The intellectual insanity resumes. Let’s take a quick look at some highlights from the news.

Penguin Pete gets into the fairytales... welocome to the computing republics of Windows, Apple, and Unix; all ruled in remarkably different ways.

Back at the Linux Foundation Austin Summit, VIA had announced plans to develop a new open-source initiative in a similar fashion what AMD has been doing. However, in the weeks following that they haven't done much for the open-source community.

"A few days ago, Marc Balmer, OpenBSD developer, received an email from an OpenBSD user. [...] Despite his initial reaction, he decided to dig deeper into this case, and he uncovered a bug that had been sitting in the code of all BSDs (including Mac OS X), including a lot of old releases. He confirmed the bug was already in 4.2BSD, released in August of 1983."

RMS: «The EFF is fighting an attempt to twist copyright law to give the software developer total power over execution of the program. Victory in this case will not eliminate the practice of restricting how users run proprietary programs. It will only limit the developers to using contracts as the means. This will not make users free.

For a lot of programmers, writing an application is fun, but writing its manual is not. Adding new features, refining the product, and responding to users' input are all more rewarding than writing instructions on how to use the software. However, good documentation is necessary to have happy, informed users who can contribute meaningfully to future development.

There has recently been a discussion about GNU switching from bzip2 to lzma for their distributed tarballs. They still offer gzip tarballs as an alternative. However, Gentoo has been preferring the bzip2 tarballs mostly due to the improved pack ratio of bzip2. Unfortunately, the software for lzma is not (yet) as mature as some would like.

"...Science, technology and social and economic interests are profoundly intertwined today, interacting and mutually influencing one another. Many movements that are struggling for changes now recognize that, unless these issues are taken up by many and various groups of citizens, it will not be possible to deal with the challenges of our times.