Bradley M. Kuhn

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Identi.ca Weekly Summary

Monday 4 July 2011 by Bradley M. Kuhn

Identi.ca Summary, 2011-06-26 through 2011-07-04

• In response to my summary last week, @fontana started a subthread about multiple copyright holders solving proprietary relicensing issues (or, in his view, lack thereof). I complained that @fontana shouldn't have started that subthread in the meta-thread for the summary itself. He disagreed. Anyway, I think the upshot of this discussion is that @fontana is more concerned about proprietary relicensing than I am, which means he must be really concerned, because I'm very concerned.
• @fontana is interested in etymology of phrase could care less. I compared it to irregardless. This descended into a discussion of whether or not I'm bothered by bad grammar.
• I started a thread complaining about trying to prepay for hotels for conference travelers. This got more interest from my followers than I would have thought. (Slow identi.ca day on Monday?)
• @laforge dented about horrible things he's seeing in his GPL enforcement efforts in Germany. I commiserated with him. He then released a blog post with further details, which had its own discussion thread on identi.ca, which in turn descended into a discussion of whether or not people should know by default where Mauritius is.
• @singpolyma answered my call to find Javascript libraries under GPL that aren't proprietary relicensed. @singpolyma indicated he couldn't find any Javascript libraries of consequence licensed as GPL.
• I complained about Conservancy inquiries for projects that haven't actually started coding yet.
• @ossguy is visiting Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Pittsburgh. I encouraged him to Falling Water and Kentuck Knob. Turns out, that's what @ossguy meant in the first place.
• @fabsh proposed @methoddan play the Star Spangled Banner on Linux Outlaws this 2011-07-04. I suggested it be the Hendrix version.
• I started a strange thread about “Open Source” Leaders.
• @michaeldexter discovered rantofabkuhn.
• @rahulsundaram and @fontana had an interesting discussion on Red Hat's history of preference for the OPL. I joined later to point out the deprecation of OPL (which I just discovered this week).
• Harmony debates continued:
  • @allisonrandal claims she deals with developers who pick GPL or LGPL and “don't understand” the implications of combining that with permissive licensed code. I find this claim quite dubious.
  • A new thread began where @allisonrandal changed the topic to discussing newbie developers. I had thought we were talking about developers who had already chosen GPL, it seems to me the topic change was a rhetorical maneuver.
  • @allisonrandal claimed that FLOSS licenses are not appropriate for inbound licensing. This position is incredibly radical; I think the Linux developers (and nearly every other Free Software developer) will be amazed to learn @allisonrandal believes that they are not using FLOSS licenses appropriately.
  • @dbs noted that his April posts to the Project Harmony mailing list didn't receive a reply.
  • @allisonrandal and I discussed copyright assignment and inbound=outbound.
  • One of the subthreads in the Harmony debates descended into various memories about discussions long before.
• I complained about the cow-orking facility where I'm working.
• I complained about Gnus being slow, and my wish to switch to running from GNU Emacs trunk.
• Someone stepped forward to talk about the hold of 501(c)(3) applications for FLOSS non-profits.
• I discussed racism in Star Wars prequels, and Jello Biafra's view on noncommercial copyright file sharing.
• I picked up on the Gilligan's Island copyright notice thread with a full blog post on the topic.
• @fontana uses OpenOffice, not LaTeX.
• Off-topic to the Gilligan's Island thread, @fontana suggested we start an AGPL'd replacement for Disqus.
• I struggled with bad aspell corrections this week.
• Verizon can't tell the difference between Canonical, Ltd. and the Canonical Hackers.
• Spawning from a discussion about Conkeror/Konqueror and lynx/links (in which @fontana was trolling @copiesofcopies), I had a rather odd conversation with @pchestek. (I am still at a loss of what fathers' sins she's talking about; I presumed she meant that preferring to avoid lawyers in some situations is a sin. “Avoiding lawyers” would certainly be a definition of sin only a lawyer could love! :) She clarified that she was using a parent/child metaphor for original trademark holders and those infringing on the trademark. I'm not particularly comfortable about the metaphor, or considering poor use of a trademark is a sin.
• I was very busy at work this week (as I also noted earlier in the week (and I'm still behind on many things :-/ ).
• I watched the documentary, Hot Coffee, and posted a few links about it.
• @jra said good things about FISL in Brazil including interesting comments about @webmink's talk.
• @fontana claimed that there is an alternative universe where Ronald Reagan stars in It's A Wonderful Life and I write proprietary PHP programs.
• @webmink made a blog post quoting me.
• @fontana and I started using OSCON's social network system in a goofy way, then @fontana compared me to Jerry Brown, which I took offense to.
• My laptop's video card failed and I had to switch laptops.
• FaiF 0x13 comes out tomorrow.

Posted on Monday 4 July 2011 at 20:01 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

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