Some of my answers to basic questions

Written in a survey about attitudes towards free software.

Is proprietary (=unfree) software immoral or unethical?

it isn't immoral (moral = what's the current stance of mainstream society), but it is unethical when solidarity and self-determination are part of your ethical axioms.

Update 2016: I nowadays just use emerge --sync; emerge @security

To keep my Gentoo up to date, I use daily and weekly update scripts which also always run revdep-rebuild after the saturday night update :)

My daily update is via pkgcore to pull in all important security updates:

pmerge @glsa

That pulls in the Gentoo Linux Security Advisories - important updates with mostly short compile time. (You need pkgcore for that: "emerge pkgcore")

Also I use two cron scripts.

-> an answer to Blog posts are no replacement for documentation by flameeyes.

Hi flameeyes,

I kinda know your problem: It's far easier to write a number of Blog posts than to write a structured book up front - and I think two major parts of that are, that a weblog provides many more "Yes, I've done it!" moments than a book and that a blog has a much lower barrier to entry.

It's often said, that Gentoo is all about choice, but that doesn't quite fit what it is for me.

After all, the highest ability to choose is Linux from scratch and I can have any amount of choice in every distribution by just going deep enough (and investing enough time).

What really distinguishes Gentoo for me is that it makes it convenient to choose.

Since we all have a limited time budget, many of us only have real freedom to choose, because we use Gentoo which makes it possible to choose with the distribution-tools.

I just thought a bit about the restrictions the GPLv3 allows, and I think I just understood their purpose and effect for the first time (correct me, if I'm wrong :) ).

What are the restrictions?

The GPLv3 allows developers (=copyright holders) to add selected restrictions, like forbidding the use of a certain brand name or similar.

The catch with them is, that any subsequent developer who adds anything is free to simply strip off the restrictions.

What is their effect?

Comment to is the web too good for us on a BBC blog:

But the web was not really free in the beginning. While its structure was open for everyone and websites bloomed and blossomed by copying code and design from others, the content of sites stayed closed by copyright.

There were many thoughts of freedom in the original web, but the structure gave more freedom than the law, and the easy copying inside the new medium still didn't reach the slow legal body of our offline communities.

From the Gentoo Forums:

I agree that spreading a positive 
message is good, but I've always 
been nervous to send thank you 
notes out to people I've never 
met.  
Worse, I don't want to potentially 
overload an inbox with a mes-
sage that isn't going to help all 
that much. Hopefully it would be 
received in a positve way. 

I try to remember to send "thank you"s from time to time.

Goal

A workflow where the repository gets updated only from repositories whose heads got signed by at least a certain percentage or a certain number of trusted committers.

Requirements

Mercurial, two hooks for checking and three special files in the repo.

The hooks do all the work - apart from them, the repo is just a normal Mercurial repository. After cloning it, you only need to setup the hooks to activate the workflow.

Extensions: gpg

Hooks: prechangegroup and pretxnchangegroup

in reply to You do know you can't rely on Gmail, right?

You're citing some of the reasons why I dislike SaaS, but there's one more:

Whenever I use a SaaS application, I trust someone whom I really can't reach, and I trust him without being able to exert any kind of control.

Anonymous DVCS in the Darknet.

There is a new Mercurial extension for interaction with Freenet called "infocalypse" (which should keep working after the information apocalypse).

It offers "fn-push" and "fn-pull" as an optimized way to store code in freenet: bundles are inserted and pulled one after the other. An index tells infocalypse in which order to pull the bundles. It makes using Mercurial in freenet far more efficient and convenient.

Also you can use it to publish collaborative anonymous websites like the freefaq and Technophob.

And it is a perfect fit for the workflow automatic trusted group of committers.

Otherwise it offers the same features as FreenetHG.

Written in the Mercurial mailing list

Hi Bernard,

Am Dienstag 03 Februar 2009 20:19:14 schrieb ... ...:
> Most of the docs I can find seem to assume the reader is familiar with
> existing software developemnt tools and methodologies.
>
> This is not the case for me.

It wasn't for me either, and I can assure you that using Mercurial becomes
natural quite quickly.

- Words and Music: Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

Listen to the song: ogg
This recording is part of the music podcast singing in the winds of time.

Refrain:
  I build my kernel and I strip it down,
  my programs only do what I need
  the tree is at my very core
  it's my whole world and it is my seed.

Today is the 25th birthday of the GNU project - the very beginning of the free software community we are today.

This is my small, humble contribution for the birthday celebration.

Happy Birthday to GNU (ogg vorbis)

Happy Birthday to GNU,
Happy Birthday to GNU,
Happy Birthday not Unix,
Happy Birthday to GNU.

Naturally this recording is free licensed.

I recently found the OpenBSD songs, and the artists say that they are part of OpenBSD, logically as well as license-wise. And OpenBSD is licensed under a three-clause BSD license which is GPL compatible - that means I can record and publish it here!

This is the OpenBSD 3.6 release song: Pond-erosa Puff, written about people who make something free and suddenly decide to go the unfree path.

Many thanks to all you OpenBSD guys!
Your license is a bit too weak for my taste, but damn, it's free - and your code is as good as your songs!

Audio-files: ogg | mp3

heavily outdated page. See bitbucket.org/ArneBab for many more projects…

Hi,

I created some projects with pyglet and some tools to facilitate 2D
game development (for me), and I though you might be interested.

• babglet: basic usage of pyglet for 2D games with optional collision
  detection and avoidance.
• blob_swarm: a swarm of blobs with emerging swarm behaviour through only pair relations.
• blob_battle: a duel-style battle between two blobs (basic graphics,
  control and movement done)

- Free Software version of "Finity's End"; original: {lyrics: CJ Cherryh, music: Leslie Fish}.
- filked by Draketo aka Arne Babenhauserheide (draketo.de) (capo 3)

- please check the dedicated site: http://infinite-hands.draketo.de -

I'm a KDE user and quite excited about KDE 4, but I think the progress of Gnome is very promising, too.

Gnome and KDE both innovate, and both push limits, and both will learn from each other.

KDE learns from Gnome and uses the Telepathy definition.

Gnome learns from KDE and switches to WebKit which originates from khtml.

Both work together under the hood of freedesktop.org

And both are moving ever faster to replace proprietary systems.

Written in reply to: How Drupal will save the world.

I experienced the same with modules (having to search for hours), and I think I know at least two ways to make Drupal more accessible to newcomers.
A bit of background: I just setup my third Drupal page and I find new modules even now. The pages were of three slightly different but very similar types:

• A newssite, needed mostly taxonomy.
• A personal site, needed book and taxonomy, as well as themes.
  

Here's the simple steps to attach a GPL license to your source files (written after requests by DiggClone and Bandnet):

For your own project, just add the following text-notice to the header/first section of each of your source-files, commented out in whatever way your language uses:

----------------following is the notice-----------------
/*
* Your Project Name - -you slogan-
* Copyright (C) 2007 - 2007 Your Name
*

Singing the songs of creation to shape a free world.

One day the silver kit asked the grey one:

“Who made the light, which brightens our singing place?”

The grey one looked at it lovingly and asked the kit to sit with him, for she would tell a story from the old days when the tribe was young.

“Once there was a time, when the world was light and happiness. During the day the sun shone on the savannah, and at night the moon cast the grass in a silver sheen.