Leading items and editorials: RMS on OpenMotif, Microsoft
patents a file format, Linux on bleeding-edge hardware, Plan 9 has
been released under an open source license, One last look at open
source in embedded systems and The Microsoft judgement is in.
“RMS on OpenMotif. Richard Stallman has, in classic form, posted
this polemic against the use of Open Motif. His complaint, of
course, is that Open Motif’s license is not an open source
license….”
“Microsoft patents a file format. We first saw the news on
Advogato that the VirtualDub program, a GPL’d video capture and
processing program, had been forced by Microsoft to remove support
for the Active Stream Format (ASF). It seems that Microsoft has a
patent on that particular format, and wasn’t pleased with the
existence of a free implementation. Feeling that it lacks the
resources to stand up to Microsoft on this issue, VirtualDub has
removed support for ASF….”
“Plan 9 has been released under an open source license. Plan 9
is a longstanding project by Rob Pike and others to develop a
“beyond Unix” operating system. It is characterized by a simple,
clean design, and the extension of the “everything is a file”
concept to cover just about everything imaginable. Many have seen
it as the “next great thing” from Bell Labs for years, but the
system has been slow to develop (the third release has just come
out, the second was in 1995) and hard to come by….”