The Zero Room

This development makes me think of all those years reading HOWTOs and editing modelines and want to weep tears of joy:

 

Bruce Byfield at Linux.com has done the world a favour by collating the many and varied hardware compatibility lists into one, highly bookmarkable article.

Like many people, I was saddened to see Eben Moglen leave the board of the Free Software Foundation, but pleased that he would be carrying on his work at the Software Freedom Law Center. If somebody were to ask me (for the record nobody did) who should replace Eben, I would have said without hesitation Benjamin Mako Hill, so I was thrilled when he got the job. One of his key achievements in my view has been kicking off the very important, and long overdue, work on finding a definition of "Free Cultural Works", which will serve the same purpose for other kinds of creative works that the Free Software Definition serves for software. His presense also helps the FSF board continue to meet it's all-important beard quota.

Linux.com has a profile of Benjamin here.

The copyright to CUPS, the printing system used by most free software operating systems (and a number of proprietary ones), has been purchased by Apple Inc., and the former copyright holder and creater of CUPS has been hired by Apple to continue working on it. He has stated that "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms".

Reaction to this has been mixed, ranging from congratulating Apple on supporting such an important project, to concern about possible ulterior motives, based on Apple's mixed track record on working with the free software community.

Back when OS X was released, I personally thought Apple was seriously moving in the direction of freeing it's software completely. This would have made perfect business sense, as the distinguishing feature of Apple's products at the time was the awesomely cool hardware; giving users the freedom to share and improve the software that Apple provided to run on it would only serve to make the overall product more attractive. Ultimately, of course Apple evolved into as much an entertainment company as a technology company, with a strong motivation to release software that was deliberately defective in ways that prevented you from doing things with it that the entertainment industry didn't like, and which was therefore licensed to users in ways that prevented them from fixing these bugs.

In this light, one comment on cups.org strikes me as intriguing...

Richard Stallman "recently" (don't you hate it when people don't attach a date to material posted on the Web?) delivered one of his regular talks,"Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks", to the University of Waterloo in Canada, who have put the video of the event online. Richard is an inspiring individual; one of only two people on Earth I'd count as a hero. Despite having heard recordings of earlier renditions of this talk, I would still have dashed out of the house to change the world immediately after watching this, were it not for the fact it was around 1am and I was not dressed for world-changing.

Also highly recommended is the video of Eben Moglen, of the Software Freedom Law Centre, talking about "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3" in June this year. Anybody who's bandwidth-impaired can get copies of these (they are appropriately licenced for free redistribution, of course) from me at the next Club Linux meeting.

This article by Rob Enderle, who less kind people than myself dismiss as a shill for a certain proprietary software company, claims that the aforementioned company has lots to celebrate about the new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely-used free software license. I got caught up responding to this... ahem... provocative article, and since nobody's posted about GPL3 here yet, I thought it was worth re-posting my comment here, as it fairly succinctly sums up the justifications for a new version of the license:

GPL3 is not "different".

GPL3 does not represent the slightest change in the objectives of the license since GPL2.1, rather it reflects changes in the environment in which the license operates.

It's official: AMD (who bought ATI last year) are planning to release free (as in speech) drivers for their graphics hardware. This is a great victory for freedom, and a devastating rebuttal to those who have been insisting that we have no choice but to stop worrying and learn to love proprietary drivers.

It's a rainy day, and for those of us who missed it, I've just noticed that video and audio from most of the presentations at linux.conf.au 2007 are available via the conference's programme page on the web site. I'm cracking open some microwave popcorn with extra butter-flavoured dairy-based solids and a jeroboam of sparkling Coca-Cola, and havin' me a nerd party.

Maybe it's just a sign of the increasing maturity of the free desktop. More likely I think it's evidence supporting the contention that GNOME's six-month release cycle has institutionalised a culture of conservatism. Either way, the release notes for GNOME 2.18 are distinctly underwhelming.

Applications are now open for Google's [Northern] Summer of Code. If you are currently a student with aspirations to becoming a master programmer, this is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to an established free software project with guidance from some of the top people in free software. There are 135 mentor organisations participating this year, including projects like Debian, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Samba, and on and on. So no matter where your interests lie, you will probably find a project you'll want to work on.

Last year the SoC contributions to Drupal, the software my day job is built around, really helped push development of some major features. And many of the mentors from Drupal in 2006 were themselves student participants in 2005, so this is really a serious stepping stone to getting a career in free software development off the ground.

Oh, and Google pays you for your work! Beats stacking shelves in the supermarket to make ends meet. There are a lot of things you can criticise Google for, but on the strength of this program alone, they can justifiably claim to be not yet wholly evil.