A few weeks ago, the OpenBSD Project announced that the Portable C Compiler (PCC) had been added to the OpenBSD source tree. There has already been some explanation of why the traditional GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is troublesome and why a new compiler is needed, but there are still some details left uncovered. In this interview, Theo de Raadt and Otto Moerbeek of the OpenBSD Project offer more information about PCC and GCC and where they are headed within the project.

Last week Open Season (a Register podcast) featured an interview with Mark Shuttleworth; it's definitely worth checking out. Below is a brief summary of the more interesting topics discussed.

The questions a company will not answer are always interesting. Recently I asked TransGaming if its seeming abandonment of its users who rely on Cedega to play World of Warcraft was merely an oversight, or if the company is too busy concentrating on its Mac projects to bother with Linux users. Almost two weeks ago, Blizzard Entertainment pushed through a required World of Warcraft patch that made the game unplayable for many Linux users, reducing frame rates to unacceptable levels, causing distorted sound, and making the OpenGL graphics engine more difficult to switch to. Considering TransGaming's history of rapidly addressing WoW patch issues, this is unusual behavior. Couple that with total silence from the company and you have a genuine mystery on your hands. What's going on at TransGaming?

I have a test computer with several hard drives in it, each with a different operating system. When I need to test a new software program or hardware peripheral, I can quickly assess its compatibility across several platforms with this computer. The hard drives are a mix between Western Digital Raptor 36GB and Seagate Barracuda SATA-V 160GB models -- fairly new, fairly fast, and presumably spacious enough for my test OSes. It did not occur to me that I might ever run out of space on the 36GB drives because there is very little "real life" data on it -- just a few megabytes worth of documents, pictures, and other test data. Since switching to Linux and BSD, I have come to think of personal data as being the big storage sink, with the operating system and desktop software being the minimal part of the hard drive's space. Well, that doesn't hold true in Windows Vista. I made the mistake of putting 64-bit Vista on one of the Raptor drives, and after a little over a month of sporadic, short-term use, I'm out of free space. This, to me, is astonishing. How is all that space being used?

A badly researched Yahoo News piece recently characterized open source developers' reluctance to adopt the new GNU General Public License version 3 as creating "a rift in the open source community between idealists who believe all software should be free of charge and free to use, and pragmatists who want to see open source software make further inroads into commercial use." There are so many things wrong in that statement that I hardly know where to begin. Is it really so difficult to understand this stuff? Yes, there is a rift in the community -- if there is a single, cohesive, unanimous community at all -- but it's not for the reasons listed in this Yahoo story.

Ed. note: In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, today's editorial was contributed by a character that both the proprietary software industry and the free software movement fear and loathe: A software pirate. According to the high-handed moral arbiters of the world, a person of such questionable character and loose (as in the opposite of tight, despite what you may have seen elsewhere on the Web) morals is a danger to our very thoughts and consciences. So if you are someone who is easily offended, or if your beliefs are so flimsy that you are afraid they will be shaken by some pirate talk, you may want to skip this one. On the other hand, if you're one of those people who secretly loves to be infuriated, and you're a proud member of the Church of Stallman or a Microsoft shareholder, read on. This editorial is dedicated to every person who has ever copied software and given it out to friends; doubly so if you also gave them the activation crack.

Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg says that Ubuntu isn't for mainstream computer users. He may be right, but I would like to know what his basis for comparison is. Though I can see based on his photo that Walt is decades older than I am and has had more access to more operating systems over the course of his career, I have to question his experience in installing, configuring, and using desktop operating systems. The issues he lists are genuine, but not unsolvable, and aren't materially different than the same initial configuration trouble that any user could have with any operating system on any modern computer.