The Free Software and Open Source movement is infectious. While the software industry has been rocked by Linux and the GPL, the ideology is flowing over into other industries, as well. The D20 System is the stand-alone game system behind the long-awaited Third Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards of the Coast VP Ryan Dancey is on a mission to release the system as an open standard, and bring the Open Gaming movement to the forefront of the market.

Over the last few weeks I've been playing with a piece of consumer electronics that has the potential to alter the way that we think of television. Its step between the inevitable future of on-demand television, and todays "ya better be home sunday at 8pm tuned in to channel 11 or you'll miss The Simpsons. Although you'd never guess it (except from the diffs on the website) it runs Linux. The device is the TiVo, and you can click below to read my review of whats good and whats bad about this thing.

Recently several stories have floated into the bin regarding troubles with NVidia and Linux. See, they've started down the right path: releasing drivers, and starting to support the OS, but unfortunately they have decided to release binary only drivers. This gets extremely complicated when standards like DRI and Multi-Head start getting involved... binary code releases make it difficult for people like XF86 developers to make everything work together. For a more qualified viewpoint, I've attached a great summary of the situation from Precision Insight's Frank LaMonica.

By e-distributing a Stephen King novella last week, the publishing industry lumbered in the footsteps of its dinosaur-cousin, the newspaper business, which has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on mostly useless and unprofitable Web sites. But it forgot to produce better or different papers, an enormous mistake, and publishers are making the same mistake. Why interactivity isn't about delivery, but attitude and content. Read more.

The recent 'Ask Slashdot' about MIDI support for Linux sparked some enlightening conversation about music, computers, and where Linux fits into the state of the art. Development of production-quality authoring, sequencing and notation software is moving ahead, but as in any artistic relationship, there's a symbiotic relationship between artists and the tools they use to ply their trade. Part I of a series.

Geographic screening -- the restriction of Net access by geography -- is the latest nightmare stemming from the culture wars launched by the music and movie industries against a free Internet. This time the firewalls aren't coming from the People's Republic of China, but out of Canada. Read more.

Note: This is the second of two installments. In the Digital Age, who owns ideas? Culture is being redefined by games, sites and new animation forms. Do we really want to throw kids who love technology, music and movies in jail? Laws like the DMCA don't promote morality or lawfulness, they undermine it. Ideas can't be contained or sold any more. Even Thomas Jefferson said so. Read more.

The Open Source movement has produced some of the world's finest software through the cooperation of developers worldwide. While it may be the most effective way of writing software the planet has ever seen, it creates its own communication challenges, as well. The days of private, closed-door meetings in pretty offices are over; disputes of all kinds are dealt with publically.

In a world splitting increasingly into real and virtual geographies, who owns ideas? The free music wars are just the first in a series of political, cultural and legal struggles that are putting the very idea of copyright and intellectual property on the table for the first time. Read more.

Note: This is the second in a two-part series.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a frontal assault on the open source ethic, both technological and social. The underlying political issue is both clear and significant: Must we depend on the creative choices and products of a handful of ferociously greedy and monopolistic corporations who have increasingly come to dominate media, culture and entertainment? Or can we define our own cultural experiences? (Read more below.)

So I'm at Linux Expo Australia, enjoying the conference. You can hit the link below to read assorted random relevant (and irrelevant) notes from the show floor. No, I haven't seen a kangaroo.

Note: This is part one of a two-part series.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed by Congress and signed into law more than a year ago, but its true impact is only beginning to be felt. Corporatism squared off brazenly against the geeks, and handily won Round One. If you're wondering where your Napster really went, read more below.

The Beacon School is a selective secondary public school on West 61st Street in New York City. It is a place where students are encouraged to work with computers and technology, not just to run educational software, but to write code, administer networks and troubleshoot hardware. Long on knowledge but short on cash, Beacon is a textbook example of how Linux and Open Source make the impossible possible in education.

"Scream 3" is a perfect send-off to a neat cinematic trilogy. It's fun, creepy, and slightly pooped, IMHO. And you have to be a genius to guess the ending (which is not in any way given away here): Read more and post your own review:

For years, Old Media dismissed electronic competitors as frivolous and temporal. Then New Media appeared to be burying its predecessors for good. It appears both notions may have been wrong. The boundaries between new and old media are getting fuzzy, as a hybrid Middle Media emerges between the two. (Read more.)

Do any of you read newspapers regularly, or see a future for them? (This column was inspired by an e-mail from a newspaper editor, asking me if I knew what might make the people who read Slashdot want to read daily papers. I said I didn't know, but that I would ask.) I suspect a lot of newspaper people will read your answers. Read more on my thoughts and post your own below:

Matthew Mastracci has sent in the first in a series of features comparing the various productivity type apps under Linux. This week is an application I haven't used since college: Word Processors. Specifically he looks KOffice's KWord and Applixware's ApplixWords. Other word processors (including StarOffice Writer, Corel's WordPerfect 8, AbiWord and KLyX will follow).

Maybe Peacefire's timing is bad. Two courts have recently said that the reverse-engineered DeCSS program is illegal to publish in the United States, and UCITA gets closer every second. Yet Peacefire today released a program that reverse-engineers the encryption on a list of sites blocked by a major censorware product. Maybe T-shirts that say 'X-Stop has a 68% error rate for blocking student homepages' will get classified as munitions next. Bennett Haselton shares his thoughts (below) on corporate crypto.

The responses were amazing to last week's LonelyNet Column about a Stanford University report which found that Internet use promotes isolation and loneliness. You speak for yourselves a lot better than anybody speaks for you. "What's going on?" asked many about the study. They also asked that the conversation continue, so it will. Read more:

As Linux trade shows appear on the schedule, there's only one sure bet. The community will be attending in full force, and the amount of corporate money being thrown into these shindigs will consistently climb. While companies vie to present their finest hardware, software and hype to the public, organizations that provide Linux community spirit make an effort to collect charitable contributions to keep the spirit of Open Source and Free Software alive.