I read an
interesting bit in Gosling’s blog. Check out the fourth bullet
about patent licenses and other legalities.

One suspects that perhaps he’s wrong about this, though, just as
he’s wrong about free software.

He writes: “[Stallman] has his own rather peculiar definition of
“Free” that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is
conserved)”. But that’s the case almost everywhere in the world we
live in — otherwise, where do profits come from? And anyway, I don’t
like these bad physics analogies. Intention, drive, dedication,
whatever — they aren’t like energy in the sense of physics and aren’t
subject to the same rules. This should be obvious.

Santa Fe

I forgot to mention something, which is that every time I’m in
Santa Fe I think about Christopher
Gabriel, who I met once while visiting Mark a few years back.

Panel and libgcj

My girlfriend, who still uses Windows (boo, hiss) downloaded some
program from the local TV station that will show the temperature and
weather conditions in a small box on the equivalent of the Gnome
panel.

It occurred to me that we should probably be able to write Gnome
panel applets in Java, ideally with security protection and minimum
fuss. Then, ideally, you could just drag jar files from Mozilla to
the panel and the applet would show up.

This could probably benefit from Michael Koch’s work on gcjwebplugin. It seems
like a fun project, but at the moment I’ve got too many other things
going on.