I am not able to sleep well if I do not take at least a cursory look at BugTraq before bed.
I just literally stumbled upon this: Apache httpd vulenrabilities (sic)
What worries me has not so much to do with the vulnerabilities themselves, rather than with the accompanying note:
The information on the vulnerabilities above was sent to Apache Software Foundation on 16 May, 2006. For over 1 year no official patch has been issued.
People like myself often point at Apache as an example of Free Software’s excellence, especially where security is concerned. So, assuming that the threats are real, is this possible, I am wondering?
I will definitely keep my eyes on this thread. Meanwhile, I am not going to sleep well tonight. 
You know I HATE to be forced using proprietary protocols and formats. Nobody should ever support a protocol for which a legal Free Software reference implementation is not available. All violations should be punished with Death by iPod Stoning.
In spite of their so-called community efforts, Real never convinced me (or rms, but that’s understood). Too bad the need to play the occasional flipping .rm file on Linux comes whenever you least expect it. So yes, there’s a RealPlayer 10 Gold for Linux, but what the…? No ALSA support? Are you joking or what?
So I did some research, and (not nearly as easily as you may think) I found out that there are nightly builds for RealPlayer.
And guess what: ALSA support!
Sweet. Well… almost.
There are times when you read something so well laid out and to the point that it’s difficult to add something to it.
In my opinion, this article about the X86 OS X kernel source code closing is one of those cases.
Short story shorter, Apple objected that opening the kernel sources is going to affect the interest of only a fraction of a fraction of their users.
Sad as it is, it may be true; nonetheless, as the title of the article clearly states, it miserably fails getting to the core of the open source issue.
The article is just a reply to an objection rather than a full coverage, yet it says a lot, and it raises interesting questions. At least it did for me.
So read it if you care.
UPDATE:
The kernel source was opened in the end. Apple is engaged in a number of twists which look friendly towards the Free/Open Source Software movement. Kudos to them. I will buy my copy of Leopard when it comes out.
Let me point you to an interesting article by Jono Bacon about the importance of communities behind pieces of free software.
I think I made this point myself here before.
I’d just stress the difference between real communities and corporate manoeuvres (hints: mambo, joomla). It’s obvious that the whole free software community needs more of the former and less and less of the latter.
I left a comment on a story on digg about Firefox being close to 10% adoption:
1 in 10 is still not much. But look at it this way. IE was MS’s move to get hold of the Internet as a platform. Not only they have not succeeded, thank the Lord, recently they also seem to be lagging. We all can see how the latest trends in web development focus on open standards, as it should be.
It does not really matter that software is free (as in whatever) as much as it matters that it’s compliant to open, unencumbered, interoperable standards (even if, as we all know, free software stands much better chances to be so inclined). In that respect, the importance of Firefox (and similar projects like Opera and KHTML) goes way beyond the percentage points of their adoption figures.
Of course this is not to say that those numbers should not grow or that I do not wish it to be so. Quite the contrary. If future releases of IE should turn into something different than the blatantly insecure, incompatible-by-design mess it is today, I’d have much less problems with it. But I seriously doubt to see it happen anytime soon.
cat >/dev/null is 
