The Government Accountability Office has a new report out about patent litigation. The study, which was commissioned as part of the America Invents Act, really features little in the way of useful conclusions or policy suggestions. It ends with a call that the Director of the Patent office “consider examining trends in patent infringement litigation” in order to make the examination process better, and suggests (obviously) that better “patent quality” would be better for everyone.
Of course, the reason the balance of power is so permanently out of whack at the Patent Office is that examiners must approve or deny patents after less than 20 hours of examination. And the Patent Office’s expenses aren’t paid with tax dollars; they’re paid entirely by applicants—the companies and individuals that want more patents, and have no interest in the public or competitors stopping their forthcoming monopolies.
Read more at ArsTechnica.
The Document Foundation yesterday announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.5, the latest update to the acclaimed 4.0 branch. This is a bug fix update, but it does address 100 bugs and several annoying regressions. All users of the 3.6 and 4.0 branches are encouraged to upgrade.
Piston Cloud, focused on the OpenStack cloud computing platform, has announced that it will donate hardware and developer resources to the Cloud Foundry community, as the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company joins itself more closely with VMware-spinoff Pivotal. Also, Joshua McKenty, CTO and co-founder of Piston, will join the Cloud Foundry Advisory Board. This partnership between Piston Cloud and Pivotal could have a big impact on the IaaS, PaaS and OpenStack cloud scene.