I decided last night to rewrite the section of code that has been offending me for the past 3 weeks. Originally the design decision was a trade-off between making a _lot_ of use of the STL or writing my own, more straightforward, templated classes. I opted for the former, the latter seems to have actually been the correct decision. I’ll be rewriting the code today.
The media flurry about SCO is really begining to piss me off. It’s all FUD people, however I wonder if all this high profile mention of GNU/Linux will do the marketing campaign favours.
I’ll be writing to all my MEP’s regarding the patent debate in the EU parlament next Monday. The only people that will gain from software patents will be large corporations like Microsoft and IBM (who seem to be doing fine without patents currently) and the big losers will be SME’s and Free Software. Alan Cox recently stated that if the EU software patents directive passes, software will be the only area covered by both patents and copyright. A bit foobar’ed. I view software as an alternative denotation mechanism for partially recursive languages, thus software is mathamatics and not patentable.
Theres a first meeting of FSF-ie in Messers Maguire (Dublin, Ireland) next Wednesday at 7:30. I’ll be there, so will others. Turn up if you want.