Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center sent in yet another Intel drm-next pull request to David Airlie for accepting into the 3.20 DRM-Next Git tree before he closes off the tree for accepting new feature code (Airlie's change for the past few kernels has been to stop accepting new code a few weeks before the N-1 release). With this latest Git pull request, the changes aren't too exciting:

Open source has helped shape the team at PushAgency.io into the programmers and developers we are today. We’ve used it throughout our educations and careers, and now incorporate it into the products and services we deliver.

We look up to people like Linus Torvalds and companies like 37Signals for their contributions to the open source movement, and it's a goal of ours to give back to the community in some way. Now that our business has reached a level of maturity, we feel we’ve made it to the point where we can devote some development time to open sourcing small parts of our product, SimplyBuilt. This is how our first open source project materialized.

Google has had enough of its long-running legal battle with Oracle over whether application programming interfaces (API)s can be copyrighted. The search giant has asked the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to bypass further battles in lower courts and address the API copyright issue once and for all. SCOTUS, in return, is soliciting the Obama administration for its view of the case before moving forward.

Also: Top 10 FOSS legal developments of 2014

The litigation surrounding Android continued this year, with significant developments in the patent litigation between Apple Computer, Inc. (Apple) and Samsung Electronics, Inc. (Samsung) and the copyright litigation over the Java APIs between Oracle Corporation (Oracle) and Google, Inc. (Google). Apple and Samsung have agreed to end patent disputes in nine countries, but they will continue the litigation in the US. As I stated last year, the Rockstar Consortium was a wild card in this dispute. However, the Rockstar Consortium settled its litigation with Google this year and sold off its patents, so it will no longer be a risk to the Android ecosystem.

The copyright litigation regarding the copyrightability of the Java APIs was brought back to life by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision which overturned the District Court decision. The District Court had found that Google was not liable for copyright infringement for its admitted copying of the Java APIs: the court found that the Java APIs were either not copyrightable or their use by Google was protected by various defenses to copyright. The CAFC overturned both the decision and the analysis and remanded the case to the District Court for a review of the fair use defense raised by Google. Subsequently, Google filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. The impact of a finding that Google was liable for copyright infringement in this case would have a dramatic effect on Android and, depending on the reasoning, would have a ripple effect across the interpretation of the scope of the “copyleft” terms of the GPL family of licenses which use APIs.

Former Red Hat employee Dave Jones has provided some closure to that Linux 3.18 kernel bug that was initially viewed as a "worrisome regression" and turned out to be very difficult to track with no official fix within the mainline Linux kernel.

The bug wasn't fixed for Linux 3.18 final but various other bugs / potentially bad code was cleaned-up in the process of tracking down and isolating this lock-up issue that Dave Jones first reported on one of his systems. The bug went unresolved and at the end of December is when Dave Jones left Red Hat and had to return his hardware -- including the affected system.