"Once you reach a certain size, you become more of a target," Alan Schoenbaum told us in a recent interview. Schoenbaum is the general counsel of Rackspace, which achieved $1 billion in revenue for the first time last year. He said that patent litigation against the San Antonio company has "accelerated over the last two years."

Until recently, Red Hat was virtually alone among large technology companies in explicitly advocating abolition, not just reform, of patents on software. Now, the fast-growing hosting company promises to be a key ally in the free software movement's fight against software patents.

Oracle has taken its share of knocks for marketing a version of Linux that's package-for-package compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but according to Oracle senior engineering veep Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Linux's reputation as a copycat is entirely undeserved.

Coekaerts argued that although Red Hat markets a Linux distribution that's put together a specific way, it has no exclusive rights to the code for the various software packages that make up that distribution.

By the time RHEL 6 shipped with a new version of the kernel, Red Hat had already back-ported some 700,000 lines of code to work with RHEL 5's outdated kernel. "Talk about forks!" Coekaerts said. "That's not mainline Linux, that's a totally different, unique tree."

"Got an e-mail from Microsoft wanting to help 'certify' Minecraft for Windows 8," Persson tweeted yesterday. "I told them to stop trying to ruin the PC as an open platform."

Microsoft has caught some heat for effectively requiring all developers to play by its rules. To not so do would mean running the risk of being ignored by the majority of gamers who wouldn't otherwise search around the Web for a title.

If you disabled Java when the last zero-day exploit was spotted in the wild, then you might consider doing so again . . . or dumping Java altogether?

To recap, this Java bug is even worse than the last critical Java vulnerability. It puts one billion users of Oracle’s Java SE, Java 5, 6 and 7, at risk. It could be exploited using these browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. If you visit a maliciously crafted website, attackers could gain total control of your PC. Wow, thanks a lot Oracle.

An old adage that many programmers stick to: "It takes a certain type of mind to learn programming, and not everyone can do it."

People may study success in college-level courses and conclude "some people aren't fit to learn programming". However, such a conclusion severely oversteps the bounds of the observed evidence. How much failure could instead be attributed to how the programming is taught (too abstract?), or which style of programming is taught (too imperative?), or the programming environment (compilation, no immediate feedback?).

Security Explorations reported 19 Java 7 security issues to Oracle on Apr. 2. Those issues included the two zero-day -- unpatched -- vulnerabilities that attackers are exploiting to infect computers with malware, Gowdiak said Wednesday via email.

The company continued to report Java 7 vulnerabilities to Oracle in the following months until the total number reached 29. "We demonstrated 16 full Java SE 7 sandbox compromises with the use of our bugs," Gowdiak said.

One of the changes that 5.5.27 brings in an extension to the mysql-test-run script — the driver script of the mysql-test suite — which makes it look for test cases in a new directory. In addition to the usual location (that is, the mysql-test/ directory in the source tree), it will now look for test cases in the internal/mysql-test/ directory. Does this mean that test cases are no longer open source? Oracle did not reply to my question. But indeed, there is evidence that this guess is true. For example, this commit mail shows that new test cases, indeed, go in this “internal” directory, which is not included in the MySQL source distribution.

It’s difficult to find anything more valuable to external developers than test cases. But arguably the revision history is. And it seems that Oracle is going to keep this information to itself too. Public MySQL trees on launchpad with the revision history are not being updated.

I believe blaming the rapid release process in general would make the search for the cause of Firefox’ problems a bit too easy, even if there is little denying that Mozilla has developed a talent for shooting itself in the foot and the rapid release process can look like a trainwreck from certain angles.

It often seems that Mozilla is trying to too hard to be everything to everyone, and has lost its identity in the process. Remembering its roots will always be important and when Mozilla does, it builds fantastic browsers.

Ubisoft hasn't exactly garnered much goodwill among PC gamers thanks to the controversial DRM efforts it has attached to its PC releases over the years.

The exploit, publicized this morning by programmer Tavis Ormandy, utilizes a bug in a browser plug-in installed alongside the UPlay software that's needed to run many of the publisher's recent PC games. With the plugin installed, opening a link to a page with a specific bit of Javascript code allows that page to open up the UPlay software and load seemingly any code it wants onto your PC.

Mozilla has released Firefox 14, a modest update with some small new features and support for encrypted searching, which will keep your Google queries safe from anyone snooping around your network.

The most visible change in this release — at least for those who keep an eye on the URL bar — is the new secure search feature. The change means that Firefox’s built-in search bar now sends searches to Google’s SSL-encrypted HTTPS address by default.