Not again.

Intellectual Property Assurance
Through the agreement, Microsoft and Linspire have developed a framework to provide patent covenants for Linspire customers. The patent covenants provide customers with confidence that the Linspire technologies they use come with rights to relevant Microsoft patents. As well, Linspire now joins a growing group of open source software (OSS) distributors collaborating with Microsoft on efforts to establish rich interoperability, deliver IP assurance to customers and build the bridge between open source and proprietary software.

For Microsoft, the agreement is the latest in a series of collaborations with Linux platform and OSS providers. This list of collaborators includes JBoss, LG Electronics, Novell, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Xandros Inc., XenSource Inc. and Zend Technologies Inc.

I now refuse to run Linspire as well. I feel really strong about this – I refuse to let Microsoft have any influence over my Linux system. They have plenty of industry influence already and every deal like this just makes me more livid.

The strangest thing about this deal?

Linspire will select the Live Search service of Windows Live as the Linspire 5.0 default Web search engine, allowing Microsoft to bring Live Search to a broader set of users and providing leading search capabilities to Linspire customers.

Seems a bit ironic they’re setting a search engine which on the UK version can’t find the FSF on a query for ‘free software’ as the default. On what is supposed to be a free software operating system (but arguably isn’t anymore).

With Apple just having released Safari for Windows and people wondering exactly why, I wanted to put out my thoughts on Gecko versus WebKit. I may well be wrong on some of the technical and historical points here, I’m just going on what my understanding is and my opinion on the two engines. Please do correct me in the comments, I’m sure I’ve made some mistake somewhere. I just want to put out my opinion on this.

At the moment, Gecko has the edge in terms of compatibility. There are only few sites that do not render properly in it, and it does very well as a rendering engine.

The problem is – Gecko was designed for Netscape 6 for Windows. Netscape 6 was a complete disaster, but the Gecko rendering engine survived and made it to where it is today.

Unfortunately, it still carries around baggage from those NS6 days. Gecko wasn’t really built for what it is doing today (although it is doing a pretty damn good job at it). Add to that the complexity of some of the architecture like XPCOM and XUL, Gecko starts to look quite heavyweight.

XPCOM adds a lot of code for marshalling objects between different usage contexts (eg. different languages). This leads to code bloat in XPCOM based systems. This was one of the reasons why Apple chose KHTML over the XPCOM-based Gecko rendering engine for their Web Browser[3]. Source

Apple chose to fork KHTML and built WebKit over implementing Gecko because they saw the value of KHTML being light, speedy, developed from the ground up for these things. In the long term, WebKit’s architecture is probably a better choice for Apple.

Do you really want to carry around Netscape 6 on your iPhone?

As far as compatibility goes, I think things will only get better now that Safari runs on Windows.

As much as I love Gecko, use Firefox, advocate Firefox and will continue to use it in the future, I think Apple made and are making the right decisions with WebKit and the Safari platform.

Just my £0.02.

Please boycott Xandros. Giving in to the game is stupid.

Novell, Xandros, who is going to give in next? Isn’t this a fun game…

Roll on GPLv3 as quickly as possible. Please. Before we lose anyone else.

Time is very precious. I’m currently working on a semi-super-secret (if there can be such a thing) coding project with my good friend Chris Van Patten. Hmmm… I can tell you this much:

“we’re an events aggregator geared toward artists”

I absolutely love coding. It’s absolutely great fun, but the problem is that precious resource known as time is so scarce. I have to keep blogging, doing all the stuff I have to get done and of course the very important task of staying sane.

If anyone’s bored and has a spare, oh, even just two hours in their day, please if you could lend me the time so you have a shorter day and I have a longer one I’d be very grateful.

The bottom line is – my personal coding projects here might seem to be inactive for a while. Rest assured that I have not forgotten about them, they should get some attention as soon as I have the time to spare!

That’s it. The DMCA has gone too far. If it can be abused in such a serious and dangerous way as that, then we’re all in big trouble.

Someone stop the DMCA now. It should be made illegal.

I am plain fed up of Google Talk refusing to allow any third-party clients to connect after about 18:00 BST. I have no idea whether anyone else has this issue, but I certainly do and it’s starting to really annoy me. It seems to happen almost every day at the moment.

I’ve tried connecting with Kopete, Pidgin, Adium and iChat, but still, nothing works. Regardless of OS or machine, I can’t get a single third party client to connect.

I want to use GTalk as my primary IM as it’s nice and compatible with Jabber as an open standard and all that, but at this rate, I’m thinking about just getting myself a standard Jabber account. All I have right now is the damn Gmail chat interface.

GPLv3:

When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technical measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work’s users, your or third parties’ legal rights to forbid circumvention of technical measures.

Translation: down with the DMCA and similar.

The GPLv3 also will hopefully prevent future MS-Novell deals (and hopefully give Novell some problems too). No-one, and I mean no-one, should be able to extort FOSS users like MS and Novell are collectively doing. No I will not use Ballmer-blessed Linux.

Haven’t read the latest draft in detail, but I think I’ll be happy to offer my GPLed stuff under the new revision when it is finalised.

No disrespect to non-free software, by the way. I’m not anti-proprietary (which RMS won’t be happy to hear). I’m just against people and companies exploiting people who do choose to release Free stuff. That’s why I’m feeling pretty pro-GPLv3 right now. 🙂

I don’t want to be unnecessarily Microsoft bashing here, but take a look at these two identical web searches on Google and Live Search:

First, Google (click to enlarge).

Now the same search on Windows Live Search (or whatever it’s called now):

Notice that in the Windows Live Search one, there is absolutely no mention of free software as in the freedom type. Not even a scrap of evidence that the FSF exist.

Now, either Windows Live Search is worse than I originally thought, or there’s some kind of conspiracy thing going on here. I hope for Microsoft’s sake it’s the former.

If it were the latter, I would be very worried.

It’s not Google being quirky either, Yahoo also list the FSF as the top result for the same query.

Do the searches yourself – on Live Search, Google and Yahoo.

UPDATE: turns out this only happens when Live Search is set to weight UK results (like when you come from a UK-based IP address through Live.com). More info.

The KDE team have just released the final schedule for KDE 4.

I’m definitely looking forward to this one, as KDE still remains one of my favourite desktop environments. Some of the new features in KDE 4 look quite cool, but I think the best features are the new stuff they’re doing with the architecture.

It is a fairly long wait though – but at least we have a target date to look forward to!

• April 1, 2007: Subsystem Freeze
  From this date forward, no new KDE subsystem or major changes can be committed to kdelibs.
• May 1, 2007: Alpha Release + kdelibs soft API Freeze
  Alpha will be a source-only release without translations. The kdelibs API is “soft-frozen”, meaning that changes can be made but only with the consent of the core developers.
• June 1, 2007: trunk/KDE is feature frozen

  Trunk is frozen for feature commits. Internationalised string changes are allowed. A list of main modules that will be included in the final release will be made.

• June 25, 2007: Beta1
  Beta 1 is prepared and released after some initial testing. The incoming bugs will be reviewed for their severity. After this release, a new Beta version will be released every month.
• September 23, 2007: Total Release Freeze
  This is the very last date for committing anything that isn’t reviewed on the development lists.
• September 25, 2007: Release Candidate 1
  Targetted date for first release candidate. Only regressions (breakage caused by the KDE 4 port) or grave bugs can be fixed. Starting with this Release Candidate, a new Release Candidate will be put out every two weeks until the codebase is sufficiently stable and all showstopper bugs have been fixed.
• October 23, 2007: Targetted Release Date

Microsoft doesn’t want you to pirate their software, but if you must choose between illegally installing Windows or a competitor’s operating system, Microsoft would prefer that you choose them. While the company obviously won’t endorse the illegal use of software, it does believe that piracy can result in profit.

At the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week in San Francisco, Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes commented on the benefits of software counterfeiting. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” he said. “We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

Nothing particularly groundbreaking about this – I just thought it was funny that they’re almost wanting you to pirate their software. 🙂

And apparently that having more market share is apparently more important than people using their software illegally.

*sigh*

[via Ars Technica]