Canonical released Ubuntu One somewhere in the past days and discussion about the thing are lighting up the Linux world. Jeez people, what is the freaking problem? Nobody is forcing you to use it, so if you don't like it, don't use it! You have a choice here. I'm not too worried about the fact that it might end up in an Ubuntu release one day, Canonical has only benefits of keeping their user base happy because switching to another Linux distro is probably the easist thing in the world to do (compare that to the whining of Vista or Leopard users, they have no compatible alternatives - except downgrading).
The whole trademark discussion lost me as well. These are total non-issues in my book, shouldn't we be putting this energy in something more interesting that will advance OSS as a whole instead?

A week or so ago, ESR had a blog entry about 'The economic case against the GPL', it spawned a hefty discussion on slashdot, as you can imagine. However the case he tries to make is correct. Companies are scared of the GPL.
As a user or independent developer the GPL is probably the most attractive license for software/open source development currently available. I know i would release all my work using this license. But companies don't see it that way, and they try hard to avoid the GPL. Linux applies to the GPL as well and it's about the only exception they are willing to make (mostly thanks to the idemnification efforts from several distro poviders).
At my current employer they are scared of the GPL as well. The general rule is to avoid anything GPL. This would make sense for our development team and they want to assure themself never to have to release code to the public. But this rule is enforced for end-user use too (as a unix admin, i would be an end-user), because there is this fear it could still end up with a customer somehow. I almost had to pick up myself after hearing that explenation.
It's even worse if you know that software is not even our core business, we have software ofcourse, as any company will these days. But we are not a software company. Software is not our product, although it enriches the products for our customers. In such case i believe that when you are completly open it will benefit your main product more then with closed software. They could enjoy the benefits of faster development of software by leveraging available GPL code instead of inventing everything all over again (which costs you money on something that isn't your core business, don't you want to avoid that?).

The problem with the current cream of the crops CPUs is that they have so many cores and there are not a lot of programs yet taking advantage of it. Recently i had a request from somebody who wanted to process fotos on his brand new Intel i7 utilizing all of his cores as much as possible. He is using ImageMagick for his batch manipulations, ofcourse it handles only one picture at a time. I thought about it for a while and came up with a simple solution, i called the script 'multirun'.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Prove of concept script to run multiple processes for dual core (or more CPUs)
# The script takes one argument - the number of concurrent jobs
#
# This script uses the 'sleep' command as test, change with your own command
#
# How it works:
# 1. it starts a jobs and puts it in the background
# 2. continue until max number of concurrent jobs are reached
# 3. wait until 2 is no longer true then go to 1.
#

if [ ! $1 ]
then
echo "missing argument"
exit
fi

CMD='/bin/sleep 30'
CONCURJOBS="$1"

while true
do
if [ `jobs | wc -l` -eq ${CONCURJOBS} ]
then
continue
else
echo "starting a new ${CMD}..."
${CMD} &
fi
done

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.