Coffs Free and Open Technology Network

Yesterday on Identica, I declared that I was:

"De-Bacon-ising. Unsubscribing from @jonobacon, #FLOSSWeekly & #ShotOfJaq. Can't bear the anti-FSF anti-RMS attitude any longer."

I soon realised this sounded too unfairly personal, so I think I'd better elaborate.

I've considered myself a part of the free software movement from the "Woah!" moment when I first read the preamble of the GPL over ten years ago. This was around the time of the formation of the open source movement, and for a while I was as confused as many people still are about the relationship between free software and open source, believing the latter term to be as Bruce Perens intended a synonym of the former.

I responded to a recent GetUp campaign and wrote a missive to Senator Conroy about the Gov.s proposed Cleanfeed. I just got the response, one of those government emails filled with missives, warning of impending severe penalties for even mentioning that I'd heard from them. Maybe my computer will self destruct as it detects me writing these words. You would have seen similar I am sure,

The information transmitted is for the use of the intended recipient only and may contain confidential and/or legally privileged material. Any review, re-transmission, disclosure, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited and may result in severe penalties.

The good thing about being a member of a relatively small credit union is that you don't have to worry about phishing email. Customers of Chase Manhattan, Barclays, or even the Commonwealth Bank may have to second-guess every email that purports to come from their financial institution, but customers of - for instance - the Sydney Credit Union are too small a target.

That is of course unless their credit union makes them an easy mark.

Some people like bad jokes, the more lame and groan-inducing the better. Richard Stallman (who henceforth I'll refer to by his preferred name, RMS) is certainly one of those people.

One of these bad jokes, told many times by RMS over the years, has recently received some criticism, which subsequently triggered a barrage of outrage:

The talk started out with a rehash of open source [sic] history--much of which is, I'm certain, quite well-known to the audience, and then lapsed into a fairly undirected rant about C# and how no one should be using it (with a completely incomprehensible comment that it was "good" that there were free C# implementations... huh?), before Richard donned his "Saint Ignotius" [sic] get-up. For me, things went rapidly and drastically downhill from that point.

Just a thought and a bloody mess. See Attachment.

I've been meaning to write about this subject in stanzas of more than 140 characters at a time, but in lieu of me getting my act together and making time to do so, here's the text of an enjoyable debate of sorts I had with cashmusic and others on Identica, reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

For some time now, I've found the Creative Commons philosophy morally troubling in a way that the free software philosophy isn't, without being able to satisfactorily articulate precisely why. (I want to stress that I am criticising the project, not the people involved in it or people who use CC licenses, many of whom recognise that it is an imperfect but useful tool for achieving goals which I would consider quite compatible with my own.) Last week Science Commons, a subproject of the Creative Commons, released a short video summarising their mission. A couple of quotes from this video struck me as problematic:

Its been some time but I feel its time to refocus on the important things. IE Free nad Open. I'm going to use these holidays to get back into openstreetmap.org and get some of the coffswifi.net stuff going again.

I was poking around the web and found out that the domain name had been used before by a company called Free Net Corporation. It was formed in 1999 and in 2000 it formed an alliance with ANZ. You may rember the days were they tried to give away free internet access through banner advertising.

Here are some links to historical information...

www.asx.com.au

www.zdnet.com.au

web.archive.org

Enjoy and have a laugh.

The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report is available here

http://census.waughpartners.com.au or download the pdf below.