Technocrat has this discussion. “Iam
writing to ask Technocrat readers & moderators for help, advice
& opinion on the status of pre-release code & open-source licensing … We have some very good
people on board & are close to the stage of releasing some alpha products. What concerns
us is the issue of licensing. On our group lists we have already published code examples &
specifications, how do we prevent some malicious persons from stealing this code &
claiming authorship. Do the GPL & other open source licenses make provision for
protection of code prior to official release or must the licensing terms be explicitly stated &
provided in conjunction with any code?”

It’s at Debian.org: “Debian 2.2r2 will probably be released by this weekend. Anthony Towns and Ben Collins argued about this, with Anthony wanting get r2 out
within the promised time frame to fix the problems in r1, while Ben prefers to wait a week or two for testing, even more pending security fixes, and to let
the porters catch up so we do not “make another point release, with known issues”. Anthony rejected this plan, stating that “it’ll be out around the
24th, US holiday or not”. This is a tough call — more security holes will surely be found soon after we release — but it’s the kind of tough call that
Anthony as release manager has to make, even if his decision is not popular.”

From KDE Dot News: “David Faure, the new KDE release coordinator, has set forth the release schedule
for KDE 2.0.1, a bugfix and translation release, and KDE 2.1. KDE 2.0.1 should be
available on December 4, and the first KDE 2.1 beta two weeks later on December
18.”

Indenticalsoftware.com has a story about Bt Builder: “Maybe the release of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition caused a feedback loop or perhaps the eternally delayed Lunar 2: Eternal Blue is the source
of the problem. For whatever reason role-playing games (RPGs) have been foremost in my thoughts. Searches into the open source RPGs has been
somewhat disappointing although not that surprising.”

Linux Planet has a column on using Network File System: “From a basic point of view, NFS and Samba are very similar. Both have a client and server application. Both allow a server
to share files with clients. Both have clients and servers on almost every platform. The big difference is the Windows PCs
have Samba-compatible clients and servers as part of their default network support and Windows requires third party
software to support NFS. Conversely, UNIX systems usually come with and use NFS by default with Samba being used to
provide file sharing with Windows PCs.”

Slashdotters discuss an article from Tomshardware questioning the site’s MPEG-4 benchmark results.

ZD Net UK reports that Hewlett-Packard has been forced by a court in Germany to shell out
an undisclosed amount of money for manufacturing hardware that allows users to
burn copyright protected music to CDs.

The internet is chock full of them! While some are a little buggy at present, the internet houses some top notch tools. In fact, Some of these tools either meet or exceed commercially available tools in quality. So what’s the catch! In one word, “documentation.” This seems to be a weak area in a lot of free projects on the web. While some projects are addressing this problem, the majority aren’t. So you might have to dig a little to find some information on certain projects. But with that all said, there still is a lot of great free development tools to be had. So below is links to the best free development tools. Read more at osfaq.com. -Anonymous Reader

InfoWorld reports on what’s being billed as the first exposition of human partner robots in Japan.

Our friends at Linux.com have a story on webs of trust: “When we hear of Users Groups participating in new, different and exciting activities, we
feel the need to get the word out for anyone else who may like to join them in the
endeavor or try it for him or herself.
One such activity is the Web of Trust. Darxus with PhillyLUG wrote in to tell us about
PLUG’s venture with PADS. Both groups have come together to develop a Web of
Trust. At the end of each of their respective meetings, they gather for keysigning
parties.”