Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

You know IP issues are becoming more mainstream when they make ESPN. [It isn't just the wire story; it was on one of the news roundup shows this evening.] The silliness of the trademarking of the phrase ’12th man’ is just… spectacular. ’12th man’ and ’6th man’ are about as generic as they come. I’m glad the ESPN talking heads appear to agree that this is stupid.

GNOME should have an award for ‘oldest bug fixed in this release cycle.’ bug 43311 (nautilus sidebar) crossed my inbox today, which was pretty impressive (filed 2000-09-26) but it looks like at least three older bugs have been fixed this cycle- one in nautilus (42087) and two in gnome-vfs (41139 and 40644). Big thanks to those guys for continuing to plug away on some old, crufty code.

I invited Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons to the GNOME Summit in the fall, hoping for cross-pollination to occur. I didn’t expect that one of the impacts would be mono and hula getting cited for their wikis, but hey… I’ll take every bit I can get :)

I read What The Dormouse Said this weekend. It purports to show ‘how the 60s counterculture shaped the personal computer industry.’ Basically, what it shows is that there were a lot of people taking drugs, protesting the war, and having sex around Berkeley and Stanford in the 60s, and that the PC industry was being invented in the same place and time, and… what a surprise, the two groups overlapped. Oh, it also showed that people willing to experiment with computer industry business models were likely to be willing with drugs. The book has some fun stories, and lots of interesting coincidences (most notably for me, Engelbert’s famous demo was produced by the producer of the last Acid Test), so I’m glad I read it, but overall, it didn’t seem to really prove much to me- the 60s didn’t cause the PC, any more than the 00s produced DRM.

Whee! We’re in the New York Times. And lots of other places, it seems.

Woot. I’ve spent the past couple weeks crashing on StopBadware.org, the new project here at work. There is still a long way to go to get to the functionality we want to have, but I think it should be a fun project- some of the ideas bouncing around about where we want to go have the potential to be really big and really interesting.

I’m loving feeling the release rush again- I know that in a healthy software situation, releases are sort of dull and methodical (or arguably hardly happen at all, if you’re a release-small-features-constantly kind of person) but there is enough event/deadline junkie in me that sometimes I really enjoy the pressure and adrenaline of getting down to the wire, and still delivering.

Something I did for the first time just now: IM with someone who was on a train. Yay for the future…

Mr. Yum has discovered the real reason Jeff doesn’t wear pants.

IBM’s classic (but slightly creepy) Linux ad is available on Google Video. Very cool. We need to get some screencasts up there :)

I was in the office for about 17 hours yesterday; I woke up this morning feeling energized and refreshed and in a better mood than I’ve been in quite some time. Probably not a coincidence.

Good, short summary on how PR people can get involved in the community without being a putz. Everyone on the corporate side of open source communities (and other online communities, like the bloggers I mentioned in the last post should read it and ask the questions she poses.