I was recently sent a link to this petition from MoveOn.org and asked what I thought about it. I'll quote a section from the petition:

Use the public airwaves for the public good, or turn them over to big companies who will stifle competition, innovation, and the wireless Internet revolution. We're urging the FCC to mandate that whoever wins the auction cannot stifle competition and innovation.

First, I generally dislike MoveOn.org because they water down the issue into platitudes so that you have to agree with their position in the petition. Who wants to support anticompetitive regulations? Who wants to stifle innovation? Obviously I should be in favor of their position, right? But they water down the issue in such a way that you can't research it either the issue or their actual position. What is the issue? What is their actual position on the issue?

I don't know so, here's what I have to say in broader terms.

Researching Geek Topics and Spectrum Use

When it comes to geek topics, the place that has the best articles, news, and commentary weighing boths sides is generally slashdot. I went to their page for Communications Articles which shows this was discussed exactly zero times over the last 30 articles which goes back to December of 2006. So, not discussed at all. MoveOn doesn't scoop slashdot. So this is apparently unimportant to slashdot which means I don't care either.

Background on the Numbers

The lowest level that registered in Analog this month was 113. So, if your project or release was downloaded fewer than 113 times it won't register. I say project OR release because it's possible that the 5.x-1.20 release of your module was quickly followed by the 5.x-1.21 release - the 5.x-1.20 version may not register even if the module is fairly popular. So, 1) the numbers are inherently flawed a little bit 2) project maintainers should only create new releases when there has been a significant enough change to warrant it. Doing so on every new commit to the project is a waste of your time, your users time, and reduces the quality of these metrics.

That said, on with the report...

And not just terms they'll understand, but terms they probably have memorized!

Ok, so this is just plain awesome. Generally speaking I don't like blogging and just linking to something else, but I have to give it to Laura on this one: Disney fairy tales deconstructed (and reconstructed) to explain copyright, public domain, fair use, and a little history of the related laws. It's a parody, it's news, it's criticism, it's small compared to the cited works, it has no commercial impact on Disney's original works, and it is absolutely, 100% brilliant.

Go watch it. Take the five minutes, it's worth it. (If you're like me and using some crazy operating system try the vlc media player).

Now, here's what I have to say. Copyright is a big deal. Trademarks are a big deal. Patents are big deal. And yes in general intellectual property rights are a really big deal. We really need to protect them. Like, really protect them. Without the guarantee of profit from protected intellectual property rights we won't have (much) investment in new music, arts, performance, technology, gadgets, and, perhaps most importantly, drugs. We like music, arts, and gadgets. We need new drugs. But we need old drugs too. And we need them at a reasonable price.

With PC World declaring Microsoft Demands Royalties for Open-Source Software we've now got a repeat of the RIAA's sue our customers strategy!

Let's say that you are running a command on a linux shell and it's taking a long time. Further, you need to disconnect your session to get on the bus or your session gets disconnected because your net connection is flakey.

Screen to the rescue

Imagine if you could just disconnect from your shell session and then reconnect. Well, you can :)

I recently attended a training that Kevin Kempter hosted. It was a really great two night session aimed at experienced DBAs/Developers so that they could learn PostgreSQL. Kevin has a lot of experience with postgres and wanted to help share that experience with other folks. He's finding a growing need for PgSQL developers in the Denver area and wants to build up a user group and network here so that companies deciding whether to use PostgreSQL or not will see an available local talent pool here in Colorado.

The other day I broached the idea of a security bounty in the Drupal project. I had first heard about this concept from the Mozilla Foundation's Security Bug Bounty which appears to be the most famous of these.

Why Security Bug Bounty's are a good idea

This is pretty simple:

1. It provides at least some motivation for folks to actually look at the code and find security bugs making the software more secure.
2. More folks looking at the code is always a good thing.
3. Just the concept and the existence of the program reminds people that we take security seriously, and informs them of the proper way to report a bug.
4. In the case of the Drupal Association - which can't make decisions about the code based about the statutes (en pdf) (more formats/languages).

Generalized Security Bug Bounty System

This concept seems to me like it could be generalized for any software project. Here are the rules I came up with, based upon the Mozilla foundation's rules.

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