Walnut Creek CD-ROM (the corporate sponsor of everyone’s favorite server operating system — FreeBSD) is merging with BSDI. The really good news is that the codebases for BSD/OS (the primary product of BSDI) and FreeBSD will be merging, creating the new FreeBSD. The commercial components of BSD/OS will be held back, and the new company will sell FreeBSD combined with those commercial components as the new BSD/OS. This is great news for BSD fans! Daemon News has the story.

Weblog Nation is a daily digest of the best Weblog posts found by Jesse James Garrett. I like it (and not just because one of my updates from yesterday is featured).

Just because I think they deserve acknowledgement, here’s a link to Slate’s list of people who made the 61 largest charitable contributions last year. Bill and Melinda Gates top the list at $2.4 billion in donations for 1999. Four of the top 10 donors are from the computer industry.

VeriSign Nabs NetSol for $21 Bil: My God, what’s wrong with this industry? First VeriSign gobbled up Thawte to give themselves a virtual monopoly on the SSL certificate market, now they’re buying Network Solutions. At least it’s one sleazy company buying another, so the total number of sleazy companies is going to be decremented. You can make VeriSign look stupid by registering your domain name at one of these companies instead of NetSol. I’ve heard good things about Register.com and Joker.com. They’re a lot cheaper than NetSol, and actually seem to care about customer service.

Researchers are working on a way to eliminate broken hyperlinks. It looks like a pretty cool method, but it still won’t fix my biggest problem with broken links, which is newspapers that rotate their stories every few days. For example, there are tons of great stories in the New York Times, but I avoid linking to them because they take most of them down after one day. The Washington Post keeps them for two weeks, still not enough in my opinion. On the other hand CNN and Salon keep their stories around forever.

Some days I read the headlines over at News.com and I’m overwhelmed by total disgust for this nasty little industry I’m a part of …

Molly Ivins sets the record straight about George Bush’s environmental record in her latest column. This is timely because a Bush crony from Dallas just secretly spent several million dollars on “issue ads” slamming McCain on the environment and praising Bush in states with upcoming primaries, like New York. They’re called issue ads because theoretically they discuss an issue and not candidates, and thus aren’t subject to spending regulations the way donations directly to a candidate are. Odd, then, that not only do the ads mention Bush and McCain by name, but they also transpose McCain’s face over smokestacks belching pollution. Dirty, dirty politics.

The Salon Free Software Project is a book-in-progress being written by Andrew Leonard. Like ESR’s book on Unix programming, the goal is to allow the public to review the book as it is written so that all of the bugs can be found and eliminated before it’s “released.”

This pro-Python screed illustrates perfectly why I have such a strong distaste for evangelism these days.

The Industry Standard has published an article on UCITA, which readers of this page already recognize as one of the consumer-unfriendly laws anyone could imagine. It’s almost impossible to believe that this law has been passed in Virginia, and could actually be codified in other states. The law is opposed by as diverse a group of organizations as you could imagine, and is supported by only the most profiteering, greedy scumbags you could hope not to encounter. The Standard article lists two proponents, Network Solutions and Microsoft, and I think you know how I feel about both of them …