Stephen Compall s11001001@identi.ca

He then ended the session with an extended appeal to move the open-source software industry away from permissive licenses like Apache 2.0 and toward copyleft licenses like the GPL. Not doing so, he said, puts the FOSS community at just as much risk of collapse as license proliferation threatened to in years past.

Didn't expect to hear that out of HP's CTO! Great though!

I love that Emacs starts smerge-mode to highlight merge conflicts in a Bazaar controlled file. Defining the following function does the same for git controlled files:

(defun vc-git-find-file-hook ()
  (when (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (re-search-forward "^<<<<<<< " nil t))
    (smerge-start-session)))

I don’t care whether it’s ello or sgrouples or FriendFace or app.net or whatever, I am not joining another walled-in social network owned by a single organization. I already have enough of those.

I don’t care if it has a strong privacy policy, I don’t care if it has good security, I don’t care if it has no advertising, I don’t care if it will let you remain pseudonymous, I don’t care if the people who own it are really cool. All of those things are worthless if the site is controlled by a single organization, because they can all be changed on a whim.

Remember, Facebook used to be ad-free, somewhat closed, had no data mining, and didn’t force you to sign up with your real name. Then they decided they had to make money, and their only resource was a captive user base.

Twitter used to be ad-free with no data mining, and it used to be open so anyone could write clients for it. Then they decided they had to make money, and that meant making sure clients showed ads properly, and that meant locking out your favorite Twitter client and showing you posts that nobody had retweeted.

Go back even further into the past, and LiveJournal used to be run by a small team of people who were directly engaged with their user base. Then they sold out to a company who didn’t care, who sold out to a Russian company who were in it for the money.

Make no mistake, this cycle will repeat itself with ello and all the other closed-off single-provider social networks. Servers cost significant time and money to run — I know because I run some. Unless you have an eccentric millionaire or a trust fund to pay for the hosting, as the site grows, sooner or later someone’s going to decide that it needs to pay for itself. In fact, even if you have funding from an eccentric millionaire, you’re still reliant on their whims to keep the privacy and advertising policies you like.

Read more: http://meta.ath0.com/2014/09/25/interested-joining-proprietary-social-network/

Listened to Tom Preston-Werner's anti-GPL keynote from OSCON. All the more reason to not use GitHub.

Installed Drop Down Terminal, a gnome-shell extension for the quake-style terminals of yore.

There seems to be a lot of bloo bloo bloo from tech companies about the breakdown of trust from users after the Snowden releases since last summer. People interviewed at the RSA conference imply that organizations like EFF that are raising awareness are in fact polarizing the conversation and preventing any kind of resolution.

To those companies I say: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck youuuuuuuuuuu.

You knew it was wrong to spy on your customers or to allow a third party to do so. You went along, over and over, with illegal and unconstitutional attacks on the Internet.

You did the wrong thing but you thought it was all going to be OK and that you'd never be caught. You got caught.

You don't deserve the public's trust. You're going to have to spend a long time earning it back. Maybe a full and honest apology, followed by a commitment to users' privacy and clear policies about government access to user data.

Own it, and mean it, and at some point you'll move past it.

GMG is actually an elaborately postmodern webcomic about a fictional open source project and its robust and dynamic community.

Caps lock, which I use as ctrl on my laptop, being flakey, making it hard to code in emacs >:| #fossworldproblems

Google Wave will fix this

Wasn't aware that this existed: #Replicant is a fully free #Android #distribution running on several devices. http://replicant.us !free !fsf

I'm now trying to dent-bomb the screen in Hall A at !LibrePlanet by having this dent update on @evan's screen!

Today WIRED published RMS's idea for software patent reform. !fsf !gnu #swpats -- ur1.ca/aqywi