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Catching up with Calibre

Last week's Edition contained an interview with Kovid Goyal, the maintainer of the Calibre electronic book manager, but it did not look deeply at the application itself. Coincidentally, your editor has been playing with Calibre with renewed interest recently. This application has made considerable progress since your editor's last look at it, so a look at where it has gone is called for. Calibre is not perfect, but it is a useful tool for a somewhat unwilling newcomer to electronic books.

Your editor is not one to resist progress; the transition from vinyl to compact disks was handled with no reservations, despite the fact that there is still something special about those old analog platters. How can one resist a medium that is bulky and heavy, limited to 30 minutes of play time, and which degrades with every playing? When CDs, in turn, started to go away barely a tear was shed. There has been no pining for 8" floppies, eight-track tapes - or for tape in general. Technology moves forward, and things get better.

But books are special. They represent an old technology well optimized for its intended task and are a thing of beauty. Your editor's love of books has swallowed up vast amounts of time and crowded the house with dead trees; Cicero's classic proverb ("a room without books is like a body without a soul") is well respected here. That occasionally leads to certain amounts of marital stress, but we digress. The point is that the movement of the written word to an increasingly digital-only form is something that has been resisted in these parts for some time.

But the writing is on the wall cloud-based persistent storage device: books as physical objects are on their way out. Once your editor got past the denial phase, it became clear that there were even some advantages to ebooks. They are often cheaper, which is nice. Certain science fiction authors would appear to be paid by the kilogram; reading them in electronic form yields the same entertainment value without the kilograms. Electronic books are especially advantageous when traveling; the weight involved in carrying sufficient reading material for a family vacation was, once again, a source of a certain amount of familial disagreement. Searchability can be a useful feature at times. There is still nothing like a real book, but the electronic version is not entirely without its charms.

One does not need to accumulate many ebooks before it becomes clear that some sort of management scheme is required. Simply keeping books on a reader device is not really an option; that device may well not be entirely under the owner's control, its capacity is limited, it can be lost or damaged, and it eventually will need to be replaced. Just dumping them on a disk somewhere has problems of its own; some sort of management tool is needed. For now, in the free software world, Calibre seems to be that tool.

Calibre

As of this writing, the current version of Calibre is 0.8.16. Releases are frequent - about one week apart - and each release adds bug fixes and new features. The web site recommends installing binary releases directly from there because distributors tend to fall behind that schedule; Rawhide did not let your editor down, though. Interestingly, those looking for the source on the Calibre web site can search for a long time; there are no easily-found pointers to the SourceForge directory where the source can be found. The program is written in Python.

One thing first-time users won't necessarily notice is that Calibre phones home when it starts. The ostensible purpose is to check for new releases, but, in the process, it reports the current running version, the operating system it is running under (Linux is reported as "oth") and a unique ID generated when the program is installed - along with the IP address, naturally. It is not a huge amount of information to report - users of proprietary reader devices have much larger information disclosure issues to be concerned about - but it's still a bit of a privacy violation. Programs that communicate with the mother ship in this way should really inform their users of the fact and give them the opportunity to opt out.

The main Calibre window provides a list of books in the library, an animated "cover browser," a list of metadata types, and a pane for information about the selected book. By default, somebody just wanting to look through the books in the library will find less than 1/4 of the available space dedicated to that task. However, one cannot fault Calibre for lacking configurability; there are few aspects of the interface that cannot be tweaked at will. Unwanted stuff is easily gotten rid of.

There is a toolbar across the top with a large number of entries; they do not all fit unless the window is made quite wide. Some of them can be a bit confusing; should one import a book with "Add books" or "Get books"? The icon labeled "N books" (for some value of N) is actually the way to switch between libraries. "Save to disk" is a bit strange for books in the library, which are already on disk; it seems to be a way to save a book in a different format, though how that relates to the "convert books" operation is not entirely clear. With a bit of time and experimentation, though, it's not too hard to figure out how things work.

There is a basic reader application built into Calibre; it works well enough, though, likely as not, few users actually read their books in this application. Some of its more obnoxious behaviors (the 1/2 second animated page flip, for example) can be disabled. One thing that cannot be turned off, though, is the obnoxious "tooltips" that show up on everything. Your editor has noticed a trend toward these annoyances in a number of applications; when one can't see the interface through the tips, something is wrong. As can be seen in the associated screenshot, the "next page" tooltip obscures the text of the book itself.

Calibre's management of devices seems to work well; when a recognized device is plugged in, a separate pane showing the contents of that device is created. Books can be copied between the library and the device at will; if needed, Calibre will convert the book to a different format on the way. Your editor's Kindle device Just Works with Calibre; all that was needed was to plug it in. Android devices also work nicely. The Calibre site recommends installing WordPlayer on Android, but interoperation with the open-source FBReader application works well. Aldiko can also be used, though it is necessary to manually import the book files into the application after Calibre has placed them on the device.

Naturally, when working with a Kindle, one quickly runs into DRM issues; Calibre will put up a dialog saying that it cannot work with a locked file and wish you luck. As it happens, there is a plugin out there that can decrypt books from a Kindle and store them in a more accessible format. The Calibre project itself won't go near such plugins, but they are not hard to find. Whether one sees unlocking an ebook as an exercise of fair-use rights on a text that one has purchased or as an act of piracy will depend on one's viewpoint and, perhaps, local law. Your editor can only say that, if he were able to store his purchased ebooks in a format that does not require a functioning Kindle or Amazon's continuing cooperation, he would be much more inclined to buy more such books in the future.

(The Kindle, incidentally, will eventually be replaced with a more open device; selecting that device is likely to be the topic of a future article).

The "Get books" option pops up a dialog that, seemingly, will search every bookstore on the planet for a given string. Results are listed with their price, format, and DRM status. The process tends to be slow - not surprising, given how many sites must be queried; one will want to trim down the number of sites to speed things up and eliminate results in undesired languages. The Calibre developers have clearly been busy setting up affiliate arrangements with as many of those bookstores as possible. The proceeds support ongoing development of the code, which seems like a good cause, certainly.

Another interesting feature is the ability to download articles from various news sources, format them appropriately, and send them to the device. In the case of the Kindle, that sending happens immediately over the Kindle's cellular connection; there is no need to plug the device into the computer first. Over 1,000 different news sources are supported at this point. If Calibre is left running, downloads can be scheduled to run at regular intervals. The value of this feature arguably drops as always-connected devices take over, but it's easy to see how it could be indispensable for those who do a fair amount of offline reading.

Wishlist and conclusion

There is a fairly well developed search feature clearly designed with the idea that there will be thousands of books in the library. Searches can key on almost any metadata, but there does not seem to be any way to search for books based on their contents. If you cannot remember which book introduced the concept of "thalience," Calibre, it seems, will not be able to help you find it. Indexing a large library to the point where it can be efficiently searched is not a small task, of course, but there are times when it would be nice.

Closer integration between Calibre and the reader devices would be useful. For example, all readers have a concept of bookmarks, or, at least, the current position within a given book. Imagine having a copy of one's current book on a phone handset; it would always be at hand when one finds oneself with an unexpected half hour to kill somewhere. Later, when curling up by the fire with the spouse, the dog, a glass of wine, and the real reader, said reader would already know the new position to start from. No such luck with the reader, alas; even the spouse and the dog can't always be counted upon. Calibre can't fix the latter, but it could convey that kind of information between reader devices.

Even nicer, someday, might be to run an application like Calibre directly on the reader devices, backed up by a library found in personally-controlled storage on the net somewhere. Google's Books offering is aiming at that sort of functionality, without the "personally-controlled" part, but books are too important to leave in some company's hands. Until such a time arrives, we'll be left managing our books on a local system and copying them to devices as needed. Calibre seems to be the best option there is for that management; it is a capable tool that does almost everything a reader could want. It definitely helps to make the transition away from real books a bit less painful.

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LinuxCon: Mobile network management with ConnMan

For handling network management tasks, at least on the desktop, most distributions (and thus Linux users) rely on NetworkManager. But, there is an alternative, called ConnMan, that was originally created as part of Intel's Moblin effort. ConnMan has found its way into Moblin's successor, MeeGo, which is no surprise, but it is also suited to smaller embedded Linux systems as well. ConnMan's creator, Marcel Holtmann, gave a talk at LinuxCon to describe ConnMan, along with some of the challenges faced in creating a compact network management tool that is targeted at mobile devices.

Holtmann started out by describing the "wishlist" for mobile devices that he came up with when he started working on ConnMan three years ago. Mobile phones were the first use-case he considered because they are complex devices with limited battery life. Also, "if you solve the phone case, you solve the tablet and netbook problem as well", he said. In addition, the needs of televisions are a subset of those needed for mobile phones.

But, other use-cases are different. Cars have different requirements, as do robots, sensors, and medical devices. The only use-case that was left out was the data center because it is "simple and pretty much static", he said.

So, after considering those use-cases, Holtmann came up with a wishlist that consisted of a handful of high-level constraints. It should be a simple and small solution, "but at the same time, really powerful". It should be automated so that it didn't have to ask the user what to do "over and over again if we knew what to do". It should have minimal dependencies so that it could run on memory-constrained devices. It should also support customization so that vendors could create their own UI on top of the core. ConnMan sprang out of that wishlist.

There were also a common set of problems that a network management application needs to deal with including IP address assignment, which is "quite complicated actually", especially when considering IPv6, he said. Dealing with network proxy support is another problem area because the "settings are really hard to explain", so there is a need to handle it automatically. DNS handling can be problematic as well.

There are interaction problems too. "Are we on the internet?" is a surprisingly hard question to answer as the system could be connected to a hotspot that requires a login for example. There is a need to make applications aware of internet connectivity—gain or loss—as well. In addition, time synchronization is important, but even more important sometimes is determining the correct timezone. All of this stuff needs to be sorted out before telling applications that the internet is available, Holtmann said.

Beyond that, there are some additional features required for mobile devices today, including a flight (airplane) mode, tethering, and statistics gathering. The latter is particularly important for devices where different kinds of connections have different costs.

Design principles

Holtmann said that he looked at how other network management applications are designed and saw a fundamental problem. Instead of keeping the policy and configuration in the low-level connection manager, those parts live in the UI, he said. He thinks this is the "wrong approach" and that policy and configuration should live in the connection manager so that experts can deal with the hard problems, rather than making users figure them out. In addition, it allows UI developers to change the interface easily, because they don't have to change the policy/configuration handling as part of that.

There are three principles that governed the design of ConnMan from a user interaction perspective. The first is to ask users "only questions they can answer". If there are questions that a user will have trouble answering, the program should try to figure them out for itself. For example, users don't know or care about the various kinds of wireless keys required, so don't ask a bunch of technical questions about WEP vs. WPA vs. pre-shared keys, just ask for the password for the wireless network. The underlying connection manager should recognize what type is required by the wireless network automatically.

The second is to only show current and valid information to the user so that they aren't overwhelmed with useless information. Don't tell them that the Ethernet cable is not plugged in, he said, "they are sitting in front of it". Hide WiFi networks that have too weak of a signal rather than showing a bunch of "<unknown>" access points. The emphasis should be on previous connections that the user has made, because the chances that "the user wants to use it again are really high".

Lastly, interact with the user only when it's needed. Part of the solution is to remember things from previous connections and configurations, but there is more. If ConnMan doesn't make connections quickly enough, users will start to think something is wrong and start "messing with things". Also, use error notifications to tell the user something useful, not just propagating the error message from the underlying code. It was difficult to keep to the principles, Holtmann said, but that was the goal.

Reducing time-to-connect

In keeping with the last principle, ConnMan has done some things differently to try to reduce the time it takes to establish a connection. As Holtmann mentioned earlier, connection establishment for IP is rather complicated with multiple pieces required to get to a point where applications can start using the internet. First there is the low-level IPv4 and IPv6 address and proxy configuration (which includes DHCP, web proxy auto-discovery (WPAD), and IPv6 auto-configuration). After that, it may need to do a WISPr (wireless internet service provider roaming) hotspot login, followed by time synchronization.

That all takes a fair amount of time largely because of various inefficiencies in the current implementations. For one thing, IPv4 and IPv6 discovery and configuration should be done in parallel, rather than serially. Arbitrary timeouts should also be eliminated.

One of the biggest problem areas was DHCP. In current Linux systems, there are multiple levels of D-Bus messages and callout scripts to handle DHCP. There are at least three script/program executions and 2 D-Bus messages, sometimes with arbitrary waits between them, to handle getting an address via DHCP. "Time is just wasted", Holtmann said.

But DHCP only requires 4 UDP messages of 300-600 bytes each, which "can be done a lot faster than you think", he said. ConnMan implemented its own DHCP library that significantly reduced the amount of time it took to get an IP address, while also reducing memory consumption. The time reduction results in "approximately 1-2 seconds that can be given back to users", while the runtime memory savings is very important for some embedded devices.

ConnMan features

The feature list for ConnMan is quite large already, and Holtmann went through a laundry list of them. Obviously, support for WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and WiMAX are "have to have" features, he said, but ConnMan provides quite a bit more than just the connectivity options. There are various low-level features that were mentioned earlier like DHCP (both client and server), WPAD and WISPr, and support for timezone switching. In addition, support for iptables, 6to4 tunnels, DNS resolver and proxy/cache, an HTTP client, tethering support, and more are available. There is also a "personal firewall" feature that is "under discussion right now", he said.

Beyond that, there are two different APIs available for different kinds of applications to use. The Service API is for configuration and is used by the ConnMan UI. It unifies the configuration for all of the different connection options (WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.) as well as providing a single signal-strength API.

The Session API is meant for applications to use to monitor the internet connection. Each application can have one or more sessions that correspond to different connections they are making. The API provides IP address change notifications, so that the application can transparently reconnect. It also allows applications to give priority information regarding how quickly its data needs to be handled (for "realtime" audio vs. background network syncing for example). It was designed with handset and in-vehicle-infotainment (IVI) needs in mind, Holtmann said.

Hotspot login "drove me crazy for a really long time", he said, but ConnMan now has WISPr 1.0 support that works correctly, unlike many other implementations (including the iPhone). It doesn't use a browser but does require an HTTP client. With ConnMan, a device can roam between different WISPr-supporting hotspots using a password agent to provide the proper credentials.

ConnMan also supports WISPr 2.0, but none of the hotspot providers do, so he has been unable to test it. This will support "real" WiFi offloading, and it doesn't require a username/password because the SIM card credentials are used to authenticate.

Proxy support is another problem area that has been solved in ConnMan, Holtmann said. A user's device may need a proxy to reach the internet when they are at work and either need a different proxy or none at all when at home. Changing proxies is difficult to do under Linux, he said. Proxy auto-configuration (PAC) is one solution, but it is JavaScript-based. Since they don't want a JavaScript interpreter in every system, a separate solution was needed.

PAC files can be large (he mentioned Intel's being 4M) and must be downloaded each time a connection is made on networks that use it. To avoid each application requiring its own PAC support, ConnMan centralizes that information, but calls out over D-Bus to the pacrunner daemon to get the required configuration. The implementation is "a little bit nasty, but it works pretty well" in practice, he said, and it alleviates users from having to fiddle with proxy configuration.

Full Network Time Protocol (NTP) support is really only needed for data centers, so ConnMan uses Simple NTP (SNTP) instead. That reduced the footprint and external dependencies required while still providing reasonable time synchronization.

ConnMan had full support for tethering via USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth before either Android or iOS, Holtmann said. It integrates with wpa_supplicant, BlueZ, and the USB gadget subsystem. In addition, there is internal iptables handling as well as DHCP and DNS proxy handling support for ConnMan tethering.

The final feature that Holtmann described is the statistics gathering for ConnMan. Different connection types have different limits, especially when roaming, so it is important for users to know what they have used. Also, some connection types should only be allowed for certain applications, he said. IVI systems may have a SIM, but the car manufacturer may only want that used for certain critical functions (navigation, system updates, etc.). There is Session API support for per-application statistics, but there is still more work to do on that.

In answer to audience questions, Holtmann noted that MeeGo is the driving force behind ConnMan, but that others use it too, including the GENIVI Alliance for IVI applications as well as manufacturers of other small embedded Linux devices. ChromeOS uses a version of ConnMan that was forked over a year ago—which is a bit surprising: "do they want the new features or not?". For those who want to try it on the desktop, he said that Ubuntu is the only regular distribution that currently has ConnMan packages.

In summary, ConnMan is "fast and simple" and does what users expect it to do, Holtmann said. The Session API is unique to ConnMan as far as he knows, and will be very useful to applications. There will be more advanced features coming in the future, he said. Overall, Holtmann made a pretty compelling argument for looking at ConnMan as an alternative to NetworkManager (though he largely avoided talking about the latter), especially for the mobile device use-cases that it targets.

[ I would like to thank the Linux Foundation for travel assistance to attend LinuxCon. ]

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LinuxCon: The mobile Linux patent landscape

It will come as no surprise to regular LWN readers that the patent situation for mobile Linux (and mobile devices in general) is an enormous mess. Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt spoke at LinuxCon to outline how he sees the current landscape and to impart some thoughts on where he sees things going from here. In addition, he described several ways that the community can get involved to help beat back the patent threat, which is most prominent in the mobile space, but certainly not limited to that particular sphere.

Android rising

Bergelt said that his talk would center around Android, because it is the "focus of a lot of ire from Microsoft", but that the same threats exist against any mobile Linux system that becomes popular. The "threat landscape" is very dynamic, he said, because it is constantly changing as various players acquire more patents. Google's move to acquire Motorola Mobility is a "very significant" move that could also change things.

Clearly, Linux is on the rise in the mobile space. Right now it is Android that is leading the way, but he is "hopeful there will be more", citing webOS, LiMo, and MeeGo as possibilities. It is "really a two-horse race" at the moment, between iOS and Android, but others may come along. That would be good because it would offer more freedom of choice, he said.

The rise of Android has been "unprecedented". If you were looking forward from 18 months ago, you couldn't imagine that something would displace iOS on mobile devices, but that's what Android has done. Android now has an "irreversible position in the mobile space", he said.

He put up a famous (or infamous) graphic that circulated earlier this year (at right) which showed all of the different patent lawsuits currently pending against Android devices. While many may have seen that graphic elsewhere, Bergelt said, he credits Microsoft for it. We should credit who created the graphic "rather than who is pushing it", he said. When something is successful, it attracts attention, and that is what is happening with Android right now, and graphics like this one are evidence of that.

Are the current lawsuits a Linux concern or just an Android concern, he asked. It would be easy to see them as only a problem for Android itself, because, other than the kernel, Android shares little with a traditional Linux platform. But you rarely will see an actual Linux lawsuit, Bergelt said, because it has been developed for 20 years in the open. Instead, opponents have "patents on adjacent technologies" that are used to go after Linux-based systems.

Until MeeGo or webOS mature and get significant market share, "mobile Linux is Android". Whether one thinks that Android is the "perfect implementation" of Linux or not, the community needs to "be in support of the mobile Linux that's out there", he said. When other mobile Linux systems mature, "we should support them equally as well".

It is important to "ensure that Android is not pulled off the shelves", Bergelt said. Microsoft and Apple would like to see Android pulled and are using their patent portfolios to "slow or stall the commercial success of Linux". Until other mobile platforms emerge, threats against Android equate to threats against Linux. Android's viability is needed to prove that there is a market for Linux-based platforms, he said.

Secondary market for patents

The stakes are so high that the secondary market for patents is "overheated", Bergelt said. The "per patent price has risen to astronomical levels", which is well beyond any reasonable level for acquiring purely defensive patents. It is not about acquiring patents for licensing revenue either: "You are not going to get your money back from licensing them; that's ridiculous", he said. Companies are recognizing that this "land grab for patents" provides an opportunity to get more for their patents than they would be able to otherwise, which is putting more patents on the market.

The Nortel patents (which recently sold for $4.5 billion to a consortium including Apple and Microsoft) are particularly worrisome, Bergelt said, because they cover mobile communications and network management. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is looking into that transaction, and members of the community can help inform the agency that there are concerns about those patents being used in anti-competitive ways. A resolution like what occurred with the Novell patents, where OIN can license them indefinitely, would be good. That particular outcome deprived Microsoft of the ability to own the Novell patents because of its history of anti-competitive behavior, he said.

Bergelt said that he has some empathy for Microsoft, because the company's history is weighing it down. "If the only thing you've known is being a monopolist, that's how you are going to work", he said. But the DoJ needs accurate information about previous and current behaviors of the purchasers of the Nortel patents. He encouraged those in the audience who knew of such behaviors to report them to the agency so that it could have a "balanced view" of the situation. The DoJ employees are "bright and accomplished", but that patent-based anti-competitive behavior is not something they normally consider, he said.

Companies that are pursuing the strategy of using patents to slow or stall competitors aren't trying to educate anyone, they are, instead, "interested in threatening people". But, "illegal behavior is illegal behavior, and that's what they're practicing", he said. Microsoft and Apple would much rather have it be a duopoly, rather than dealing with the "disruptive situation" that Linux brings. Neither of those two companies "have the ability to compete with Linux in the long term", Bergelt said.

The idea is to "tax" Linux heavily with licensing fees. Microsoft has pursued a "totem-building strategy", where it gets companies to license its "Linux patents", often by throwing those patent licenses into other, unrelated deals. This "creates a presumption" that the licenses have value. There is also a more targeted component where the company uses the other licensees—who may be price-insensitive and thus willing to sign suboptimal agreements—as a weapon against smaller, more price-sensitive companies. Microsoft will also use its patents on a particular technology as the centerpiece and throw in other patent licenses as part of any deal. The FAT filesystem patents, which expire soon, have been used that way. More recently, "active sync" is being used as a centerpiece, and the company claims ten patents on that technology.

But Microsoft cannot use the Novell patents in this way, and that's what Bergelt would like to see happen with the Nortel patents as well. Right now, the licensing fee that is being charged is $15 per mobile device, but Microsoft would like to get that up to $30-40 by adding on other patents. Apple's "touch" patents—which were mostly acquired, not developed by Apple—are being used in this way as well. This can change the decisions that vendors and mobile carriers make because at some point it becomes uneconomical to pay higher per unit royalties, he said.

There is also the problem of "opportunistic patent aggressors", which are typically "non-practicing entities" (NPEs), also known as "patent trolls". These organizations are focused on generating a return. He pointed to Intellectual Ventures (IV) as the "largest patent troll in the world". IV has used investment from universities and foundations—fooled by misleading information into investing in the company—to amass an enormous patent portfolio of 34,000 worldwide patents in 9,000 patent families, he said. IV is "not an innovation company", but is, instead, a "business designed to use patents to drive return".

The market for patents has led companies like InterDigital to put themselves on sale, Bergelt said. That company has 2500+ patents that "almost exclusively relate to mobile communication", and have generated billions of dollars in traditional licensing revenue. Their patents still have life left, but the overheated market provides a way to "cash out" their portfolio. In addition, financial services firms are pouring "billions" into patent companies, and they are looking for a return on those investments, he said.

Fighting the good fight

"Things are going to get worse before they get better", Bergelt said, which echoes numerous observers of the patent mess. He sees a need for "more people to work together" to try to, eventually, fix the problem. There are so many patents that shouldn't have been issued, "free radicals" he called them, that it will take a long time to undo that. Part of the problem is that "code is not searchable in a way that's useful" to determine "prior art", so patent examiners don't have an easy way to disallow patents based on earlier implementations of the idea.

There are several defensive patent pools that have spent "billions to acquire patents". These include RPX, which has 100 members, and AlliedSecurityTrust (AST), which has 22 members, as well as OIN itself. OIN is a "very peculiar company" in that has six members but is "tasked with protecting the community". OIN and its members know that the community is "where new innovation is coming from", Bergelt said, and those innovations can be used to build billion dollar companies.

There is work to be done on mobilizing the open source software community to help fight these patents, he said. There is a "tremendous amount of prior art" that has not been identified, so OIN and others have been working on "structures" where developers can document their ideas in ways that can be used by the patent office. One of those is the "defensive publication", which is like a "patent without claims". OIN has spent "tens of thousands of dollars" to try to educate developers on how to defensively publish their ideas. In addition, there are opportunities for the community to identify existing prior art that can limit the claims or possibly invalidate patents that are in the examination process.

Unlike a technology platform that can be "overtaken by events", open source is a social phenomenon that is unstoppable, Bergelt said; we are not going back to the siloed world. Collaboration "low in the stack", while competing high in the stack, where companies may have intellectual property interests, is the way new systems will be developed.

Bergelt also gave an overview of the work that the Linux Defenders project is doing with help from the community. It is highlighting patent applications that shouldn't go forward by pointing out prior art. That means that the community "saves us the problem of having another free radical". After patents are issued, the Post-Issue Peer to Patent initiative allows the community to potentially invalidate or limit the scope of bad patents. But in order for those projects to work, more community involvement is needed, he said.

The "stakes have been raised", Bergelt said, and the computing landscape is being reshaped by smartphones. New technologies are going to allow these devices to go way beyond where they are today, he said, and that's why he's excited to see things like MeeGo and webOS. Microsoft is now recognizing that personal computing is undergoing a major shift, and it (and others) are fighting the competition in the mobile space with any weapons they can find.

Community engagement is needed in several areas, but identifying and codifying prior art is the biggest piece. We will see lots of bidding for the InterDigital portfolio over the next several months, there will be more IP speculators and trolls trying to cash in, and anti-competitive actions from larger companies will take place. We should support Android and the platforms that come after it and remember that our opponents "are going to fight like hell", Bergelt said.

After Bergelt finished, the Linux Foundation's legal counsel, Karen Copenhaver, amplified one part of Bergelt's message. The DoJ, she said, is waiting to let things play out with the Nortel patents to see if there is a big lawsuit or International Trade Commission (ITC) action using those patents. But the impact of the patents happens "long before that" in meetings between the patent consortium and vendors. So it is imperative that we provide the DoJ information on how these patents affect Linux well before any litigation occurs, she said. Both Copenhaver and Bergelt were clearly reaching out to vendors and others who have been threatened with patent actions by Microsoft, Apple, or other members of the patent-purchasing consortium.

[ I would like to thank the Linux Foundation for travel assistance to attend LinuxCon. ]

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Next week's edition will be published on September 9

The US Labor Day holiday is September 5. In celebration, we will attempt to labor a bit less than usual, with the result that the Weekly Edition that would normally come out on September 8 will be published on the 9th instead.

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