Worth reading: Simon Willison’s “Things I learned at EuroOSCON.” Bits that I found alternately interesting or alarming:
“SVK … lets you mirror from, branch and commit patches back to Subversion, CVS, Perforce and more”
“If a worm locked your drive with a random password, it would be illegal under the DMCA to recover your files”
“PHP 6 (out next year) will probably have namespaces”
“The European broadcast flag proposals are even nastier than the US ones”
OK, no more grousing from the FUD department about how OpenDocument isn’t actually supported by any shipping applications. OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released yesterday, making it the first office suite which uses OpenDocument as a native format.
(KOffice, which reads and writes OpenDocument via filters, says native support is coming in its 1.5 release in a few months.)
For us Mac users, there’s a bit of a lag – NeoOffice/J is still at 1.1, and even the X11 builds for Mac OS X have not caught up to the release yet.
I missed it last month when MySQL AB signed an agreeement with SCO. But it’s hard to miss the backlash now. SCO peed in the pool and it’s just not cool to hang out with them anymore. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos defends the deal in a Computer Business Review article from yesterday:
…Mickos maintained that MySQL’s track record in promoting open source and opposing the European technology patent directive should retain the community’s trust. “That’s a hundred times more influential than any deal with SCO could have been,” he said.
Some recent news is giving me flashbacks to 1995, when Unisys sprung their GIF patent surprise on the young World Wide Web. We got quite angry and some enterprising people even built a replacement for the beloved GIF.
Are we going there again? Forgent, a Texas company that “develops and licenses intellectual property and makes scheduling software” (it makes me feel dirty just to type that) is suing 40 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo, for infringing on JPEG-related patent No. 4,698,672.
There are almost as many unix software packaging systems as there are flavors of unix – Debian’s APT, FreeBSD’s ports, Red Hat’s RPM, Gentoo’s portage, et al. Under OS X or Darwin, the two main contenders are DarwinPorts and Fink. I used Fink for a long time, but switched to DarwinPorts last year in one of my periodic retoolings, and found I liked it better. My reasons are intangible; my gut tells me that only one of these systems is going to be “the one,” and that it’s going to be DP. Mostly that just means I like the feel of it. It has fewer packages than Fink (2800 vs. about 5000), but seems to be gaining.