Hello, and welcome to another fun-filled week of frolic and mayhem in the software industry. We’ll get right to the news, but first this short commercial message.
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And now, back to our program.
iPhone developers ask for whom the suit trolls
The continued three-ring-circus that is software intellectual property continued to roll right along last week, with a group of iPhone app developers the latest to feel the sting. Lodsys sent legal nasty-grams to a number of developers who were taking advantage of the evidently patented idea of doing in-app purchases. This has evidently led Apple to put some new iPhone apps, which use the feature, on hold.
Interestingly, Lodsys claims that Apple, among others (including Microsoft and Google) already licenses the patent, but that it doesn’t extend to developers using Apple’s in-app function. That’s going to be an interesting argument to watch play out. Does that mean if Apple licensed a technology to render an iOS control, and developers use that control in their applications, they’d need to get a license as well?
Apart from being a headache for both Apple and the developer community, there could be other far-reaching ramifications. For example, would Steam’s in-game purchasing of weapons and clothing be subject to the same patent? Until Congress or the courts step in and stop the madness, it’s anyone’s guess.
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Mono strikes out on its own
As previously reported, Novell’s new overlords (that would be Attachmate, which still sounds like some kind of “As Seen On TV” product to me) gave the Mono developers their walking papers last week. Now Mono guru Miguel De Icaza has formed a new company to pick up the pieces. The company, called Xamarin (which sounds like a prescription sleeping aid to me), will offer commercial Mono support, as well as .NET tools for Android and iOS.
Knit One, perl 5.14
Perl 6 may be languishing out there with “Duke Nukem Forever,” but there’s still new perl to be had. This week, perl 5.14 hit the streets. Improved Unicode support seems to be a major thrust of the release (click here for all the gripping details.)
For those of us who grew up (professionally, at least) with perl in our toolbag, it’s good to see continued active development on the language. While I may not pull that particular tool out as often as I used to, I still find myself writing the occasional script to grovel over a file and pull out the golden nuggets I need.
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