There is is an interesting blog post over at http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control about using open source software to reduce the likelihood of software errors.

Michael Casadevall (the "Driver" for the Gopher Connection Library project) has recently opened a launchpad project for GopherVR. For some strange reason it pleases me that GopherVR is back under active development.

With all the commotion this week over the launch of FireFox 3 and Wine 1.0 there were a couple of software announcements that might of passed by most of the world but which I found quite exciting...

First, to coincide with the launch of FireFox 3 the Overbite project went public with the first public release of their FireFox 3 add-on that brings "gopherspace back to modern operating systems and browsers".

And secondly, the libgopher project reached an important milestone with the announcement of the first feature complete version of their simple library that can handle Gopher pages and parse menu items and such.

I read with great disappointment Cameron Kaiser's post to the gopher mailing list http://lists.complete.org/gopher@complete.org/2008/01/msg00009.html.gz/ in which he reported the comments by Brandon Eich on bug 388195 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388195#c47/ apparently announcing the end of Gopher support in Mozilla/FireFox etc.

Support for the Gopher protocol has made it into the recently released Firefox 3 Beta 1.

Why are the Mozilla/FireFox people so intent on trying to kill Gopher support in their products?

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351748
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388195
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388192
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388195