Apparently only students and office workers are using Linux. If one peers at the current version of the vfolder menu spec from freedesktop.org one discovers that all the problems of the previous setup have been put back into the spec, while some entirely new problems have been created. For example, all Science (including Mathematics) and Engineering applications are horribly miscategorized. xdrawchem in Education? Octave in Development? We might as well have OpenOffice in Accessories and Firefox in Games.

There's a new GNU PDF Project in the works to support the upcoming ISO standard PDF implementation and they need your help. The FSF Europe has posted a new RMS video. Conversion of software to the new GPLv3 license continues at a steady pace. The SFLC files a history-making legal complaint against a GPLv2 violator and resolves a GPLv2 dispute between the BSD and Linux communities. Unofficial Gnash Flash binaries for Windows are available. GNU Hurd gets IPv6 support and a new pfinet maintainer. RMS will be speaking Columbia, Costa Rica, Japan, and the US this month. Oh, and did I mention that new and improved versions of GNOME and GTK+ have been released.?

Oh humble assert, how much confusion have you caused! This might seem like a banal topic and hardly "master" material, but I continually see people get this wrong, so perhaps an article on this topic is worthwhile.

A recent article has surfaced discussing what the author thinks are reasons Linux won't succeed on the desktop. It is his mentality, and not his reasons, which are the real culprits.

This is a call to ISPs to block Internet-connected computers within their vicinity, which are infected with malware, especially, one that has turned the computer into a zombie machine, that is used to attack, spam or compromise other machines.

Abstract: Wikipedia has grown so large that it may serve first as the referential background for open-source artificial intelligence (AI) and then as food for thought when the emerging AI Minds try to know and understand the world around them.

Lots of news this month! The FSF foundation joined other groups in making a political statement about proprietary software. We've got a report and new photos of the Defective by Design protest of the BBC. GPLv3 adoption continues. GNU Grub was spotted in a Marvel comic book. A new and improved alpha version of Gnash is out. RMS makes a whirlwind tour of California. Read all about it in this month's edition along with updates on major GNU packages like GNOME and gcc. There's even some news on the Hurd this month.

My thoughts on the Social Graph, and opening it up...

The Network Planning Team (NPT) was established in March 2007 in support of a proposed merger of Internet2 and National LambdaRail, Inc.(NLR)

Mr. Gordon Cook stated Why the proposed merger MUST not happen

"the merger as currently proposed in my opinion would be a disaster that would kill the crown jewel of Network infrastructure in the United States. "

On my intranet, between 'trusted' Linux hosts, sit switches/routers/firewalls. I am having the hardest time to persuade our info sec dept. to allow ICMP protocol packets to go between our servers. These servers are master server/ device server/ client server of an Enterprise distributed backup to ADIC tape library application with media management layer to Oracle RMAN interface.

Never mind copyright abuse, porn, and corporate co-optation. Just looking at usage of the global set of point-to-point links ("tubes" per Sen. Stevens), BitTorrent and similar protocols draw down the available network capacity many times more than necessary to move files or frames from the machines that have them to the machines that want them. What can we do instead?

1. What do you think is the most important single sentence of advice that you can offer to someone who wants to contribute to the free software community?

2. If you had the opportunity to say one sentence to someone who knows about computers and free software (EG they have used both Linux and Windows and done a small amount of programming) to convince them that they should join the free software team, what would it be?

It was a slow month for GNU/FSF news but even during a slow month there's plenty to tell you about. The adoption of the GPLv3 continues, over 300 packages are now using it. The 2007 Trophées du Libre awards are coming up soon. The FSF Europe published a new issue of their newsletter, full of interesting free software news from Europe. There was a minor GCC release, and the last new GCC release under the GPLv2 license. RMS will be in Peru this month, giving talks at several schools and conferences. Read on for all the details.

Three weeks ago, etbe (Russell Cocker) suddenly started pumping hateful leftist propaganda into Advogato. Since then, the metric reports for few nodes to which I am connected shows a precipitous decline, below the level of 3 in fact. This proves that Advogato works as designed at least to stop small scale attacks.

The GPL version 3 is out. Is anyone using it yet? Freshmeat says yes. Will it transform the software industry? Eben Moglen says yes. Will it change the Novell-Microsoft deal? Microsoft says no, then announces changes in the same press release. Is Microsoft's goal to start a Linux civil war? EWeek says Maybe. Read all about it in this week's installment of GNU and FSF news. As always, you can also find out where RMS is speaking this month and read the latest news on other GNU projects including GCC and GNOME.

Technology rules our first-world lives. The fears of a return to dark-ages that was predicted and worried about in the nineties has only become more of a risk, as ever more dependence on technology expands. First-world economies and societies, run by consumerism and led by corporations, are simply not aware of - let alone taking into account - just how much damage Information Technology does to people, nor are they considering the consequences of that damage, or their reliance on the people who are being made so ill.

So this article's purpose is to draw attention to the enormous responsibility being placed at the feet of IT specialists - both programmers and maintainers - whilst at the same time pointing out that those very same IT specialists are under absolutely crippling psychological and physical pressure, as a direct result of working with IT systems. The question has now been asked: what do we do about this?

(article first published as TechnoHealth by lkcl)

The trust metric system seems to be chalk full of bugs lately. In relation to what bwtaylor said earlier, the trust metric system seems not to be working correctly. Other issues have been happening as well.

Last month we learned GPLv3 might not be compatible with the Apache 2.0 license after all. Better news this month. The incompatibilities have been fixed in the final draft of the GPLv3. Another piece of good news this month is that Novell's pact with Microsoft may backfire on them, resulting in patent protection for the entire free software community. What else is new this month? A major new release of GCC. A new GNOME Roadmap. A new book on GTK+. Most suprising, there's a new release of Emacs.

Tops (TableOrientedProgramming) vs. Oops (Object Oriented Programming languages)

I can't seem to get to the bottom of shifting grounds when masterminds make arguements about:

As the number of people using Linux in mobile situations increases, the need to reduce power consumption also increases. While some of these power savings are obvious (like turning off hardware when it's not being used), others are more subtle. The combination of recent changes to the kernel and some small adjustments to existing code can have a significant effect on your battery life.