Nathan Willis n8@identi.ca

Today I found this nice service that keeps track of many, many different versions of a given package, across many different repositories for different GNU distributions: repology.org

It's similar to pkgs.org, but much more exhaustive and detailed.

See for instance, the versions page for Dianara, or the packages page (sort of extended mode of the versions page).

BTW, today ActivityPub got voted to go to Proposed Recommendation in the Social Working Group!

Which means that at this point it's up to W3C membership and management to move it to the space of it being an official spec.

The implementation reports page is looking pretty good too!

Now I really need a rest...

URL: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2017/nov/03/sflc-legal-action/

SFLC Files Bizarre Legal Action Against Its Former Client, Software Freedom Conservancy

by Conservancy's Staff on November 3, 2017

About a month ago, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the not-for-profit law firm which launched Conservancy in 2006 and served as Conservancy's law firm until July 2011, took the bizarre and frivolous step of filing a legal action in the United States Patent and Trademark Office seeking cancellation of Conservancy's trademark for our name, “Software Freedom Conservancy”. We were surprised by this spurious action. In our eleven years of coexistence, SFLC has raised no concerns nor complaints about our name, nor ever asked us to change it. We filed our formal answer to SFLC's action yesterday. In the interest of transparency for our thousands of volunteers, donors, Supporters, and friends, we at Conservancy today decided to talk publicly about the matter.

SFLC's action to cancel our trademark initiated a process nearly identical to litigation. As such, our legal counsel has asked us to limit what we say about the matter. However, we pride ourselves on our commitment to transparency. In those rare instances when we initiated or funded legal action — to defend the public interest through GPL enforcement — we have been as candid as possible about the circumstances. We always explain the extent to which we exhausted other possible solutions, and why we chose litigation as the last resort.

Currently, this trademark action is in its early stages. SFLC filed a petition on September 22. Yesterday, we provided an answer that lists defenses that we plan to use. However, we welcome press inquiries and interviews on the subject and will do our best to respond and engage in public discussion when possible.

We are surprised and sad that our former attorneys, who kindly helped our organization start in our earliest days and later excitedly endorsed us when we moved from a volunteer organization to a staffed one, would seek to invalidate our trademark. Conservancy and SFLC are very different organizations and sometimes publicly disagree about detailed policy issues. Yet, both non-profits are charities organized to promote the public's interest. Thus, we are especially disappointed that SFLC would waste the precious resources of both organizations in this frivolous action.

Meanwhile, there is now widespread agreement in the FLOSS community, embodied both in the FSF's and Conservancy's Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement and the Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement, that FLOSS community members view “legal action as a last resort, to be initiated only when other community efforts have failed to resolve the problem.” We at Conservancy have always adhered to this fundamental principle, not only in GPL enforcement, but in all endeavors. In stark contrast, SFLC made no efforts — over the last eleven years since Conservancy was formed, nor in the last five years since we registered our name as a trademark — to express any concerns about our name, or a desire for us to change our name. We first learned of SFLC's complaints from this surprise attack of legal action.

SFLC's actions indicate that while they have provided legal services to some members of our FLOSS community, they do not view themselves as members of our FLOSS community, nor consider themselves bound by our community's norms. We are prepared to defend our brand, not just for ourselves but for our many member projects who have their home at Conservancy, our Outreachy diversity initiative, and our collective efforts to promote FLOSS. Nevertheless, we hope SFLC will see the error of their ways and withdraw the action, so that both organizations can refocus resources on serving the public.

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Please email any comments on this entry to info@sfconservancy.org.

Congrats!

Apparently you can buy the Purism laptops now, and they look legit

Get ready, Debian Stretch will release on June 17!

For historical reasons, I'll comment here...

(This is a practice run xD)

Writing the ActivityPub test suite is exposing all the things I haven't written in Pubstrate's AP implementation yet. I guess that's good?

If your website greets me with a popover covering the whole content, urging me to "subscribe" or "follow" you on some social silo, chances are I'll close that browser tab and never visit your site again.

Sincerely,

A user of the rotten WWW.

Apparently I'm total garbage today at getting things done. Sigh...

At least I made soup.

Putting some almond milk in my rooibos tea.

... It's coming on the season for raspbetty zinger cold brew tea, but I don't have space in my tiny fridgedare to have it whenever I want.

also on my blog

In spring through fall, we always have a couple of pitchers (one decaf and one caffeinated) of "iced tea" in the fridge (though it's not necessarily the tea plant, if you care about that term... personally I think people are a bit snobby about having only one plant be The Acceptable Drink Herb). It's easy enough... just get a pitcher, add some tea bags to it (or loose tea in some sort of reusable loose-tea-holder or something, but honestly I'm too lazy for that) and some sweetener if that's your bag (we've been using stevia + erythritol sweetener stuff, sold as Truvia or whatever) and fill it with water, stirring once.

Now put it in the fridge.

You're done! You now have a delicious cold beverage that you can drink whenever and which costs about as little as a flavored beverage can.

Tea I like to drink:

• Celestial Seasonings makes a lot of "fruity" herbal tea things that are pretty good in combination with black tea. I put in half black tea bags and half peach/raspberry/mint/whatever.
• Chai, caffeinated or decaf. If you make this with Stevia or whatever, then pour it into a glass with a tablespoon of creamer, that's 1/5 or less the calories of the "iced chai" sold at a common coffee shop.
• Some combination of: cucumber slices, lime wedges, lemon wedges, mint leaves.

Takes up some space in the fridge, but IMO it's worth it. And hey, better than filling it up with soda probably...

Me: "I'll just reorder the arguments to my json library before I get users who aren't me"

Me later, updating json-ld library: "Oh my god"

do you even glyph

DebCon17 registration is now open https://debconf17.debconf.org/news/2017-04-12-registration/

Hurghhhh