So I decided to take the plunge and try Seth’s legendary GNOME blog tool. Earlier attempts failed horribly due to missing dependencies etc., but now I was able to apt-get what I needed. Had to rebuild the SRPM instead of using Seth’s, but after that the thing worked sweetly.

Was shown a very nice example of someone doing Cortado streaming. They use our applet to play a video on the net and it works very well. The cool thing is that this is free Creative commons content combined with our free GPL java applet player, using the free Ogg formats hosted on the free GNU/Linux platform :)

There was a nice interview on Gizmodo with Bill Gates where he was asked to clarify his ‘communist’ statements to CNET. What was nice about the interview was that the interviewer didn’t let Bill of to easy with just fluffy feelgood questions.

I still think Bill do not see the basic issue though. He still defends IP like it is a black and white issue. For me IP issues are like taxes. I think everyone agree that taxes are a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that having everyone paying 100% tax would be the best thing. People from different sides of the political spectrum have different ideas on what the sweet spot for taxes are, but the number who go for 0% or 100% is marginal. Bill’s argument seems to be that since 20% tax is working out so well we should jump much closer to 100% as that naturally would work out 5 times better.

So to keep with the analogy, I think most in our camp, the IP sceptics, think that we have slided towards 50% in regards to IP, especially due to rampant software patenting, and need to get back to 20% for society to work as well as possible, while Bill and his buddies wants to go to 80% or higher.

Another important item is that all things are not the same. I know how patents work out in the software world, and see that they are currently causing more harm than good. That doesn’t mean the patent system is broken for the medical research sector for instance, could very well be that it is, but I don’t know the sector well enough to say. IP maximalists tend to try to mush everything together in order to be able to say that since patents work well for ‘this’ it of course works equally well for ‘that’.