The current licensee is trying to renegotiate their terms with Topps after plunging into debt via some astonishingly poor management.

Catalyst has been in negotiations with some additional parties for weeks concerning how to pay down debts, including making partial payments, turning over stock and so on, as they’ve requested. We’ve been notified that some of these parties are pursuing additional legal means to secure the monies owed despite the negotiations. Our legal counsel has advised that the lawsuit is baseless. As such, Catalyst will defend against it and expect it to be dismissed in the near future. Regardless, we’re continuing our negotiations and will continue to move, as we’ve been doing, to pay debts down as quickly as possible.

Finally, as some of you may have noticed, we’ve just changed the legal text and logos on all our appropriate sites that reference Shadowrun and BattleTech from WizKids to The Topps Company, Inc., per their direction. We’ve been in contact with Topps for weeks regarding these situations. We are currently in negotiations to re-secure the Shadowrun and BattleTech licenses.

It appears to be an edited rip of Aakash Soneri's Sone. (A comparison: Sone is teal, the new logo face is wine, where it overlaps is cobalt blue.) The changes appear to be as insubstantial as adding a slant to ascenders and shifting the baselines of some of the glyphs.

If Canonical modified Sone, didn't license it, and they start freely distributing it ("our global community will still maintain access to the resources needed to construct logos that use the branding" - so either the modified glyphs for the logo as svg, or the modified font itself), that's a dick move.

And if they did license it, then why is an open-source project licensing commercial fonts and calling it a reflection of the project?

Maybe it's a placeholder - who knows? Canonical doesn't say anything about the font's origin or license in the linked documentation, nor does Canonical's Jono Bacon in his nearly identical announcement.

But it is disappointing to see an open source project - whose community already made LGPL-licensed typefaces for their current logo - make and publicize such a half-assed effort, even in a preliminary stage, without any explanation on the decision.

When you say, as an organization based on community contribution:

"We wanted Ubuntu to reflect the precision and engineering that sits at the heart of the product. The new logo reflects this but not at the expense of the immediately recognisable circle of friends."

And you follow that with a logo that's based on a commercial typeface, you're reneging on that intent in at least one of two ways:

• You're disrespecting the designer of the commercial font by modifying it and refusing to give credit - if it's licensed correctly at all;
• You're disrespecting the open-source community, which includes professional designers who've went to bat for you in the past.

Even if Sone was correctly licensed, and Canonical got permission to modify it for their logo and future redistribution, why not get it from the community?

And if it wasn't licensed correctly, then is Ubuntu following the lead of Arial and just ripping things off in a legal but unethical manner when they can't find what they want in a convenient license?

(And maybe it's a coincidence - a really bad coincidence that still should be fixed. Without any explanation, nobody can tell.)

Nothing so far released regarding RBN and the Rock Band Creators Club indicates that it will require XNA. XNA Creators Club != XNA Studio, XNA the programming language, XNA the flamethrower, etc.

Details about Magma, which packages the songs for distribution, haven't been released; all Harmonix says is that it's a "PC tool." That means it may require XNA, but for all we know, it equally might require Java, or COBOL, or shoving your head up your ass. There's just no information yet.

it's also $1,000 to get started ... If you own a PLAYSTATION 3 and a PC running Linux, or if you own a Wii and a Macintosh computer, you also need to buy an Xbox 360 and a PC running Windows.

Ignoring the suggestion that a Mac owner or Linux user has to buy another computer to run Windows, you're looking at about $640-$850 ($230 Xbox Pro + $150 Windows license + $100-$150 360 Rock Band set + $100 Creators Club + $60-$225 Reaper license). Reaper has an OS X build and works in wine, but since we don't know anything about Magma, it may well require Windows. If not, the cost of entry drops further. If your band or label makes less than $20,000 gross/year, Reaper costs $60, not $225.

At $80, selling their songs at the standard small-label price of $1/80 points per song, the band would have to sell about 2,650 songs to recoup their investment, before taxes. At $640, its 2,133 songs.

Sounds daunting, eh? Dropping $640 with no guarantee of profit? If you're just putting on 2 or 3 songs, you could probably hire a ScoreHero forum person who has a few years' experience in charting to put it together for $200-$300, or less, who knows.

There's no accurate sales figures for Rock Band DLC; Statosphere used to attempt to estimate them based on leaderboard activity, and the song that had sold the fewest copies as of Sept. 2008 (Devo's "Through Being Cool") sold an estimated 2,895 copies in three weeks at $2/sale. MC Frontalot moved an estimated 3,445 copies at $1 each of "Livin' at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe" in one week.

The worst-selling song, The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb," was available on opening day and sold an estimated 13,550 copies in the first 11 months of Rock Band's existence; projecting that performance onto a RBN release, that'd be a gross take for the artist of $4,065, at 30 percent of each $1 sale.

Don't take any of this for any significance - IANA band's business manager, the DLC stats above are sketchy at best, and it'll be a much more crowded marketplace full of songs that will, on average, have lower-quality audio and note charts. But 1.) it's not $1,000 for gear, and for most small bands and some small labels, it won't be $500, and 2.) there's a decent chance artists and labels with a fan base and dedication to quality and promotion can break even.

Nothing so far released regarding RBN and the Rock Band Creators Club indicates that it will require XNA. XNA Creators Club != XNA Studio, XNA the programming language, XNA the flamethrower, etc.

Details about Magma, which packages the songs for distribution, haven't been released; all Harmonix says is that it's a "PC tool." That means it may require XNA, but for all we know, it equally might require Java, or COBOL, or shoving your head up your ass. There's just no information yet.

it's also $1,000 to get started ... If you own a PLAYSTATION 3 and a PC running Linux, or if you own a Wii and a Macintosh computer, you also need to buy an Xbox 360 and a PC running Windows.

Ignoring the suggestion that a Mac owner or Linux user has to buy another computer to run Windows, you're looking at about $640-$850 ($230 Xbox Pro + $150 Windows license + $100-$150 360 Rock Band set + $100 Creators Club + $60-$225 Reaper license). Reaper has an OS X build and works in wine, but since we don't know anything about Magma, it may well require Windows. If not, the cost of entry drops further. If your band or label makes less than $20,000 gross/year, Reaper costs $60, not $225.

At $80, selling their songs at the standard small-label price of $1/80 points per song, the band would have to sell about 2,650 songs to recoup their investment, before taxes. At $640, its 2,133 songs.

Sounds daunting, eh? Dropping $640 with no guarantee of profit? If you're just putting on 2 or 3 songs, you could probably hire a ScoreHero forum person who has a few years' experience in charting to put it together for $200-$300, or less, who knows.

There's no accurate sales figures for Rock Band DLC; Statosphere used to attempt to estimate them based on leaderboard activity, and the song that had sold the fewest copies as of Sept. 2008 (Devo's "Through Being Cool") sold an estimated 2,895 copies in three weeks at $2/sale. MC Frontalot moved an estimated 3,445 copies at $1 each of "Livin' at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe" in one week.

The worst-selling song, The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb," was available on opening day and sold an estimated 13,550 copies in the first 11 months of Rock Band's existence; projecting that performance onto a RBN release, that'd be a gross take for the artist of $4,065, at 30 percent of each $1 sale.

Don't take any of this for any significance - IANA band's business manager, the DLC stats above are sketchy at best, and it'll be a much more crowded marketplace full of songs that will, on average, have lower-quality audio and note charts. But 1.) it's not $1,000 for gear, and for most small bands and some small labels, it won't be $500, and 2.) there's a decent chance artists and labels with a fan base and dedication to quality and promotion can break even.

Songs submitted through this process must then be reviewed by other developers to check for playability, inappropriate lyrics, copyright infringement and so on. Harmonix will post approved tracks to an in-game download store separate from its existing "Rock Band" store where creators can set their own price (50 cents to $3 per song) and receive 30% of any resulting sales. Gamers will also be able to demo 30-second samples of each track.

The Billboard article is extremely detailed, with info on training the review community; Microsoft's development of a Harmonix-hosted subset of the XBL Creators Club, with special rules just for Rock Band; details on the software to be used by artists and and HMX; record label Sub Pop announcing that they're already moving content onto the network, including all of their fall releases; and MTV saying they may eventually combine the RBN and existing Rock Band Store markets if RBN is successful.

1.) If TC can prove that the data was transferred from last.fm to CBS, they're refusing to disclose it because they expect to be sued and will use the evidence to build a truth defense against the libel suit.

If this is true, TC doesn't care about informing the public - if they did, either TC would have the balls to post the evidence by now on their site, or slip a copy to Wikileaks or some other gray-market info distributor to hit the blogs. The end goal for Arrington is publicity for the site and page views.

2.) If TC can't prove this, and only has a single unsubstantiated source, they're refusing to disclose the source because they expect to be sued and plan to throw the source to CBS' lawyers as a diversion. If this is the case, TC is looking to burn off some excess money. The end goal for Arrington is publicity for the site and page views.

Even if TC can prove it has a source, last.fm/CBS would have to sue TC to get to it. If CBS sues TC and TC doesn't produce any source or evidence, TC faces the full liability for CBS' losses, and likely significant punitive damages.

If Arrington agrees to reveal the source or evidence, and it turns out the source was wrong, a judge would likely limit damages compared to what it would award against the source, as the libel originated with the source. In this situation, TC didn't invent the false information, it merely relayed it, and in many cases this does not result in heftier judgments against the outlet. (Sometimes it does, but in any case, Arrington can point at the source and blame him/her/it, self-validate his journalistic ethics, and continue working.) The story makes banner headlines across news sites. TC loses a chunk of cash, but FFS, it's a blog about to compete with Apple and tablet PC makers. It obviously has cash to burn. The net result for Arrington is publicity for the site and page views.

If Arrington refuses to reveal the source, either the judge slaps the full brunt of libel against tc, or the judge jails Arrington for contempt. Arrington happily martyrs himself for "journalism" and goes to jail for contempt, blogging by mail or phone or prison sex or whatever, until CBS decides to stop paying its legal team and drops the suit. (Arrington's sponsors - including competing music services - would be happy to foot the bill.) The end result for Arrington is a SHIT-TON of publicity for the site and page views.

And finally, libel suits that span the Atlantic are tough nuts to crack. Legal action is possible, but it's expensive, and therefore unlikely. Last.fm suspended the deletion of account data the last time TC did this, allowing Angry Internet People to sulk back when it was evident TC didn't have the cards to play their accusations in public and folded. We'll see if it happens again - considering the mirroring of the previous incident's tactics, that's probably true.

In that case, all CBS/last.fm suing TC would accomplish is... publicity and page views for Arrington and TC.

Arrington can't lose, he knows it, and we all break down TC's site to spit on Arrington or pat his back. Meanwhile, he passes all THAT info on to HIS advertisers.

as Bruce Perens famously said at Linux SF Con 2006, Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Jamie Zawinski (the DNA Lounge/Unix Mozilla 1.1 guy) said it in 1998.

So finally I talked my boss into getting me an SGI Indy (which I've since replaced with an SGI O2) and life became joyous again. Because SGI actually knows something about building user interfaces, and about making it possible to administer a machine without being a member of the technological priesthood. For but one example, I was able to install and format a new disk on this machine through GUIs, without once having to run ``man'' and try to remember some random arcane command that I last used in 1986.

This is the part where I start getting hate mail from people, and cheerleading messages telling me to take a look at it again, because it's so much better now. I understand. I'll take your word for it. And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux. But as we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance.

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more. I hope that some day it will have evolved to the point where my mom can take home a Linux box, turn it on, and get on with her life without having to become a Unix sysadmin first, and without having to give up on all the ease of use she's come to expect from allegedly less powerful operating systems.

Just two years later, he took it mostly back.

IANAL, but juvenile disciplinary records are sealed in most/all states, and tough to open. Turn 18 and most people won't know you ever went unless you commit a crime or they, um, have access to a corrupt public official. Like this one.

I'm still trying to figure out how popular projects like Miro and Songbird really are, and why. How useful is mashing Web functions together with media to create some interactive behemoth? Why do people need these bloated apps for content discovery when browsing a Web site and running an RSS-supporting torrent client is at least as effective?

Is it just the convenience of not leaving an app? If it's the interface, I understand even less - both are so cluttered, even with Miro's upgrade, and resource-intensive. Neither appears to have any meaningful integration with any media center software - MythTV can't even sync with Miro's library without a hack since Miro doesn't have much of a backend API - and neither has much of a 10-foot interface, so that kills it for me on a TV, which is the only place I'd watch anything more than a YouTube clip.

OpenCandy was removed from Miro two months ago after user complaints.

Hi All,

We're going to remove OpenCandy from our installer next week. Thanks for pushing back on this.

We still think the core idea of open source projects promoting one another is a great one, and we'll continue to support and promote other FOSS projects whenever possible.

~Jesse

Also from that post:

OpenCandy is a a software recommendation engine that we added recently in order to suggest other free and open source software to our users. You can find out about the organization at www.opencandy.com.

I wasn't aware that it permanently left their recommendation engine on the user's machine after running it. We'll look into that right now and fix it as soon as possible.