A source close to the NDP (and a long time member of PLUG) reports that as of this past weekend, Manitoba's New Democratic Party became the first major political party in North America to officially support Free and Open Source Software.

Further to our discussion from Thursday's meeting, here are the links to some copyright resources. If we are going to be successful in calling for fairness and balance in copyright, we certainly need to familiarize ourselves with these resources. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

NOTE: This has been updated to include links to the legal text of the BMG vs. John Doe decision that some say made music downloading legal in Canada.

Shall we change the textual information, name of the group and domain so Richard Stallman will come speak at OpenCity (the PLUG hosted celebration of participatory culture)? He wants us to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux (to give recognition to the significant contributions made by him and the http://www.fsf.org Free Software Foundation) as a precondition for speaking at our event. I would dearly like RMS to come, make his impassioned speeches and everything else he has to say but not within the context of an ultimatum. Following is some of the discussion thus far on the http://mail2.plug.ca/mailman/listinfo Sparkplug Mailing List, both for and against as well as RMS' position. Let's be careful and judicious in this since it means a radical identity change for the group (and funding to make all the legal changes since we are registered as a not for profit corporation under the Corporations Act).

A couple of weeks ago, at our Firefox CD Release Party I had the pleasure of spending the evening with a very knowledgeable group of individuals discussing the technology and politics behind the growing popularity of Voice Over IP (VoIP) systems worldwide and here in Manitoba. One of those taking part in the discussion was Bill Reid, a veteran of near legendary status in Manitoba's history of networking. He compared the current growing pains of VoIP to his early efforts in establishing MBnet as Manitoba's first internet point of presence. The discussion was so thought-provoking and informative that I couldn't resist inviting Mr. Reid to come and speak to PLUG members about the technology and the issues surrounding VoIP.

Mel Seder, one of PLUG's very first members, and one of the nicest guys imaginable passed away last week. We offer our condolences to Mel's family. Less than a month ago, Mel had been diagnosed with Primary Pulmonary Hypertension, a rare degenerative lung disorder.

A casual GNU/Linux meetup will be held Tuesday, Nov 2 at the Fyxx Expresso Bar at 310 Broadway Avenue at 8:00 PM. Please sign up at Meetup.com and RSVP to let us know if you will be coming.

It's time to raise a glass to a great Open Source project - the Mozilla Organization is celebrating the release of Firefox 1.0, and we're joining the party! There will be parties in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, but you don't have to travel that far to join the festivities. We'll be having our own little fete right here in The Peg. We'll be meeting at 8:00 PM, Saturday November 20th at Bar Italia 737 Corydon Avenue. Bring your own custom CDs if you want. We'll be bringing a few, too. And most importantly, bring your festive 'tude. All the great work the Mozilla folks have done deserves a great celebration.

This month, thanks to the kind folks at the University of Winnipeg Library, our meeting will be held in the University of Winnipeg Duckworth Centre on Spence Street at Ellice, in room 2D16 this Thursday, October 21 at 7:00 PM. Admission is free and all are welcome.

Our special guest at the meeting will be Scott Balneaves from Legal Aid Manitoba. In addition to working at Legal Aid's IT department, Scott is a developer with the Linux Terminal Server Project. So when Legal Aid hit a budget crunch when it needed to upgrade its desktop systems, Scott deployed the Linux Terminal Server Project.

After publishing a short diatribe on the dangers of MS-Excel monoculture in government, I stumbled upon an article about scientists losing genetic data because of Excel's "helpful" autoformatting feature.

I've been happily using Debian for a few months now (based on Knoppix, 3.6 recently, hard disk installation), athough I've used apt in a very basic manner, mostly from kpackage in kde. I need help as I can't get my system to access some available packages in "unstable". I checked that the packages in question are available from my mirror:

http://debian.yorku.ca/debian/pool/main/r/r-base/

Particularly, I'm trying to upgrade from version 1.9.1 to version 2.0 of those packages. My sources.list file includes lines for "stable", "unstable", "testing" and "experimental" from that same mirror (debian.yorku.ca). I have been advised that the problem may be related to the system pinning to "testing", so that upgrades from "unstable" are not available. I checked this, but I have no /etc/apt/preferences file in my system, so I have no idea how it can be pinning to any release. However, my /etc/apt/apt.conf contains:

APT::Default-Release "testing";
APT::Cache-Limit 10000000;
Apt::Get::Purge;

I'd greatly appreciate any advise, as there's no one around me with any knowledge of Linux systems.

Cheers