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Article Mash-up (July, 2006) Posted 2006.07.13 06:33 PDT (#)

Just dropping a quick note here because Independence Week (I took a few extra vacation days after the 4th) gave me time to start more projects than I normally do. And now I'm really busy from them. So in that vein, three quick notes.

The first is a really cool patch to GTK+ which is the beginnings Inplace-Tooltips — the next generation version of my TreeViewHints hack. I have an Ogg Theora screencast of what it can already do in Ex Falso (with TreeViewHints disabled), and am hoping to make a MNG in case it's smaller. I think the hard parts of this battle are making sure the behavior is perfect, that it doesn't leak references, and getting the decision makers to recognize its importance.

The second is a request to those holding copyright interests in GPL-licensed GStreamer-using projects Fluendo has asked to consider relicensing under terms compatible with plugins with which they wouldn't otherwise be compatible. Don't. You chose to license your code under the GPL for a reason. You are being asked to weaken your support for Free Software for commercial reasons, and being offered only the opportunity to be distributed with a particular Linux distribution. You are being asked to trade your belief in Freedom for an imaginary increase in your user base. Freedom is worth much more than that. Stand up for your beliefs and don't worry about people using encumbered formats in distributions that can't handle this a better way.

The last is I've started learning Cairo and have put together the beginnings of a Go client (so far it's just the board display). Cairo is a real treat to work with, but there's not any good introductory documentation. I received a great explanation of the basics just last night from Carl Worth and I hope to put it and the rest of what I've learned into a series of blog posts, and later perhaps a three-in-one tutorial of PyGTK gobjects and cairo.