Three things i want to share with you all today;

Ubuntu 9.04 has been released, it's not a LTS release but i think it is a welcome update to 8.10, certainly for netbook users since 'Netbook remix' is now an official separate version.

A website got blocked by court order in Belgium. It's a website reporting in which neighbourhood previously convicted pedophiles live. No exact addresses are given, so you don't know who the offender is. I'm not a proponent of these kind of tactics which are basicly censoring. However what shocked me more is that there is a Belgian law that allows this since 2001, it's allowed by law to disable access to data on computerised systems when; it's subject of a crime and/or are in disturb civil peace or vice - scary.
The reasoning is that they fear actions towards the pedophiles if people find out there is one living in their neighbourhood. First, how does that website gather its information? I guess it is publicly available somewhere, if this information is not publicly available then how did they get their hands on it? But, and i recon this is the case, if the data is freely available somewhere already, this site is just taking that information and publishing it in an easily accessable format. in that case the blockade of the website must be lifted!

Bundled sales are now allowed in Belgium, previously this was not allowed by law. Thus, special deals like an iphone for 1 euro when signing a contract with a mobile provider were previously not allowed. I'm still not sure if i'm pro or contra, as always this can have benefits to customers, but in some cases you might even end up paying more or are tricked into an expensive scheme.

Oracle buying Sun, who ever saw that comming? Sure it makes Oracle even stronger then they were before because they now also have a serious hardware division in their portfolio. But the questions start here already, recently Oracle announced the Exabyte. This is a total solution combining Software from Oracle (including Unbreakable Linux) and Hardware from HP. I can't imagine they will continue this product using HP's products.

On the software front there is even more to worry about, because the impact on OSS could be huge. First, what will happen with Oracle's efforts on Linux? They have their own Linux version and are activly contributing to the kernel (most famous contribution is probably Btrfs). Previously Wim Coekaerts was able to push Oracle away from the Solaris platform and onto Linux, will he be able to keep Oracle dedicated to Linux or not? He hasn't posted anything on his blog as of this date on this matter. If they keep Linux as their main platform (which i hope they do), Wim could be the man to push a Solaris/Linux merge.

All other software i'm not worried about, OpenOffice will continue to get development, perhaps even more so. Oracle might just want to try a fight with MS with this one. I also hope this will spur a good database component in OOo, currently it's a bit of an unstable complicated mess. Java will continue to grow, Oracle already has a huge investment in this programming language and now they own it.

Who is worried about MySQL? Probably nobody, Sun already did a good job of killing it way before Oracle came into the play.

Patents are the rotten apple in the software industry, this is even much more so for Open Source developers. Recently we have been bombarder all over the net about the MS vs. TomTom case, which resolves around a 'long filename' patent in FAT. Nobody is sure what the real reason for the lawsuit is; is MS targetting Linux (which TomTom uses on their devices), do they want to destroy a competitor or both?

I'm not really a big fan of ZDNet, but it's hard to completly ignore them. Today i read this article which is pretty much spot on. I suggest you read it too. On the 'No Software Patents' site you can read a famous quote from Bill Gates from 1991;

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."

Next on James Huggins site you'll read the following from MS' VP of Legal (from 1994);

"Microsoft has never initiated an action for patent infringement. We have, however, unfortunately been the defendant in several lawsuits involving software-related patents. The defense of those suits has consumed considerable of our resources, resources we'd prefer to use in positive and constructive research and development efforts."

It's aparently easy to forget your own past.

In the latest edition of the DataNews magazine (free ict magazine targeted at manager types), there is an article about Fosdem. The article is in Ducth but you can probably translate it decently enough to english (if needed) to get a better understanding about what i'm talking about.
There is a section where they question if the GPL is still a valid license, or is it out-dated? They argue that the GPL is not loved by companies and thus loses its competitive edge. Who cares? certainly not the OSS developer, he is not writing his piece of code for the benefit of companies, he doing it for himself, other developers and the users, screw the companies. GPL protects the user.
Last they move on to the subject that GPL3 has issues because it doesn't allow DRM, and that scares even more companies away. If that isn't a good thing for the user, i don't know what is. In fact, this last reason alone proves that the GPL servers and protects the users, you have to love it for that.

How about some Fosdem 2009 pictures, again i'll be focusing on the athmosphere, as for the talks, there are other resources to get more info on them. If you haven't been to Fosdem yet, I hope these picture will wet your appetite.

What? I don't want to do that, delete my willy are you nuts!?

It's always that crowded, from the early morning till late in the afternoon.

Hey, an Ubuntu stand, they weren't here the previous years. As you can see from the shot, Netbooks everywhere!

Power to the people!

This is becomming a problem. This is a picture taken during a lecture in one of the main tracks. There is room for more then 800 people, if there are 80 people in whole it's a lot. In contrast, the dev.rooms are packed and sometimes don't have enough seats. Fosdem needs to figure out how to avoid things like this. Tracks should get a populairity vote to know in which room to schedule them.

Brussels is so much fun, so much to see. Even a simple tree holds a surprise.

Ubuntu init replacement upstart lecture first slide.

Look! i can take shit pictures with my phone camera

Two heroes, Micheal Meeks and Keith Packard discussing the meaning of life.

My Fosdem loot: Fedora CD, OpenSUSE CD, NetBSD CD, MirOS CD, PCBSD CD, FreeBSD CD, Fosdem 09 girly T-Shirt (for my wife), Flyers for/from Ubuntu, Fosdem, Perlmonks Workshop (Leuven, Belgium), BSD; 2 badges from the Firefox/Mozilla stand, 1 foot-sticker from the Gnome stand, an O'Reilly plastic bag and the O'Reilly CSS pocket guide. Geek life is good.

Show people KDE4 and tell them it is Windows 7, lets see how they react.



Surprised? Can you imagine how upset MS would be if a distro would be named 'Lindows' which could confuse people in actually buying a Linux version instead of Windows and then liking it more.