Microsoft Plans Shared Source .NET: Tim O’Reilly, Rael Dornfest, and David Sims interview Dave Stutz from Microsoft on their shared source plans for the .NET framework. I found it very difficult to discern what, exactly, my rights as a developer would be under shared source from Stutz’s answers to the interview questions. It’s interesting that Microsoft is going to implement .NET on FreeBSD rather than on Linux due to philosophical problems they have with the GPL. I’m operating under the assumption that this is simply an attempt by Microsoft to weaken Linux as the dominant open source operating system player and increase divisiveness in the open source community over licensing.

CNN has an interesting story about the marketing of American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s new novel.

Is the Web doomed? That’s the question Scott Rosenberg asks in his article on AOL and Microsoft fighting over control of users. That’s really what the fight is over, too. Microsoft and AOL don’t want to control the Internet, they want to destroy it. The only reason they play along is that either of them splintered off, users would probably still choose the Internet over their proprietary crap. Let’s keep it that way.

Seth David Schoen’s comparison of Microsoft’s EULA and the GPL is particularly instructive when we’re judging which is more restrictive. It takes real temerity for the maker of proprietary software complaining about the restrictiveness of the GPL.

I’ve often wondered how serious Apple is about the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, and also how seriously they take the fact that Darwin is an open source project. Well, the fact that they’ve hired Jordan Hubbard seems to indicate that their commitment to BSD is very strong indeed.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today that may not be heared but will be felt around the world. The ruling states that companies must pay royalties to freelancers when they resell their work through archiving services like Lexus/Nexus. This seems like a no-brainer (and indeed, the 2nd circuit Court of Appeals agreed unanimously in 1999), and could really rock the publishing industry. I hope it doesn’t turn out to hurt freelancers in the end by discouraging publishers from using their work at all, or forcing them to sign work-for-hire agreements more often than they already do.

Microsoft has created quite a stir by releasing a software package that prohibits use of the software with “potentially viral software” (meaning open source software). This provoked an interesting thread on the FSB mailing list. It seems to me that the license terms described in the article are nothing but a publicity stunt. Microsoft has been referring to the GPL as viral for months now, and by referring to it (and other less restrictive open source licenses) as viral in an official sense, they’re hoping to get other people to latch onto that false characterization as well. It’s cheap and dirty, but it’s to be expected.

CGI::Application is an extremely nifty Perl module that allows you to build Web applications in a more reusable manner. It also eliminates a lot of the grunt work associated with building Web applications. There are a few Web apps I need to write, and I’m glad I didn’t start on them before seeing this, because it looks really, really useful.

Voter.com is auctioning off its remaining assets. Items in the auction: a list of 170,000 luckless souls who signed up for newsletters with voter.com, one slightly used content management system implemented using StoryServer and Oracle (StoryServer and Oracle not included), and several domain names of questionable value.

The Economist weighs in on the failure of AOL and Microsoft to cut a deal extending their old agreement where AOL used IE and Microsoft put AOL on the Windows desktop. The best possible outcome here is that they kill each other, but obviously that’s unlikely.