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.

www.feministblogs.org

A while back I mentioned that Geekery Today is now syndicated at Anarchoblogs, a group blog automatically generated by syndicating the weblogs of a passle of anarchists. It’s a great project, both for bloggers and for readers, and it got me thinking about the value of using free software tools to aggregate independent DIY media into communities of interest. And, especially, about the potential benefits of a similar project for another group committed to DIY media and all too often marginalized, trivialized, or simply ignored in the mainstream media–whether traditional or alternative, or, yes, in the blog world (or in the blog world, or in the blog world, or…): that is, Feminist Bloggers.

So, after spending about a week grubbing around with software and in conversation with some of my favorite bloggers, I’m pleased to announce the public launch of a new collaborative project that we’ve developed: FeministBlogs.org, a syndication-based group blog for self-identified feminists, womanists, women’s liberationists, and pro-feminist men. The site uses contributors’ newsfeeds (RSS or Atom) and the Planet aggregator to generate a community weblog out of our posts. That helps bloggers by raising awareness, firing up debates, encouraging cross-linking and discussions, increasing Google juice, etc. More importantly, it helps readers by making it easier to follow discussions, keep track of several feeds in one place (if you’re in to that sort of thing), and to discover new feminist bloggers. It also helps, inter alia, to raise the visibility of alternatives to a bunch of boys shouting at each other, and to drive another nail into the coffin of Where are all the good female political bloggers?. And that, my friends, is good for everyone. Syndication is powerful.

We’re starting small, with a basic design and a small core of bloggers. But the public launch is only the first step on the road to world domination; further steps include welcoming new members, gathering some more information, making the process of joining more user friendly, and anything else we can do to help the community grow and thrive. So far, our contributors are:

• BlackFeminism.org
• CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism
• feministe
• Pinko Feminist Hellcat
• Rad Geek People’s Daily
• Rox Populi
• Sappho’s Breathing
• Trish Wilson

Do you have a blog that regularly discusses gender and politics from a feminist perspective? Then we’d love for you to join us. Do you want independent alternatives to the malestream media? Then check out:

www.feministblogs.org

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.

Something I meant to mention earlier, but put on the back burner for the duration of the usual November Nonsense: Rad Geek People’s Daily is now syndicated at Anarchoblogs, a rad project that Anarchogeek launched a bit more than a month ago in order to raise awareness of anarchist weblogs and build community and conversations between anarchist webloggers.

If you’re interested in the technical jots and tittles, Anarchoblogs tracks the Atom feed of Geekery Today, and then uses Planet Planet to aggregate posts with posts from all the other feeds that it tracks, and shoehorn the results into an HTML template and some syndication format feeds. If you’re not interested in the technical jots and tittles, the main thing that you need to know is that Anarchoblogs is a great place to find out about anarchist weblogs you haven’t read before, and to keep track of what’s going on on their sites all in one place. All in all, a very cool project cobbled together out of some neat, low-energy hacks.

Give it a look. If you’re an anarchist (autonomist, voluntaryist, syndicalist, whatever), submit your site. Keep on rocking in the free world.

You really ought to be getting out and voting today. It’s not a civic duty, but it is a prudent contribution towards your own self-defense and it’s not like it takes that long, anyway.

But if you already have, feel free to engage in some far deeper and more meaningful activities. For example, if you have Flash and a mouse, you can slap the tar out of virtual avatars of George Bush and John Kerry.

Ah, political engagement.