SIS declares voting invalid

SIS logo
IDG reports that yesterday SIS announced that the voting on August 27 was invalid since they say that they have information that indicates one of the voting organizations participated with more than one vote.

With the big official ISO voting coming up already now on Sunday September 2nd, there isn’t enough time for SIS to make a revote so the Swedish official take on the OOXML will be… “no vote”.

With the proved very inefficient working methods of SIS, I figure this is the best outcome anyway since a revote now would just make a senseless race from both camps to register new members to be able to buy the outcome of the next vote!

Also on slashdot.

Microsoft announced that an employee of theirs offered monetary compensation for voting their way and one suspects it has something to do with this invalidating business…

It seems the French OOXML discussions was a lot of fun as well: “something resembling a bar-fight” !

curl plans autumn 2007

curl
We enter feature-freeze on August 31 and we then fix remaining known issues for a week or two in September before we release 7.17.0.

The version number bump is this time mostly due to the new way of dealing with LDAP (being linked properly build-time instead of dlopening run-time like before) and the new LDAPS support. 7.17.0 also brings a brand new port to OS/400, it treats strings sent to curl_easy_setopt() differently and it builds and runs with recent libssh2 versions – that lib changed so much recently so that libcurl 7.16.4 can’t be built with libssh2 0.16 or later.

I am starting my paternity leave on October 1st to take care of Rex full-time, and I’m not sure at this point in time how much that’ll affect how much time and energy I’ll have for curl hacking, at least initially, so getting the curl release done before this seems like a good idea to me.

Edit: I should clarify that the “treats strings differently” means that libcurl will copy the strings passed to it, so that applications no longer need to keep them around until libcurl is done with them like they have been forced to up until < 7.17.0.

mi4code 1.0.0

MrH mailed me the latest version of mi4code that now incorporates proper support for the recent Sansa 1.03.07 firmware (claimed to be beta, only available from some unofficial sansa fan sites, such as anythingbutipod.com), and I’ve uploaded it to the mi4code page.

Note that we still don’t advice anyone to actually use the unofficial 1.03 version as it has been reported to be bad in several aspects, such as the removal of MSC mode!

GPLv3 pains start now

rockbox Yeah, Rockbox ships as a GPLv2 licensed package, without the “or later” option for users to switch license at will. This has been all fine and dandy for a long time and Rockbox includes source from a busload of different other projects, licensed as GPLv2 and BSD etc.

Now, some of the projects Rockbox uses or wants to use are slowly turning GPLv3. First out being espeak, and the corresponding Rockbox patch for using it.

GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible. We cannot ship binaries built with a mix of these licenses.

So, we’re now starting to see the real-world effects of the GPLv3 license. Slowly some projects are going v3, and we (as in the Rockbox project) must remain with their older v2 sources until we take the jump (more or less forced) to v3 – only to then have the reversed situation as then we can’t use projects that are licensed strictly GPLv2 (without the “or later”)…

Sigh. The world is a complicated place.

Buy your own standard from SIS

As Marcus Rejås blogged and has been mentioned already by mainstream “media” such as IDG, Microsoft and its allies managed to buy themselves a favorable vote from Sweden in the OOXML debacle.

For our Swedish readers, I can’t but to show this funny picture I found on the SIS web site:
(gone)

The text in that circle on the right says “buy standards by clicking on your area”… and boy, did they!

(Updates: further Swedish details in DN and ekot.)

Blogging blogging

I’ve been “blogging” more or less for ages already (my first post on Advogato was in May 2000) but I thought it was about time I installed a proper blog software so that I could post my rants easier and possibly somewhat more often than what I’ve done in the past…

Ok, so this is a WordPress default install on Debian unstable and it was a fairly easy install once I found the “.deb” install procedure linked from WordPress’ site

curl, open source and networking