Copyright Everything

With Debian planing on releasing Etch some time in the next few weeks I’m getting ready to update my server with the new operating system. The biggest news story coming from this isn’t about all the awesome new features, but that Debian will be shipping without the Firefox and Thunderbird names and icons. This dispute arises from Debian’s pure dedication to being a completely open source OS. That is no proprietary licensed anything.

The Mozilla corp., however has trademarked their icons for Firefox and Thunderbird under a proprietary license. Not that this is a bad thing - and it’s perfectly reasonable for a open source software company. They’ve taken the time to build their brand and product and market it to the world - they have every right to trademark their work - but do they really have the right to deny Debian it’s new release without the popular Firefox name.
Apparently they do, and the problem might not get worked out before the release date is met. Debian wants to use Firefox without the proprietary licensed icons, but Mozilla corp. doesn’t feel that’s appropriate. I hope Mozilla can bend a little for this great Linux distrobution because it’s really an incentive for Windows users to switch to Linux - knowing that they can use firefox.

Even though the same browser will be used under a different name, it’s going to have a negative impact on new Linux users considering Debian as their distro. In my experience, most new users are under the impression that all Linux distros are just like Debian, that is, containing only programs that fall under a free license. Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case and many Linux distros run proprietary code.

Debian is exactly the opposite of proprietary and that’s just one of the many reasons why it’s the best Operating System around.

I’m just getting settled into my new job and lifestyle here in Tucson. I will be doing a css reboot on this site and trying to set aside some time for blogging when I get that done.
-josh

Apple has just previewed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the next installment of Macintosh systems. New features include Spaces

“Work or play, it’s up to you!”
“Thanks to Leopard you can lead a clutter free life … all you need is spaces.”

Wow - spaces! Just think of all the possibilities…. I think I’ll switch from Linux now (just kidding). It’s really interesting marketing approach they’re taking with spaces. Are you really cluttered without it? I would go out on a limb and say the average Mac user is not cluttered - but this probably isn’t aimed at the average user.

How about time machine? I’m sure there has to be some feature to really delete a file. Of course files aren’t actually deleted from a hard drive, but I really think this feature is a bit over the top - I delete files to free space, can you still do that. This isn’t saying I don’t like travelling back in time - I do - it’s just I usually don’t take my computer with me. But I’ve never owned a mac : ).

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I have been telling myself for over a year that I’m going to discontinue my cell phone service and just start using skype. Today, I’m one step closer - I finally got a decent headset so I decided to hop on the band waggen and download it. They actually had a .deb package from the website - so it was an easy install (of course there’s also klik) and I was up and making phone calls in no time. Err… I mean computer calls… whatever.

I have IE 5, 5.5, and 6.0 running on my Debian linux workstation. I don’t use them for browsing, but as a web developer I find it necessary to check how my sites are rendered in the wonderfull world of windows. Today I got the urge to try out some of my sites in IE7 - which i do have on a dusty XP partition - but I really didn’t want to reboot. So I tried giving it a go in wine.

It’s been a while since I’ve used M$, and If you haven’t needed any new software from them, you might not know that they introduced this genuine advantage program a few months back. I was quickly reminded of this when I tried to download the software, but to my suprise, I passed the first validation check and was allowed to download the software to my linux box.

I thought it was too good to be true and erupted with laughter. Of course it wasn’t to good to be true, but it also wasn’t good enough to install. IE7 was not installing, I got the following error:

Unable to find a volume for file extraction. Please verify that you have proper permissions.

So, I didn’t pass the file verification process which leads me to believe that I will have to boot into Windows in the near future. This is a very scary prospect - but I’m hoping Vista and IE7 will get pushed back even further. But supposing I could pass the file verification, running IE7 on Linux obviously goes against the intention of the software publisher. Nonetheless, it’s hard to see who else would even want that hunk of junk code running on Linux besides the open source zealot web developers like myself. -P

This is the inaugural post of Copyright Everything. I don’t have much to say, except that yesterday was Milo’s (my web server) 100th consecutive day of being on the web. I consider this a very notable achievement especially taking into account that it’s Debian Testing. I have had no major problems or setbacks, but today I had to restart the ssh server due to an overload request - I have an exciting life!

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