OStatic

Emacs is one of the oldest and best-known text editors, beloved by programmers not only for its amazing functionality, but also for the fact that it can be customized and extended in almost every way. Emacs might seem like a dinosaur, and there are many people who have abandoned it in favor of IDEs such as Eclipse. However, Emacs continues to undergo development, and there are two excellent implementations for OS X. If you are a Macintosh user, and have thought about trying Emacs at some time, read on: You'll not only learn something about Emacs history, but also about the two GUI versions that are available (free of charge, of course) for the Mac.

The GNU General Public License is nearly 20 years old (version 1 came out in 1989). In that time there have been at least 100 million lawsuits filed in the US (and that's a conservative estimate). Amazingly enough, not one of those millions of court cases has actually tested the GPL's validity. How can that be - and is it a problem for the open source software movement?

As reported in Groklaw and on the plaintiff's blog, Skype has decided to withdraw its appeal against a 2007 German court decision that found it was violating the terms of the GPL. What's interesting here is not the scale of Skype's problems (they were shipping mobile devices without including the required source code, or an offer to send it, with the device), but that things played out in court pretty much as the original GPL designers would have liked.