A smattering of interesting news for the IT bods out there (and for my reference too):
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s statement to Congress about keeping the ‘Net neutral contains a loverly metaphor from a senator. TB-L pointed out that rather than restricting people’s actions with DRM, they should be given the opportunity to do the right thing. Senator Mary Bono asked if that wasn’t like having a speed limit and not enforcing it. TB-L repolied that it was much more akin to not having your car cut out when you got to 70 mph. Cars give people the choice to do the right thing and are quite successful;
- Sun has joined the Free Software Foundation. You should too!
- There’s a rather interesting breakdown of who contributed what to the latest LInux kernel (2.6.20), showing that it’s mostly paid programmers, with a large number of small contributions by free workers, and overall is a broad, well-supported community. As it should be;
- Finally, both California and Minnesota have enacted or are proposing legislation to store documents on an open format (specifically ODF) as Massechussetts did a while ago (and Texas apparently). If you want to get your hands on ODF (and you really should), you can convert from M$ Word using either Sun’s brand new plugin, or OpenOffice itslf will read (and write) ODFs.