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Militias fighting over control of minerals used in electronic devices like mobile phones and laptops are systematically brutalizing and killing civilians in the the Congo.

(Credit: Mark Craemer)

When Advanced Micro Devices came up with the name of "Congo" for its new dual-core chip targeting ultra-thin devices executives were thinking of the river in Africa, following the company's practice of naming mobile projects after rivers.

But some bloggers who monitor humanitarian crises and conflicts in Africa blasted the chipmaker for using the name of a country where civilians are dying and brutalized in a conflict over natural resources like tin, tungsten, and coltan that end up in electronics equipment like computers and mobile phones.

The Congo is "the place where trade in minerals vital to technology like ultra-thin laptops is fueling the deadliest conflict in the world," writes David Sullivan on his Enough blog.

The site has named the African country the most dangerous place in the world to be a female because of the epidemic of sexual violence that has been going on there for years.

A post on the Congo Resources blog says: "Nicknaming their product after the Congo--well, that takes chutzpah."

The cause was also taken up by a Daily Kos blogger who sent a letter of complaint to AMD Chief Executive Dirk Meyer last week.

Contacted for comment this week, AMD spokesman John Taylor said the company "truly regrets" causing any offense, even unintentionally. "It was an oversight not to see that (the code name) could be viewed in an entirely different context," he said.

AMD began using the name "2nd Generation Ultrathin Platform" instead of Congo as part of a natural pre-launch naming transition, Taylor said. "The Daily Kos blog helped finalize and expedite a process that was already in motion," he added. "We're striving for that codename to be retired."

This isn't the first time a tech company has been bitten by a product name. In 2003, Intel was forced to change the code name of a planned Itanium chip from Tanglewood to Tukwila to avoid a trademark dispute with the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts.

Microsoft ran into problems with the name of its new search engine, Bing, in China after finding out that the word has several meanings in Mandarin, including "to be ill." As a result, the Chinese version of Bing has been named "biying," which means "must respond," according to The Wall Street Journal.

In 1994, Apple had a notorious dispute with Carl Sagan after he complained about Apple code-naming the Power Macintosh 7100 after him. Apple changed the code name first to "Butt-Head Astronomer" and then "LAW" for "Lawyers Are Wimps" before settling a libel lawsuit with the famous astronomer, according to The Mac Observer.

And then, of course, there is the trouble Apple got in over the company name itself. Apple Inc. and Apple Corps Ltd., the record label started by the The Beatles in 1968, finally reached an agreement in 2007 to settle their trademark dispute.

Update 8:25 p.m. PST:Taylor later added that "AMD has been a member of the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) since 2006. As part of our supply chain management process, we set expectations annually with our top tier suppliers regarding adherence to our Worldwide Standards of Business Conduct and the EICC Code of Conduct. We are actively monitoring the conflict minerals issue as well as proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress. The EICC is currently researching the extractive metals supply chain (specifically tin, tantalum, and cobalt) as it relates to the electronics industry. We will continue to monitor this relevant issue and its potential effects."

Python developers on Wednesday released the final version of Python 3.0, a major reworking of the programming language that is incompatible with the Python 2 series.

Python is widely used for Web applications such as YouTube. Python 3.0, also called Python 3000 or Py3K, is the first Python release that is intentionally backwards-incompatible, according to project founder Guido van Rossum.

"Nevertheless, after digesting the changes, you'll find that Python really hasn't changed all that much--by and large, we're mostly fixing well-known annoyances and warts, and removing a lot of old cruft," van Rossum said in a document outlining the changes.

The most significant changes include modifications to the workings of built-in objects, such as dictionaries and strings, and the removal of older features, according to the Python development team. The standard library has been reorganized in some prominent places, developers said.

In general, the changes are designed to simplify Python development and remove needless complexity that has built up over time, according to van Rossum. However, Python developers have long made it clear that the new release would necessitate changes in most Python-based applications.

"3.0 is also known as the release where we break all your code, but we're doing it for a good reason...Pretty much every program will need changes," said release manager Anthony Baxter in a keynote speech at Linux.conf.au in Melbourne in February.

Baxter stressed that the shift would be some time in coming. "2.x is also not going away...We'll keep maintaining (the 2.x series) as long as there is interest and need," he said.

One of the most notable changes is turning the "print" statement, used for all kinds of information output, into a function. "Currently print has awful syntax for doing all sorts of things," Baxter said.

He said another major change is that Unicode will now be the default. "There's a real shambles in Python at the moment when it comes to mixing Unicode and non-Unicode strings," Baxter said.

Other changes, such as altering models used for division and switching the symbols for "not equal" from "" to "!=", have long been discussed in the Python community but have been held back because of fears over backwards compatibility. With the shift to 3.0, the view is: "What the hell. We're breaking the code anyway; let's fix it", Baxter said.

Matthew Broersma of ZDNet.co.uk reported from London.

Google has undone an earlier ban on the Mozilla Public License, an option for open-source projects hosted at its Google Code site.

Chris DiBona, Google's manager of open-source programs

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Ostensibly as part of an effort to discourage the proliferation of open-source licenses, Google dropped support for the MPL earlier in August. Now, though, the company reconsidered, restoring it and adding support for the Eclipse Public License as well.

"How we think about licenses is getting a bit more nuanced," said Chris DiBona, leader of Google's open-source team in a blog posting.

Before, the company had tried to discourage the increase in the number of open-source licenses; having multiple licenses can increase legal costs and in some cases prohibit mingling code from one open-source project to another. But the Eclipse programming tool project is thriving, and it's better not to block its projects, Di Bona said.

"Eclipse is an important, lively and healthy project with an enormous plug-in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative license. They aren't interested in using the BSD or other open-source licenses that are readily combinable with EPL code," Di Bona said. "We have decided that after nearly 2 years of operation, that it was time to add the EPL and serve these open source developers."

And Google has also allowed some licenses that are employed by particular users.

"In that light, our removal of the MPL from the site seemed a little absurd. So, our bad," Di Bona said. "We're putting that option back up for new projects. The groups that want to use the MPL to enable their additions, extensions and more for Firefox and other Mozilla projects are legion and considering their recent summit, represent a very healthy global collection of developers."