Jazz Pioneer 'Jelly Roll' Morton's Music Finally Free For Re-use In Europe -- A Hundred Years Too Late

A recent Techdirt post reminded us that thanks to its crazy copyright laws, the US won't be seeing anything new in the public domain for many years. But even in those "fortunate" countries that get to use cultural works a mere 70 years after the creator's death, the situation is still pretty absurd. 

On Techdirt.

All That (Non-DRM'd) Jazz

It's striking that more and more DRM-free sites are starting to achieve prominence - and, one hopes, profitability. Here's another, AllAboutJazz.com, which has a very clever sample system: you can hear all the track, at high quality, but only in 30 second bursts; cunning. But be warned: once you start listening to this stuff, you may have an irresistible urge to buy something from its online shop.... (Via Boing Boing.)

All That Jazz

This looks an interesting project:

The Jazz research project seeks to extend the Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) software development environment with collaborative capabilities to support coordination, communication, and awareness among a small close-knit team of developers. This involves creating connections to server infrastructure for messaging, awareness, and source control, building hooks into the Eclipse development environment to supply awareness of the developers' interactions with source code and source control, and integrating user interfaces for communication and awareness within the Eclipse environment to provide unobtrusive access to in-context team information.

Let's hope that this Jazz does better than the earlier one from Lotus (which was bought by IBM):

Lotus Jazz was an office productivity suite for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1985 for $595, after the substantial success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC. It was a commercial failure due to its low quality and aggressive competition.

Ah yes, I remember it well....