Blackmoor Vituperative

I received an interesting email today from the Czech Republic. They are using the graphics I put together for Sharing is not piracy and Copying is not piracy for a campaign against the new copyright law in the Czech Republic.

I love the Czech Republic. I wish them luck.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 establishes that anyone born of an American citizen is themselves a “natural born citizen” of the USA. The 1790 act originally traced that citizenship through the father, and only included “free white persons”; the 1952 naturalization act amends that by prohibiting racial and gender discrimination in naturalization. So if your mother was a citizen of the USA when you were born, and you were born on the Moon, you are eligible to run for President. Just FYI, in case you were born on the Moon.

(I think I need a new category, for “Blindingly obvious”.)

Note to self: other people are probably happier not knowing what I am thinking.

I ran across this at Gary Corby’s web site. Very cool. I found this very helpful. I never know what typeface to use. I stay awake long nights, fretting over it.

Happy Easter.

What does Easter mean to me? To me, it means that the azaleas are blooming, and that the weather is turning warm. Winter is over, and life has returned to the Earth once again. Some people want to celebrate this with chocolate bunnies and colored eggs. I think those are great symbols; in fact, the egg thing harkens back to the goddess Oestre, from which the holiday gets its name. Some people celebrate it by retelling old myths, where gods and goddesses return from the underworld, like Persephone and Jesus. Those are great stories. But I think the real story, the real reason to celebrate, is the world outside my window, green and blooming and alive.

In response to pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice and Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (Das Bundeskartellamt), Microsoft and its CPTN Holding Partners — Apple, EMC, and Oracle — have revised their agreements so that the Novell patents will be under both GPLv2 and Open Innovation Network protection.

So what does it all mean? Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, founding partner of Gesmer Updegrove, a top technology law firm, said, “This is a rather breath-taking announcement from a number of perspectives. Among others, the granularity of the restrictions imposed demonstrates a level of understanding of open source software in general, and Linux in particular, that has not been demonstrated by regulators in the past. It also demonstrates a very different attitude on the part of both the U.S. and German regulators, on the one hand, and Microsoft, on the other, from what we saw the last time that Microsoft was under the microscope. In the past, Microsoft was more disposed to fight than negotiate, and the U.S. and the European Commission were far apart in their attitudes. This announcement conclusively places open-source software on the U.S. regulatory map.”

(from Microsoft gets Novell’s Patents rights but must share them with Open-Source Software, ZDNet)

I think this is a really interesting development. Interesting in the sense that it’s not antagonistic to consumers and developers, and that it’s not what I predicted, or even guessed might happen.

Taking a brief break from Serious Business (database character sets, fun stuff!), to grab a snack and peruse some news, I ran across this story of a woman who was slapped on the ass by a total stranger, and how she responded.

I thought this kind of thing only happened in old movies. Slapping a woman you don’t even know (or even one you do know) on the ass? On a public street? Who does that? WTF?

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

OOo is one of many open source software projects that Oracle obtained in its acquisition of Sun. OOo has long been plagued by governance issues and friction between its corporate stakeholders. Sun’s copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process significantly hindered community participation in the project. Oracle declined to address these issues after its acquisition of Sun and exacerbated the friction by failing to engage with the OOo community in a transparent and open way.

A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community. […]

The community defections eventually made OOo financially untenable for Oracle, which is why the company has finally thrown in the towel. Oracle says that it is ready to hand over control of the project to the community, but doing so at this point would be little more than a symbolic gesture; the community has already moved on of its own accord. […]

The LibreOffice escape from Oracle is a powerful demonstration of how open source forking can be used to protect community autonomy and lock out exploitative stakeholders.

(from Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project, ArsTechnica)

You might be tempted to applaud. You shouldn’t. We would all be better off if Oracle had participated in the OpenOffice project in a transparent and open way. Users would be better off, because Oracle brings a lot to the table, and Oracle would be better off, because they would have a foundation for their commercial Cloud Office project (which appears to have been terminated along with their participation in OpenOffice). So, we all lose here, in the short term.

However, in the long term, the project continues, under better conditions that Oracle permitted, and we all benefit from that. It’s just a shame that Oracle was so short-sighted.

I had the strangest dream last night. I was teaching French at a Catholic school, but I was neither French nor Catholic. The students were nuns, and they weren’t paying any attention to me, just taking turns sitting on the desks and pushing each other around around the room.

RavenCon is over. Sunday is generally slow at cons, and today was no exception. Even so, I enjoyed the panels I sat in on. I don’t have any final thoughts, really. I think it went pretty well.

Favorite thing at RavenCon 2011 that had nothing to do with me: pretty young women in corsets. (Yeah, so sue me.)

End of the day Saturday, and I think it’s gone pretty well. I was able to sit in on a few panels, and that was fun, because they were panels I thought up and I wanted to hear people talk about them. Superheroes and the law, for example. There was only one serious hiccup today, when an equipment delay caused a filk to run late, which caused the next filk to run late, which caused the next panel to run late…

This actually wasn’t a big deal, due to some quick thinking by the affected panelists, who came up with a feasible solution. I mean, yes, we had people hanging out in the hallway for 30 minutes, and the delays in the panels almost certainly made someone miss a panel or performance they wanted to see, but it could have been considerably worse.

Now, I made a point of putting nearly all of the presentations in one room, and all of the filk in another, hopefully to prevent this kind of situation. I think next year I will make an even greater effort to restrict all audiovisual programming to one room. The time it takes to break down and move the equipment is just too long. I’ll also move the filk related programming to a larger room next year. The room I was told to put the filk in was too small for the audiences.

Other than that, there were no major issues. People got to where they needed to be, when they needed to be there, and for the most part the equipment got there as well.

I am a trifle disappointed in the parties. That’s kind of a mean thing to say, because the parties I was able to find were held by very nice people and had a great selection of drinks and goodies. But still, there were only maybe 2.5 parties total this evening, and 1.5 of those shut down before midnight. RavenCon is just not a party con.

I had a weird experience when I decided to call it a night and head back to my room. The doorway to the hallway our room is on was blocked by eight or so teenage girls, sitting around playing cards. When I walked up, intended to step gingerly through them and on my way, one of them informed me that this area was off limits, and “girls only”.

“Well, my room is down that hall,” I said. “Do you mind if I go to it?”

“No, it’s not,” the girl assured me. I was not sure whether to be annoyed or amused. I had never encountered a situation quite like this, and wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. I was just baffled.

“This is the fourth floor,” another girl added in a haughty tone. I looked at the numbers on the nearby door, and son of a gun if she wasn’t right. Whoops.

“Oh, wow. I’m on the wrong floor,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.” And I sheepishly headed back to the elevator, wondering how I’d ended up on the fourth floor, despite my being almost completely sober.

Which just goes to show, teenage girls still have the ability to make me feel like an idiot. Some things never change.