How Fark Does Patents

Following up on my recent post on patents, here's a (WARNING: strong language) blog post from Fark about their recent troubles. Good to see more people calling this stuff out for what it is.

Patents in the Blagosphere

Patents seem to be all the rage at the moment, ever since NPR did a piece called "When Patents Attack!" It's a bit dry, but gives a really good overview on the current patent situation. Well worth a listen, or a read (pdf) if you prefer.

The Economist also recently did an article entitled "Patents Against Prosperity" that gives a revealing look into the ridiculousness of recent patent legislation.

And then there's this recent post on Google's own blog, calling out its competitors for effectively ganging up on the open source Android platform. In an update to that very post, it looks like the Department of Justice was having none of it, going so far as to slap the GPL on all acquired patents:

"All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System."

Here's hoping all of this recent dialog pushes patent reform into public discourse. I've got my fingers crossed!

Linus Torvalds moves to XFCE.

Albeit grudgingly, Linus Torvalds himself has gotten fed up with Gnome's disregard for usability, and has switched to XFCE. Along with Ubuntu Studio's somewhat recent switch, this is great news for XFCE, hopefully heralding further adoption and contribution to the project.

So nyah. :P