"W3C today published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web... «HTML is of course a very important standard,» said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. «I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web. To integrate the input of so many people is hard work, as is the challenge of balancing stability with innovation, pragmatism with idealism.» ..."

Sean Moss-Pultz was kind enough to answer a few questions with fsckin w/ linux. He’s got some pretty interesting answers to questions plaguing geeks and non-geeks alike, such as the eternal debate on which is better - Ninjas or Pirates?

"In cooperation with the Media Education Foundation and La Lutta, Free Culture @ NYU is screening Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property at 9pm on Thursday, January 31..."

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has confirmed (last November) his commitment of giving 50,000 laptops to Ethiopia. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature - it is model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow.

The #1 item on my Top 10 List of Linux FUD Patterns concerns its learning curve. This pattern is probably the most prevalent and primarily appeals to fear by attempting to convince you that Linux is too hard for the average person to use or that it is simply not user friendly. There are many variations of this pattern, from the straight-forward “Linux is for geeks” assault to more mature, logical arguments, such as “if Linux can do everything the fill-in-the-blank OS can do, why bother with the hassle of switching?”.

"Dave Harding made an excellent speech last year about Software Freedom, and makes a first rate job of explaining the early Bill Gates «letter to hobbyists» incident. He also does a nice job of presenting «Apple II and VisiCalc» as similar to «Windows and Office» today; and that Symbolics, with its focus on elegant superior technology and design chic but anti social policies, is similar to Apple today. Here's his transcription of the first 10 minutes, download the Ogg Vorbis speech directly for the full thing..."

PackageKit aims to take the pain out of the package management on GNU/Linux systems and create a system that can compete with Windows and Mac. Development is proceeding at a rapid pace and it is set to be available in Fedora 9. To find out more, we talked to Richard Hughes, project creator, and Robin Norwood, the Fedora feature owner; as always, you can catch some screenshots at the end!

I hate for my first post to this mailing list to be a depressing one,
but I need to pass along some bad news.