OASIS seems to have taken it to heart, because it has today announced what looks to me like the perfect basis for technology standards in an open source world.Their new rules2 include a new "mode" which standards projects can opt into using. In this new mode, all contributors promise that they will not assert any patents they may own related to the standard the project is defining. Contributors make this covenant:Each Obligated Party in a Non-Assertion Mode TC irrevocably covenants that, subject to Section 10.3.2 and Section 11 of the OASIS IPR Policy, it will not assert any of its Essential Claims covered by its Contribution Obligations or Participation Obligations against any OASIS Party or third party for making, having made, using, marketing, importing, offering to sell, selling, and otherwise distributing Covered Products that implement an OASIS Final Deliverable developed by that TC.

The covenant described in Section 10.3.1 may be suspended or revoked by the Obligated Party with respect to any OASIS Party or third party if that OASIS Party or third party asserts an Essential Claim in a suit first brought against, or attempts in writing to assert an Essential Claim against, a Beneficiary with respect to a Covered Product that implements the same OASIS Final Deliverable.

There's a redline PDF document showing the changes - the new stuff is mainly in section 10, although other areas had to be changed to match as well, I gather.

White House officials plan to release Version 2.0 of the new government data portal, Data.gov, in the next couple of months, federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra said today. The federal Web site, which makes government data available for public reuse, will likely feature new tagging capabilities and an expanded array of information tools, Kundra said. Data.gov, which debuted May 21, has 87,000 data feeds from various government agencies. That number is expected to top 100,000 by next week, Kundra said.

Microsoft might be hesitating on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in Internet Explorer 8, but Google's pressing on. The search giant's engineers are building a JavaScript library to render static and dynamic SVG in Microsoft's browser. Google promised that the library, a Javascript shim, will simply drop into IE.

SVG has a huge presence on the web. This facet of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML 5 spec is supported in Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and Apple's iPhone, and is used in Google Maps and Google Docs. It also topped a list of features wanted by developers in a OpenAJAX browser wish list last year.

There's suspicion, though, that the reason has more to do with Microsoft's internal politics, with the company wanting graphics and drawing in IE done using Silverlight instead. SVG Web is more than an answer to Microsoft's foot-dragging, however. Google has declared for HTML 5 on the web, proclaiming last week that the web programming model has "won". Support for graphics capabilities in HTML 5 should also be seen as Google's partial answer to Adobe Systems' Flash. Google has complained that Flash is not open source and its development is not driven by the community. Google said the benefit of SVG Web is that it would sit inside the DOM whereas Flash "sits on top of the web, it's not part of the web"

WASHINGTON, June 3 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is investigating a possible no talent-poaching pact by big tech businesses, a tech industry source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

Genentech said it was cooperating with the probe.

A Google spokesman confirmed that the search engine giant had been contacted and was cooperating but had no further comment.

The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation's largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review. The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on the search engine giant Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple, maker of the popular iPhone; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Without a doubt, the product that has the entire web buzzing right now is Google Wave (), the search giant’s newly announced communication platform. Earlier this week, we brought you detailed information on the new Google () product in our article Google Wave: A Complete Guide, but now we want to explore exactly why everyone is so excited about Google Wave. You’ve probably heard people talk about Google Wave being a game-changer, a disruptive product, or maybe even as an email killer. But while keywords and phrases like these grab people’s attention, they don’t explain why or how Google Wave could be a paradigm-shifter. In this article, we explore these questions by highlighting some of Google Wave’s most unique and promising features. By exploring these features, we can better understand the potential of this new technology.

Operational Transformation This is the crucial part of Wave’s technology. Google Wave makes extensive use of Operational Transformations (OT) which are executed on the server. When an user edits a collaborative document opened by several users, the client program provides an Optimistic UI by immediately displaying what he/she types but it also sends the editing operation to the server to be ratified hoping that it will be accepted by the server. The client waits for the server to evaluate the operation and will cache any other operations until the server replies. After the server replies, all cached operations are sent from client to server in bulk. The server, considering operations received from other clients, will transform the operation accordingly and will inform all clients about the transformation, and the clients will update their UI accordingly. Operations are sent to the server and propagated to each client on a character by character basis, unless it is a bulk operation. The server is the keeper of the document and its version is considered the “correct” version. In the end, each client will be updated with the final version received from the server, which is the result of possibly many operational transformations. There are recovery means provided for communication failure or server/client crash. All XML documents exchanged between the client and the server carry a checksum for rapid identification of miscommunications.

Google Wave is a new communication and collaboration tool that lets people work together more productively online. If you haven't already seen the demo presentation, please take a jump over to learn more about Google Wave by visiting http://wave.google.com/.

If you'd like to learn more about the Google Wave APIs: request access to the sandbox, check out the code samples, and join us in the Google Wave API forum.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama will announce on Friday the creation of a "cyber czar" position, stepping up his administration's efforts to better protect the nation's computer networks. The White House appointment will be followed in coming days by the formal creation of a new military cyber command that will coordinate the defense of Pentagon computer networks and improve U.S. offensive capabilities in cyberwarfare.

The cybersecurity chief will report to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council, a compromise resulting from a fierce White House turf battle over the responsibilities and powers of the new office. Mr. Obama won't announce on Friday the person who will fill the new job. That isn't expected for at least a few more days.

Christine A. Varney, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department's Antitrust Division, will participate in the eighth annual International Competition Network (ICN) conference in Zurich, Switzerland, from June 3-5, 2009. At the conference, senior government antitrust officials, private-sector antitrust experts from around the world, and representatives from intergovernmental organizations will meet to discuss competition issues.

The ICN conference will focus on the recent accomplishments of its five substantive working groups which address: unilateral conduct, mergers, cartels, advocacy and competition policy implementation. Conference panels will include discussions on proposed Recommended Practices for Substantive Merger Analysis and the analysis of tying and discounting arrangements, and will promote the general exchange of views regarding competition law and policy among the participants. Members also will finalize work programs for the coming year.

In October 2001, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) joined with antitrust agencies from 13 other jurisdictions around the world (Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Zambia) to create the ICN. The ICN now includes 107 member agencies from 96 jurisdictions. The goal of the ICN is to provide a forum for antitrust agencies to address antitrust enforcement and policy issues of common interest and formulate proposals for procedural and substantive convergence through a results-oriented agenda and structure.

The next revision of the HTML web language will make Adobe's Flash technology largely redundant, according to the chief executive of browser company Opera. The open web standards included in HyperText Markup Language version 5 (HTML 5) provide a viable alternative to Adobe's proprietary Flash for the delivery of rich media web content, Jon von Tetzchner told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.

Von Tetzchner said that HTML 5's handling of rich media meant that Flash — Adobe's ubiquitous, proprietary multimedia platform for the web — is becoming largely unnecessary. "You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash."