Sun president, Jonathan Schwartz, has criticized GPL. My favourite piece is
a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world
Yes, but also to poor nations. GPL may not be good for him, but it's good for other people :)
Zdnet has a longer article with more cites.
Many websites don't scale correctly for higher (higher than 1024x768) resolutions. I've made a fast search (using 1280x1024) and here are my findings.
Not computer related news sites usually don't scale well. Examples: gazeta.pl (Polish daily) - empty area at left and right side of the text (it's approx 800 pixels wide), rzeczpospolita.pl (another Polish daily) - big white area on the right. Also big international news sites don't scale, as BBC, CNN, New York Times (all have white area on the right)
Portals have design very similar to news sites. All well-known Polish portals don't scale: Onet, Wirtualna Polska, o2.pl and Interia. International ones are no better. Yahoo uses approx 60 per cent of the screen. MSN is different, because it has dark blue empty area instead of white. CBS has it black and smaller than the previous ones.
From the sites I have visited, only Google news scales correctly.
It's much easier to find a technical news site that scales. Famous Slashdot scales well, the same with heise.de. Not all look correctly, however: Linux.org has yellow area on the right, Linux.pl - white on both sides.
From Polish FLOSSnews sites 7thguard scales, but Linux news not. New design of hacking.pl doesn't scale, either.
Before checking big companies I throught that those technology-related have websites designed better. And the result: Microsoft, IBM, Intel, NVidia, Dell, HP and Apple have websites that don't scale. The only exception is AMD.
It looks there's much to improve. I'm wondering if the sites are use correct HTML/XML etc. Will probably check it.
New MySQL beta was released recently. MySQL 5 will have stroed procedures, triggers and views. Subqueries are available since somewhere in 4.1 series. I'm wondering how will this change performance... I guess I need to wait until final release.
There's an zdnet article about this. Changelog is available on MySQL site.
Zdnet reports doubts about GPL licence in version 3 that will be released in one or two years. On the Debian discussion list one problem was pointed. Linux kernel is released under GPL2 with no standard option allowing to choose later GPL version instead.
I don't know how GPL 3 will look like (the project has not been released yet), so it's hard to say if there will be a think inside hat may make someone fork to use the new licence. For most project agreement of all contributors is not that hard to get, but sometimes (serveral hundred authors or more), it may be a problem.
The second thing is the note about later versions of GPL. Many projects have it (how many? I don't know). It requires trust in FSF.
The fact is that there may be a problem with contacting all the authors. Will it be a big one? We'll see. And we'll learn this way.
Yahoo has released search for content released under Creative Commons licences. You can search for content you can use commercially. Good idea, I'm waiting for a similar thing released by Google. I know it's useful, because I've spent much time searching for material with acceptable licences for this site :)
AOL has new terms of use for their instant messaging system AIM. Inside there's an interesting passage:
You or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to public areas of any AIM Product. However, by submitting or posting Content to public areas of AIM Products (for example, posting a message on a message board or submitting your picture for the "Rate-A-Buddy" feature), you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. Once you submit or post Content to any public area on an AIM Product, AOL does not need to give you any further right to inspect or approve uses of such Content or to compensate you for any such uses. AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating Content posted to public areas of AIM Products.
All bolds are mine.
It means that your work can be used without your agreement (you may prefer Creative Commons licence). The solution is stop using AIM if you still do it.
An article about GCC version 4.0 which should be out soon was published on zdnet. Mark Mitchell, who's release manager for GCC 4 is cited a number of times. Most of it is about performance.GCC 4.0, according to him, should be faster than previous versions (generate faster code). As gcc is the compiler I use very often, it's a good news.
I wanted to know more, so I've found GCC Wiki entry about features in 4.0. And that's right - it's mostly about optimization. Most features don't tell me much, but I hope the result will be good.
There's also a long list of GCC 4.1 planned features. I wonder how many of them will be actually present in the final realease. The list is impressive.
When will be GCC 4 released so it can be tested? This year. The development plan says early 2005. It should be soon. We'll see...
Nero burning program is available fo Linux. From what I know, it's used to burn CDs and DVDs and quite popular among Windows users.
To download Linux version you need to be a registred Windows version user (but not demo and OEM). RedHat, Fedora, SuSE and Debian are officially supported distributions. What's interesting, Mandrake is not mentioned... Other sources say that the program is available in RPM and DEB format and should work also for other distributions (still, not Slackware). Not sure if it's true - I haven't tried it.
Will Nero for Linux become popular? Maybe, if it becomes free. K3b is a very good program and it's not that easy to move Linux users to another solution when the current one works well. I think that currently Nero is only interesting for people who already have Windows version (and not OEM version that came with their CD-burner).
I'm also thinking which library was used for user interface. The screenshots suggest GTK. I'm not sure, however, it may be also Qt (or a different library).