Women in Software – Open Source, Cold Shoulder (registration required, find login/password at bugmenot). Interesting article that analyzes also why “while the gender ratio in the industry as a whole is roughly five to one, the ratio in FLOSS appears to be several hundred to one”. I have to admit that reading a “female” nickname on a technical mailing list often surprises me. I’m not proud of it and I guess this is just due to the fact that, to me, this is not a frequent fact and I’m not used to. Anyway any article that allows to think about our own limits (and possibly overcome them) is good and so I think this article can help us in moving forward.
[Via my shared institute printer (I always look at pages printed in the printer and often find something interesting, I guess it is similar to a deadtree del.icio.us page ;-) )]

Some recent bla bla bla by billgates about interoperability (while the all history of micro$oft is all about closed formats that force you to use the buggy micro$oft software). And a good reply by Opera CEO, noting for example that the page of the billgates announcement produces 126 HTML errors (it it not interoperable since it does not conform to standards) [the printer-friendly page is even worst] and that “your server sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets“.
Why did gates speak about interoperability? My guess is that more and more governments are thinking about moving away from M$Office (for the really interoperable OpenOffice) and billgates is trying the last, desperate attempt to say “ehi, governments, we are open too”. Some weeks ago, at the University of Trento there was a day devoted to “Software libero e formati aperti per la Pubblica Amministrazione” (free sofware and open formats for the Public Sector). There was Markus Spring who is in charge to migrate 14.000 computers of Munich’s City Hall from closed-gates software to gnulinux/openoffice/freesoftware. He said many times that the reason for the switch was INDEPENDENCE: they want to be independent from a single vendor and free to read citizens data with different softwares (just in case your vendor closes its activity), especially in the future and free to move to different vendor, if they wish. This is not possible with closed formats (such as .doc): about this I suggest you to read “We Can Put an End to Word Attachments” by Richard M. Stallman. I especially enjoy the presentation of Roberto Di Cosmo that was an astonishingly clear, entertaining and convincing talk about why governments should only use free software and open formats (even if they are much much much more expensing than closed software). Check his talk (PDF in Italian) and all the other talks. If you are organizing a presentation trying to convince a public administration about the reasons for switching to free software and open formats, call him, he will convince even stones (in English, French, Spanish or Italian)!

zeusnews (in Italian) reports on a number of failures of billgates technologies in his “see the future. today” show(off).
The video is (kind of) available at microsfot site. But I was not able to see it. In general with my gnu/linux laptop I’m able to watch all the videos i wish notwithstanding the closeness of the format. Instead this time, after some efforts without success (there is the scary mms:// protocol), i realized that if they don’t want to make easy for me to see it, perfect, I’m not going to see it. Zeusnews also reports the fact Microsoft removed the video from the web for some time but had now put it there again.
Luckily enough, I was able to see the 1998 show with the usual windows crash (.mov file) that is always fun but it also makes me think that, despite being a worst software product, windows got a global monopoly on users’ computers.
Below, you can find the salient pieces related to (4) failures from the transcript of billgates failure-show: