The real question is whether it would have cost them $170 million to leave the OtherOS feature alone. Lets not forget Sony started the fight with the community by removing a feature originally provided on the hardware that was used heavily by researchers and programmers at home. Then the community found a way to root the PS3, then they patched it, then the root keys were found, then they started blocking rooted consoles from the network, then the network was taken down for everyone.

The community is big, Sony is small, and there are enough fringe elements in the community to make us dangerous as a whole. Hopefully they've learned their lesson and begin behaving in a more cooperative manner with the community, but I have a feeling they're just going to raise the stakes even further.

Or at least until one of the copyright holders for the GPL source code they're using sends them a cease and desist order.

Much of the Android source is under a permissive or academic license, but they are required to provide the source code to the copyleft parts.

The Ubuntu project is also losing support from developers over these things. I quit the project when they added the Ubuntu One music store, started selling proprietary software through software center, and became a peddler for MPEG-4 patent licenses. Most of my friends who used to be Ubuntu members have since quit as well, none of us want to follow them down the dark path they're headed.

I should probably update the email address associated with my slashdot account.

PIL is working on Python 3; "The current free version is PIL 1.1.7. This release supports Python 1.5.2 and newer, including 2.5 and 2.6. A version for 3.X will be released later" (source). So is Django, Turbogears, wxpython, pygtk, etc. You can vote on which major 3rd party packages you'd like to see ported.

PyQT, CherryPy, Genshi, and many others are already ported to Python 3.

Yep, "import antigravity" is an easter egg. It also contains geohash code, but the core functionality of the module demonstrates how easy Python is;

import webbrowser
webbrowser.open("http://xkcd.com/353/")

Works with every major web browser, no muss, no fuss.

I don't know of a major Python library that isn't upgrading to Py3 - and this release marks the tipping point where we wave goodbye to the aging 2.x codebase.

PEP-3003, the moratorium to changes to the language to allow alternative Python implementations to catch up, only applies up to the 3.2 series so we're going to continue moving forward from here. Nobody's forcing Python 2 users to upgrade their code, but there's many advantages and ever decreases hurdles to doing so.

Don't fear change, this change is good and necessary for the advancement of the language.

You don't even have to go to this great of a length; if you want to root Linux machines, release a proprietary driver in the form of a binary Linux kernel module and watch as your customers blindly install it.

This is one reason why we should insist on the source code to all firmware - or reverse engineer write new firmware ourselves.

Ditto. I was planning to purchase a PS/3 for our home entertainment system just before they decided to end support for the Other OS feature.

Then again, their Linux support was never that great with their intentionally crippled hypervisor. What use is a Linux console without accelerated 3d and video? I can build a dual core system with 2gigs ram and accelerated graphics for under $150.

These games from the Humble Indy Bundle have not been released under a free license, nor does it appear they will be. All that is being released are their engines. There are already dozens of free software game engines available with no free software games which use them.

While this is a nice gesture, and does raise some awareness for software freedom, its important to point out that the games themselves are still very much proprietary.

This is not the first. A company in New Hampshire has been printing, with a 4-ink inkjet process, solar cells for years now. A quick patent search shows dozens of other groups with their own solar-from-inkjet techniques.

Sounds like the MIT guys failed to do their research.

Synergy, which allows you to use a single keyboard+mouse across multiple systems (Linux, OSX, Windows) uses the scroll lock key to lock your mouse in the current screen.

This is especially useful when playing full screen games which use bumping the pointer against the edge to scroll, but also being able to unlock to check email on another computer.

New Hampshire has already passed into law that any federal identification program is unconstitutional with 2007 HB0685. To quote the bill, which was signed into law;

The general court finds that the public policy established by Congress in the Real ID Act of 2005, Public Law 109-13, is contrary and repugnant to Articles 1 through 10 of the New Hampshire constitution as well as Amendments 4 though 10 of the Constitution for the United States of America. Therefore, the state of New Hampshire shall not participate in any driver's license program pursuant to the Real ID Act of 2005 or in any national identification card system that may follow therefrom.

I'd like to point New Hampshire residents to MV Communications which offers DSL service throughout New Hampshire.

Oh, did I mention they'll throw in a static IP on your residential DSL just for asking? I've been using MV for over a year now, they're the best ISP I've ever had.

It appears that their tracking of adoption rates are based solely on projects hosted on Sourceforge.

Most GNU projects are hosted on Savannah, many are hosted on GNA!, and many are self-hosted. It would be more accurate to use a service such as Ohloh to track license adoption.

I believe you'd find, when these other data sources are included, the numbers are very different.