Only a few weeks left until OSCON. Alas, I won’t be making it this year. I’m taking a few weeks with the family in August to drive down the California coast, and with a major software delivery coming up at work, I just don’t have the time for another trip out west. So raise a glass for me, it looks like it’ll be a blast.
Meanwhile …
IBM hands off Lotus Symphony
It seems like everyone these days is in a gifting mood these days, and the various open source foundations are the benefactors. Sun gave OpenOffice to Apache, Hudson went to Eclipse, and now IBM has left a big bundle of love on Apache’s doorstep containing Lotus Symphony, with a note asking Apache to give it a good home.
It makes sense for IBM to make the gift, since Symphony was built on top of OpenOffice. Speculation abounds that Apache will merge the Symphony codebase into the mainline OpenOffice source, creating the One Office Suite to Rule Them All (but remember, one does not simply send a purchase order to Mordor…)
OSCON 2011 — Join today’s open source innovators, builders, and pioneers July 25-29 as they gather at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Ore.
Your travel / patent guide to East Texas
If you work for a high-tech company, there’s an increasing likelihood that you’re going to be taking a trip out to East Texas sometime in your career. That’s because there were 236 patent cases filed there in 2006 (up from 14 in 2003), and it’s just kept growing since then.
Since you may have to travel out there because you’re on the receiving end of a patent troll’s suit, we provide the following handy guide to the area. We’ll start with Marshall, Texas, with a population in the mid-twenty thousands. If you’re there in the winter, stuck in Judge T. John Ward’s courtroom, be sure to check out the Wonderland of Lights, and look for pottery deals year-round.
If your legal troubles bring you to Tyler, home of Judge Leonard Davis, make sure to bring your lightweight suits in the summer, as the average temperatures are in the mid-90s, and nothing spoils your testimony on user interface prior art more than embarrassing sweat stains.
Finally, if you draw Judge David Folsom, you’ll be off to a city that actually straddles two states, Texarkana. Texarkana’s main employer is the Red River Army Depot. Other than that, it has a depressingly sparse Wikipedia page, so maybe you should hope you end up in one of the other venues.
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