Microsoft offers free software to Louisiana SMBs (InfoWorld)

Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new program, called the Software License Relief Program, in conjunction with the 2007 Hope & Recovery Summit, which is commemorating the second anniversary of both storms. Microsoft is working with the Louisiana Small Business Development Center (LSBDC) to offer the program, which will launch next month and gives eligible small businesses access to software from Microsoft, including Windows and Office, free of charge for a year.

The program doesn't come without a catch, however — there are eligibility requirements for businesses, one of which is to purchase a three-year Microsoft Open Value License that spreads out software license payments over three years. Open Value bundles core software offerings from Microsoft into one license. After purchasing the software, businesses can bring the first year's invoice to any LSBDC, and Microsoft will pay the bill. The businesses themselves are responsible for the last two years of the license.

Microsoft estimates that for a typical small business of 50 employees, with 25 PCs licensing Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system suite of programs, that year of licensing at no charge could save the organization as much as $12,050. The company traditionally does not disclose the specific cost for Open Value licenses because they vary by company.

To receive the program's benefits, small businesses also must have been in business prior to the dates Hurricanes Katrina and Rita made landfall — Aug. 29, 2005 or Sept. 24, 2005, respectively. Other requirements include having less than 200 employees; being based in one of the 19 federal disaster-designated Louisiana parishes; and having applied for small-business assistance through at least one federal or state government program, whether the application was approved or not.

Microsoft has donated millions of dollars to the recovery effort in the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which devastated the region two years ago. In the first year after the storms hit, the company donated more than $11 million in cash and technology to organizations such as the American Red Cross; Governor's Funds in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama; and America's Second Harvest. The company also offered grants to establish or rebuild community technology centers destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Tech in Brief: Hollywood studios set $4 billion summer record

CBS, Washington Post in online news deal (AP)

The two companies are planning to announce the arrangement on Tuesday and begin sharing news video and stories about the presidential campaign on the same day. Readers will be able to engage reporters from both CBS’s news division and the Post in live chats and other online interactions.

Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for the Post’s online division, said the news-sharing arrangement applied only to the online outlets of the two news organizations.

The CBS network is part of CBS Corp., while the Post’s parent company is The Washington Post Co., which also owns Newsweek magazine, the Kaplan education business and the online magazine Slate.

Asustek to launch low-price computer (AP)

Developed with Intel Corp., the Asustek laptop with a 7-inch screen will also come in a more sophisticated version that will target the developed world, said company Chairman Jonney Shih.

“It will be a laptop that’s easy to learn, easy to play and easy to work with … one targeting both the emerging and mature markets,” Shih said in an interview.

More than 500 engineers, mostly from Asustek’s bases in Taiwan and China, were involved in the development of the low-price laptop, Shih said.

A simple model of the product will be priced at $199 at the retail level, while one with more features will sell for between $245 and $299, he said.

The laptop, which will run the Linux operating system, will carry the company’s ASUS brand.

Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman, said the project is part of the company’s “World Ahead” program — which involves investing $1 billion over five years to deliver low-cost computers around the world.

Asustek said early this year the company hoped to produce half a million of the low-price laptops this year. Officials later said the volume could be sharply cut because of the late launch and the shortage of a few key components.

Asustek is the world’s largest maker of computer motherboards. Of the 138 million desktop personal computers sold worldwide last year, 56 million units, or about 40 percent, were built on ASUS brand motherboards.

A latecomer in making laptops, Asustek is now among the world’s top 10 laptop makers.

Unlocking the iPhone could invite DMCA suit (Macworld.com)

Apple and AT&T may have a legal case against unlockers under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), especially if they try to sell software code or devices that unlock the iPhone, the lawyers said. But the legal landscape gets a bit complicated — there’s a legal exception to the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions that allows individual mobile phone users to unlock their devices for use on other networks.

So figuring out how to unlock the iPhone yourself is not likely to be a DMCA violation, most of the IP lawyers said. But posting instructions or code online, even for free, may earn you a cease and desist letter from an unfriendly lawyer, and selling software or a device that unlocks the phone is inviting trouble, most of the lawyers said.

But there’s plenty of disagreement among IP lawyers about the interpretation of the DMCA.

“It’s an extremely grey [area], because I don’t think the exemption was altogether clear,” said Bart Showalter, an intellectual property lawyer in Dallas with the Baker Botts LLP law firm. “The idea of trying to use copyright to, in a sense, establish exclusivity in a service contract … is going to be an interesting thing to watch.”

John McLaughlin, founder of Uniquephones, based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, had planned to release software Saturday that would allow users to unlock their iPhone. But early Saturday morning, McLaughlin said he received a phone call from a man saying he was from a law firm representing AT&T. The caller said McLaughlin could be sued for copyright infringement.

Two other groups have claimed to have unlocked the iPhone.

Representatives of both AT&T and Apple declined to comment Monday on possible legal actions against unlockers.

Showalter suggested that unlocking the iPhone and posting code or instructions for free would likely fall under the exception to the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions, thus protecting the unlocker from legal action.

The exception allows circumvention of device controls “for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network,” according to language from the U.S. registrar of copyrights. So if a hacker unlocks the iPhone, then posts the unlocking code for free, he’s engaging in a legal activity and enabling others to engage in the same legal activity, said Michael Lewis, an IP lawyer with Fox Rothschild LLP.

If that hacker is sued, he could probably argue that posting of the unlocking code is protected by free speech provisions in U.S. law, according to Lewis.

Other IP lawyers disagreed. Movie studios have successfully sued Web site operators for distributing the DeCSS DVD-copying code, noted Carole Handler, an IP lawyer with Foley and Lardner LLP. The unlocker of the iPhone who posts code online could be held liable for secondary copyright infringement, she said.

“I don’t see that [Apple and AT&T] have a choice,” Handler said. “They have to do something. If you don’t protect your intellectual property, it’s gone.”

Lewis’ colleague, Gerry Norton, agreed, saying the unlocking exception was narrowly written. “The exception was just for the end user,” he said.

Most of the lawyers agreed that selling software to unlock the iPhone, as McLaughlin was planning to do, would invite a lawsuit under the DMCA. “The courts seem to have less sympathy for people who are doing things to make a buck,” Lewis said.

But there wasn’t even unanimous agreement on the legal liability of selling unlocking software. If the software being distributed targeted only the network lock on the iPhone, the developer could have a defense, Showalter said.

“It does seem a little unusual to me that they say somebody can unlock their phone, but if someone tells them how to do it, that’s a violation of the DMCA,” he said. “If the software that’s being sold is only doing the minimum amount that’s necessary to allow it to interoperate with other services, you may have some support in the DMCA exception.”

Beyond the legal questions about unlocking the iPhone, Apple and AT&T could face their own legal challenges, Handler said. The exclusive contract between the two companies could lead to an antitrust lawsuit if a competitor or customer could successfully argue there’s no other device like the iPhone available on the market, she said.

“Consumers want new technology,” she said. “This is the era of the consumer controlling the media. When the consumer is told he or she can’t do something, they get pretty upset, and they start claiming conspiracy, antitrust and the whole bit.”

As Sugar 5.0 debuts, SugarCRM looks to developer version (InfoWorld)

Sugar 5.0 is one of the most significant releases from the open source startup since its founding in 2004, according to John Roberts, SugarCRM's CEO. Around 40 engineers at the 125-person company have been working on the release for the past 18 months, he said.

Looking ahead, the vendor plans to also package Sugar as a development platform probably under the product name Sugar Developer edition. "Sugar has always been a platform," Roberts said. As well as traditional CRM functionality, third-party developers have already created other capabilities based on Sugar, including financial and human resources management modules.

SugarCRM unveiled the beta release of Sugar 5.0 on Monday, with the final version of the software due out toward the end of September. As with other Sugar releases, the new version comes in three editions: one open source and the other two commercial releases for which the vendor charges for additional functionality and technical support.

Formerly known as Sugar Open Source, the free edition of the software changes its name to Sugar Community Edition with the debut of release 5.0. Another difference is that  instead of the vendor's own Sugar Public License, a derivation of the Mozilla Public License, as had previously been the case.

As before, users can deploy the commercial editions, Professional and Enterprise, in a variety of ways, including on-site and on-demand along with appliance and stack versions. Customers can move between on-site and on-demand versions of Sugar as they choose, Roberts said.

In Sugar 5.0, the vendor has written a new on-demand architecture for the hosted versions of its software. The architecture is multi-instance, meaning that each customer receives their own instance of the CRM software instead of all customers sharing the same instance of the software, often known as multitenancy. The new release also gives users the ability to build custom modules and share them across their Sugar deployments.

SugarCRM hopes that the new architecture will let the company compete more aggressively with current and future on-demand CRM rivals, especially market pioneer . While both Oracle and SAP already provide hosted versions of their CRM software, Microsoft is preparing to roll out its Dynamics CRM Live service later this year. SAP is also planning an on-demand applications suite, code-named A1S, which includes CRM functionality and is due out early in 2008.

SugarCRM has been in the on-demand market for over two years, and 40 percent of the vendor's 2,000 paying customers have opted for that deployment, Roberts said.

Like other commercial open source startups, including database vendor MySQL, SugarCRM harbors ambitions of some day becoming a $1 billion enterprise player. "We've always believed we can be a large enterprise public company," Roberts said, pointing that the CRM market has plenty of room for growth since many companies have yet to invest in the software. SugarCRM is looking to go public in 2008 or 2009, he added.

SugarCRM is already widening its global horizons and is in the process of opening an office in Beijing, Roberts said. To support its on-demand operations, .

Sugar 5.1 is due out in December and version 5.5 will likely appear in mid-2008, Roberts said. SugarCRM plans to incorporate more Web 2.0 collaborative capabilities in its CRM software such as wikis, real-time chat, and desktop sharing.

IDC: Server Sales Continue Upswing (NewsFactor)

"The server market not only continues to experience solid growth, but revenue growth has accelerated over the past seven quarters," observed IDC's Enterprise Platforms vice president Matt Eastwood.

For the most part, according to Eastwood, growth is being driven by a broad-based move among enterprises to adopt new distributed-computing workload configurations. The new enterprise focus on fostering business growth increasingly requires "both scale-up consolidated systems and scale-out distributed configurations to meet very different workload needs in today's enterprise," he said.

Dell Makes Headway

IDC noted that server sales in the under $25,000 category grew by a robust 11 percent with respect to the year-ago reporting period. By contrast, revenue from midrange enterprise servers essentially remained flat at 0.2 percent growth, and with high-end enterprise servers showing a minor 1.7 percent bump up from one year earlier.

IBM, as expected, held onto its No. 1 status overall by capturing a 31 percent share of the market. Big Blue was able to leverage the popularity of its System x, System z, and System p servers to increase factory revenue by 6.4 percent.

But the market's biggest surprise story in the quarter came from No. 4 Dell, which grew its factory revenue by an impressive 20.2 percent with respect to the year-ago period — the most robust growth of any leading vendor. The embattled server-maker will no doubt be pointing this out to investors as a sign that its new enterprise strategy is making some headway.

Blade Sales Accelerate

Blade servers continued to be the fastest-growing segment of the worldwide server market, noted IDC research analyst Jed Scaramella. During the second quarter, blade-server revenue grew by 36.7 percent to $875 million.

"IDC believes blades are in the next wave of product evolution and customer adoption," Scaramella said. "As I.T. organizations become more familiar with the platform, they are able to deploy blades in I.T. environments that are suited to take advantage of the management capabilities, as well as the cost and serviceability benefits."

Hewlett-Packard maintained its market-leading position in the blade server segment by growing its revenue by 71.9 percent year-over-year. The company currently holds 47.2 percent market share, which is 9.7 points above its revenue market share from just one year earlier.

Windows Rules

The sale of Linux-based servers rose by 19 percent to $1.8 billion in the quarter. However, the open-source system still has a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft's Windows server revenue, which grew by 18.7 percent to $5.0 billion and a market-leading 38.2 percent revenue share in the quarter.

By contrast, revenue growth in the Unix server category declined by 4 percent with respect to the year-earlier period. However, due to continuing success in the high-end segment, Unix revenues totaled $4.2 billion in the quarter, which was good enough for a 31.7 percent share of the worldwide server market.

"While we still believe that spending for Unix-based servers will decline over time, the competition for leadership" between the Unix market's top suppliers "is expected to remain heated for some time," said IDC's Enterprise Platforms research director Steve Josselyn.

YouTube criticized over Neo-Nazi clips (Reuters)

The videos hosted on YouTube include clips of a 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda film "Jud Suess" and two music videos of outlawed German far-right rock band Landser, which show footage from World War II depicting Nazi military operations.

Report Mainz, which is due to air the program, said in a statement that Social Democrat (SPD) parliamentarian Dieter Wiefelspuetz said airing the clips on YouTube in Germany was scandalous. Report Mainz quoted him as saying: "Publishing these films amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of the people."

Report Mainz also said that Germany's Central Council of Jews Vice President Salomon Korn was considering pressing charges against Google Germany.

According to the statement from Report Mainz, German youth protection body has complained to Google Germany more than 100 times and asked Google, which bought YouTube last year, to remove the clips.

Some of the material has been on the site for almost a year.

Google Germany was not immediately available for comment.

More than 60 years after the Holocaust, Germany is grappling with a rise in support for Nazi ideas. Neo-Nazi violence in Germany has reached its highest level since reunification in 1990.

(Reporting by Nicola Leske)

Amidst Mac efforts, EA also pushes iPod games (Macworld.com)

Nearly a year ago, , and EA was an early supplier. iPods games, available for $4.99 each, run the gamut from puzzle to card, arcade and more.

Although Apple and its publishing partners don’t reveal the number of games sold, EA is arguably Apple’s biggest iPod games publisher: Seven of the 18 games now available from the iTunes Store are EA titles, more than any other single publisher. EA’s contributions to the iPod game library include a version of the classic popular action puzzle game Tetris, the number crossword game Sudoku, the Asian-flavored tile-matching game Mahjong, a title, solitaire, and most recently, two games based on the hugely popular game series The Sims.

To find out about the market for iPod games, we spoke to James Holloway, EA Mobile’s managing producer of emerging platforms. In his role with EA, Holloway is front and center when it comes to creating games that are fun to play on Apple’s fifth-generation iPods.

Designing for the iPod

When Apple first revealed plans to publish games for the iPod, some industry watchers scoffed—limited processor performance, a small display and the device’s Click Wheel interface seemed like serious limitations, compared to modern handheld game systems like the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). However, Holloway says that developing games for the iPod is no different than designing them to run on a mobile phone; in some ways, he adds, it’s better.

“The Click Wheel interface is a good thing,” Holloway said. “It keeps the gameplay simple and keeps the game mechanics simple. We’re really good at developing games for devices that weren’t originally meant to play games.”

What’s more, the iPod’s homogeneity as a platform makes it an easier target than mobile phones, which are made by many different manufacturers. “With the iPod there’s once device, with mobile phones you have to develop for varying capabilities,” he explained.

That’s not to say that there aren’t challenges creating iPod games, however.

“We have to support multiple languages,” said Holloway. “When you buy our games, they have Japanese, French, German and Spanish support built into them. And if you change your language settings on the iPod, the game will automatically detect and dynamically change what language it’s using.”

When it comes to actual game design, however, the same rules apply for the iPod as for other systems, Holloway said.

“The games we make to be picked up and played quickly, and they also have to be interruptible and short—something you can play for a couple of minutes, put it down, then come back to later,” he added.

Casual and innovative

This emphasis on approachability isn’t something that means gameplay experiences on the iPod have to be shallow, Holloway warns.

With EA’s most recent releases, and , the company has taken familiar gameplay elements and mixed them with new gaming styles. In either game, you have the option of just playing a simple game against a computer-controlled opponent, or you can create an in-game player who has goals and aspirations, just like The Sims in the computer game.

“I don’t want to confuse ‘casual’ with ‘not innovative,’” Holloway said. “Even though they’re easy to play, they have a lot of depth and interesting twists. Mobile platforms are a great opportunity in general to explore new gameplay mechanics. You make it so people can understand how to play the game from the beginning—‘I know what I’m supposed to do.’ It can be intuitive, but refreshing and different.”

Solid partnership

During a May conference call with financial analysts, EA’s senior management to release four new games for the iPod. The Sims Bowling and The Sims Pool are the first two.

Holloway is staying mum on any other offerings for the iPod or when they might be coming, however, preferring to leave those sorts of announcements to someone else at EA. Still, he’s very complimentary to Apple about the iPod, and Apple’s strategy with it as a game platform.

“I think the games are affordable for most people. For what people are getting, it’s a tremendous value,” he said. “We’re very pleased with what Apple has done and we think our partnership is a really good one.”

Microsoft's Antipiracy Software Nails Legit Users (NewsFactor)

WGA is a tool in Microsoft's fight against piracy, which is costing the software industry upwards of $29 billion a year, according to the Business Software Alliance. WGA forces users to validate their copy of the operating system to receive updates for Windows XP. For Vista, invalid copies are stripped of features such as DirectX support and the Aero interface.

There are no reports on how many customers were affected or what caused the glitch. And although Microsoft fixed the issue rapidly, the problems left plenty of irate customers in its wake.

Windows Users Speak Out

One user who called himself "Mhornyak" left this comment on Microsoft's WGA blog: "You really ought to work on making WGA actually an advantage. Right now, users of pirate copies of Windows had an extra couple days of use."

Another user by the name of "Michaelosity" commented that he paid well in excess of $200 for his copy of Vista Ultimate and getting the "your copy of Vista appears to be counterfeit" message, having functionality removed, and not being able to install updates from Microsoft "doesn't make for a very good experience."

Other users were satisfied that Microsoft fixed the problem in less than a day, although some took a sideways jab at Redmond. "I also want to say, because I know how painful all-nighters are: Congrats to the WGA team for getting things working again. It's not your fault that the company policy is bad," Mhornyak concluded.

Open-Source Advantage

Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment on the root of the problem, but Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis, suggested a broad perspective of the situation that might offer some good cheer to the open-source community.

When you compare closed-source software to subscription-based open-source software or just freeware open-source software, he said, some of the advantages of open source become apparent. "It shouldn't be so difficult to install and manage your software," Shimmin said. "I would think the days of entering radically long key digits and having your machine sniff out other pieces of software that might be running against policy are numbered."

Shimmin recalled a semirecent Microsoft Office version that sniffed out versions of the program running on a network without individual licenses. Consumers, he argued, are fed up with that approach.

"This snafu is not such a travesty for enterprise customers because they are not going to be rolling this out on a Sunday hoping to get everything running by Monday," he said. "Problems like this hit consumers the hardest."