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According to Reuters, one more thread in the long-running saga of Rambus and the JEDEC SDRAM standards abuse saga appears to be reaching an end.

Certainly the most watched standards-related legal conflict of the decade involves the participation of memory technology vendor Rambus, Inc. in a working group hosted by standards developer Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) in the early 1990s. Rambus has been involved in more litigation than SCO, but last week for the first time it settled a case with a regulator. The question is why?

Yesterday I filed a pro bono amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief with the United States Supreme Court in support of the Federal Trade Commission's petition for writ of certiorari in its suit against Rambus Technologies. I'm pleased to report that 19 standard setting organizations (SSOs), representing over 13,300 members, joined as amici curiae supporting this brief; the list of participants appears later in this blog entry.

If you've ever wondered whether there is a SCO case for open standards, many people would say that the answer is "yes." And the stand in for SCO that they would pick is a company called Rambus incorporated.

European Union regulators have charged Rambus Inc. with antitrust abuse, alleging the memory chip designer demanded "unreasonable" royalties for its patents that were fraudulently set as industry standards.

[May not seem like a Linux article, but think of things like OOXML and the Mono Project. The European Union is acting against Rambus for submitting standards for certification without disclosing that the standards could not be met without patented technology. - dinotrac]

A Federal Court has found Qualcomm Corporation guilty of the same type of conduct for which the FTC slammed memory technology maker Rambus: failing to disclose its patents in a standards process, only to assert its "submarine" patents after that standard had been widely adopted.

The world of open source has its SCO suit, and the world of open standards has its Rambus mess. Rambus is a memory technology developer that the Federal Trade Commission has ruled created an illegal monopoly by "gaming" the standard setting process. Last Friday, Rambus won a tactical victory that will allow it to continue to charge its current royalties, so long as the part the FTC deems to be excessive goes into an escrow account, until an appeal by Rambus' is won or lost.

For the third time in two weeks there is a new and significant standards case. This time around, Nokia is claiming that Qualcomm is violating its obligation to provide a license under "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) terms to patents that would be infringed under an ETSI standard. The Nokia suit is a defensive move, because Qualcomm is seeking injunctions to prevent Nokia from selling its new mobile handsets unless Nokia knuckles under to Qualcomm's license terms.

Santa Clara-based Foundery Networks has filed a "Son of Rambus" law suit alleging that French telecommunications giant Alcatel engaged in exactly the same sort of "submarine patent" trap-setting that the FTC slammed Rambus for last week.