In this month's exciting episode of GNU and FSF News, we learn that Eben Moglen has resigned from the FSF, the FSFE starts a list of Free Software legal experts in Europe, Vista has it in for GCC, GNOME will soon fit in the palm of your hand, RMS visits Sweden, and the GPLv3 still can't get along with the Apache 2.0 license. Read on to find out the details of these and other recent stories in the free software community.

This is the year 2007. This is Shlomi Fish, a good hacker. And I have an announcement to make: I refuse to be an IT slave. Moreover: if you want to employ people like me (and you do), you should not give us only good conditions - you should give us exceptional ones. Otherwise, we'll probably leave, or be fired, much to your misfortune.

an Essay I wrote titled "The End of Info-Tech Slavery" directed for software developers and managers alike.

After a lull, the competition between the major players in the browser / web client space is heating up again. Now that Microsoft has ramped up their PR campaign on Silverlight (formerly WPF/E), and Adobe is doing the same with their Apollo, a lot of people are talking about what it all means, both in terms of the technical merits of the platforms and the effect of proprietary lock-in on freedom. One particularly skeptical take on the latter is Mark Pilgrim's Silly season post, which has been making the rounds of the tech blogs.

I would like to call everyone's attention the fact that a certain well known crank has achieved and maintained master status on Advogato, despite having posted several crank articles here: 910, 819, 809, and 769. I have to ask: Doesn't this prove that advogato's trust metric system is a failure?

I started at Virginia Tech in August of 1991. I have lived in Blacksburg since then. All of these years, I have told people that "I go to Virginia Tech, but I am not a 'Hokie.'" I acquainted that term with the mascot, the "Hokie Pride" phenomenon, and, generally, team sports. As with many in the geek community, I've never really been much on those concepts.

This is a monthly summary of news about the Free Software Foundation and GNU project. This summary has been distilled down from FSF press releases, blogs, email lists, and website news pages. The idea is to provide a concise summary of FSF/GNU news from the past month for those who don't have the time or interest to find and read all the original news sources within that community.

There are at least 20 million FOAF profiles out there, from Advogato, LiveJournal, Opera Community, personal hand-maintained files etc. In many cases, the FOAF is also an export of the social network, i.e. they are statements that one user knows another.

I don't know any spammers, nor do any of my friends. Besides, spammers tends to use random MAIL FROM addresses anyway, so if any of my friends, and their friends, actually, pretty much anyone that is reachable by following that social network originating from me, is sending me an email, it is pretty safe to accept it.

SQL - Structured Query Language - an extremely powerful mechanism for the storage, retrieval and manipulation of data. I've been using it for years - but not on a particularly large scale (twenty tables, maximum).

This article seeks to emphatically draw the reader's attention to the stupidity of home-growing your own database access layer on top of a 3rd normalised form database design, even if it's a nice object-orientated one, and why you should avoid stored procedures at all costs, and even, to some extent, Views, when you have particularly large 3rd normalised form databases.

This is a monthly summary of news about the Free Software Foundation and GNU project. This summary has been distilled down from FSF press releases, blogs, email lists, and website news pages. The idea is to provide a concise summary of FSF/GNU news from the past month for those who don't have the time or interest to find and read all the original news sources within that community.

This article outlines an algorithm for solving routing on IPv6 mobile IP networks: treating the internet as a 48-dimensional hypercube, and using zeroconf to find your local neighbours.

Like the dog that fetches the stick even if you pretended to throw it, SPF is better implemented by Spammers than it is by everyone else. This should tell you many things, not least of which is that spammers aren't too bright. So, when even the Champion of Championed anti-spam measures aptly named Sender Policy Framework is a better measure of detecting spam than it is ham, it's time to look at expanding the tried-and-tested methods - to think ahead of the spammers a bit.

Therefore, this article discusses the implications and practicalities of extending greylisting - a proven simple method of blocking spam-bots - to be much more effective: automatically distributing and publishing statistics gathered from the 'awaiting approval' greylists from your incoming SMTP connections. much like Pyzor is used, by spamassassin.

And it's important to do this before spammers learn how to obey the SMTP specification (45x error codes)...

Skype's service, when it first came out, was impossible to stop. Two hundred engineers from France Telecom were put onto the task of working out how to kill skype, and they failed. Skype uses SIP for the voice traffic - so, three years later, real-time SIP Quality-of-Service deprioritisation proxies can now be used by ISPs to trash it unless you pay them money to use their version of Skype - and suddenly the service gets great quality.

This article outlines an idea on how to dodge these kinds of problems for any traffic not just VoIP, by treating IPv4 as just another carrier (like radio waves) over which IPv6 is tunneled, and applying standard and well-known techniques such as spread-spectrum technology in creative and evil-minded ways.

Lican Huang has created an IETF RFC draft for distributed peer-to-peer dns, using both structured and unstructured peer-to-peer communications. whilst many would argue that DNS is already peer-to-peer, IPv6 has so many addresses that it makes a complete mockery of attempts to use existing DNS infrastructure.

The BBC has recently published a public consultation on its proposals for providing online access to broadcast content; essentially the television analogue of its long-standing listen again and simulcast services.

Unfortunately, they seem to want to impose gratuitous restrictions using DRM, and have concluded that they must therefore make their content available only to users of recent versions Microsoft Windows and its Media Player.

I encourage every BBC licence payer to express their opinion of this proposal, by following the link above to the BBC consultation. My own response follows...

Here we all sit with these huge brains we're so proud of. Using them, we can throw a rock to knock down a bird. We can invent mathematics, and organza, and politics, and hard questions. Meanwhile, the lowly starfish creeps along the ocean floor, eon upon eon, nibbling, nibbling. It has no brain. It has no head to put one in.

first came "The Desktop". then came "The Web". Somewhere along the way, Shit Happened. mostly in the form of a cancer on society called 'capitalism' that allowed a two-bit company, that couldn't (by law!) care one bit about anything but profit, to take over nearly every desktop computer in the world. Everybody but us free software people is living in a nightmare monoculture world, devoid of innovation, for nearly fifteen going on twenty years.

With the advent and maturing of free software, the excitement and innovation is coming back, along with the freedom and encouragement and enjoyment of expression of creativity. And pyjamas and the original Google Web Kit are classic examples that have the potential to accelerate that process even more: making the web browser into just a desktop window, or even bypassing the web server and web browser altogether. all without having to know anything about HTML or the web, at all.

This article shows why that is, and outlines how and what needs to be done to make it happen.

I love exim4 - and i cannot get on with either postfix or sendmail. The level of sophistication that is required these days to set up a trouble-free email server is, i believe, matched only by exim4's sophistication and ease-of-setup. postfix is great - and secure - and lovely - but if you need a rocket wizard to configure it, then it's not much good to anybody. And sendmail is just... my hat off to anyone who can configure sendmail because it's just... just... absolutely fine for anyone who has an IQ of above 160. So, finally, having got a setup that i am finally happy with, that can cope with several domains, i thought it was time to let people know about it.

In this article I explain the implementation of a network of contacts I wrote for a website.

Back in the APM days, everything was easy. You called an ioctl on /dev/apm, and the kernel made a BIOS call. After that, it was all up to the hardware. Sure, it never really worked properly, and it was basically impossible to debug what the hardware actually did. And then ACPI came along, and nothing worked at all. Several years later, we're almost back to where we were with APM. But what's actually happening when you hit that sleep key?

This is the first in what will hopefully be monthly summaries of news from the Free Software Foundation and GNU project. This summary has been distilled down from press releases, blogs, email lists, and website news pages. The idea is to provide a concise summary of the latest FSF/GNU news for those who don't have the time or interest to find and read all the original news sources within that community.