Novell has dug it's own tomb?

It seems to me that Novell has screwed itself unless they are planning to start selling greeting cards instead of Linux. According to their agreement with Microsoft their users are covered for patent infringement. Everything would be good unless someone claimed that there's a patent infringement, like Ballmer did last Thursday. So now that there's an allegation of patent infringement Novell can still distribute their software since they are covered by their agreement, but wait, the GPL states otherwise:

7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

So, even if there's another agreement, they can't get away from the GPL and since the GPL doesn't allow distribution of software under a royalty agreement (they are "paying" for an agreement to be able to distribute the software avoiding patent infringement) then they can't distribute GPL software at all, what are they going to distribute now? Baby dolls?

Firefox 2

Wow, 2.0 already... wow.

I've been using the 1.9 development versions (Deer Park) and the 2.0 release candidates for a while, but now it's final out, officially and stable. So what's so good about it?

Well, I will cut it down to just the things *I* found useful, I won't talk for example about RSS, since I rarely use RSS feeds in FF (I use my google.com/ig homepage for that).

Dead sessions
This is something epiphany had, before I switched to Firefox 0.9, and something that I always missed. Now Firefox 2.0 brings it back to my life. Sure you wont need this if Firefox didn't crash, but software crashes, it's part of their nature. Now when your Firefox crashes you won't lose your 20 something open tabs and have to figure out what you were looking at, instead you will get a nice dialog asking you if you want to resume the previous session, just click yes and all your tabs are back, nice!

Closed tabs
Did you ever close a tab by mistake followed by a "OH F**K", and you don't even remember what it was? I surely did. Now Firefox comes to the rescue with a nice Recently Closed Tabs in the History menu drop down. Another lovely feature.

Spell checker
Now this is a nice one, if you care at all about spell checking. Of c0urs3 if u r l337 u don care . But if you prefer writing properly, now Firefox will tell you when you made a typo underlining the wrong words. Just like any other software with spell checking that you might imagine, it shows suggestions, allows you to add it to the dictionary, supports various languages, etc etc etc. Did I say lovely?

Performance
Maybe it's just me, but I actually thing Firefox feels faster than previous versions... although some may say the contrary... you will have to try it.

Ok, that's about the coolest things I can think of over the top of my head, there's lots more cool stuff of course, even a new slick default theme, but overall I think that if you haven't yet, you HAVE to try it.

And by the way, if you use Firefox in more than one computer, you should try the Foxmarks extension.