More information on why the FCC has delayed its next round of wireless spectrum auctions: Turns out the agency may have auctioned off the same chunk of airspace several times over the past couple of years. At least two of the successful bidders in the January 2001 auction are not amused that they might never receive their licenses, and have begun to shine a spotlight on all sorts of ugly secrets the Federal Communications Commission would rather the general public not pay any attention. Get the dirt at Interactive Week.

From that weekly list of links and news for the Python community, we learn that Python 2.1.1c1 — a bugfix release candidate for Python 2.1 — has been released and is now GPL-compatible. If you’ve ever wondered how the people behind Python put that programming tool together, check out Andrew M. Kuchling’s explanation of the process. Another contributor provides a summary of what can happen to a community when language changes break existing code. All this and more is posted in the latest Python-URL mailing at Linux Weekly News.

Where the Dutch are: You can find them at SorryGates.com, where over ten thousand Dutch computer users have ordered copies of StarOffice, Sun Microsystems Inc.’s free suite of office productivity software. Sun ran a print ad campaign that was triggered by Microsoft’s plan to revamp its licensing policies, but the response to that campaign, offering free StarOffice CDs to anyone visiting SorryGates.com, caught even Sun off guard. The company eventually ran out of CDs and had to limit the offer to free downloads only. Full story at IDG.

Combine an open rooftop with an antenna and a Linux server and you too can be a threat to the planned corporate wireless monopoly. Read all about the world of wireless 802.11b freenets in this informative article at ISP-Planet.

A lengthy articleon corporate network and Internet security at Interactive Week devotes an entire page to the question: Which is more seucre? — Open Source vs. proprietary. From the lead paragraph: “Is open source software more secure than proprietary software? in a word, “yes.” However, will using open source software solve your security needs? The answer is a resounding “no.””

A brief item on softwareuncovered.com notes that Microsoft will assist Ximian with its Open Source .NET alternative, Mono. The Redmond, Wash. software company will provide technical assistance for the Mono project. Microsoft was chock full of comments about how assisting an Open Source project was the best thing since sliced bread.

“The minutes are a bit late, I was hoping the information concerning
the executive director would get public just after the meeting, but
it seems to take a little longer than I expected initially. Anyway,
the identity of the person hired will be made public real soon.”

	  Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting 10 July 2001
	  ===============================================


Presents:
=========

    Havoc Pennington (chairing)
    Daniel Veillard  (minutes)
    Federico 
    John Heard
    Dan Mueth        
    Raph Levien
    Owen Taylor

Regrets:
========

    Miguel de Icaza (regrets)
    Bart Decrem (regrets)
    Maciej Stachowiak 
    Jim Gettys


Decisions:
==========

   - Mostly discussions, it was light agenda, still wondering about
     the gnome.org mail aliases policies.
   - finishing the work on hiring an executive director for GNOME 
Foundation

Action Done:
============

  ACTION: Dan to mail Christian about asking the managers of the
          various projects for updates and links to important threads
          in the mail archives.
     => done, Christian was receptive, looks started.

Actions:
========

  ACTION: Havoc to invite Sander and Martin
     => postponed

  ACTION: Dan to work with Membership Committee to re-open the 
membership list.
    => still pending

  ACTION: Havoc send the AB list to the board looking for completion
          of the member liasons.
    => still pending, waiting for update from the manager.

  ACTION: John try to get a Copyright assigment form and procedure for 
the
          GNOME Foundation
    => still pending waiting on the FSF, RMS is working on that.

  ACTION: Maciej to email the Board the current draft of the platform
          license policy for review.
    => still pending

New Actions:
============

  ACTION: Federico to post the new version of the policy for gnome.org 
email 

Discussion:
===========

 - approve/review last week's minutes and actions

   => approved

 - We didn't invite Sander and Martin because Martin is
   gone this week

 - Hiring executive director for GNOME Foundation
   We have reached an agreement on job description, salary, and
   benefits.
   Initial contract will be for only 3 months to give time for 
finishing
   the incorporation work.

 - GNOME 1.4.1
   Seems Kjartaan is doing the intermediate release, sounds good.

 - press release on accessibility,
   Confirm what we decided here, it wasn't communicated to Sun well
   The intent of the PR is to raise awareness and get more contributors
   accessibility patches and apps using them.
   The board wait for the draft and will review it.
   Having the framework, guidelines, documentation and a few good 
examples
   may be sufficiant to get lots of improvement.

 - There have been various requests for reusing the Gnome logo for
   tee-shirt or other. Discussed how to handle this.

 - email alias policy for gnome.org email and login accounts.
   Proposal:
    - modules maintainers need shell account
    - for mail we don't have a clear idea yet what whould be the 
policy:
      1/ nobody
      2/ case by case 
      3/ foundation members

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network 
http://redhat.com/products/network/
veillard@redhat.com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  
http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
Sep 17-18 2001 Brussels Red Hat TechWorld 
http://www.redhat-techworld.com

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

Cox writes, “This time the VIA fix should work, sorry about that.

“So far so good, but still treat this one with care. We now use the
official VIA workaround for the southbridge bugs. That should fix
the ES137x/SB PCI problems on VIA and some other stuff without
breaking the IDE corruption fix.
The i810 security hole is now patched too.”

2.4.6-ac5
o Fix VIA workaround (I merged the wrong diff) (me)
o Small NTFS update (Anton Altaparmakov)
o Add io memory emulation to user mode Linux (Greg Lonnon)
o Futher uml management console updates (Jeff Dike)
o Update uml defconfig, clean up casts,signals (Jeff Dike,
suser to capable James Stevenson)
o Fix midi via72cxxx ‘bad devc’ crash (Adrian Cox)
o Add snprintf/vsnprintf to the kernel (Crutcher Dunnavant)
| Lots of places want tweaking to use snprintf now
| notably the isdn code with its own snprintf
o Don’t go off the end of the ROM looking for SBF (me)
o Fix warning in mce code (Mikael Pettersson)

2.4.6-ac4
o Update VIA southbridge bug fix to VIA provided
workaround. (me)
| Except we apply it even when no sblive is present
o Fix up includes to use slab.h (Chris Wedgewood)
o Switch es1371 internal amp to a table (Frank Aune, me)
o Merge improve zone balancing (Marcelo Tosatti)
| Should fix a lot of high zone balancing problems
o Update to megaraid 1.17a (Atul Mukker)
o Add large file support to user mode Linux (Lennert Buytenhek)
o Add management console to user mode Linux (Lennert Buytenhek)
o IDE updates (Andre Hedrick)
o Updated SBNI drivers (Yaroslav Polyakov, Denis I.Timofeev)
o Fix the i810 ‘read any kernel memory’ bug (me)

“Development of code that today comprises Linux stretches far, far back to the roots of the self-recursively named GNU’s Not Unix (GNU) Project founded by Richard M. Stallman in 1984. The GNU Project (pronounce the G) was dedicated to producing a free version of Unix because of Stallman’ idea that free access to software source is a moral imperative. As the GNU Web page puts it, “‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer.'” More at FreeOS.com.

The Standard: “If Comcast succeeds with its takeover of AT&T Broadband, what will become of Excite@Home, one of the Internet Economy’s most ambitious startups?”