Open Source mailing lists can easily spiral into a high noise-to-signal state. The following is a rough idea on how to make a system that would allow low-effort group moderation of a mailing list.

Salon has an interesting article on the difficulty of many University students, faculty, and staff in America of releasing their code under an open source license. Academic development of free software is probably much more important than commercial development, even though the latter has received much more press over the last couple of years.

in security, you need to offset the risk with the cost. in mathematical terms, security tends to zero as the sum of the number of idiots increases to infinity. raph has pointed out that there is a new attention-seeker on the block [in which case, why am i writing this? *sigh*]. this article outlines a plan to consider, re-raising and summarising a number of issues already discussed to increase advogato's signal-to-noise ratio for open source discussion - which is what advogato is all about.

Transparent Persistence, Fault-Tolerance and Load-Balancing for Java Systems.

Orders of magnitude FASTER and SIMPLER than a traditional DBMS. No pre or post-processing required, no weird proprietary VM required, no base-class inheritance or clumsy interface definition required: just PLAIN JAVA CODE.

How is this possible?

The contraction iof the World Wide Web continues, and another resource that helps make learning about things posible is under an ecconomic threat.

The current debate between stalwarts of the Free Software and Open Source Software movements over the basic principles of software distribution is harming all of us in a very real way. Is there no hope for an end to this conflict?

I, along with some help from the Hackers-IL mailing list of which I am a member, formulated a list of Open-Source rules', not unlike the Ferengi Rules of Acuiqisition. The Rules are still open and any additions are welcome.

Just when you thought it was over, popular discursion site Kuro5hin is back from the dead. The web site seems to be quite slow, proabably due to massive load (I guess this submission won't solve that problem).

A new magazine called Free Software Magazine will be published starting January 2002 by the Free Software Foundation, China Academy. The table of contents is already online, with the preface by Richard Stallman and topics include GNOME, GNUStep, GnuPG, Zope and others. The editor also calls for contributions from the free software community and projects like KDE. Apparently the first issue will be published in English and Simplified Chinese.

Articles previously published elsewhere can also be submitted (by the original authors/copyright holders) for publication in this magazine, preferably but not necessarily under the GFDL.

I'm looking for hosting for some free software projects. In a past article comment, hacker alluded to "dozens of alternatives", but I've been only able to find savannah and hacker's SourceFubar site.

I feel the hosting decision is best made now rather than after momentum is gained, so I'm curious what else is out there...

E-mail encryption seems to be hard enough, or annoying enough, that even many technically sophisticated people don't do it regularly. Non-technical people rarely seem to be able to figure it out at all.

Most academic software is released under a "free for academic use" license, which makes it impossible to use such software in a free software project. Some notable counterexamples exist. I am looking for more examples of academic software that has been successfully released under truly free licenses.

What follows is an e-mail interview with Bernhard Reiter and Bernhard Herzog of Intevation, a German free software company. Bernhard Herzog is also the author of Sketch, a vector-graphics editor written in Python.

There's no shortage of documents out there detailing how to sell free software to suits, but they all seem to assume that I'm either selling software or am a consultant of some type.

I work for a manufacturer. We don't sell software.

Thought the advogato community might be interested in a short report I have written based on sourceforge project data. It gives a general overview of projects housed at sourceforge. Any comments are greatly appreciated.

kuro5hin is still off the air. It is dismal to me that "technology and culture from the trenches" seems to be in a foxhole forever.

This article was written in response to the breakthrough in cell biology, specifically, the events relating to cloning of human embryos.

A U.S. company said on Sunday it had cloned a human embryo in a breakthrough aimed not at creating a human being but at mining the embryo for stem cells used to treat disease. It is the first time anyone has reported successfully cloning a human embryo, and biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology Inc., based in Worcester, Massachusetts, said it hopes the experiment will lead to tailored treatments for diseases ranging from Parkinson's to juvenile diabetes.
--Reuters

Seeing as how some anti-virus software manufacturers will not be looking for the FBI's Magic Lantern virus, it seems to me that the open source/free software community should be doing what it does best: doing it ourselves.

Is a software license an expression of freedom or of power? An article on the GNU website argues that it is an act of power over others, not an act of freedom. I disagree.

Microsoft has taken a legal issue and attempted to force themselves upon our children even more then they already are. Forcing a substandard product that costs 100 times more then the compitition is not a lesson I want my children to learn.