Featured Comments: Week of 2011 March 27

There were a couple posts this past week that got quite a few comments, so I'll try to repost most of those.

Apple's Stupid Trademark Cases: Now Including Emacs

Before I get to the comments themselves, I would like to say that I wanted to write this article last year, but I decided not to in order to better build up a particular writing style and reputation. With readers coming from LXer, Linux Today, and Tuxmachines to read the articles in this space, and having written this blog for over one and a half years, I think both are now pretty much set.
Reader Innocent Bystander said, "OMG, this is the 3rd time today I felt for these April's fool stories. Blog authors are getting creative these days."
Commenter surja said, "whew!"

Review: Elementary OS 0.1 "Jupiter"

An anonymous reader said, "Unfortunately Midori will NEVER be replaced by the Elementary team. They have extremely tight ties to the Midori devs. google would drop gmail before elementary drops midori, lol."
Another anonymous commenter had this suggestion, of sorts: "Midori is an awesome browser if people actually take the time to configure it to their likings and investigate its features, which include being able to identify as another browser so some pages work better. You can always add another browser and keep Midori for backup."
The original Elementary developer DanRabbit said, "Hey There, Just wanted to thank you for writing the review :D But also to point out that nobody ever said Pantheon would be finished for Jupiter (in fact we weren't going to even tell anyone we were working on it yet). I'm sorry you were disappointed it wasn't included, but it wouldn't have been a good reflection of what Pantheon will be all about :) As far as the next version of elementary OS, there have been no promises to ship Gnome 3 or GTK3. We'll have to see what the future holds!"
Fuduntu creator FEWT asked, "I have a question (because I'm curious :), why the name 'Jupiter' when there is already an established FOSS product with the same name? It is a fantastic name though, I'm rather fond of it for some strange reason." For those who don't know, the other Jupiter application is the laptop hardware and power management tool included by default in Fuduntu.
Bodhi Linux creator Jeff91 had this to say: "Just wanted to say Midori is a great browser (posting this from it). The Elementary OS team just need to give it some sane default settings. You can easily resolve a few of Midori larger quirks with the right configuration. Personally I think if Elementary OS sticks with Gnome 2 it could be that drop in Ubuntu deriv for Gnome with the main distro jumping to that silly unity thing."
Reader G said, "My Major issue is not with Midori which worked quite well. I found the Major issue is the mail client they shipped with, which has no support for smtp authentication or any other custom options. So for me if was unusable referring to the email client. Other than that the OS itself worked as expected and allowed me to pull in firefox and evolution. Overall nice clean product. Another recommendation is on the software store you change the heading to say Elementary instead of Ubuntu and that will give it a more polished look."
Commenter Dillon had this to say: " @PV: Just wanted to say, great review. Very thorough. Agree with you on just about everything. @DanRabbit: if you're reading this, keep up the good work! Also, where can I send bug reports? Do you have an official forum where followers like myself could discuss the next release? Looking forward to seeing your secret projects in action come next release! Thanks."
Reader Ankleface Wroughtlandmire asked, "Hi, can Elementary be used without 3D effects? I have no need for another layer of bugs and complexity on top of the mess of bugs and complexity that is Xorg. And there are many machines that at least initially do not support 3D compositing out of the box. Apart from its 3D dependencies, Elementary OS is looking very promising."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, I hope to be less busy, but I only have two posts planned. We'll see what happens. Remember, if you like what I write, please keep subscribing and commenting!

Patenting Yoga is Patently Stupid

Or is it?
It comes from an article I read yesterday in the ([gasp] PRINT!) newspaper. It deals with the commercialization of yoga and the patenting of yogic asanas in the US.
The article says that many asanas are patented in the US, of course just to make a bigger buck. In India, these same asanas cannot be patented as they qualify as "traditional knowledge and methods" (which cannot be commercialized). The problem, of course, is that the US's patent laws preempt all other countries' patent laws, so this may (unfortunately) change in India as well. Thankfully, as it stands, yogic asanas cannot be patented. To ensure that this is so, many (both religious and secular) practitioners of yoga are compiling libraries of asanas and having them approved as "traditional knowledge" to ensure that they can never be patented in India.
I applaud this measure. Sure, companies need to make a buck somehow. But what about those people who practice yoga through traditional means instead of going to a company's yoga program? Would they be patent violators?
Of course, the same goes for the commercialization of ayurveda and basmati rice. As both are part of traditional Indian culture, they will undoubtedly be protected at least initially in India, but not in the US. In fact, ayurveda already goes under several different trademarked names in the US, while basmati rice has been patented by an agricultural company (oh, the gall!). The problem eventually becomes, in each case, the US's broader patent laws causing other countries legislating to achieve parity in the scope of patents. This means, then, that traditional practitioners of ayurveda would eventually be considered patent violators; something similar to the effort to stop the patenting of yogic asanas would need to be undertaken here. The case of basmati rice is more serious; farmers of basmati rice in India who already make pretty meager livelihoods (at best) would be completely put out of business.