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Links 9/7/2011: Ian Murdock Resurfaces in Interview, Firefox Aurora 7



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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Anti-rantifesto: Why free software and free culture aren't the same
    Nina Paley, a professional illustrator and animator, has produced a fairly energetic rantifesto arguing that the "four freedoms" of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) should apply to free cultural works as well. While that might be nice, I think Paley is way off base.

    Let me say at the outset that I have no problem at all with artists who choose to adopt the "four freedoms" espoused by the Free Software Foundation that Paley wants applied to free culture. What I do have a problem with is the idea that the FSF is hypocritical for distinguishing between culture and code. None of this should be taken to assume that I'm not in favor of artists and creators willingly adopting the same freedoms that the FSF argues in favor of for code. I simply disagree, very strongly, that it's a one-to-one comparison or that having different standards for code and culture make one hypocritical.

    And I would agree that some freedoms are more desirable than others, both for free culture and for works that hold traditional copyright. I have some qualms with Paley's attack on the Non-Commercial restrictions, but my primary problem is with the attack on the No Derivatives (ND) restriction. Since most of my concerns lie with her argument against ND restrictions, that's all I'm going to focus on here. Commercial restrictions can wait for another day.


  • VLC media player suffering in face of crapware and uncaring Google
    Ludovic Fauvet, one of the developers working at VideoLan, has done a blog post about the extent of these malicious alternative versions of VLC. He lists 18 common URLs that appear in search results for VLC, all of which include crapware/adware/spyware. By far the most common are associated with pinballcorp.com, eorezo.com and tut4pc.com (do not visit them).

    The reason they manage to get so high up on the search listings is because they are willing to pay for adwords. At the same time, Fauvet states that asking Google to remove these links turns out to be pointless because “Google ignore us, they’re making money with these scams.”


  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Is Back: New Firefox Aurora 7 Looks Promising
        Mozilla today released a new Firefox Aurora release: As Firefox 6 is moved into beta, Firefox 7 is beginning to take shape and will deliver substantial performance improvements across the board.


      • Mozilla Thunderbird gets Conversations Mode
        Love it, or hate, Gmail introduced millions of people to the concept of fully threaded email conversations.

        It's a concept that Mozilla is now delivering to its Thunderbird email users by way of a the Conversations add-on.

        Conversations this week got it's first stable release, tagged officially as version 2.0 (now up to version 2.0.4 for some incremental bug fixes). The real push with this add-on is that it is fully integrated with the new Thunderbird 5.0 release which came out last week.


      • Aurora 7 is here


      • Firefox 6 (And 7!) Are Right Around The Corner -- Here's What's New
        Yes, you read that headline right.

        Even though Firefox 5 launched just a few weeks ago, Firefox 6, and even Firefox 7 are already chugging along nicely.

        Since the launch of Firefox 4 this year, Mozilla has moved to a rapid release schedule. That means new versions of Firefox will come out every six weeks or so.


      • Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.2 based on Firefox 5
        The SeaMonkey Project developers have made version 2.2 of their "all-in-one internet application suite" available to download. SeaMonkey 2.2 is a major update that is based on the same Gecko layout engine as the recent Firefox 5.0 release.

        Like Firefox, it offers improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance, and introduces support for CSS animation. Users can now change archive options via the Copies & Folders Account Settings pane. Other changes include updated standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas, and improved spell checking for some locales.






  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle coughs up Java 7 release candidate
      Oracle has published the first release candidate for JDK 7, the long-awaited next version of Java set to officially debut on July 28.

      On Thursday, during a webcast from the Oracle bunker in Redwood City, California, Java chief architect Mark Reinhold said that the most significant thing about the new release is that "we're finally shipping it". Though it has been nearly five years since the release of Java 6, the new version isn't exactly a huge leap forward.


    • Oracle v. Google - The Daubert Motion - Final Briefing
      One of the things I enjoy in the law is reading briefs, especially in the context of the give and take of the parties briefing a topic in contention in litigation. That is certainly the case with respect to the pending Daubert motion [PDF], filed by Google, in which it requests the court to exclude Oracle's damages expert, Prof. Iain Cockburn. On June 14 Google filed its opening brief in support of its Daubert motion, and about a week later Oracle filed its response. Now we have the final piece of the briefing debate in the form of Google's reply [PDF] to Oracle's response.


    • Oracle Expands Virtual Desktops for Linux
      The VDI 3.3 release is also the first from Oracle that is supported on Oracle Linux.




  • Funding

    • Investing In Open Source
      In addition to two other talks, I had the opportunity to speak as the co-presenter in a session about the evolution of OpenOffice.org. The growth of the developer community for that codebase was always stifled, and while there are some excellent and experienced developers on working on it, very few have affiliations beyond Sun/Oracle. Following Oracle's decision to withdraw, the maintenance of the code is moving on from corporate sponsorship to community management under the auspices of The Document Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Hardware

      • An open hardware license from the folks who brought you the web
        CERN announced version 1.1 of its Open Hardware License (OHL), a legal framework "designed to facilitate knowledge exchange across the electronic design community. The license is intended to become for hardware what the GPL (General Public License) is for software, the organization says.


      • For the good of all of us: CERN launches open source hardware effort
        Open source software is used extensively by CERN, the particle physics lab behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. In fact, the organization even maintains its very own Linux distribution—based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux—called Scientific Linux CERN. Inspired by the productivity of Linux development, a group of CERN engineers have decided to bring the advantages of the open source software development model to the world of hardware.


      • AMD in open source push
        Chipmaker AMD wants to increase its presence on Linux and has hired two familiar names to the open source community.

        Michel Dänzer and Christian König are well known Linux graphics driver developers. They are joining John Bridgman and Alex Deucher in working on the open source driver stack.






  • Standards/Consortia

    • Samsung releases code of WebCL implementation for WebKit
      The WebCL standard is still a work in progress, but the first experimental implementations have already arrived. Samsung has opened the source code of its WebCL prototype for WebKit, which is designed to run on Mac OS X. The company has also published some videos that demonstrate the efficacy of WebCL in action.






Leftovers

  • Trolls: The Town Drunks Of The Internet
    A study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University has reached a conclusion that many of us have entertained but dismissed as "not having a study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University behind it." Namely: trolling is like being sloppy drunk.


  • Security



    • Solitary critical Windows update to star in modest Patch Tuesday
      Microsoft is to issue four bulletins next Tuesday – one of which is critical – as part of the July edition of its Patch Tuesday update cycle.

      The sole critical update involves an unspecified flaw restricted to Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Another bulletin tackles a remote code execution bug in Visio 2003 SP3.

      The other two "important" updates both involve security bugs in Windows7, Vista, XP and 2008.






  • Finance

    • Liberty Mutual Sues Goldman Over Freddie Mac Investment Losses
      Boston-based Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. and several of its subsidiaries have sued investment banker Goldman, Sachs & Co. for “making materially misleading statements and omissions” in a preferred stock offering of mortgage lender Freddie Mac in November 2007.

      The insurers invested $37.5 million in the Series Z offering of Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.) shares backed by subprime mortgages and underwritten by Goldman, according to the filing made in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.

      The insurers say that if they had been informed of the “true state” of Freddie Mac’s capitalization, they would never have purchased the Series Z preferred shares. They say that as a result of what they charge is Goldman’s “fraudulent conduct,” their more than $37 million in investments are “virtually worthless.”

      Their complaint says they have suffered “huge losses” on the shares of stock they have sold, as well as on the shares of stock that they still hold.

      They are asking treble damages and a jury trial.

      The plaintiffs include Liberty Mutual and its subsidiaries Safeco, Employers of Wausau, Peerless and Liberty Life.

      Goldman Sachs told Insurance Journal it will fight the suit.


    • Fed Releases Details On Secret $855 Billion Single-Tranche OMO Bailout Program: Just Another Foreign Bank Rescue Operation
      A month ago we reported about Bob Ivry's discovery that the Fed had been conducting a secretive bailout operation between March and December 2008, under which banks borrowed as much as $855 billion over the time frame for a rate as low as 0.01%. As the Fed itself explains following a just disclosed launch of a page dedicated to this Saint OMO, "The Federal Reserve System conducted a series of single-tranche term repurchase agreements from March 2008 to December 2008 with the intention of mitigating heightened stress in funding markets.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights









Clip of the Day



Nina Simone - Love Me Or Leave Me



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Credit: TinyOgg

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