The Recording Industry Association of America has done a number of distressing, disgusting, and disgraceful things in its never-ending quest to fill its coffers with ill-gotten gains from every American with an internet connection. The news out of Pittsburgh, however, carries what we have to class as the most depraved stunt we've seen them pull so far.

The much-anticipated next incarnation of the popular Python programming language — voted favorite scripting language in the 2008 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards — slithered onto the scene on Wednesday with the release of Python 3.0. Known popularly as Python 3000 or Py3k, Python 3.0 bears the distinction of being the first release in the language's history to deliberately break compatibility with previous versions.

The naming conventions for Linux distributions are a many-splendored thing: Ubuntu's names are perhaps most well-known, owing to their ear-pleasing alliteration and the sheer number necessitated by the frequency of releases. Debian, too, is well known for naming the versions inhabiting the multi-tiered release system after characters from the Toy Story franchise — even down-to-business Gentoo is in on the games, with the 2008.0 release bearing the codename "It's got what plants crave." Now it's Fedora's turn at bat, with entries open on the nom de plume for Fedora 11.

Just as those of us in the U.S. were preparing to pop our turkeys in the oven, the hard-working fellows at the openSUSE Project — the community organization behind the openSUSE Linux distribution — were lifting the lid on their own creation: a brand new license for openSUSE 11.1 — that doesn't involve a EULA.