Engineering at PalmSource Inc has written an open letter to the Linux community announcing that Palm Cobalt is to run on top of the Linux operating system. The company has done so, he says, because it believes that Linux is set to become `a leading operating system for mobile devices`. ...more