Showing headlines posted by Tsela

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland.

When it released the source code to its Solaris operating system, Sun Microsystems bet that people would pick it up and run. Sun said it wanted to see a community form around the OpenSolaris code, and take it beyond what the company had done with it in its more than 25 years of development of the OS. Today the community Sun was looking for seems to be coming to life.

LXer Day Desk: 12-05-2005

Has Microsoft repeated history in its fight against Linux? We wonder if the Redmond company has confused the proposed implementation of the Open Document Format as part of the fight against Linux. One only has to look back at anti-trust litigation from 1968 to shed light on the question. Have the people who are supposed to represent the interests of we, the people, failed? You must answer that question for yourself and so should the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Anonymous. (Thanks whoever it was, this week's newsletter would have been a no-show without you.)

OPEN RESOURCE « The politics of control | Open Resource Home November 22, 2005 The Windows Idiot Tax For those who still believe that running Windows instead of Linux is cheaper or more cost effective let me give you a real world scenario I discovered today.

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland.

Sony's rootkit style DRM software XCP, designed to prevent copyright infringement, looks like it's breaching the terms of a copyright agreement itself, by including code written by no less than MPAA nemesis "DVD Jon" Johansen.

[ED.- DRM software illegally containing code written by someone who got sued by the MPAA for circumventing the DRM on DVDs... Oh! The irony! - Tsela]

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland, with contributions from Christophe Grandsire.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Three of the world's biggest electronics companies -- IBM, Sony and Philips -- have joined forces with the two largest Linux software distributors to create a company for sharing Linux patents, royalty-free.

[ED.- While the true solution is to ban software patents, which should not have existed in the first place, this won't happen for a while, so this initiative is welcome. Hopefully it will just be a stop-gap measure until people come to their senses. - Tsela]

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland.

It reads like an Onion parody, but it is real. Here's the USPTO published application title:

Process of relaying a story having a unique plot

[ED.- The nonsense landslide that began with software patents has now finally reached its logical conclusion. If this patent is accepted, nobody will ever be able to deny anymore that the US Patent system is irreparably broken. - Tsela]

On the occasion of the World Wide Web's fifteenth birthday, the author comments on how it is full openness and Open Standards that made the Internet the success it has become, and why the current technological and legal climate would make a similar revolution impossible today.

[ED.- Without open standards, without openness, without decentralisation, there would have been no Internet. Think about it next time someone praises proprietary standards - Tsela]

How did a school in Italy go from having one computer for the entire school and no Internet connection to having a thin-client network connected to the whole world? Free software, of course.

[ED.- Having myself received my first IT classes in elementary school, I can testify of the importance of such projects. A must read! - Tsela]

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland, with contributions from Christophe Grandsire.

As most readers probably know, Massachusetts has chosen the OpenDocument standard as their standard for office suite data exchange. Massachusetts has published the comments about this decision from many sources, including Adobe, Corel, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. Microsoft was extremely unhappy that the OASIS OpenDocument standard was selected instead of their proprietary XML format, aka the Microsoft Office Open XML format, that is under development.

Pamela Jones asked me to comment in more depth on Microsoft’s response, because I’ve had past related experience (e.g., with standards, XML, and even OpenDocument specifically). Many people have made brief comments about this letter, but she thought a more detailed commentary would help those who are less familiar with this topic. So, here’s my attempt at commenting on Microsoft’s letter in more detail.

[ED.- A very long, but thorough rebuttal of Microsoft's anti-ODF FUD, complete with references. A must read, especially if you're a government, or any other organisation concerned about your who controls your own documents!]

You know how I always write that software is math, so allowing software patents is like patenting 2+2=4, and then telling the world they can't use 2+2 any more? Well, they've about done it now.

Technology vendors strive for lock-in. They lock us in with obvious tricks, such as Microsoft with its file formats, a monopoly mechanism as pervasive as its Windows desktop control. They control us with digital rights management (DRM, more properly called digital restrictions management) schemes that force us to break the law to make backups or even to quote from other works. They forbid us from tweaking or substituting, as ink-jet printer companies try to do when they misuse copyright laws to make life hard for other companies that want to sell us cheaper ink. They create cartels and impose rules like the DVD regional coding scheme, which keeps us from watching a movie we buy in Europe on a DVD player we bought in the U.S. Governments do their part. They use regulations to keep vital technology from becoming ubiquitous, such as the U.S. government's export-control restrictions that still give most e-mail messages all the data security of postcards. It just goes on and on.

St. Louis, MO - On Monday, June 20, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Blizzard v. BnetD, a case that could dramatically impact consumers' ability to customize software and electronic devices and to obtain customized tools created by others.

Just a little bit more on the work which is done on updating the General Public License, but every bit is interesting here.

Well, well, what have we here? SCO has put up its own legal documents page after all. Evidently the generic brand anti-Groklaw websites that coincidentally sprang up just when theirs didn't were not a huge success. So they have put up their own page here: http://www.sco.com/scoip/ All they have there so far are some of the legal documents in all their cases. But Frank Sorenson noticed one little thing: it appears the defenders of their most holy IP grabbed the PDFs from Groklaw and Frank's tuxrocks.com site, without giving us credit for doing the work of obtaining the documents from the court and scanning them to create the PDFs. Oops.