The Software Freedom Law Center recently issued a detailed statement analyzing a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding wireless devices. Though there are many interesting points in the paper, the big news here is that the FCC has said that devices that have firmware that is designed to be modified or replaced by outside developers or users will have to go through a special certification process. That may sound bad at first, but consider the fact that a few wireless network chip manufacturers have claimed that they cannot release their hardware documentation or firmware interface documentation to open source driver developers because FCC regulations forbid it. That excuse is no longer valid.

Recently I received an email from a PR person trying to get some press about a software product that monitor's people's online activity. The purpose of this horrifically invasive product is to cut down on the amount of time employees "waste" in such grossly unethical things as reading articles on Web sites like this one, and other "online activities." I think this would be better marketed as a method of getting employees to quit instead of laying them off.

Today I tried to help a Mac user save some pictures to a DVD. There were more than 1GB of photos, so it made more sense to use a DVD than two CDs. Unfortunately, Mac OS X thinks that you need to make movies when you insert a blank DVD disc -- it has no idea that you want to save data to it. What you, the user, want to do does not matter. All that matters is that you do what Apple says a computer should do. This is "the Apple way," and some people find it enjoyable.

Many people would do well with a good lesson on how to behave on the Internet -- on forums, on mailing lists, in IRC and other chat, and in email. Even some who have been actively participating in online communities for years never really had a firm grasp of Internet etiquette. For those of us who know the rules, educating newer or plainly ignorant users is something that we avoid until it annoys us to the boiling point. Perhaps a better solution would be to send a link to Netiquette and let the book's author do the work for you. It's not perfect, but this book covers the basics thoroughly enough to provide an excellent beginner's primer or intermediate's refresher on the etiquette of Internet communication.

Yesterday I wrote about the difference of opinion over Core 2 Duo bugs between BSD and Linux leaders. That's just a small part of a larger issue of the open source software community being pulled in different directions. On the one side you have the people who write code, and on the other you have people who tell us all what to do. Everybody wants to be the queen bee, but in reality we already have too many.

With Intel's Core 2 Duo processor errata announcement came immediate and conflicting messages from both the Linux and BSD communities. Are we supposed to worry about these CPU bugs, or not?

The GNU General Public License version 3 is unleashed to the world today, ready and willing to conquer perceived problems with the legal system in the U.S. and other countries. It's been carefully considered, debated, and examined by very smart people with a lot of experience with software license law and advocacy. Programmers, lawyers, and businesspeople have looked it over and petitioned changes until most parties were reasonably satisfied with the result. So today is, ostensibly, GPLv3 release day, but I think in the future that it will be remembered in a sad sort of way. We will look back on this and say that June 29, 2007 was the day when the Free Software Foundation jumped the shark, creating an impassable chasm where there was already an uncomfortable rift between the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project, and the larger free software and open source worlds. The GPLv3 adds restrictions galore for developers and users alike, none of which are designed to be understood by the people who matter most -- programmers and users. The FSF tells us that the new restrictions in the GPLv3, on patents, patent licensing, and hardware capabilities, are there to make us more free. That's right -- more restrictions are being forced on us so that we can be "more free." If that sounds like a big steaming pile of nonsense to you, then I'm with you, brother.