An email fluttering around a few mailing lists has been submitted in various forms here today. It's about changes to the SourceForge terms of service. Some relevant links unclude the old terms, new terms, old privacy statement, new privacy statement and contact for "questions or concerns" (Patrick McGovern, Site Director). Obviously since SF is owned by the same parent company as Slashdot, I'm biased and corrupt and you should ignore my opinions on the subject, but while I don't particularly like this any more then anyone else, I also don't think it's the huge deal that others are making of it. Especially considering projects aren't paying for the free service. You get what you pay for after all. I have attached a summary to this article of the changes that are being called into question if you don't want to do a mental diff on the links above.

An Anonymous Reader writes: "Jonas Oberg announced the launch of GNU-Friends, a news site for friends of the GNU Project based on the Kuro5hin Scoop-backend. GNU-Friends is intended to provide news from and by the Free Software community, especially such news that does not generally make it to onto other news channels. Also started with GNU-Friends is the Free Software Development Network. More info on how to join it can be found here."

A not-so Anonymous Coward queries: "My company is about to start development on a new project, and I have to decide on a language and development environment. My boss gave me a set of criteria which needs to be filled: intuitive and easy to use IDE; simplified GUI design and event handling; advanced error handling; advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection; full support for operator and function overloading; and portable (at compile-time) across various platforms. I have already looked at C++, Java, C++, C#, Eiffel, and even VB.net; I may be missing something but as far as I can tell all of these languages are missing something from this list. Is there a language available that has all of these features? I thought that someone from Slashdot would be able to point me in the right direction?" If you were to design a language from the ground up, what features would you include and why?

moyix writes: "There's an article over at perl.com that describes how to use a perl module called Quantum::Entanglement. Using this module, one can simulate programming for a quantum computer. Developers looking to keep their skills current well into the next decade should check this out ;) Debian folks can grab libquantum-entanglement-perl and libquantum-superpositions-perl."

Sowbug writes "Here's some interesting Saturday night reading: a critical examination of many of the advertised benefits of .NET's CLR (Common Language Runtime) and the other technologies (MSIL, CLS, CTS) that make it possible. It's written from the perspective of a Java advocate, Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein. "

Karma Sucks writes "Check out this summary of a keynote at Linux.conf.au by Michi Henning of CORBA fame. It really hits the nail on several points. I especially liked the point about people constantly rewriting letters in these modern times, as opposed to say 1945 where it just wasn't worth the pain of re-typing a letter. The only point that didn't made sense in this summary was the one about "source code being useless"."

f00zbll writes: "Cnet is running an article by Bill Joy on security and how it relates to C# and Microsoft at large. BJ quotes verbatim: 'C# provides the ability to write unsafe code. In unsafe code it is possible to declare and operate on pointers, to perform conversions between pointers and integral types, to take the address of variables, and so forth.'"

bkuhn writes: "The FSF has released a draft version 1.2 of the the GNU Free Documentation License for comment by the Free Software community. Comments should be directed to <fdl-comments@fsf.org>."

Numen writes "With all the talk of .NET being thrown about there is a common factor occuring through many discussions, namely the claim that .NET will be unable to address functional and logic languages such as Prolog and LISP. To this end I would like to drawn peoples' attention to two resources, that shown how this may well be a non-issue, and to ask, does this change anybodies mind? "

Jens_AAMC wrote in to point out that the 2001 Turing Award has been announced, going to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard for their work in object-oriented programming.

vvizard writes "After almost a full year of development since PostgreSQL v7.1 was released, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is proud to announce the availability of their latest development milestone ... PostgreSQL v7.2, another step forward for the project."

AccordionGuy writes: "Google has just announced its first annual programming contest! The objective is to write a program that will do something "interesting" with the about 900,000 Web pages' worth data that's Google provides. In addition to writing the program, contestants also have to convince the judges why their program is interesting (or useful) and why it will scale (that is, handle a constantly increasing load of data that grows as the Web grows). The prize is US$10,000 in cash, a V.I.P. tour of the Google facility in Mountain View, California and possibly a chance to run their program on Google's complete billion-Web-page store."

Crispin Cowan writes "We have just announced the Sardonix source code security auditing portal. Sardonix is intended to help, encourage, and preserve community security auditing of open source programs. The "many eyes" effect is enabled by open source software, but is not assured. Sardonix seeks to measure who is actually reviewing the source, and reward that work with public props.

Crispin"

josephfeller writes: ""Meeting Challenges and Surviving Success: The 2nd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering" will be held on May 25, 2002 as part of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (http://www.icse-conferences.org/2002/). Full details and the Call for Papers are at http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2002/."

Krellis writes: "The Perl Foundation today announced that they have awarded a Perl Development Grant to Larry Wall, the creator of Perl and designer of Perl 6, joining Dan Sugalski and Dr. Damian Conway, the other 2002 grant recipients. The Perl Development Grants are funded by donations; over USD 80,000 has been donated so far, a total of USD 240,000 is needed for the three grants. See http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ for more information on how you can pitch in - every dollar counts! See also the use.perl.org story for more information."

Bruce Perens writes: "He'll have to change its name, but Tom Lord's arch revision control system is revolutionary. Where CVS is a cathedral, 'arch' is a bazaar, with the ability for branches to live on separate servers from the main trunk of the project's development. Thus, you can create a branch without the authority, or even the cooperation, of the managers of the main tree. A global name-space makes all revision archives worldwide appear as if they are the same repository. Using this system, most of what we do using 'patch' today would go away -- we'd just choose, or merge, branches. Much of the synchronization problem we have with patches is handled by tools that eliminate and/or manage conflicts -- they solve some of the thorny graph topology issues around patch management. Arch also poses its own answer to the 'Linus Doesn't Scale' problem. This is well worth checking out." If you're asking "What about subversion?", well, so is Tom.

SpinyNorman writes: "Survey shows open source developers mostly veteran pros, not slashdot weenies. Slashdot weenie Hemos should have submitted this himself already seeing as he was involved in it as LinuxWorld! Open source a needed outlet for programming pros." Like any survey, it's bound to miss some avenues of exploration, but this is the best look at a large group of open source developers I've seen yet. The survey itself (a joint project of the Boston Consulting Group and Slashdot-parent OSDN) lives at www.osdn.com/bcg, or you can jump straight to it in either PDF or html.

cozimek asks: "I've got a question I'm sure many other Slashdot users have dealt with. My startup has been starting programming development with testing from our beta-clients. One of these clients, however, has begun discussing intellectual property rights. They believe that they deserve rights to parts of our software because they have helped give us advice through the development process. We think we own it all, and that they should be happy to have our services, tailored to their needs, for free. Has anyone dealt with these issues? Has anyone created a beta-tester contract?" As with all such issues, the devil is in the details...particularly the contractual ones. If you've had such issues before, from either side, please let us know how things turned out.

MightyMicro writes "According to the Motifdeveloper community site, the O'Reilly Motif Programming Manual and Reference Guide are now available for free download from Imperial Software's site. As Open Motif is also free for Linux (and xBSD), this looks like a valuable resource."

BlackNova writes "Var'aq is "a speculative glance at what a programming language on a Klingon computer system would look like." Make sure to read the Preliminary Specification and the Proposed Extensions."