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Microsoft announced the founding of Live Labs, which is their answer to the Web 2.0 topic. Intrestingly enough they (again) aim higher and call it World 2.0.

IEBlog reports that Internet Explorer 7 will be supporting a scriptable native version of XMLHTTP. This can be instantiated using the same syntax across different browsers and decouples AJAX functionality from an ActiveX enabled environment.

Obviously the guys from Redmond do eventually learn - slower than others though. They finaly seem to recognize state of the art technologies, such as RSS, tabbed browsing and propper AJAX support which have been arround for a while now in Firefox, Opera or Safari.

No doubt - Microsoft definetly tries to regain some of the aprox. 30% market share firefox is said to have in Europe today and be part of the Web2.0 evolution. I’m surprsied by the fact that what seems to be pretty obvious for a lot of us again becomes a lot of attention in the media.
It will take some more improvements though to make me use IE.

As a result of a legal dispute on personal rights of the deceased hacker Tron a court order yesterday forced the German Wiki community to disable the redirect from wikipedia.de to de.wikipedia.org.

Tron’s parents see a violation of their personal rights in Wikipedia mentioning Tron’s real (last) name.
The full details on the current controversy have been added to the English version of the article here.

The very interesting question that will have to be answered - not only in Germany is: What is Wikipedia? And how much freedom of press protects it’s content?

[Update] Wikinews has the full story here.

The FSF is revising and updating the GNU General Public License to version 3. The last change was implemented back in 1991 basically by Richard Stallman himself.

Ever since the GPLv2 is used by a lot of projects, and groups among them famous ones like the FSF’s GNU software, Linux, MySQL and huge parts of firefox. Changing laws and regulations in many countries require modifications to the existing version 2.

The rationale for modification is clear: The GPL operates by granting permission beyond what copyright law itself requires. As a copyleft license, the GPL’s primary goal is to defend a set of core freedoms for all software users. For this reason, the GPL places some requirements on the licensee, but only to the extent necessary to prevent some users from denying freedom to others. In a few parts of the revised license, we have reacted to alarming developments by adding certain new requirements, as in our section on DRM. These requirements are narrowly drawn and are directed at preventing the mechanism of freedom from being turned against it self.

The new version introduces propagation as an extension to distribution which is less common in the legal world and obviously broadens the scope of sharing or distributing software.

A good example of the necessary modifications to the existing license is the extension of accessiobility to source of protected programs that can only be run with keys or authorization codes on certain machines. These will have to be included in the distribution (or propagation).

Section 2 further internationalizes the GPL. Under the copyright laws of some countries, it may be necessary for a copyright license to include an explicit provision setting forth the duration of the rights being granted.

Unsurprising all aspects of DRM are being declined. The new section 3 of the GPL provides means to take action against activities contrary to users’ freedom, if governments fail to act what for instance the German government does quite actively.

Software distribution and propagation does not have to be conducted at no charge anymore, which had led to quite some discussion in the past.

Its up to the public (you and me) to discuss the draft until the deadline of Jan 15th 2007, which will result in the version 3 of the GPL. The final say is with Richard Stallman though - of course.

Welcome to blog.wohlrapp.com. Setting up wordpress is good fun. Faster than I thought. I’m impressed with the progress the tool has made. No surprise that AJAX has found it’s way into my favorite blog software. I will evaluate this over the next couple of days…