For several years, a dark cloud has hung over the US open source community. Mostly triggered by the “SCO v. Everybody cases”, this cloud is the fear that some manner of patent could bring down open source projects, such as the kernel itself.
Two days ago, Red Hat, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, the Free Software Foundation and several others have chimed in that it is time for patent reform by filing briefs in a case involving two guys trying to patent betting on the weather. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to over-analyze this thing, but I will provide links to all the gory details.
http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/04/07/red-hat-asks-federal-court-to-limit-patents-on-software/
http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/34783lgl20080403.html
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/bilski
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/samuelsonclinic/intellectual_property_0
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080409033837121
I am testing the Hardy Heron beta right now. I’ll spare a recap of the features that everyone else is talking about and delve into a UI change that I noticed right away. Instead of having a million boxes all over your screen when you are deleting, copying , and moving files, there is one that stacks all your active Nautilus progress bars together. This is more than likely a feature of the new Gnome release, but being the geeky sysadmin that I am, it was the first shiny thing that caught my eye. I still haven’t tested Brasero, but I will try to over the weekend. K3B is really getting to be overkill even though it has been my favorite recording software for the past six years. I will post more results when I can.
For those not aware, Canonical now has a voting system setup for submitting your own ideas on how to improve Ubuntu, called Ubuntu Brainstorm. This is similar to the Dell IdeaStorm site that established Ubuntu as a distribution that Dell Computer needed to include purchase options for. Anyway, I have submitted an idea for community review and will include a link on the sidebar of this blog for your review.
My suggestion is providing a portal with tips, tricks, and directions for new and interested users. The idea may need some further documentation and thought, but I already have 64 votes as of this post. Feel free to check it out, and if you are at all interested, please consider voting for this idea.
