Along with Rusty's efforts, I think the Australian FOSS community are starting to realise this stuff is important to our future.
Whoops! Sorry about that...
We're getting some press on the issue too. The more the better. One of the committees stop accepting submissions on April 13 (Easter Tuesday) and the other on April 30 - not long to mobilise the Free and Open-Source community in Australia. Please do your bit where you can.
hypatia: You aren't allowed to make your submission to either the lower house or senate committees public at all. The committee will make submissions public later at their own discretion. Linux Australia is combatting this by making their position paper available on which their submission will be based.
Rocking interview with rml on ars including stuff on Project Utopia - desktop nirvana!
OT: Only a couple of days left to own a piece of history - FreeBSD hacker Greg Lehey's beard.
Job interview yesterday. Went well.
Useful Project Utopia link: http://www.joeshaw.org/#20040308.
Interesting article about whether Looking Glass will go open-source. A big test for Sun to see if they grok open-source, or whether they're just trying to skim the profits.
Could this influence the Thoughts on the future of open source desktop development (aka Java vs C#) discussion by some cool dudes in the GNOME world? Is this body of code cool enough to make a difference? What if Sun open sourced Java and made Looking Glass technologies patent free to [L]GPL projects? Can this be done legally? Is this an NPL situation? Is the eye candy good enough to influence what we hack on? Is GNOME destined to not make a decision on these technologies going forward? Will Xim^WNovell continue down the C# path anyway? Will Sun stay stubborn on Java staying closed source?
It shall be an interesting time to see how all this pans out :-)
As part of all this, we've updated OpenSource.Org.Au, your portal to Open Source in Australia. This is long overdue - end-users, business, government, education, and the press all want to know about how Open Source is a good thing right now. Our time in the spot light is now!
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!