I’ve been putting most things on the back burner for the past few days while I get together graduate school applications and polish off a few other tasks that have been on the to-do list for a bit too long. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure…

• Now that you’ve already liberated your Office software (thanks, OpenOffice.org!) and your web browser (thanks, Mozilla Firefox!), you can also reclaim your inbox with the public release of Mozilla Thunderbird, a top-notch open source, standalone e-mail client. It features (inter alia) adaptive spam filters, nice RSS / Atom newsfeed support, and extra-useful Saved Search folders. Migrating from AOL? Outlook? Outlook Express? Eudora? No problem! That’s the thing about open source software: they keep making software that works. Score another one for the free world.

• Patent protectionists show once again how they make our lives better and reward innovation. Another threat to technological civilization will no doubt soon be averted by further intellectual enclosure. (Thanks, Copyfight.)

• Fred Vincy has a thorough take-down of editorial hand-wringing over boys’ supposedly declining educational prospects. In fact, the whole thing is a huge sham (for some tangentially related points, see GT 2002-02-06: The Weird, Wild World of Anti-feminism), and as Fred points out, several steps of the argument apparently require you to presume that the money men make is more important than the money women make. It also includes, among other chicanery, this marvelous explanation of the problem: The small group of experts who research the problem only now is beginning to trace its outlines. It isn’t so much that schools have changed in ways that hurt boys. It’s that society has changed in ways that help girls. Helping girls? O tempora! O mores! (Perhaps someone at USA Today does need help with their verbal skills, after all…)

• George Bush really did tell Tony Blair The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur. You can test your knowledge of our Prince President’s gnomic wisdom at the BBC.

• Now that Fallujah had to be destroyed in order to save it, military commissars now have a free hand to build their model city in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Bright ideas for liberated Fallujah include apartheid-style passbooks for all Fallujans and possibly industrial conscription in which all work for Fallujan men is organized under military-style batallions and directed by Army commanders. (For those keeping score, that’s one of Leon Trotsky’s theses about the possible uses of the Red Army after the Civil War drew to a close. It managed to horrify even his fellow Bolsheviks–no small feat, that. Freedom is, indeed, on the march.)

So it goes in this possible world. There should be some more in the way of non-lazy posting coming soon.

I’d meant to post a note about this earlier, when it was posted at php.net, but I was distracted by other things. Fortunately, though, Aptenobytes mentioned it yesterday, and so I have been reminded.

Under the influence of the patent system and big industry lobbyists, the European Union is on the verge of making a huge mistake: to pass a law that would legalize software patents.

If that happens, you will pay dearly. Europe’s software industry will fall victim to unscrupulous extortioners. A cartel of large corporations will crush smaller competitors. Consequently, we will all pay more money for less good and less secure software. You personally, your household, your company, your government, all of us.

— No Software Patents

Companies that push for software patents are more or less universally large corporations that want to extract profits while sitting on their patent portfolio laurels; people who are doing innovative, groundbreaking work now in software and Internet services–such as Red Hat, the developers behind PHP and MySQL, and 1&1, among others–are leading the fight against patents. Software patents don’t foster innovation; they stifle it. And in a society where software and Internet services are the leading technological fields of the forseeable future, that means that software patents are nothing less than a roadblock in the way of civilization. A free culture needs free tools to build it; but to build the tools we need (unfortunately) to resist the on-going intellectual enclosure movement that is being directed against us. You can find out more about what you can do to help from the No Software Patents website.

Open source software hit another big milestone yesterday–Mozilla Firefox is officially out of beta and released in version 1.0. Better yet, it’s taking off like a rocket–with over 1,000,000 downloads on the first day of release (!) and widespread coverage in the mainstream media, from CNN to the BBC to Al-Jazeera (!!).

If you’re not already familiar with Firefox, you can find out more about the project and its goals, see Ben Goodger’s Firefox 1.0 – Signed, sealed, and delivered. This milestone is especially exciting because Firefox is far and away one of the best FLOSS projects aimed at consumers. Not only does it successfully serve as a replacement for its leading competitor (also known as evil), but exceeds it in both features and user interface design. Whereas Internet Exploder became a merely competant browser (albeit one with broken style sheet support) by version 6.0 and then simply stopped, Firefox continues to make small, important, and delightful improvements. A small but pleasant case in point: Firefox 1.0 ditches the big, clunky Find dialogue–you know, the one that pops up when you press Ctrl-F and that you have to keep moving with your mouse in order to see the text you’re searching for. To find text on a webpage in Firefox 1.0, you can just start typing and a small, unobtrusive toolbar appears at the bottom of your screen with the text you are searching for in it. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl-F and the same toolbar will pop up, ready for you to type in it.

I cite that not because it’s really a huge deal–it’s not, although trimming the amount of time wasted on unnecessary dialogue boxes means a much more pleasant computing experience than you might guess off the top of your head–but rather because it’s one of a million improvements, some of them small (like ditching the Find dialogue or support for RSS/Atom based Live Bookmarks) and others much larger (such as tabbed browsing and ad blocking) that make the web so much more of a joy to use with Mozilla Firefox than with Internet Exploder. So go get Firefox if you haven’t already. (If you’ve already got 1.0 preview release, you should still pick up the official 1.0; there are a few minor tweaks and improvements worth having.)

As far as software reviews go, this has been something of a fluff piece; I don’t have any real detailed comments on the release that haven’t already been said better elsewhere. (I do have some thoughts on the companion almost-out-of-beta 0.9 release of Mozilla Thunderbird–but that’s another geek-out for another day.) But I would like to take a moment to say how exciting it is to see how much effort is going into producing a really good piece of software in the open source world, and to see CNN or the Beeb discussing the organization and motivations behind a FLOSS product. Firefox is rapidly taking territory in a battle that everyone thought was over; it’s applying solid user interface design principles and showing that open source software can not only replace proprietary desktop applications, but exceed them in every respect. As Firefox moves forward–promoting web standards as it goes, incidentally–we are moving further towards building free tools for a free culture. Every download is another support voluntarily kicked out from under the bloated Behemoth of government-protected intellectual monopolists–a blow against Behemoth without setting Leviathan to battle against it. So give it a download, and keep on rocking in the free world.

The latest issue of Wired arrived at my door a few days ago with a delighful surprise tucked into the front cover: an unassuming white compact disc, included for free with the magazine, that just happened to contain 16 precision strikes against the intellectual monopolists, freed under a Creative Commons copyleft license for sharing and sampling.

Since I’ve inveighed against enforced intellectual property monopolies and praised copylefting content here before, you know that I’d be delighted just to see the growth in the world of free content (free as in free speech, not as in free lunch–the songs were gratis as well as libre, but that’s not the important part) and the contribution of big-name artists to publicity for the work that Creative Commons is doing.

However, I’m also happy because it has so many damn good songs on it; in the car and at home I’ve been enjoying a free culture that now embraces fantastic tracks from the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Le Tigre, and Chuck D, among others. The real hidden gem of the CD, though, is from The Rapture, a group I’d never encountered before hearing them on the Wired CD, in the form of 7:05 of deviously pulsing electronic deliciousness known as Sister Saviour (Blackstrobe Remix). The groove–racing, zigzagging, turning back on itself in my mind–is something that has to be shared. And the best part is that I can, thanks to artists who are actually willing to turn their work out into the world without threatening people who presume to use it.

Since I like this m?@c3;ba;sica libre so much, I’ve decided to do just that–by making it all available to you, gentle reader. You can find a full track listing and MP3 files of each track in the extended section of this entry. Listen, share, remix. Enjoy!

Further reading

• GT 2003/11/06: Copyleft and Copyright: the Prospects for Liberty
• Rad Geek People’s Daily: Copyleft Notice
• In a Blog’s Stead 2003/09/14: Thoughtcrime Read the rest of M?@c3;ba;sica libre …

FLOSS advocates — and anyone who likes excellent software for free — rejoice! OpenOffice.org has released its latest milestone release: OpenOffice.org version 1.1.1, a new version of OpenOffice.org 1.1 with scads of new bug fixes, a couple new features, and better performance than ever. OOo is a full-featured, high-quality, open source office suite, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a vector graphics drawer, and presentation software. All the software can read and write files from Microsoft Office, but it also features an open, XML-based standard file format, and it can even export documents to PDF and presentations to Flash. Download it today! You have nothing to lose but your licensing fees …