Open Source News
March 4, 2004
How I Lost the Big One
Legal Affairs is running a lengthy retrospective by Lawrence Lessig on the Eldred case. "This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can't help believing that my own mistake lost it."
GnomeMeeting 1.00 released
GnomeMeeting version 1.00, a videoconferencing and VOIP/IP-Telephony application, has been announced. " Major new features include a redesigned configuration assistant, a redesigned preferences window, new status support, audio and video devices plugins with native ALSA support, a new manual, ..."
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story
Eric S. Raymond writes about his frustration in configuring a popular open source software package. "I've just gone through the experience of trying to configure CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. It has proved a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Unix. This is all the more frustrating because the developers of CUPS have obviously tried hard to produce an accessible system -- but the best intentions and effort have led to a system which despite its superficial pseudo-friendliness is so undiscoverable that it might as well have been written in ancient Sanskrit."
The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up
Eric S. Raymond has gotten some fallout on his CUPS rant. "This rant made it onto all the major open-source news channels, so I was expecting a fair amount of feedback (and maybe pushback). But the volume of community reaction that thundered into my mailbox far surpassed what I had been expecting -- and the dominant theme, too, was a bit of a surprise. Not the hundreds of iterations of "Tell it, brother!", nor the handful of people who excoriated me as an arrogant twerp; those are both normal features of the response when I fire a broadside. No, the really interesting part was how many of the letters said. in effect, "Gee. And all this time I thought it was just me...""
Editor of 'The Inquirer' Mike Magee Switches to Mozilla
The editor of The Inquirer has switched to Mozilla. "Magee, who also founded The Register, says that Mozilla 1.6 "is fast and has far better features than Internet Explorer, and far less drawbacks too.""
Court: DeCSS ban violated free speech
News.com reports that a California appeals court has reversed an order barring the publication of DeCSS. "The plaintiff, the DVD Copy Control Association, had argued that Andrew Bunner violated its intellectual property rights by posting on the Internet code known as DeCSS that can be used to bypass Hollywood's encryption scheme for DVDs. Bunner's attorneys had countered that the code was no longer a secret by the time he posted it on his Web site. On Friday, California's Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, reversing a trial judge's order first issued in 1999."
Introduction to Databases with MySQL
MySQL AB will be conducting three instances of a course entitled Introduction to Databases with MySQL. The course will be held in Washington DC, Stockholm, and San Francisco in April, May, and June. "This course covers the fundamentals of SQL and relational databases, using MySQL as a teaching tool."
Community Driven Geolocation Service
hostip.info is a new site that allows you to look up the physical location of an IP address. "It is running on Linux, releases all the data under GPL, and has a cool animation once the city's located (needs Java)".