Kelly McNeill writes “Contrary to popular belief, Richard Stallman is actually one of the world’s biggest advocates of copyright laws. Without copyright laws to enforce the GNU General Public License (GPL) or any other license for that matter, all open source code would be in the public domain, free for the taking. Section Five of the GNU GPL says, “You are not required to accept this License … However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.” Well, not quite, Rich.”

ELQ writes “Trumpet Software is mostly known for their Internet communications software package, Trumpet Winsock, which has been adopted by the Internet world back in 1995, at the times where Windows 3.1 and Win95 did not come as standard with full internet connetion capabilities. But the main product these days for Trumpet Software is PetrOS, a 32-bit Operating System, which has the goal to be compatible by all means (binary and API compatible) with Microsoft Windows. OSNews is interviewing the main architect behind the project, Peter Tattam, who talks in depth about PetrOS, and also there is shown an early screenshot of the PetrOS GUI, which is still under heavy development.”

Turn-based fantasy/strategy game Dominions is now at version 1.05; users who purchased the game should receive patch information shortly (if you haven’t already). Those playing the demo can download an update. Illwinter Game Design has posted a complete changelog.

Zack Brown posts the latest edition of Kernel Traffic. Hot topics in this edition: IBM prefers to keep source for its S390 ethernet drivers under wraps, a filesystem comparison, and the announcement of version 0.2 of the Hardware Detection Tool.

“Since the old Linux-Sound list has apparently gone into oblivion
when the vger.rutgers.edu machine died, some folks on the
Linux-Audio-Dev list felt that it might be time to start a new one
especially for users.” The newly-created Linux Audio User (LAU) mailing list is a discussion forum for users of Linux audio editing, composition, MIDI sequencing, and related tools. Read the announcement, or head on over to the LAU-L home page to subscribe.

From GarageGames: “Who would’a thought? We took three random characters, V and 1 and 2, and added
them together to make up the name of our game engine. It kind of made sense because
a V12 is actually a real life engine. Get it? GarageGames, engine. 🙂

Oh well, somebody beat us to it, and their lawyers are not amused. So, we need to
change the name of the engine.”

“Sendmail, Inc., and the Sendmail Consortium proudly announce the availability of sendmail 8.12.0.

sendmail 8.12 has been developed with two main topics in mind: enhanced security and better performance.

sendmail is by default not set-user-ID root anymore which avoids potential local root exploits; before installing, see the file sendmail/SECURITY for
further information.” Read the full announcement at Sendmail.org.

PC World: “Industry analysts seem to agree that Hewlett-Packard’s planned acquisition of Compaq Computer is good for
just about every big IT hardware and services company around–except HP and Compaq, that is.

Their reasoning goes like this: If the deal wins approval, HP/Compaq will drag itself through the quagmire of a
months-long reorganization, laying off thousands and discontinuing one product line after another. During this
chaos, the thinking goes, customers would lose their service and support connections and would flee to
another vendor.

The choice alternatives, many analysts predict, are IBM, mainly for services, and Dell Computer, mainly for
hardware, especially PCs and servers.”

From BBC News: “A website that can read your body language and know what you
want before you have even clicked on anything may sound like
science fiction.

But this is what researchers in the US are working on.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
Boston, US, say they have developed a way to record mouse
movements on a page and learn how people behave when they are
on the internet.

They found that certain movements of the mouse are common,
allowing them to predict how someone uses the web.

This sort of information would be invaluable to content providers
who are looking for ways of increasing the effectiveness of their
websites.”

Posted at Internet Wire: “The HR-XML Consortium, the global
independent organization dedicated to creating
worldwide XML standards for the human resources
industry, will be examining a proposal to develop data
exchange standards for the staffing industry. The
sponsors of the initiative are the world’s six leading staffing companies, who have worked collaboratively
for the first time in their history to develop an extensive specification, which has been donated to the
HR-XML Consortium for review, revision, and implementation.”