The JBoss Group has found some code in Apache’s Geronimo project (which is designed to be a JBoss competitor) that they say is copied from JBoss. Naturally, they had their lawyers send a letter (PDF) to Apache telling them to knock it off. Unlike SCO, they entertain the possibility that this might have been an honest mistake, and more importantly, they included examples of actual code from JBoss and Geronimo for comparison. The main differences here are in motivation, of course. JBoss wants to keep their code from being released under a less restrictive license, and more importantly, don’t want the Geronimo people to use JBoss code to give them a head start toward releasing a JBoss competitor. SCO just wants someone to give them bucketloads of money so that they don’t die the corporate death that they so richly deserve.

I love Google, but I don’t mind seeing them deflated a bit. The problem here isn’t Google, really, it’s the Google fanboi tribe (of which I sometimes am a part).

The Republicans have worked the judicial nominations issue masterfully since Bush took office. After spending eight years of taking an extremely obstructionist tack on nominations, they’ve done nothing but complain about resistance to Bush’s nominees, despite the fact that they hold the majority int he Senate. The New York times has an editorial on this today. Awhile back I posted a long piece on how Bush’s nominees were treated as compared to Clinton’s, and which illustrated clearly that it was the Republicans who started politicizing the process in the first place.

I’m a huge supporter of free trade and immigration, in principle. I find it increasingly worrying that Americans, proudly led by our political leaders, are irrationally blaming both free trade and immigration for our economic problems, rather than looking deeper for the actual causes. I mention this only because I just read a great essay by Julian Sanchez on these topics. It also provides me with a nice segue into something else I’ve been meaning to say.

Lately I read often about negative population growth in the United States and Europe (maybe other rich countries as well). The statements are generally written in foreboding tones, and say something like, “If not for immigration, the population of country so and so would be shrinking.” Or warning that this trend will begin soon. Who cares? There are people all over ther world who are dying to immigrate to rich countries, so that they can start a life that involves working hard and paying taxes until they retire. If negative population growth becomes a problem, you simply liberalize your immigration policy and start letting in the kinds of workers that you need. The only reason to oppose this is bigotry, because the immigrants you get won’t be white. Thanks to centuries of imperialism, they will speak the language at least.

Imagine if you will that we live in a country where politicians tend to best serve the interests of those people who pay for their campaigns. Taking a look at this chart, which candidates do you feel are most likely to serve you, on economic matters in particular?

As a veteran Microsoft basher, I would be remiss if I didn’t point to Joe Gregorio’s critique of what we’ve seen of Longhorn: Longhorn versus the light of day.

Doc Searls wrote up some analysis of Novell’s acquisition of SuSE.

Iraqi guerillas shot down another US helicopter today, killing all 6 of the soldiers who were aboard. The downing of the helicopter last week and now this one reminded me of the Fred Kaplan article from April that discussed why the Army has so many helicopters in the first place. The most disturbing bit of trivia from the article is that the Army lost more than 5,000 helicopters in the Vietnam War.

Is there anything more political than the teaching of history? Here’s a brief description of Iraq’s new history books:

The first indicator of what a Saddam-free education will look like is arriving this month, as millions of newly revised textbooks roll off the printing presses to be distributed to Iraq’s 5.5 million schoolchildren in 16,000 schools. All 563 texts were heavily edited and revised over the summer by a team of US-appointed Iraqi educators. Every image of Saddam and the Baath Party has been removed.

But so has much more – including most of modern history. Pressured for time, and hoping to avoid political controversy, the Ministry of Education under the US-led coalition government removed any content considered “controversial,” including the 1991 Gulf War; the Iran-Iraq war; and all references to Israelis, Americans, or Kurds.

A malfeasant hacked into a server where the source code repository for the Linux kernel resides and injected a clever exploit into the source. They wrote the code such that any program calling a particular system function with a certain set of flags would gain root access to the machine. Fortunately, the hack was sniffed out through a regular a file integrity check and some subsequent digging. The most ingenious part is that the hack only comprised two lines of code, and was camouflaged as the common = != == mistake that programmers make all the time.