OStatic

The U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on Bilski vs. Kappos on Monday, November 9th. Not surprisingly, many open source advocates are on the edge of their seats because it's an opportunity for the Supreme Court to decide that software is not patentable. Confused about the details? As part of its mission to advance Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) through law-related services, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has provided a backgrounder with information on briefs filed by parties of interest to the FLOSS community.

Not content to dominate search and online advertising, two operating systems, and cross-platform browser, Google is now getting into the programming language business as well. Yesterday Google announced Go a brand-new systems programming language. Why does Google need Go? According to the FAQ on the site, Google saw a gap in the existing systems programming languages, and the company decided it was worth trying again with a new language that has taken ideas from other systems programming languages as well as scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.