The IcedTea project has been launched by GNU Classpath. It's goal is to make Sun's recently freed Java implementation, called OpenJDK, work in free software environments. This involves replacing some binary blobs with code from GNU Classpath, and making or adapting a free software build system for OpenJDK.

As the announcement says, it's just in the experimental stages, but it's great to see progress being made through the collaboration of Sun and the free software community.

In other news, Xandros and LG Electronics have signed patent deals with Microsoft for the privilege of distributing free software. That MS are rushing these deals out the door before GPLv3 comes into usage could be a sign that they don't have much confidence in getting more of these deals post-GPLv3. The direction the money is flowing in (not toward MS) also seems to be a sign that MS does not have much confidence in it's patent claims.

When GPLv3 is released at the end of June, these companies will have to disclaim those deals if they want to distribute future versions of software that moves to GPLv3 (such as all GNU projects). So these deals will be exposed as useless and MS's patent claims will be undermined by their refusal to go to court or even detail which patents are infringed.

Meanwhile, this week, Slashdot ran yet another "Stallman is splitting the community" article (it seems the next round of the anti-GPLv3 campaign has started). When Slashdot is publishing this crap, is there a place for people to get free software news and participate in informed debate? Bruce Perens's answer was to set up Technocrat, although it has a science/technolgy focus rather than a free software focus. A new website with a free software focus is FSDaily, so I wish them luck.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

The GNU project has released Emacs 22. For the curious, now is a good time to try the World's greatest software package. There is even an Emacs tour for people to take a look first.

Emacs development began in 1976 and has been active development ever since. It was built for extensibility, and for thirty years, users have been adding and smoothing the features that make their daily work easier. The documentation for GNU Emacs is also amazing. As well as the comprehensive manual, there is convenient per-function and per-variable information available from within Emacs.

When I moved from ViM to Emacs in 2002, I was amazed that most of the mildly complex tricks that I learned with ViM were coded into Emacs and available at a key press. It's definitely the piece of software the contributes most to the efficiency of my computer usage.

Version 22 doesn't have a killer feature, there are just jumper loads of changes that make things more like you'd expect or more convenient, such as:

• The TRAMP packages for editing remote files transparently over FTP or SSH etc. is included
• Now follows convention of 'left mouse click to follow link'.
• Can now handle 256 megabyte files on 32-bit machines.
• C-x eee now executes the last macro 3 times, so you don't have to C-x e C-x e C-x e
• The new Kmacro package has added a load of other conveniences too.
• GTK+ gui support, although I don't use those features.
• Better interface defaults: syntax highlighting is on by default and the colour scheme is much easier on the eyes.
• New longlines-mode for editing paragraph-style documents which don't start a new line in the file for each line displayed on the screen.
• Consistent display of lists of messages with line numbers such as the results of grep or html validation.

A list of notable changes can be seen in the NEWS file. There are new features for programmers, but I'm not one (any more). And there is better support for editing files in Asian writing systems, and for users of non-standard hardware and operating systems, but I can't comment on any of those features either.

Tips and tricks for Emacs can be found on this independent site: http://www.emacswiki.org/, and the Emacs article on Wikipedia is quite good. And discussion of the release can be found on LWN.net, Slashdot, OSNews, etc.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship