Slashback: Quiesence, Jazz, RAND
Please write your elected W3C representative. haplo21112 writes "The W3C has posted a next-steps comment on the mailing list for the Patent Policy Frame Work proposal.
It announces among other things that two Open Source People have been added to the working group as Invited experts, Eben Moglen (General Counsel, Free Software Foundation) and Bruce Perens (Co-Founder of the Open Source Initiative). They have also announced a home page for the Working Group at: http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg/
Especially interesting is the Second Objection noted on the page from IBM, where basically they are revealed as one of the drivers of the proposal. They grumble about RF and pretty much say they would vastly prefer RAND."
You'd like to think so, eh? ColaMan writes: "Is CodeRed finally dead? I've had a counter on my webserver (yay apache!) that tracks attempts, but since the start of the month only 1 lone attempt has been logged on our permanent IP dialup connection (and that was just overnight). This compares to 2490 attempts for August and 931 for September. Nimda still seems to be plodding along though - I've had 159 unique ip's so far this month and 466 for September. Knowing that my IP address is in some bandwidth-forsaken backwater of the internet, I was wondering how things were going CodeRed-wise in the Real Internet?"
I forget -- does the M stand for "Microsoft," or "Macintosh"? An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember this story from last Tuesday asking about audio applications on linux? Today the Jazz++ mailinglist declared jazz++ dead (find the message here). While not the perfect midi sequencer, jazz++ is robust and GPL'd. Since jazz++ only appeared twice in the postings (each moderated at +1 ...) related to the earlier story, it would seem this fine product has low visibility among the /. crowd. The only viable GNU/Linux midi solution died the same week ./ had a call for audio solutions on Linux. Gotta love irony..."
From Bundesrat to Bangkok Germany may be considering it, but Thailand is doing them one better. TheMMaster writes "According to this article on newsbytes, the Thai government will switch to open-source software, linux on the desktop, StarOffice. This is a nice example of OSS, and probably why a lot of people contribute, to help people (OK and for fun)"
As usual, the actual developers float high above the flames on their behalf. Yep, KDE is 5 years old -- and fm6 writes: "A nice contrast to the usual GNOME-versus-KDE flamage: the users of news.gnome.org wish KDE a happy 5th birthday." Remember, the flame wars you see about these two projects have little to do with the fact that both have already created killer desktops, and are continuing to do so faster than human beings should be allowed to travel.
So why is this rubust and successfull, gpl'ed program dead? Just because it won't link against new libraries doesn't make it dead.
And it's ofcourse GPL, which means that you can reuse parts of it in other software.
I've gotta wish KDE a happy birthday -- it was my first Linux GUI and arguably my favourite. The "winds of change" have prompted me to switch to GNOME and while I have to admit I adore Ximian/GNOME I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for KDE. Isn't it great to see how alive and well competition in the Linux scene is? Thank God for KDE (and GNOME) because they've made each other a tonne better simply by their existence.
Some of us actually use midi to make interesting music (if you consider techno to be interesting music), since it is the primary way to control hardware synthesizers and samplers. The lack of good midi/audio support in linux is actually the main reason I don't have linux on my home computer. If this program is dead, it's just one more reason for me to stay with Windows...