Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/04/identica-weekly.html

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.