The opening salvo in an open war

The shit finally hits the fan…. : On a New Road.

So Oracle, who now owns Sun, who open-sourced Java(1), is suing Google over the way open Android is mis-using open Java.

Sounds like an open and shut case. I, for one, am looking forward to the opening statement.

(1) On November 13, 2006, Sun released much of Java as open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). On May 8, 2007, Sun finished the process, making all of Java’s core code available under free software/open-source distribution terms, aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright.

HP's PC group spends 0.7% of sales on R&D

The research and development budget used to be 9 percent of revenue, Mr. House told me; now it was closer to 2 percent. “In the personal computer group, it is seven-tenths of 1 percent,” he added. “That’s why H.P. had no response to the iPad.”

via Talking Business – The Real Reason for Ousting H.P.’s Chief – NYTimes.com.

HP, by sales, the largest technology company in the world, can’t be bothered to spend money on R&D for its PC division. This is a surprise?  Since when does any PC company spend any money on R&D? Put another way, even if they did spend the money, what would they be researching and developing? PCs are commodity products where any improvements would neither be valued nor used.  On the measures of performance that everyone has for the PC, the product has been more than good enough for a decade.

They did not have a response to the iPad because they did not think anybody needed an iPad.  And that is mostly because Microsoft did not think anybody needed an iPad.

None of this has anything to do with Mr. Hurd. His peer group all agree on these fundamentals.