legal

Google says it will keep Motorola's phones at arm's length at all costs. And Motorola's patents are tricky to enforce. So now what?

Europe likes privacy; China likes control; the Middle East likes to shut off the Internet. Does just having a Web site make your company a target?

Rather than looking into antitrust, the EU should investigate Google's privacy practices, as much to show the rest of IT what its risk is as to reveal anything about Google.

I don't know, but I do know that it's going to make a mess of the technology business and all of us will pay for it.

In some ways, proprietary software contribution agreements are a lot easier to deal with: a developer writes some code, a company pays for it, and the developer's code is owned by the company, for all eternity. But with the wildly different licenses, organizations, and developer motivations that exist in the open source world, it's hard to get standard templates for these agreements created.

Late last month, the folks over at SourceForge.Net found themselves in a bit of a kerfuffle regarding their decision to start enforcing US export laws regarding the transfer of technology to certain individuals, companies, and entities (a.k.a. nations the US has deemed bad news). How they dealt with the community backlash is a good lesson in compromise.

Who is this so-called "Papermaster", and what do the big brains at Apple want with him?