Hello all,
The new edition of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review is out now. I meant to publish this post late last week, but between the last-minute scramble to get the issue ready (this one was supposed to be easy but turned out to involve a whole lot of corrections at a late stage), it got missed out somehow.

Anyway, if you’re into law and open source, you could do a lot worse than to check it out. You can download a PDF of the entire thing, or order a print version via Lulu (which is very cool).

I guess I’m supposed to be neutral given that I run a lot of the reviews, copyedit and put the thing together, but the highlights for me are probably Silvia Pfeiffer’s article on open standards for video codecs in HTML5, which is well-written and extremely topical at the moment, and Susannah Sheppard’s article on the potential for competition law to affect Free Software, which is something I hadn’t directly considered before.

We’ve reached an interesting stage in the development of the journal. It’s now clear that it has a high degree of FOSS community support, and we are beginning to get the same from the academic community. Much work is still to be done though. We desperately need more submissions, could do with a more streamlined workflow, and on an ongoing basis we will require a more permanent governance structure.

One of the things that has helped most in achieving visibility is being part of the OCLC OAIster database. This is replicated across lots of libraries, as part of their ‘find an eJournal’ systems. It means that more academics and students are more likely to be able to find the publication without doing a web search.

We also now deposit DOI numbers with CrossRef – this helps articles maintain their authority if they get distributed across the web or hosted by some other server (as our licence policy allows).

One Torrent to bind them, one Torrent to rule them all!

Bram Cohen has posted a beta of a trackerless BitTorrent client. Once it goes final it’s expected to make the MPAA, BSA and RIAA’s elaborate game of litegation Whack-a-Mole even more difficult, as noted by ZDNet Australia. As well as that, it should speed things up, presuming that torrent files will now get wider distribution and swarms will become bigger. Here’s Slashdot’s lowdown:

Trackerless BitTorrent Beta Posted:

jgarzik writes “BitTorrent development is occuring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. Yesterday, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta.”

(Via Slashdot.)

Clever stuff.

Mining the Hive Mind, Wikipedia-style: “One of many Wikipedia-based applications, Omnipelagos mines the hive mind to map the connections between two things.”

(Via MetaFilter.)

Forbes Poll : Which Company Makes The Best Personal Computers?:

IBM introduced the original personal computer back in 1981. Three years later, Lenovo Group brought the first PCs to China. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and a PC revolution has occurred. Computers are as commonplace as TV sets in households worldwide, and Lenovo is buying IBM’s PC division for $1.75 billion. Yet now there is a plethora of PC manufacturers from which to choose–not to mention Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ), whose Macintosh computers are often touted as being anti-PC. One fierce competitor is industry leader Dell (nasdaq: DELL – news – people ), which yesterday announced record-setting fourth-quarter sales. So we ask you, who makes the best personal computers?

Get out and vote, chapettes and chaps! It’s your DUTY!

(Via Sen No Sen.)

Someone posted this anonymously on Slashdot today – I have to say it’s pretty accurate – and all my furniture IS from IKEA! What??

1. Windows
   You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you’re pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month “playing the stock market” but in reality you’re only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn’t been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be “The Asshole”. Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
3. Apple
   You think you’re so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your “loft apartment”, which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns ‘n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to “Steve” would be “pretty cool”. When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don’t know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you “run Unix” now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
5. Linspire
   You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don’t know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer he installed Linspire on your machine.
7. Umbongo (ed: Ubuntu Linux)
   You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandella, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
9. Gentoy (ed: Gentoo Linux)
   You’ve been “into computers” for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as “a bit of a hacker”. Wouldn’t know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You’ve explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an “optimised floorplan”. They’ve tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you’ve ignored them so far because you can’t read those complicated regulatory documents.
11. Linux From Scratch
    Much like the Gentoy user but you’d also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You’re not just building a house from matchsticks, you’re planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You’ve cleared some land but don’t know what to do next because you havn’t read the books you’ve got, so you’ve posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It’s been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.

Some of the replies are pretty good too:

7. Amiga You are a bitter person, twisted by how unfair the world is to have ignored your choice of system and operating system. You still think it is the late 80s, and don’t realise that everybody else has caught up, gone past and then lapped you. Oddly enough you hate your neighbour, also an Amiga fanboy, because they have a blue front door. You have a collection of Amiga t-shirts, including a XXXL Amiga Inc t-shirt sent out 3 years after you paid $50 to try and keep your platform alive. You current hardware uses a 5 year old VIA southbridge, and you need to use a PCI card IDE controller because of it. You don’t really know how computers work despite having used one for nearly 20 years. You still think that PCs have no custom chips and use the original x86 instruction set.

And another:

8. GNU HERD You don’t really exist in the conventional sense. You are more an abstraction. So too is your operating system. Your imaginery friends call you all the time to arrange getting together to add on more features to your imaginery OS. You will always buy the fair trade bar of chocolate for $5 before the bag of smarties @ $0.50 but thats ok, because although the cost to your productivity by using HERD now runs into the tens of thousands, that is more than made up for by the imaginery dent you are doing to the Microsoft corrporation. You could be from anywhere but you might well be German and as you know very well, its dangerous to purchase proprietary software but it’s ok to stone someone else to death for using it! : )

And finally, a comment on OpenBSD…

7. OpenBSD You walk around feeling incredibly secure, since you’re supposed to be secure by default. Then, because you didn’t take the time to understand the OS and did something stupid, you realize that you’ve been walking with your fly down the whole time. Of course the girls you tried to pick up at the bar called you out right away with your smug attitude, lack of “features”, and that “Puff” t-shirt you thought was cool. Once you realize your mistakes, you desperately post to misc@openbsd.org begging for help. You get laughed at by other people just like you, only of a higher caliber. But hey, you don’t care, you’re secure… right?