Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Is this just me or do we see a highly increased rate of (important and interesting) stuff being released (or announced to be released soon) under the terms of the GPL lately?

A few examples:

• VirtualBox — a VMware-like virtualisation solution
• Second Life — the client for now, but the server software might follow
• Fortress — Sun's Fortran replacement
• OpenSolaris — scheduled to be released under the GPLv3
• Java — this might have a huge impact...
• Sun UltraSPARC T1 — a complete, modern CPU

This is a great trend and good news for all of us. A special thanks to Sun for releasing more and more stuff under free licenses!

After you have installed a minimum SELinux setup in QEMU, you might want to tweak and edit the policy to fit your needs.

A nice, graphical method to do so is to use SLIDE, written by Tresys (and released under the terms of the GPL). SLIDE is an Eclipse (>= 3.1) plugin, which you can install easily:

• Click Help->Software Updates->Find and install...
• Click Search for new features to install, then New remote site
• Enter "http://www.tresys.com/files/eclipse-update/" as URL, click Finish.
• After that, select the new entry, and install SLIDE (will restart Eclipse).

Of course, you can also easily use your favourite text-editor to edit the plain policy files (if you use the te.vim file from Thomas Bleher you get syntax highlighting, at least for *.te files). After placing the file in the ~/.vim/syntax directory, add this to your ~/.vimrc:

if has("autocmd")
  filetype plugin on
  augroup te
    autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile          *.te set filetype=te
  augroup END
endif

Let the flames begin...

(via Luke Welling)

No, I'm not dead, just very very busy...

There have been quite a few interesting new Free Software projects and news popping up recently (or I only recently noticed them):

• The GPLv3 is back in the news: Stallman, Torvalds, Moglen share views on DRM and GPLv3. Very interesting read!
• Ditto for the next-generation Creative Commons licenses: Creative Commons Version 3.0 - Public Discussion Launched. See also Evan Prodromou's Debian Creative Commons Workgroup report.
• On to more practical things: I have put quite some time into trying out and working on LinuxBIOS, a free replacement of traditional, closed-source, proprietary BIOSes. More details on that later... If you want to check it out, and/or help (patches are always welcome), have a look at the wiki or the mailing list.
• The Call for nominations for the 2006 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software has been posted. Who do you think should get the award this year?
• Intel has released Free Software drivers (2D and 3D!) for their Intel® 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. The code is licensed partly under the MIT license, partly the GPL. Thanks Intel!
• Apple has released some more code as Free Software: Apple Opens Up: Kernel, Mac OS Forge, iCal Server, Bonjour, Launchd. Thanks Apple! They switched from the APSL 2.0 to the Apache license 2.0 (at least for some of the code), not sure why. They're both considered "Open Source", and both are GPL-incompatible.
• GNU Classpath 0.92 "Bling! Bling!" has been released, with full support for 2D graphics. One step closer to a free Java environment (not that I would recommend anybody to write stuff in Java if you have a choice)...

• Back Door Found in Diebold Voting Machines. Really? Who would have thought?
• You can now say apt-get install sun-java5-jdk (and a few other packages) in Debian, as Sun has finally relaxed its license a bit. Note that it's still not free, it's just free enough to be distributed in Debian's non-free section now ;-)
• Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure?, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Or: How to restart an ancient flamewar...
• I reached the last level of Battle for Wesnoth, of the "Heir to the Throne" campaign to be more precise. Replays will be available when I'm through...