I just posted a snapshot of the new Ghostscript IJS client. If you have a printer with an IJS driver available, I encourage you to test it. Currently, that's HP printers, and you can also try Russell Lang's patch for gimp-print.

In other news, hpijs is now free software, under an BSD-minus-advertising license no less. This is very cool. I provided some nice quotes that will probably be used in their formal announcement.

Microsoft and security

The comments to the recent Slashdot story that Microsoft was going to focus on security had a childish, bickering tone. Fact is, this is a good thing. Microsoft's weakness in security has caused a lot of suffering, and it's just luck that it hasn't been worse. The free software community can take a lot of credit, I think, for inspiring Microsoft to take this initiative. Now they can chase OpenBSD's taillights for a while :)

NIH

NIH is just as rampant in the free software community as anywhere else, if not more so. The threadlet here on vector graphics libraries is certainly a case in point. I hadn't heard of the anti-grain geometry library until now, but it looks vaguely interesting. In any case, I guess a lot of times it's simply more fun to start a new project of your own than to contribute to one that already exists.

I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I think NIH is responsible to some extent for the relative abundance of half-finished components, and the relative paucity of finished systems. If we're to improve on this, I think it would be a good idea to think about how to make collaboration more fun.

Life

Life is good!