Slashdot Mirror

tqft writes "From the sourceforge page: 'Source Sans is a set of monospaced OpenType fonts that have been designed to work well coding environments. This family of fonts is a complementary design to the Source Sans family.' License: Open Font License 1.1 (OFL 1.1) (both FSF and DFSG free). Hope to see it Debian (& other) repositories soon." The example text doesn't really look too much better than Inconsolata. But, hey, who can complain about more liberally licensed fonts?

netdemonboberb asks: "I don't know where else we should turn, because no site will write articles on [this subject] and IBM is denying that their IBM 600 series laptops have flaky batteries. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute distributed these laptops to freshman students in 1999 and almost everyone I knew in my class had this issue. Ralph Levien's page has suggested it appears to be an issue with the 'Smart Monitoring' circuitry. I'm writing this article to get the issue out in the open so IBM can no longer deny it. These batteries are expensive, and I have had to replace mine 4 times already. Can anyone who reads/maintains slashdot help or provide any advice on getting resolution for this?" I must say that from personal experience, I've wondered if this might be the case as well. I have an IBM Thinkpad 600e laptop and I've already gone through 2 batteries. The laptop is currently inactive as it must be tied to the wall if it is to be used. Has anyone else experienced shorter-than-average battery life using these laptops? Were you able to do anything to improve the battery life?

Justin Mason writes "Raph Levien, Advogato builder, GNOME and Gimp hacker, and general graphics guru, has made 19 patents available for free use by GPLed programs." Raph adds: "I hope to see the dithering code used in free inkjet drivers soon." It's great to see that kind of commitment; if a few hundred more people did that, think where we'd be. On behalf of my BSD-lovin' friends, I asked Raph why the GPL specifically and how he felt about about other licenses; for his reply, "read more"...

Raph responded:

For now, I'm only intending for the grant to extend to the GPL. One particular hazard I want to avoid is a potential proprietary licensee for the patent simply creating a "libraphspatent.so" (or "RAPHPTNT.DLL") that's licensed under, say, the X license, and then linking to their proprietary code. That scenario neither compensates me for the patents nor does it particularly help the cause of free software.

That said, I'm not by any means a GPL bigot. I've released quite a bit of code under less restrictive licenses in cases where I've felt the use of the code is more important than the other goals the GPL promotes. I just didn't see a way to make this grant extend to these other licenses without creating a serious hazard. There are some other people working to create patent pools for the benefit of free software generally, and I'm happy to work with them in this direction.

The Advogato article has more details on the grant itself and discussion of the consequences.

shomon2 writes "Macromedia's web site has the news that "..versions of its Flash Player will be available free on 1 September for Linux, Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Solaris, and Silicon Graphics Inc.'s Irix platforms." " Still worthing checking out SVG however.

So yesterday Gimp 0.99.27 squirted out, bringing us one step closer. Then Raph Levien writes "The Gimp 1.0 CD will be pressing in a few weeks, and we're looking for all the cool artwork we can get. This is your chance to be famous, contribute to what's shaping up to be a really nice CD, and help out the commercial free software movement just a little. More details at this location. "

So yesterday Gimp 0.99.27 squirted out, bringing us one step closer. Then Raph Levien writes "The Gimp 1.0 CD will be pressing in a few weeks, and we're looking for all the cool artwork we can get. This is your chance to be famous, contribute to what's shaping up to be a really nice CD, and help out the commercial free software movement just a little. More details at this location. "