The World Has Survived Because It Has Laughed. This odd message came to me from Stefan Furtonov. It came in the post on very thin grey paper.

A new element has been added to the judgment of literary worth. It is nothing to do with the elegance of the prose, the vividness of the dialogue or descriptive qualities. The main question to pose is "does the writer smoke?"

The OOXML document format war is over, and the good guys lost. The world will be a worse place because of it, for a long time to come. After being a lobbyist for many months, it was a great relief to get back to being a Samba coder. At least that's something I feel I have some competence in. The jury is still out on my lobbying career.

The high-definition DVD format struggle is over. Toshiba's High-definition DVD (HD-DVD) was slugging it out in the market with Sony's BLU-RAY disk format. BLU-RAY has won, and no one except for the creators of HD-DVD is really sorry. I have an HD-DVD player stuck upstairs in a closet (inherited from the previous owner when we moved into our new house) and even I don't care. I never bought any HD-DVD's you see.

December 20th 2007. Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.

Groklaw is the blog that has made a difference. Created as a personal project by Pamela Jones, better known as PJ, in 2003, its stated purpose was to increase understanding of the law as it is applied to Linux and free software.

Groklaw emerged just as SCO began its legal action against IBM and the Linux community, and quickly became a focus for Linux users, programmers and legal professionals in their mission to expose, understand and demystify the issues surrounding SCO's legal action.

Debian GNU/Linux was the first project to be deliberately modelled on the principles of distributed software development, and provides the core software for many of the more successful commercial Linux distributions. Though Debian does not have the high profile of other Linux distributions the commercial success of Linux may owe more to the Debian community than advocates of Linux in the enterprise are ever likely to acknowledge.

X Window, X11 or "X," as it is known for short, provides the programming framework and the underlying runtime system for most Unix and Linux-based network-transparent windowing implementations. It runs on a huge number of Linux and Unix flavors, including Mac OS X and with a bit of help, on several Windows varieties. Without X11 , there is no KDE, no GNOME, and no Linux-based window manager, unless one is prepared to accept an X replacement. They do exist, and many carry a proprietary license, while X comes with a GPL-compatible license.

It hasn't been a good month for my code. Samba, the project I'm responsible for, has had to announce several security flaws. Unfortunately some of them were in code I wrote. I always do a large amount of soul-searching whenever that happens. There's nothing worse than finding out something you were responsible for is the cause of many thousands of people having to waste their time rolling out patches. It always makes me wonder if the time has come to give up this programming lark and end my days peacefully in management, messing up other peoples code instead of creating my own.

Innovation is a weasel word. It used to earn an honest living, but now it's been hijacked by marketing people for dishonest purposes. It's now in the same category as "rich". Does anyone now hear the words "rich user experience" or "rich client" without thinking of a bloated, Windows-only client that doesn't use open or standard protocols ?