Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News has a good column on UCITA, a ridiculous new package of laws that would give software makers carte blanche to trample their customers even more than they already do. The idea of taking away more rights from software purchasers is even more absurd when you consider just how bad most software is; most of the server-based Web software I’ve evaluated over the past two years is absolute rubbish, and the sellers of that software want to take away my right to tell you that. It’s a great deal if they can get it.

I was wondering tonight if there is a port of the Java Development Kit to FreeBSD. The answer: yes there is.

It looks like the blame for the eBay outage has finally been placed, and Sun is left holding the bag. It didn’t take Microsoft long to start gloating. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s argument is that it doesn’t matter how unreliable Windows NT is, if you cluster enough of the servers, you’ll always have enough of them up at one time to consider your site to be reliable. The idea that you can do the same thing with a real operating system, like Yahoo does, is foreign to them.

Fast Company has an article that gives Eric Schmidt’s rules on managing geeks. You wouldn’t think it could be so simple, but the rules are frighteningly on target. All managers should read this article and live it.

Could this case be an ominous sign for rc3.org daily? The Dutch supreme court has ruled that sites which provide links to copyright-infringing material also infringe upon that copyright. News.com also managed to find a legal expert who said that this finding isn’t outside the realm of plausability for the US courts either. Once again the Scientologists break new ground in limiting personal freedom and shutting down independent voices. Damned clams.

NetScripter keeps track of resources for Open Source web developers. Specifically, they have lots of links of interest to PHP and Perl developers.

Wired News has a story about the tempest in a teapot surrounding the use of dirty words in the Linux Kernel. The only reason this story is interesting is the great quotes from Linux Torvalds.

Linux Weekly News has a useful rundown of the Red Hat S-1 filing.

From the “Wake up idiot” file comes this Don Crabb column. In it, Crabb runs down the reasons why Apple is being dressed up for sale to an entertainment megacorp like Disney, Viacom, or Time-Warner. These rumors have been floating around since long before Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to Apple, so I wonder why it is that Crabb would close with the statement, “Remember where you heard it first.” Maybe he wants to remind us of all of those rumors we read on the 9,135 Apple-tracking Web sites over the years.

One of my favorite news resources on the ‘net is the Yahoo photo gallery.