In our third and final part of the 'Making Music with Linux' trilogy, we try to make sense of the alphabet soup of the Linux sound world by exploring OSS and ALSA, and we investigate musical notation systems and software available for Linux.

For years, Old Media dismissed electronic competitors as frivolous and temporal. Then New Media appeared to be burying its predecessors for good. It appears both notions may have been wrong. The boundaries between new and old media are getting fuzzy, as a hybrid Middle Media emerges between the two. (Read more.)

Steven Young writes "As an intellectual property attorney, and a regular Slashdot reader, I would like to share a few of my thoughts regarding patent issues, especially as they relate to programmers. Although patents (for better or worse) are playing an ever-expanding role in the software field, many programmers do not know much about them." (Full story below.)

Two weeks ago, Jane's Intelligence Review presented media with a new, radically improved information model for the 21st Century. Will they pay attention?

Rene S. Hollan has sent an insightful piece regarding the use of a non-GPL license that is still fair to the free software community, and might even win the approval of RMS ^[?] .

John Dillinger wasn't nailed with much more fanfare than the alleged creator of the now-famed Melissa virus, whose apprehension in New Jersey a few days ago drew a governor and a platoon of state, local and federal cyber-cops. This syndrome is becoming almost ritualistic. The virus and the arrest tell us a lot about Crime and Hype; Technological Hostility, and Closing the Distance that makes so much online hostility so easy.

Christian Reiniger of the new Linux Game Development Project has written up a nice piece that you might want to read if you want to see more games on Linux, and how this new project will aid that. The way I see it, the apps are coming, and in many cases, already here. We just need the games.