Software

Noted Professor of Law Lawrence Lessig posted a blurb about recent (failed) efforts to get the World Intellectual Property Organization to consider adopting and supporting "open and collaborative projects to create public goods," of which FOSS was just one example. Things appeared to be going smoothly at first, but once Microsoft started lobbying against these efforst, true ignorance was shown.

Read the full story. It'll answer a lot of questions about why our patent and IP systems are in such a sorry state.

Yeah, baby! Been waiting for this for a long time, and it definitely hasn't disappointed. Grab it while it's hot!

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New features since 1.0

Update: 10/01 14:36 CST:Here's the official release announcement, as well as internetnews.com coverage.

NewsForge has a very interesting article on Ogg Vorbis, covering what it is, why it was developed, and where it's headed. It also includes some information about it's main competitors, Thomson Multimedia's MP3 codec, and Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (wma) codec.

Overall, it's quite educational, and a worthy read. Here's the Full story.

The first version of the newly-braded has been released. Here are the Release Notes (including the download link), why you should use Mozilla Firebird, and a very useful Mozilla Firebird Help site (including many great tips and tricks).

The new beta for mozilla has been released... i hope they've added some more stuff.

Here's the link

"Note: OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 has a bug printing to a non-default printer. Please upgrade immediately to OpenOffice.org 1.0.3.1 if you are affected by this bug. A small patch to resolve this issue will be available shortly."

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OpenBSD 3.3 was released today.

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There's an interesting story on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com today about the importance of both Open Source and Open Standards in the software world. This is a counter to Jonathan Schwartz's argument that open standards are more important that open source, but it brings up several great points in addition to a rebuttal.

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Robin Miller wrote a great little article on removing the splash screen that appears while OpenOffice (and StarOffice) loads. This is something that has frequently annoyed me, since it takes up the majority of the screen and cannot be pushed to the background, preventing you from doing any other work while waiting.

Read the full article below for all the details, but the short answer is to edit your global sofficerc file in Linux (soffice.ini in Windows), and change "Logo=1" to "Logo=0" in the [Bootstrap] section.

Thanks for the tip!

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A couple weeks ago, the Mozilla development team announced that after the 1.4 release of Mozilla they'll be switching primary development to separate browser and mail clients, codenamed Firebird and Thunderbird.

Since then, there's been a whole lot of heated discussion, mostly coming from supporters of the Firebird database project, about objections to Mozilla "stealing" their name. Regardless of who thinks who did what, the database project no more owns that name than the Mozilla group does. In the immortal words of CmdrTaco, "As always, a small group of users are being real asses about the whole thing. Yay." 'Nuff said.

Anyway, in response to this debate, a "Mozilla Branding" document was released today to clarify their branding strategy. To sum up:

• "Mozilla Application Suite" is the name of the full Mozilla suite that we know it as today
• "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" are the codenames of the standalone browser and mail clients, respectively, that will be used until Mozilla 1.4 is released
• After the 1.4 release, the standalone client codenames will be dropped in favor of "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail".

The full document and additional details can be found here:
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/branding.html