Tbird is a software product quite close to my heart: I think it’s important for a number of reasons, not least because it’s one of the few cross-platform mail clients that works well on Windows, and feels comfortable for use in a commercial context. Having Mozilla Foundation spin Thunderbird out to a new commercial entity didn’t fill me with cheer because they were essentially cutting it loose, and Thunderbird 3 didn’t excite me before it was released and hasn’t done since it was released.
Since the news about Google demanding unfiltered search came out earlier today, I’ve speculated in a number of places that Google have broader reasons for wanting out of China, and that the issue of search – and, by extension, free speech – was not exactly #1 on their list of priorities. In particular, I mentioned on LWN my thoughts on what kind of an effect Chinese infiltration of Google Apps would have on the customer base they’re trying to build.
The new covenant covering Novell’s Moonlight is up, and unfortunately it looks like people who weren’t happy before still won’t be happy. In a lot of ways, this is the classic caught between two stools situation: one side wants to give up as little as possible, the other wants something as unambiguous as possible.
So, what are the problems? Jason from “MonoNoNo” gave his thoughts here. While I disagree with much of his analysis – e.
It has been great to see Fedora 12 release this week. Apart from the major kerfuffle over PackageKit (which I understand, even if I don’t recognise the problem), it seems to have gone really well – especially since the reaction in the critical press has been surprisingly un-critical. Hardware support seems to be good, including graphics, which is slightly surprising given the huge amount of change in this area, viz.:
As part of doing some testing of the upcoming Fedora 12 release, I decided to put it on my EeePC 901 netbook. I had a feeling it would be relatively well supported, and indeed the installation was extremely smooth. I was going to also test the work Peter has been doing on the Moblin packages, but instead I got detoured into Gnome-Shell: my Fedora 12 laptop runs Nouveau (no 3D for me!
Years ago, Mitch Kapor invested large sums of money into the OSAF – Open Source Applications Foundation – to come up with a new personal information manager called Chandler. Having burned through the $8 million they got via various means ($5M from Kapor originally), most (all?) of their developers were cut loose early in 2009 as I understand it, leaving the Chandler project – and associated projects – somewhat in limbo.
So, litl has finally broken cover – I had written previously some first thoughts based on the various tid-bits that had leaked, and I thought it might be interesting to follow up on this. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that I had missed anything particularly big: this is supposed to sit like a photo frame in various places in your home, can connect up to a TV but doesn’t really do any multimedia stuff itself, doesn’t have non-wifi wireless, and doesn’t have a touchscreen.
It’s not very often that there are genuine reasons for investigative journalism in the free software world; for the most part, the stuff that happens within the community is open and well-covered by the likes of LWN (who, if you don’t already subscribe to, you should). The stuff that happens outside the community – well, you rarely get to hear about what goes on. We know companies lobby, both against competitors products and against ideas their competitors promote, and that’s nothing new – that’s just competition.
I’ve been waiting for litl to break cover for what seems like forever. The people seem to be all extremely smart, and it sounded like they had such a great idea, even if no-one knew what it was. However, engadget have seen some FCC information on a new “Easel” product from litl – and I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed, because it’s a netbook.
Of course, it almost certainly isn’t.
A horrible, horrible headline for an extremely interesting story: RMS is amongst one of those who has signed his name to a letter to the Commissioner for Competition and Director General Competition of the EU that the Oracle-Sun merger should not take place due to the harm that it would do to MySQL. I saw this via Joe Brockmeier’s posting on the subject, in which he reads the letter as essentially saying that the GPL is not good enough to protect MySQL – which I think is inferring the wrong idea from what’s written.
