During the month of October I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the past, present, and future of F/OSS. This was due in part to participation in a
Berkman Center event on Free Culture, where we discussed the historical arc of Free Software to Free Culture, the relationships between them (and their differences), and also the content and meaning each. Over the years, what I have found so interesting about Free Software is how it left its enclave to inspire countless groups into rethinking the politics and ethics of production and access and yet, as
I raised in this pod-cast interview (due to the prompting of my interviewer, Elizabeth Stark), Free Software and/or Free Culture is still pretty bounded and contained phenomenon especially when compared to something like the existing consciousness over the environmental movement, which many folks know about and understand even when and if they are not involved in doing anything for the movement. I always ask my first year students whether they know what Free Software or Free Culture is and 9 out 10 stare at me with those blank eyes that basically speak in silence: no.
Now, there are a group of activists, many located in Europe, a number of them with deep roots in the social justice movement who are
taking Free Culture down a different path, trying to expand its meaning and conjoin it to social justice issues, build a broad set of coalitions across the political spectrum so as to override the fragmentation that is so characteristic to contemporary political moment, and use FC as an opportunity to critique the market fundamentalism of the last few decades.
If you are interested in these issues, take a look at their
charter: they are looking for comments (critical and constructive) as well as endorsements (here is the
long version).
I myself have a few comments, for example, I think it is worth noting something like the limits of what FC can do, that even if in many ways it can be activated to do good in the world, it is also best to highlight in the same swoop that FC is not some political panacea and has limits.
For example some groups in the world, notably some indigenous communities abide by a different logic of access and culture, whereby full access is not culturally or ethically desirable, as the work of
Kim Christen has illuminated. I also wonder in what ways issues of labor might be addressed more forcefully, and though they briefly raise the question of environmental sustainability, it is worth expanding these more directly and deeply
as this article by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell make clear.
There is more to say but I will leave it here for now and just say it is really great to see Free Culture taken down another political path that is rooted in coalition building.
Most librarians probably already know this, but maybe the programmers don t yet.
A SirsiDynix Corp lobby paper against Open Source technologies escaped onto the internet. SirsiDynix is a competitor of our co-op with products that compete with Koha. They re also interesting because Sirsi bought another competitor (Dynix), essentially stopped its product line (something near impossible with Free and Open Source Software like Koha) to replace it with its own and has ended up a messy lawsuit with Queens Borough Public Library as a consequence of that all as I understand it.
Late last month, someone leaked SirsiDynix s criticism of Free and Open Source Software which is missing references for key evidence and described on WikiLeaks as containing possible libel per se against certain competitors . The comments and links at thesecretmirror and code4lib wiki seem interesting dissections.
I feel that this document is taking advantage of an opportunity presented by the biggest promoters of FOSS library management systems not speaking about freedom. As you can see from some comments on thesecretmirror, it s all about freedom. reflections Missing the point: It s time to talk about software freedom develops that point a bit more and gives a few links back to other statements of freedom which I d not seen before.
Anyway, one of the points in the leaked document was that the US Department of Defense (DoD) restricts use of FOSS. Unluckily for SirsiDynix, on 16 October, a memo was published by the DoD CIO saying Defense: Open source software is more secure than commercial code. There s some analysis by David Wheeler discussed on LWN.
Anyway, who would you believe about FOSS? An under-fire legacy private software competitor, or the Department of Defense? I don t like either that much, but there s not really a contest. DoD are willing to bet lives on it.
Just wanted to share comments on some movies I've watched recently.
Among many of 
Others are doing it, so I thought I'd join in, too. Though, from a different perspective. Often enough people claim that package maintainers don't seem to care about their packages anymore once they did hit stable because they say it isn't as easy to update packages in stable. While this is partly true it still doesn't send a too good impression to have a high and increasing release-critical bug count for stable.
). Rather, it is meant to convince people that fixing
RC bugs (at least some of them which are nevertheless a
huge slide of the total) is easier than what we might
think and help fighting the boredom. Not
sure it is being successful in its "marketing" facet, but it has
surely been fun for me thus far!
The difficulty with living on the Joey sleep schedule as the year wanes
is finding enough daylight to have a satisfying day.
The plan was to hike in the mountains, but my inbox said otherwise. Ugly
new 
Yesterday was the last day of presidential campaign, the most poisonous campaign since 1989, when the communist rule has fallen ... or so says history.
I normally don't relay security announces for GForge or FusionForge on
this blog, but I will make an exception this time: Alain Peyrat found
several places in the code with insufficient input sanitizing, which
can cause cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-3303). It's
been fixed in the 4.7 and 4.8 branches as well as the trunk of
FusionForge (and in Debian Sid and Squeeze), and updated Debian
packages for GForge 4.5 and 4.7rc2 have been released for users of the
Etch and Lenny distributions.
The reason I make an exception for announcing this here is to remind
people that I appear to be the only one maintaining code for GForge
4.5. I do that for two reasons: first, because I'm the maintainer of
the package in Debian, and Debian Etch has GForge 4.5, and Etch is
supported for security fixes; second, because I also admin/maintain an
instance for a client of mine, so I need to backport the fixes anyway,
and making them public is no bother. Both of these reasons are going
to vanish sometime in the not too distant future: security support for
Etch will end in February, 2010, and I hope to have migrated my
client's forge to FusionForge 4.8 by then too. A direct consequence
is that I will probably stop maintenance for GForge 4.5 in the coming
months (at least I'll stop doing it in my free time).
So if you're still using GForge 4.5, you should really consider
upgrading to something supported, either GForge AS (free download from
the GForge Group) or FusionForge (free as in Free Software). Both
have an upgrade path. Obviously I think FusionForge is a better
choice, but my position is probably biased.