As you may have noticed, 2002 was the year Microsoft decided Linux was a major competitive threat. 2003 may be the year Microsoft reacts to that threat with more than rhetoric.

See: EFF Press release, YaHoo News UK, Aftenposten (Norway)

In a 2001 submission to Industry Canada I suggested that not only should playing DVD's on FLOSS players be considered legal, but that the DVD CSS technology itself is of questionable legality under Canada's Competition Act.

According to BusinessWeek, the average S&P 500 company makes a 7% profit. Microsoft makes more than 5 times that number with over a 35% profit. There's nothing wrong with making profit, that's why you have a business and of course I hope that Lindows.com can make a profit too. However, excessive profits usually mean something is not right with our free market system which normally does a good job of preventing consumer gouging.

Is commercial speech free speech? Should commercial speech be afforded any more protection than other forms of limited speech such as defamation (Slander and Libel) are?

Articles on Dissident Voice and Reclaim Democracy (among many others) argue that corporations should not.

Nike obviously believes otherwise.

On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide--now part of Dow--accidentally killed 5,000 residents of Bhopal, India, when its pesticide plant sprung a leak. It abandoned the plant without cleaning it up, and since then, an estimated 15,000 more people have died from complications, most resulting from chemicals released into the groundwater.

More coverage: Wired.com, greenpeace.org

See earlier Weblog entry for more about CCFDA and my open letter.

Evan Leibovitch, President and chairman of the Linux Professional Institute

12/17/2002 1:55:52 PM - Linux became more accepted as a corporate computing platform in 2002 and as a result more people started to get involved in developing Linux-based solutions. Getting these Linux professionals certified in the new IT Wild West was a big challenge for LPI president.

It has been another full year for the Linux and free software community. The economy was difficult worldwide, but Linux continues to develop and gain strength. It has been fun to watch.

For the fifth straight year, we at LWN have gone over the year's news and picked out the most significant events. This is version 0.9 of the 2002 timeline; we will continue to add events and fix bugs through the end of the year.

Research by George Zieman gives the true reason for falling CD sales: the major labels have slashed production by 25 per cent in the past two years, he argues.

There is an effect that I noticed while walking around the streets of New York City, and then again in Toronto, on campuses, and elsewhere. Less and less do you find people walking along, in their own worlds, listening on headphones to personal music devices. More likely than a Walkman or Discman, I see people with cell phones clutched to their ears.

Given all the other evidence, I believe that music file copying as a form of advertising is likely what is responsible for the decline in CD sales being as minimal as it has been.

The case against ElcomSoft is considered a crucial test of the criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial law designed to extend copyright protections into the digital age.