I wrote two months ago about the Finnish hacker heroes Mikko Rauhala and Einari Karttunen, who were going to trial for breaking the Finnish EUCD law (equ

Finnish Linux Users Group has posted the results of their poll with election candidates. A certain Nils Torvalds, running for the Swedish Peoples Party1 was among the 10% who answered. I'll translate this just for your Saturday amusement...

• 1This small party represents mainly the Swedish speaking minority in Finland. There is no connection to Sweden-the-country-next-to-us, just so you know.

According to Google this has not yet been reported in English, so I'll guess it's up to me...

Mikko Rauhala and Einar Karttunen have on February 13th, 2007 been charged with breaking parts of the Finnish copyright law that were passed in 2005 to implement the EUropean Copyright Directive, our equivalent of the DMCA. The charges are that they participated in an online service organised by Mr Rauhala to provide advice on how to circumvent DRM and in addition Mr Karttunen has published online a computer program written by him in the Haskell programming language. The charge is especially serious because Rauhala paid Karttunen 0,05€ for this program.

I did not see this coming.

There is a case coming up in the US Supreme Court, where Microsoft and AT&T are arguing whether a software patent granted in the US can also regulate how some software can be sold abroad. The case itself borders on ridiculous for an engineer to understand, but there seems to be no limits on what lawyers for big companies can come up with. Of course we don't want to care in Europe whether the US patent system allows something or not, just as we don't care about any other US laws either in our independent nations.

SUSE is indeed the nr1 choice right now, but I think there are many of us troubled with the direction Novell is going. (Part of the problem being, we can only guess what the direction is...)[...] I often wonder whether Novell knew what they were buying into when they bought both Ximian and SUSE. (me discussing Novell on LWN about 6 months ago)

FLUG member Simon Rönnqvist appropriately pointed out, that now that the book has been translated into English, the next logical step would be to make a translation into t

This is an old blog entry I copied from the Finnish book's site mainly to use as filling while I was designing the layout for this site. Since it might be an interesting read, I'll just leave it here. Hope you enjoy...

While Conan visits Finland as I write, last Thursday there was a chance to meetup with an even more interesting American. Earlier I had bumped into my old friend and former collague Ilija Lazarov, who informed me that the Nr 1 Open Source guy in Redmond, Bill Hilf would be visiting Rantasauna at my former university. So, did I really want to spend an evening listening to Microsoft's opinion on Open Source? Sure, that might be interesting. And no, Bill Hilf is not the "Get The Facts" man, I don't think I would have been interested in that kind of stuff. All in all, there would be a sauna, food and drinks courtesy of Microsoft, and if nothing else, I could meet two old friends Aali and Ilija, so the worst case scenario was good enough to go there. Luckily, Bill himself turned out to be a very interesting guy as well. He seems to be involved in anything MS does with Open Source, and lots of high-level stuff, like relationships with the EU Commission. Apparently, he came up with the idea to offer the source code instead of documentation. ("Not that I would say in public.")