Forgent Networks has added Microsoft to the list of companies it has sued alleging infringement of a patent for a data compression technique it claims is used in the JPEG digital image standard.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, comes after Forgent was unable to negotiate a licensing agreement with the Redmond, Washington-based software maker, says Michael Noonan, director of investor relations at Forgent.

Forgent sued 31 companies in April 2004 and several other companies after that. The company has reached licensing agreements with more than 35 companies and received more than $100 million in licensing revenue to this point, it says. Licensees include Sony, Adobe Systems, Macromedia, and Onkyo, Noonan says.

Companies that have been sued include Apple Computer, Dell, Eastman Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Xerox.

Source: PCWorld

Librarians around the world are probably breathing a bit easier now that a vintage copy of Electronics Magazine has been found.

An engineer in England turned up a copy of the magazine under his floorboards and bagged a $10,000 reward from Intel, according to the BBC.

The California chipmaker had posted the bounty on eBay last week on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Moore’s Law. In a 1965 article in the now defunct magazine, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore had first posited his thoughts on how silicon technology would evolve. As it turned out, neither Moore nor Intel had saved a copy of the publication.

Source: News.com

Borland Software is releasing code from its core JBuilder integrated development environment (IDE) into the Eclipse open source community after a surprise drop in first-quarter sales.

The company hopes to offset JBuilder’s R&D expenses by putting the suite into Eclipse, where the open source community would - theoretically - drive API and feature improvements.

Borland is expected to announce full details of its plans during the next couple of weeks.

Source: The Register