I love python for a number of reasons. Brevity is one of them. Readability is another. However writing readable concise code can take some time to getting used to. This post discusses some code snippets especially in the context of some of the comparisons done between python and clojure.

The new version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Windows 7, has the same problem that Vista, XP, and all previous versions have had -- it's proprietary software. Users are not permitted to share or modify the Windows software, or examine how it works inside.

The practice of selling license exceptions became a hot topic when I co-signed Knowledge Ecology International's letter warning that Oracle's purchase of MySQL (plus the rest of Sun) might not be good for MySQL. As the following article explains, my feelings about selling license exceptions are mixed. Clearly it is possible to develop powerful and complex software packages under the GNU GPL without selling exceptions, and we do this. MySQL can be developed this way too. However, selling exceptions has been used by MySQL developers. Who should decide whether to continue this?

There was a long time that I was looking for a way to put away my old CRM server! But why? Because I had installed a virtualization environment with Xen and all my servers are turned to small VPS on a nice pretty infrastructure. The base point was that the CRM had a USB/Lock and there was no way to take the lock under a virtualized VPS. This tutorial shows how you can set up a USB-over-IP server.

Much has happened in the Perl 6 land in 2009. Here is my humble attempt to summarize some of it; If you find something that I missed, feel free to contact me, I'll try to add it.

Our petition aims to unify the voices of concerned Europeans, associations and companies, and calls on our politicians in Europe to stop patents on software with legislative clarifications. The patent system is misused to restrain competition for the economical benefit of a few but fails to promote innovation. A software market environment is better off with no patents on software at all.

What will follow are not promises or even predictions about what KDE is going to do in 2010. Instead, I'll be writing about things that we should probably put thought and attention to in the coming year. Some of these things are already getting attention and effort, some of them aren't. Some are outright challenges we face, some are simply opportunities.

First branded as a communist plot, then derided as a form of cancer, before being upgraded to merely a 'grey spectre', free and open source software (FOSS) has had a pretty rough ride from Microsoft over the years. For many in the open source community, the company represents all that is troubling about closed source software development. Recently, though, there have been developments.