EFF: Today EFF, joined by Public Knowledge, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Apache Software Foundation, filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case in which Microsoft is trying to make it easier to invalidate an issued U.S. patent. If successful, this challenge should help in the fight against bad patents by lowering the standard required to prove that the patent is invalid to the same one required to prove infringement. It should especially help the free and open source community.
Richard Hillesley: A significant difference between LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org is that there will be no copyright assignment, and the code will belong to the individual developers, as it does on many other free software projects.
Mike Davies (Isolani): The upside of starting with a clean state of Atom was we could think through every part of the specification, and use the collective experience of the syndication developers to produce a better specification. Also the discussions around the Atom Publishing Protocol helped kickstart REST as a viable and simpler way of offering web services.
In any case, you can still put a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke inside the same shopping cart as your half-gallon of 2% milk. What matters most to consumers isn’t the packaging but what is inside.
rhiannon: The recent releases of Google Chrome (6 and up) have PDF support built-in, but it’s not enabled by default. Here’s how to enable the PDF viewer in Chrome. [via Paul Hoffman]
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me. Ubuntu 10.04, Chrome 6.0.472.63 beta. The plugin itself does seem to be present at /opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so.
John Gruber: What I didn’t foresee was the tremendous amount of software out there that does not properly parse non-ASCII characters in URLs, particularly IDN domain names. Twitter clients (including, seemingly, every app written using Adobe AIR, which includes some very popular Twitter clients), web browsers (including Firefox), and, for a few months, even the Twitter.com website wasn’t properly identifying DF’s short URLs as links.
I’ve delayed posting this as I wasn’t sure what was OK to post and what was not, but during the second week of this month my son deployed to Kirkuk Regional Air Base where is will be maintaining radar equipment, currently during the night shift.
It is odd to have him without access to a cell phone, but we do talk to him once a week or so, and keep in touch via IM and Facebook. He’s also received a number of care packages that we and other family members have sent.
Tony Gentilcore: WebKit nightly builds now support the HTML5 async and defer script attributes. This makes it easier for web pages to load faster by downloading JavaScript without blocking other elements of the page.
I’ve done some informal testing, and it appears that defer does have an effect on XHTML pages, at least on Firefox. I’ve started to modify my pages accordingly. If anybody sees any problems, let me know.
Ted Johnson: I can confirm that your bug report was received and the bug will be fixed for IE9 beta.
And I can verify that the bug was fixed. At the present time, everything on my site displays and works the same with the latest versions of all the major browsers, with the exception of a few CSS3 features that not all browsers support, namely gradient, box-shadow, transition, and (possibly) border-radius.
Anil Dash: some problems are better solved with lots of different efforts instead of one committee-built compromise.
Perhaps I have an odd sense of humor, but I find it a bit amusing and ironic Anil’s page triggered a reaction that the ASF should have One True Page to capture the ASF gestalt on this subject. The [http://github.com/blog/712-pull-requests-2-0
So, of course, I can’t resist the opportunity to fork that discussion.
Luis Villa: The highlight of this release is new patent language, modeled on Apache’s. We believe that this language should give better protection to MPL-using communities, make it possible for MPL-licensed projects to use Apache code, and be simpler to understand