Lately I have been feeling very comfortable/enthused with the way various big pieces in the Linux and GNOME universes are coming together. A conscious decision I made a month or so back to step away from some of the trivia that was annoying me may be paying dividends, or maybe it's just blind luck. The crap still annoys me; I am just trying to be disciplined enough to not respond for a few weeks (hopefully months).

For example, I would recommend that anybody even peripherally involved in Open Source contributions should read Nat's recent write-up for an example of how to intelligently incorporate a bunch of extra developers. Dave's version of the same event is also interesting. This type of management talent has to be a large part of the reason Ximian are still around and considered a worthwhile investment for Novell.

Urgh!

In local news... our friendly (sic) federal government has decided that corrupting Australian copyright law to match that of the USA was an acceptable point to concede during recent trade negotations. Really, if the US are that concerned about differences in their terms versus the rest of the world, they should stop messing around and just go back to life + 50 years like so many other countries. It is not really rocket science (unless you work for Disney, et al). Of course this example of yet another small chipping away at reasonableness will go unnoticed by almost everybody, since it is buried at the bottom of what is ultimately a fairly major trade deal -- but the copyright thing was just a bullying side point, rather than in any way significantly related to the trade talks.

And you have to love the treatment of the media in Australia. Well, at least the treatment we give to some foreign media elements, if not to the local ones. I am not sure what conclusion to draw from the fact that the report was filed by an Australian reporter in Washington (one assumes "D.C.", rather than "the state of...").

Maybe the Linux arena is only looking good in relation to the real world going on outside the window...