LWN’s Jonathan Corbet attended Novell’s Special Meeting about the Novell/Microsoft deal. LWN has a transcript of the Novell IRC meeting. Of particular interest is Jonathan’s question itself:

Novell claims to have not acknowledged any patent infringements by Linux. But Novell is now paying a tax to Microsoft on the Linux distributions it ships. What, exactly, is Novell paying for?

Novell’s answer is fairly unsatisfying. If anyone can sue anyone at any time for any reason (and this is true in the US, though you may have to deal with the consequences of an angry judge who rules that you sued for a very stupid reason), why not make such agreements with everyone?

Bruce Perens has posted an open letter to Novell regarding its patent agreement with Microsoft. I likewise find it troubling that Novell may lobby in favor of software patents while claiming to have the interests of the Linux and FOSS communities in mind.

Tis the season to be deluged with ads for all manner of crap for kids, including “educational” computer games. Yeah, right. Wouldn’t you rather give your kids something of value, and that will help them develop real skills? Instead of turning into nearsighted wheezing lardbutted obsessive-compulsive button-pushers?

Novell’s Mono 1.2 Press Release mentions that the project adds support for Windows Forms.

That was fast. I’m neither a Microsoft nor a Novell customer. Now I’m curious, though; does this software infringe Patents #6,920,461 and #6,959,294? (Note that, at least per my reading of the former, Microsoft has only patented the interface.)

(Note two: if you might work on Mono or a similar project in the future, and if U.S. patent laws apply to you, erase the fact that I mentioned those patents from your head entirely. Then contact your representative legislators to complain that a single sentence I wrote here may make you liable for treble damages someday.)

As hard drive capacities outstripped CDs and DVDs, hard-drive based backups became necessary. (I know y’all tape backup fans are still out there. You may have your cumbersome, slow, unwieldy, mechanically clunky tape backups with their even slower, more cumbersome restores. Kthxbye). For my clients I am very diligent and make sure they are well-protected. But for me- well, you know how it goes.

I can’t find the original GNOME announcement from August 1997 in comp.os.linux.advocacy, but I did find an interesting thread on Desktop Options. My, the changes since then.

Update: As Jeff Waugh mentions in the comments, the GNOME project as a whole has not chosen to use Mono as the foundation for the project, nor is there any indication that they will. I just found it interesting to see how some things change yet other things don’t in nearly a decade.

Apparently Oracle wants to compete with Red Hat in the Big Serious Linux Distribution world. How does a distributor compete with the 799-pound gorilla of software? Bernard Golden suggests that it’s easy in Too Soon for Red Hat to Run Up the White Flag. In short, he believes that Red Hat is small enough to be nimble and has an established advantage, while Oracle won’t have much success trying to undercut its more profitable products.