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To quote Rob Pike on doing one thing and doing it well, "those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."

(But, yes, pedantry aside I agree with your original point!)

Infringement is a matter of fact - so the judge is saying to the jury:
"assume for the moment that Oracle have copyright: if so, on the facts
in front of you, is it a fact that Google infringed? If they did infringe, did they have any defence"

That's a finding of fact by the jury: if Google never infringed, Oracle have no case. If google have a valid defence, Oracle have no case.

This gets the finding of fact, which is all that the jury can do. _When_ this case goes to appeal, they can leave aside the factual questions put to the jury - "Jury nullification" - and concentrate on the issues of law.

Then the judge goes on to establish the law as to whether APIs are actually copyrightable.

Then the judge will go on to decide the patent issue

http://mobile.twitter.com/neilhimself/status/198880813520...

It's pretty obvious where that point is.

(The great thing about distributed source control is you can marshall patches in large groups with less merge friction, which means sucking everything of interest out of a branch is much less time consuming. But you still need everybody to agree on where "upstream" lives and what they're resyncing with. Apache OpenOffice really has no point, it exists because Oracle had an attack of ego and Apache inexplicably went along with it.)

The only major advantage of the Jury system in the USA is that the Jury has the legal ability to nullify laws. If a Jury decides that a law or a ruling is unjust they could declare the defendant not guilty, even if he is clearly guilty of breaking the law.

It'll be a while before Apache's office catches up, and then it has to thrive and exceed the others. Which I don't really see happen.

You only have to load the two up side-by-side to see which one is actually a more "complete" and usable office suite, and just look at the code to see which has cleaner code. In one of the LibreOffice releases they deleted / translated some thousands of German comments and hundreds of unused functions, for instance. That suggests they had a much better understanding of the code and what it does and what is used before Apache OO even existed.

I think Libre has "won" and will probably continue to "win" for a while yet. Until then, the others are just free sources of patches.

I also found a post saying that someone is working on packaging gimp 2.8 for Debian unstable, so I'll wait for that. I can live without pressure sensitivity anyway.

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gimp-2.8-release...

I can see myself using Cyanogen in the same mode to recover some features disabled by my provider and to get rid of the bloatware they've hardwired into the phone.

I doubt every person jail breaking his or her iPhone is a geek.

Whenever vendors go to far the number of "hobbyists" tend to grow significantly.

The US habit of throwing people off pretty much *ensures* it is NOT a jury of your peers, as originally constituted.

Cheers,
Wol