Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about social networking [1]. One of his points is “Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts“, another concerns the issue of forced “friends” where colleagues and casual acquaintances demand to be added to a friends list. He speculates that the reason for social networking systems to be a fad is that once too many people you don’t really like force themselves into your friends list then you will feel compelled to join a different service. I believe that the practice of ranking friends is simply a bad idea and wonder whether anyone who has completed high-school has ever used it seriously. If you publicly rank your friends then you will alienate other friends (particularly any who might have ranked you more highly than you ranked them). Everyone who has used social networking systems has discovered the pressure to avoid alienating people that you don’t actually like. It seems obvious that alienating people who you do like is even more of a problem. In my previous post about Better Social Networking [2] I suggested having multiple lists on your social networking server that are published to different people. That would allow segregating the lists as a way of dealing with some demands to be listed. People who are associated with work (colleagues, managers, and in an example Cory used students at a school where a teacher worked) would be on a work list. The work list would point to the work profiles of other people which would match whatever the standards are for the industry in question (which would still allow quite a range, the standards for sys-admins of ISPs differ significantly from those for primary school teachers). I’m sure that someone who worked for an ISP in Amsterdam would understand that a work-based friend request made to someone who teaches primary school in a part of the world that is religiously conservative would understand why that request would be declined (but the same person might add them to a personal friends list). Another way of alleviating such problems is to not require that listing be bi-directional. Current social networking systems involve one party making a friend request to another which is listed as pending in the GUI for both parties. The options are to either leave it in that state (which is an annoyance) or reject it (which may cause offence). With a uni-directional listing one party would add the other and hope for the best. If they aren’t obsessive about such things they may not even notice that the other party didn’t reciprocate. Also it would allow for famous people receiving links from many people to their public profile without any expectation of reciprocation. Of course a distributed social networking system such as I suggest would inherently have uni-directional links as there would be no central repository to force them to be all bi-directional.

• [1] http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/18/better-social-networking/

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These are all just 'first-builds' so problems could well lie ahead but I have now built a set of cross built packages for Emdebian (ARM) that edos-debcheck says is installable for a basic GPE installation. Only one package remains as a problem - gpe-filemanager builds fine but the current dependencies of libgnomevfs mean that gconf is required which doesn't give an option to disable ldap which is something I would rather do without. Certainly, existing GPE installations do without ldap but that could just be because these tend to use older versions of the particular libraries.
The GPE team status report covers the rest of the package set with links to the Debian and Emdebian packages.
I've got a few ITP's to close and a few more to open and close before the full GPE toolset is available (and I need to work out what has happened to the source package for gpe-terminal) but things are looking good.
All the cross building problems were in the base packages and a few of the lower level system libraries - the X libraries and GPE applications cross build very easily, thanks mainly to CDBS support in emdebian-tools.
The hard task lies ahead - configuring the packages so that Emdebian can support pre-built installation images for specific devices with their specific hardware configuration (and nothing else).
I'm expecting a 70% reduction in the amount of space required for the same package set relative to Debian.
When browsing the Emdebian package set you may think that 1,736 packages (or so) is a lot but this is mainly down to the Emdebian Tdeb implementation which splits out each translation for each package into a package of its own.
The next stage of the Tdeb process is to migrate those packages into a separate repository and finish the development of langupdate. Then, each user can choose to install only the .mo files required for their specific needs instead of getting 250Mb of translations for languages that are unsupported on their machine anyway.
The main deviation from the existing tdeb proposal is that Emdebian needs finer granularity so that gettext translations are separate from translated manpages - because Emdebian doesn't include any manpages.

When Ubuntu announced public availability of Personal Package Archives, I thought it might be good to use it to provide up to date Gammu related packages. After successful registration I uploaded Gammu package and no reaction so far, so I'll wait. However this memorised me that I wanted to use OpenSUSE Build Service for same purpose some time ago. I filled in registration and as I didn't receive any email about being accepted, I absolutely forgot about that. Now just tried to log in and it works. So you can now have access to latest Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages for most recent RPM distributions (Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Mandriva 2006, Mandriva 2007, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE Factory, SLES 9 and SLE 10). I could not test them so any feedback is welcome :-). You can find all packages on overview page or directly in download folders. Playing with spec files after long time was quite painful, but I got to it after I managed the hardest thing - how to make build dependencies which will work on all these distros. I hope I will be able to announce similar service for Ubuntu users using PPA, but now I have to wait for some reaction on my source uploads.

Of all of the problematic qualities and implications of MySpace, I think I might find the fact that it leads to constructions like "His MySpace," "Their MySpace" or even "My MySpace" the most objectionable.

Long weekend of travel and family, and now we're back on our way to Montreal. I spent most of Thanksgiving weekend with my father's family in New Jersey, where he and my mom both grew up and where 4 of his brothers and sisters still live (and their kids, and so on). We left Montreal on Tuesday afternoon, had dinner in Albany, and got down to Newburg (New York) in the early evening. The next morning we spent several hours at the nearby Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, which was about as crass and consumeristic as it sounds. But the loonie is still strong, and it's nice to buy some clothes. I especially like buying things a few sizes smaller than what I had to get a few months ago. Wednesday night we got into Hillsborough, NJ, where my Aunt Barbara lives, and visited with her and her family. Barb has four great kids -- Phillip (16?), Maddy and Vicky (14?), and Nick (13?), who are all my cousins despite being at least 20 years younger than me. When Amita June was too tired to move we hit the hay for the night, and in the morning we all hung around playing Wii sports (even AJ!), and had a hearty dinner in the early afternoon. Then we went to my Uncle Paul's for dessert, coffee, and a nice 2003 Ramos Pinto Vintage Port that we brought along. Friday and Saturday we spent at my Aunt Helen and Uncle Marty's house in Highland Park (New Jersey). They have a great 100-year-old house right by the Raritan River, and it was really nice seeing them. We had dinner with Paul and his wife Eileen on Friday night, and we saw the lighting of the Christmas tree in Princeton. Today we started the two-day trip home. It's not really that long a drive -- about 6-10 hours, depending on the route and kind of weather -- but we like to split it up into two days, since we have a 2-year-old aboard. We stopped in New York (city)/Queens to see our friend Jen for brunch at a nice place called Quaint, where I got a good house-cured salmon and Maj had an excellent bowl of granola. Amita got some nice challah french toast, which she wolfed down with the help of her kind parents. Tonight we stopped in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts to sleep over. I like this part of MA, and the New York Times had a recent article about its bookish culture, called In the Valley of the Literate. We had a nice quick dinner at Bueno Y Sano in Northampton, and we'll stick around tomorrow for more shopping (books! Whole Foods!) and a little site-seeing before we head home. It'll be good to be back in MTL, though. I miss my bed, and we only have a few weeks there before we're off again to California for Christmas time. tags: travel thanksgiving newjersey amitajune shopping pioneervalley

Montreal SantaCon Speaking of Christmas, one of the things we'll be shopping for tomorrow is santa costumes. Friday, November 30th is SantaCon Montreal 2007. SantaCon is a world-wide anarchic cluster-together of goofballs and lunatics who go rampaging around their town from bar to mall to bar in full Santa costume (or Mrs. Santa, or elves, or reindeer, or something similar). Everyone's invited, nobody's in charge, and a fun time is had by all. SantaCon started in the 90s in San Francisco (like everything), but I never managed to go. I finally went to SantaCon in Austin in 2001, and had an amazingly good time. My pals at The Ministry of Truth have photo evidence here and here and here. There's nothing like overflowing a bar with 100 of your new best friends, all dressed like Santa, dancing and goofing off and having a good time. It brightens up everyone's day. Anyways, we'll be picking up Maj the beginnings of an outfit here on the US side of the border, so she'll be able to accessorize with her own bits and pieces. I'll probably pick up a couple of spares for friends in Montreal, too. I'm really looking forward to the event -- it should be a good time. There's a Facebook event for people who go for that kind of thing. tags: santacon montreal cacophony santarchy santacon2007 santaconmontreal2007

le Sans Fil to go municipal I was excited to read (via Steve Faguy) that our beloved local community wireless group, le Sans Fil will be providing wireless to many parks and open spaces around Montreal. This is great news for Montrealers -- the city had previous vowed up the street and back that it would never have a municipal wireless program of any sort. So good deal. It sounds like it's going to be a tough job -- I don't think wiring up outdoor spaces for wireless is anywhere near as easy as doing caf s or homes. And I think it's going to be tough to show value -- after all, people are only outdoors in parks in great numbers during the few warm months of the year here. And when people are out in parks, they're not usually checking their email -- they tend to do more outdoorsy things. But my guess is that park culture will adapt to the new resource pretty well. Congrats to SF -- I think they're a great organization that's up to this new challenge. tags: montreal ilesansfil muniwifi

It seems there is a long standing tradition to post a “Hello Planet” entry when being added to a new planet. Well Hello http://planet.debian.org , My name is Brandon Holtsclaw, and have done a bit of Debian and Ubuntu work over the last few years ( and hopefully will continue to do-so ). Only my posts taged with “planet-debian” are fed here so hopefully I wont spam totaly “unrealated to debian” things. Thanks Mako for getting me all setup. If you would like to see all my posts or know a little bit more about me you can follow these few links ( or drop me an email ):
http://www.imbrandon.com/
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=brandon@imbrandon.com
https://launchpad.net/~imbrandon Nothing more to see here … move along.

Apparently some people worry that Gforge may be abandoned, or on the verge of being superseded with the proprietary "Gforge Advanced Server" rewrite. Let it be known that I for one have no plans to switch to Gforge AS, for all the reasons you'd expect from a free software user and advocate: I don't have access to the source code (it's made illegible by some sort of industrial PHP obfuscator), I can't hack it because the license doesn't allow me to, I can't audit it for security flaws, I can't adapt it to particular needs, etc. Since a significant part of my income comes from maintaining Gforge instances for clients, with local modifications for their particular needs, it's an economical necessity that Gforge stays free. And evolving. Right. Having said that, I guess I have to show concrete evolutions in addition to principles and ideals. So what changed recently?

• I believe the Gettext transition is now more or less complete. The initial bulk of it was done during the summer, but a few odds and ends were still dangling, such as plural forms here and there. The translations should now also be used in the appropriate place (no more receiving an email in Dutch even though you're French, simply because the person who clicked on the button that triggered the email was Dutch). I'm trying to bring the French translation to completion, but it's a long and boring task, so it'll happen gradually. As for other languages... "patches welcome".
• I've started using IPv6 at home, with a dual IPv4+IPv6 stack and hostnames that resolve to both kinds of addresses. The problem is that neither Gforge nor its packaging were designed with IPv6 in mind, so the Apache virtual host didn't listen on the IPv6 address, and even when it did, Gforge wouldn't understand IPv6 addresses in its session code. All that has been fixed, and you can now run Gforge on a dual-stack server.
• Lots of "undefined variable" PHP warnings have been fixed (not only by me, by the way). They probably weren't harmful by themselves, but they were signs of sloppy coding.
• The FCKeditor plugin now uses FCKeditor as provided by the Debian package, rather than its own (outdated and unmaintained) copy.

All this has committed and uploaded to Debian. As usual, please test and report failures. Plans for my foreseeable future include:

• Making the clean-and-working Mediawiki integration plugin public (the delay is not due to technical reasons).
• Using placeholders in SQL queries, to reduce the risk of SQL injections. This probably means a full audit of all the places in the code where queries are made, so it may take some time.
• Maybe a full audit for HTML injections and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, too. Probably a long and boring task too.
• Switching to ucf for management of config files.
• I'm still toying with the idea of switching to dbconfig-common, too. But since I'm not sure it's going to be good enough, that's not very high on my priority list.
• I'm pondering whether I should try to make a live-CD with an installed Gforge. Or maybe a fully automated installation with debian-installer and preseeding. That may debunk the misconception that Gforge is hard to install.

Places where help would be most welcome:

• Translations! I can do French, I fixed a few strings in Spanish and Japanese, maybe I can do some minor fixes in German too, but that's not good enough. Of course, translators should be aware this is not a small task: gforge.pot contains about 2200 strings. But even reading and fixing (or removing) the obviously incorrect translations would help.
• Packaging for RPM-based systems. I fear that aspect of Gforge has been all but abandoned, and I don't think there are any working RPMs around.
• Testing, testing, testing. Gforge is rather versatile, and a big piece of software. I don't use all the features myself, so bugs are likely to lurk in those places I don't see often enough.
• I know some of you out there have a locally patched Gforge installation. You know you'll have a hell of a time porting those patches to the next version when you upgrade. Why not share them, so everyone profits from them (and you can then profit from the patches from the other users)?

There. That was the news. Now for a bit of trivia: it's amazing how having a metric of one's productivity gives an incentive to increase it. I found mine on Ohloh, which provides code and license analyses and statistics on free software projects, as well as statistics on commits by contributors. They even have a shiny widget with a scrollable timeline showing commits over time, as well as comparative commit graphs. My obvious personal goal is to get up to the first position among the contributors, but of course I wouldn't complain if the current top committer stayed ahead by springing back into activity.

It's been a while since I last posted about emacs-snapshot, so here's a summary of the latest changes:

• New packages: nXML, remember.el, bubbles.el (a Same Game implementation), doc-view.el (to view PDF/PS/DVI files in Emacs), ...
• Many commands now have useful minibuffer defaults (accessible using M-n).
• M-q, M-$, TAB now operate on the region if it's active and transient-mark-mode is enabled.
• diff-mode now does word-level highlighting of hunks.

I am making a small project with TurboGears and I am just loving the widgets and the identity framework. There are some rough spots, like the documentation, but luckily for the most pars you can just launch an ipython interpreter and use tab completion to look at what functions are available. But then I got this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./start-foo.py", line 23, in
from foo.controllers import Root
File “…Foo/foo/controllers.py”, line 22, in
action=”save_settings”
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/turbogears/widgets/meta.py”, line 169, in widget_init
validator = generate_schema(self.validator, widgets)
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/turbogears/widgets/meta.py”, line 277, in generate_schema
if widget.is_named:
AttributeError: type object ‘SettingsFields’ has no attribute ‘is_named’

And I could not find any help on this. Luckily I found Lucas manual and by comparing the code I found that in this part of the code:
settings_form = widgets.TableForm(
fields=SettingsFields,
action="save_settings"
)
Instead of passing the whole SettingsFields class, an instance of it needs to be passed ( as in “fields=SettingsFields(),” ). Cann’t wait to see all the goodies they are making now in TG 2.0, but considering my experience, I will wait until they update the documentation for it before diving in.

Last night I finally got around to having a play with Clutter. Considering I'd never used it before, I'm really impressed with just how easy the API is to use. Within half an hour I had images fading in and out, and this morning I built Eye of Gnome and rewrote my hack as a slideshow plugin. There is no point releasing the code just (patches required, and a nasty bug remaining), but I did make a screencast. NP: Maxinquaye, Tricky

A week or two ago, I went to the local standaard boekhandel to use the gift certificate that my mother had bought me for my birthday (which was in may). For the 50 of that certificate, I bought me the Dutch version of 1984, plus 4 DVD boxes: one with Hitchcock's Psycho, one containing Superman Returns, another one of Dances with wolves, and a final box containing David Lynch's masterpiece Mulholland Drive. Not a bad deal, I must say; especially as the latter two boxes were on a "buy one, get one free" promotion, where those boxes each had a second DVD with a different movie. For Dances with wolves, I forgot which one it is; but for Mulholland Drive, that was The Singing Detective. Now if anyone ever tells me that 20 for a DVD with a single movie is a reasonable price, then, well, hah. Anyway. I hadn't seen Psycho before; but in a past life where I did drama school, we had some classes about this movie. As a result, some of its secrets were spoiled, and I didn't enjoy it as much as I probably would have had I not had this knowledge beforehand. Still, it was an enjoyable experience. If you've never seen this movie, shame on you! Go to the local video store, and rent it. Preferably in its original black & white form, not the 1998 remake. Dances with wolves is a pretty interesting movie, too. Of course, as I'd seen part of it before, I already knew that. Superman Returns is not bad, as a no-brainer entertainment movie. It's nothing beyond that, however. Finally, Mulholland Drive is strange. Back in 2001, when the movie first came out, I went to see it at the local movie theatre; it is one of those complex movies which, once you've finished seeing it, will still leave you puzzled until you see it a few more times. Few other movies ever manage to do that to me (I think the only other one is Pulp Fiction). At the time, I planned to watch the movie again as soon as possible, but for various reasons that didn't happen; and now, after six years, I had almost completely forgotten the plot. Which is good, really—I enjoyed it much more. And I think I got it, this time; rather than trying to find the logic in the plot, I just went with the flow, which helps a lot. The other two I still have to see. But hey, there's still time, right? Oh, and 1984? It's nice how you want to scream and yell when the system completely takes over Winston's mind. An interesting book.

Better than just a party, it s a bug squashing party! Imagemagick needs your help. It a very important package for Debian and its really outdated. It has more than 100 bugs.


The objective, is to reduce the bugs to less than 20 in a month in the current development version. Let s go for them! :)

My blog is syndicated on Planet Debian, Planet GSLUG, and Facebook (through their "notes" system). I occasionally get a comment about one of my posts over on Facebook, and every time I do I remember one of the reasons I avoid that site.

[someone] made a comment about your note "note title".

To see the comment, follow the link below:
[link to Facebook]

What's missing here is of course the actual text of the comment. Blogger does this right: the actual comment is emailed to me. Not only does this impose the annoyance of having to click on the link, but I often read my email offline, and so a message like this is worse than useless for me. (worse as I have to postpone it for later, which means I need to deal with it twice) It would be even better if I didn't have to click to reply, but with a Web service you kind of expect that. (one of the reasons that I'll be setting up my own blog at some point: I can use software that actually allows me to compose replies offline)

I don't know why Facebook does this, but my guess is that either (a) they haven't thought about it, or (b) they want to drive up page views and make it annoying for me to not use their site. If it's (b), then that apparently works for a large swathe of the population, but it makes me want to avoid them like a bad cliche.

Today I was thrilled to see that Cory Doctorow (who among other things wrote one of my favourite Sci-fi novels [1]) copied one of my blog posts on to BoingBoing.net [2]. Then I reviewed the licence conditions (which had previously been contained in the About Page and is now a post on my documents blog [3]) and discovered that I had not permitted such use! In the second part of this post (not included in the RSS feed) I have the old and new license conditions for my blog content. My plan is that my document blog [4] will have the current version of such documents while this blog will have every iteration along the way. The new version of my license explicitly permits BoingBoing to do what they want with my content. I don’t have any objection to what Cory did, and I would have been rather unhappy if he had sent me an email saying “I wanted to feature your post on BoingBoing but sorry you miss out because of your license”. But his procedure does not work well. Now I am wondering, how do I construct a license agreement that permits my content to be used by big popular sites that give my blog new readers and my ideas a wider audience while denying the content to sploggers who just want to use my patterns of words for google hits? How do I permit my content to be used by people who contribute as much to the community as Cory but deny it to talentless people who want to exploit my work while contributing nothing to the world? How can I ensure that people who want to reference my work can learn about the licence conditions (the About Page apparently doesn’t work)? These are serious questions and I invite suggestions as to how to solve them. The fact that I have forgiven Cory for not abiding by my license and granted him permission to do the same thing again whenever he wishes is not the ideal solution. For authors to find people who copy their work and respond with forgiveness or DMCA take-down notices according to who does the copying and the reason for it is a losing game and a distraction from the work of creating the useful content. I understand the BoingBoing situation, they deliver summaries and copies of blog posts rapidly and frequently. Discovering conditions of use and asking for clarification from the authors (which may take days or weeks) would really affect the process. Also anyone who reads my blog would probably realise that I want to have such posts copied on sites such as BoingBoing.

• [1] http://www.craphound.com/est/


• [2] http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/20/customized-smtp-serv.html


• [3] http://doc.coker.com.au/legal/blog-license/


• [4] http://doc.coker.com.au/

(more…)

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Debian has provided Rmetrics packages for financial engineering and computational finance since the Rmetrics release for R 1.9.0 in the summer of 2004. Over the years, Rmetrics has gotten more granular and changed from a handful of packages to two handfuls --- and the most recent release extended this trend even further to almost two dozen packages as shown in this chart. Rmetrics now comprosises over twenty individual packages. Eleven new packages were added in the 260.72 release for R 2.6.0, and they required eight other new packages from CRAN. While I would have preferred a more spread-out approach than the shotgun approach of having to introduce all these new packages at once (which took the last four weeks), I am in support of the reorganisation which should make maintenance more easy going forward. So to get all of these packages onto a Debian box, a quick sudo apt-get install r-cran-rmetrics is all it takes. Currently supported only in the always-fresh unstable flavour, but hopefully soon in testing too. A big Thank You goes to the Debian FTPmasters. Of the 20-some packages that I added to Debian during this Rmetrics expansion, many were added within a day or two. Lastly, thanks also to Florian Hahne, Robert Gentleman and Elijah Wright for much appreciated help with R's Rgraphviz and graph packages to create the chart above. It only takes a handful of lines to create the basic graph, and another few lines for the colours and titles. The code is available on request, of course, but you need the current development versions of the BioConductor packages Rgraphviz and graph (which are not in Debian yet).

One says the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I made this experience back in easter for the first time. I was over at my brother's place for easter celebration when I got up in the morning, went into the bath and looked into the mirror for morning toilet. I washed my face like always with cold water to refresh myself, and when I removed my hands... I was sure I was looking into a female face. It quite a lot bewildered me; it was the first time this happened. And I wasn't even properly shaved...
An experience like this is something special I guess, and it happened more and more often in the meantime. I guess this is one more proof that what I feel is the right thing. ... even though still some others seem to be immensly ammused by it. When I went to the ceilidh at the debconf in EDI I received some pretty nasty responses to my outfit, which I didn't expect within a project about Freedom and Openness. Though, I give the people the doubt of not knowing what they have done. It's too much in human nature to joke about things they don't understand, not knowingly insulting others. I'd like to dedicate this fine tune from Garbage to them: Bleed Like Me. If you listen closely to the lyrics you might be able to find out why... There has also been a genderfuck night in the club next to the night venue which on the other hand was pretty nice. It was attended by quite some people from Debian, some expectedly, some to my happy surprise. Thank you again guys, for making this evening to something special. I hope you keep it in as nice remembrance as me. My former SO drew a while ago a pretty nice picture about me. I didn't ask for it, or did hint it, which makes me even more happier about it. Thank you Babsi, really. :) I switched my hackergotchi on Planet Debian to it just in case. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. I stumbled upon it in the Venus Envy comic I got notified about earlier this year, you might want to check its contribution, but beware, it might as disturb you as it does to me. I'm thankful that Erin dis survive it, because she gives so much strength with her comic to me and possibly also others...

Since I am too tired (well really sick) to write anything about Tokyo, here are some of my pictures and here is one I am quite fond of.

Update: Due to the popularity of this post I have created a T-Shirt and put it on sale at http://www.cafepress.com/email_eula . Update: Unlike most of my blog content I permit anyone to copy most or all of this post for commercial use (this includes blogs with google advertising) as long as they correctly identify me as the author. Usually I only allow such mirroring for non-commercial sites. Update: I now have a copy of this post at http://doc.coker.com.au/legal/conditions-email/ which I will modify if necessary. I have previously written about using a SMTP protocol level disclaimer to trump any legalistic sigs [1]. The conditions of sending mail to my server are now as follows:

1. A signature will in no way restrict my use of your message. You sent the message to me because you want me to read it (it was not mis-sent, my mail server does not accept mis-addressed mail). I will keep the message as long as I like either deliberately or because I forgot to delete it.


2. I reserve the right to publish any email that is threatening (including any threats of legal action). I don’t like being threatened and part of my defence is to publish such threats at an appropriate time. Anyone who is considering the possibility of threatening me should consider when their threat may re-appear.


3. I reserve the right to publish any email that is abusive/profane, is a confession of criminal or unethical behaviour, or is evidence that the sender is a liar or insane.


4. I reserve the right to forward all amusing email to my friends for their enjoyment.

My mail server will now provide the URL of this page to everyone who connects at the first stage of the SMTP protocol. When a mail server continues the connection that indicates acceptance of these conditions. This doesn’t mean that I wildly forward email and business discussions are kept confidential of course. I expect that most people don’t keep mail secret when it matches the conditions in my list above, unlike most people I’m publishing the list of reasons.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/12/29/email-disclaimers/

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The Free Software Foundation sent out a press release today announcing a new addition to the FSF stable of licenses: the Affero General Public License or AGPL. The FSF has also published a set of answers to anticipated questions in the GPL FAQ. The first paragraph of the release explains what the AGPL is:

This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to ensure that users who interact with the licensed software over a network can receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to begin fostering user and development communities around free software web services and other network-oriented software.

The GPL is designed to ensure that users of software have access to the source code -- source is prerequisite to freedom and to the type of collaboration that has made free software successful. However, the GPL doesn't say "users" when it talks about who gets freedom; instead, it references people to whom the software is distributed. It doesn't say users for two reasons. The first is that, under copyright, "distribution" is a much more meaningful term and a powerful hook than "use" which is not, in most cases, one of the copyright holder's exclusive rights. The second is that, until very recently, having a copy of software was prerequisite to using it; possession was prerequisite to use. Things have changed. A large part of many people's computing experience involves running web applications. These include email clients (e.g., GMail or other webmails), office applications (e.g., Google Docs), social network systems, and others. These applications all run on servers -- i.e., on other people's computers. The providers of these services, the Googles and the FaceBooks, build upon, modify and improve GPL software without giving back to their users or the community that they took their software from. The AGPL was created several years ago by FSF board member Henri Poole as a way to address this issue. The license took the form of the GPLv2 with one extra clause. It was a first stab at a license and was imperfect. The language and methods were clunky and, most problematically, the license was incompatible with software under the GPL. The new AGPL is based on the GPLv3 and the extra clause has been rethought and rewritten. It has been vetted using the GPLv3 comment process and dozens of insightful comments from dozens of lawyers, hackers, and users of free software have been incorporated. The new license fixes the issues that many folks -- including myself -- had with the first version of the license. More importantly it can now be linked to GPLv3 code which makes the license a whole lot more practical. I am quoted in the release being excited about the license and I really am. I've got 2-3 major development projects (including Selectricity) which I've been waiting to distribute so that I could do so under the AGPLv3. The AGPL isn't a complete answer to the problem faced by disempowered users of web services. Without data or the capacity (in terms of servers, money, and expertise) to run web applications, the state and quality of these users' freedom remains far from clear. Thankfully, there are a whole bunch of folks thinking about what freedom for users of services might be -- it's a conversation that I'm going to push the FSF to participate in and pursue moving forward. The AGPLv3 marks a first solid contribution to the process of answering that question. If you'd like to help supporting or assisting the FSF in this effort, please consider becoming an associate member or donating.