Dave Neary

Daniel Chalef and Matthew Aslett responded to my suggestion at OSBC that copyright assignment was unnecessary, and potentially harmful, to building a core community around your project. Daniel wrote that he even got the impression that I thought requesting copyright assignment was “somewhat evil”. This seems like a good opportunity for me to clarify exactly what I think about copyright assignment for free software projects. First: copyright assignment is usually unnecessary. Most of the most vibrant and diverse communities around do not have copyright assignment in place. GIMP, GNOME, KDE, Inkscape, Scribus and the Linux kernel all get along just fine without requesting copyright assignment (joint or otherwise) from new contributors. There are some reasons why copyright assignment might be useful, and Matthew mentions them. Relicencing your software is easier when you own everything, and extremely difficult if you don’t. Defending copyright infringement is potentially easier if there is a single copyright holder. The Linux kernel is pretty much set as GPL v2, because even creating a list of all of the copyright holders would be problematic. Getting their agreement to change licence would be nigh on impossible. Not quite 100% impossible, though, as Mozilla has shown. The relicencing effort of Mozilla took considerable time and resources, and I’m sure the people involved would be delighted not to have needed to go through it. But it is possible. There is another reason proponents say that a JCA is useful: client indemnification. I happen to think that this is a straw man. Enterprise has embraced Linux, GNOME, Apache and any number of other projects without the need for indemnification. And those clients who do need indemnification can get it from companies like IBM, Sun, Red Hat and others. Owning all the copyright might give more credibility to your client indemnification, but it’s certainly not necessary. There is a conflation of issues going on with customer indemnification too. What is more important than the ownership of the code is the origin of the code. I would certainly agree that projects should follow decent due dilligence procedures to ensure that a submission is the submitter’s own work, and that he has the right or permission to submit the code under your project’s licence. But this is independent of copyright assignment. Daniel mentions Mozilla as an example of a non-vendor-led-project requiring copyright assignment - he is mistaken. The Mozilla Committer’s Agreement (pdf) requires a new committer to do due dilligence on the origin of code he contributes, and not commit code which he is not authorised to do. But they do not require joint copyright assignment. Also note when the agreement gets signed - not on your first patch, but when you are becoming a core committer - when you are getting right to the top of the Mozilla food chain. Second: Copyright assignment is potentially harmful. It is right and proper that a new contributor to your project jump through some hoops to learn the ways of the community. Communities are layered according to involvement, and the trust which they earn through their involvement. You don’t give the keys to the office to a new employee on day one. What you do on day one is show someone around, introduce them to everyone, let them know what the values of your community are. Now, what does someone learn about the values of your community if, once they have gone to the effort to modify the software to add a new feature, had their patch reviewed by your committers and met your coding standards, the very next thing you do is send them a legal form that they need to print, sign, and return (and incidentally, agree with) before you will integrate their code in your project? The hoops that people should be made to jump through are cultural and technical. Learn the tone, meet the core members, learn how to use the tools, the coding conventions, and familiarise yourself with the vision of the community. The role of community members at this stage is to welcome and teach. The equivalent of showing someone around on the first day. Every additional difficulty which a new contributor experiences is an additional reason for him to not stick around. If someone doesn’t make the effort to familiarise himself with your community processes and tools, then that’s probably not a big deal. But if someone walks away for another reason, something that you could change, something that you can do away with without changing the nature of the community, then that’s a loss. Among the most common superfluous barriers to entry that you find in free software projects are complicated build systems or uncommon tools, long delays in having questions answerred and patches reviewed, and unnecessary bureaucracy around contributing. A JCA fits squarely into that third category. In a word, the core principle is: To build a vibrant core developer community independent of your company, have as few barriers to contributing as possible. There is another issue at play here, one which might not be welcomed by the vendors driving the communities where I think a JCA requirement does the most harm. That issue is trust. One of the things I said at OSBC during my presentation is that companies aren’t community members - their employees might be. Communities are made up of people, individual personalities, quirks, beliefs. While we often assign human characteristics to companies, companies don’t believe. They don’t have morals. The personality of a company can change with the board of directors. Luis Villa once wrote “what if the corporate winds change? … At that point, all the community has is the license, and [the company]’s licensing choices … When [the company] actually trusts communities, and signals as such by treating the community as equals [...] then the community should (and I think will) trust them back. But not until then.” Luis touches on an important point. Trust is the currency we live & die by. And companies earn trust by the licencing choices they make. The Apache Foundation, Python Software Foundation and Free Software Foundation are community-run non-profits. As well as their licence choices, we also have their by-laws, their membership rules and their history. They are trusted entities. In a fundamental way, assigning or sharing copyright with a non-profit with a healthy governance structure is different from sharing copyright with a company. There are many cases of companies taking community code and forking commercial versions off it, keeping some code just for themselves. Trolltech, SugarCRM and Digium notably release a commercial version which is different from their GPL edition (Update: Several people have written in to tell me that this is no longer the case with Trolltech, since they were bought by Nokia and QT was relicenced under the LGPL - it appeared that people felt clarification was necessary, although the original point stands - Trolltech did sell a commercial QT different from their GPL “community” edition). There are even cases of companies withdrawing from the community completely and forking commercial-only versions of software which had previously released under the GPL. A recent example is Novell’s sale of Netmail to Messaging Architects, resulting in the creation of the Bongo project, forked off the last GPL release available. In 2001, Sunspire (since defunct) decided to release future versions of Tuxracer as a commercial game, resulting in the creation of Planet Penguin Racer, among others, off the last GPL version. Xara dipped their toes releasing most of their core product under the GPL, but decided after a few years that the experiment had failed. Xara Xtreme continues with a community effort to port the rendering engine to Cairo, but to my knowledge, no-one from Xara is working on that effort. Examples like these show that companies can not be trusted to continue developing the software indefinitely as free software. So as an external developer being asked to sign a JCA, you have to ask yourself the question whether you are prepared to allow the company driving the project the ability to build a commercial product with your code in there. At best, that question constitutes another barrier to entry. At OSBC, I was pointing out some of the down sides of choices that people are making without even questioning them. JCAs are good for some things, but bad at building a big developer community. What I always say is that you first need to know what you want from your community, and set up the rules appropriately. Nothing is inherently evil in this area, and of course the copyright holder has the right to set the rules of the game. What is important is to be aware of the trade-offs which come from those choices. To summarise where I stand, copyright assignment or sharing agreements are usually unnecessary, potentially harmful if you are trying to build a vibrant core developer community, by making bureaucracy and the trust of your company core issues for new contributors. There are situations where a JCA is merited, but this comes at a cost, in terms of the number of external contributors you will attract. Updates: Most of the comments tended to concentrate on two things which I had said, but not emphasised enough. I have tried to clarify slightly where appropriate in the text. First, Trolltech used to distribute a commercial and community edition of QT which were different, but as the QT Software Group in Nokia, this is no longer the case (showing that licencing can change after an acquisition (for the better), as it happens. Second, assigning copyright to a non-profit is, I think, a less controversial proposition for most people because of the extra trust afforded to non-profits through their by-laws, governance structure and not-for-profit status. And it is worth pointing out that KDE eV has a voluntary joint copyright assignment for contributors that they encourage people to sign - Aaron Seigo pointed this out. I think it’s a neat way to make future relicencing easier without adding the initial barrier to entry.

How is it like to be a plain housewife?

i've been to work since before i got married so i didn't experience being really just a plain housewife. during weekends, i personally do the household chores and sometimes i complained about it. well, no one had asked me to do that. it's just voluntary. i can't imagine being a plain housewife all my wife. i know it's a nobel work but sometimes one tends to forget about herself because of the never-ending chores at home. how is it like to be really at home 24/7?

emotional information retrieval

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 60, No. 5. (2009), pp. 863-876.Some documents provoke emotions in people viewing them. Will it be possible to describe emotions consistently and use this information in retrieval systems? We tested collective (statistically aggregated) emotion indexing using images as examples. Considering psychological results, basic emotions are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness. This study follows an approach developed by Lee and Neal (2007) for music emotion retrieval and applies scroll bars for tagging basic emotions and their intensities. A sample comprising 763 persons tagged emotions caused by images (retrieved from ) applying scroll bars and (linguistic) tags. Using SPSS, we performed descriptive statistics and correlation analysis. For more than half of the images, the test persons have clear emotion favorites. There are prototypical images for given emotions. The document-specific consistency of tagging using a scroll bar is, for some images, very high. Most of the (most commonly used) linguistic tags are on the basic level (in the sense of Rosch's basic level theory). The distributions of the linguistic tags in our examples follow an inverse power-law. Hence, it seems possible to apply collective image emotion tagging to image information systems and to present a new search option for basic emotions. This article is one of the first steps in the research area of emotional information retrieval (EmIR).Stefanie Schmidt, Wolfgang Stock

My Gallery

My Live Gallery, Create Live Galleries, Photo Albums and Slideshows Online Upload Your Pictures & Publish Your Photo Gallery - About About MyLiveGallery : "MyLiveGallery.com enables you to instantly create live galleries, photo albums and slideshows online. Use it to turn your photos into attractive galleries and share them with others. It is as easy as 1-2-3. Just specify the name, upload your pictures or get photos from Flickr, select a theme and the gallery is ready!"(MyLiveGallery.com)Maak snel een fotogallery en slideshow van je digitale foto's. Geef een titel en upload alle foto's die je wilt gebruiken of foto's online van je Flickr-account. Kies een thema voor je foto-gallery en publiceer en deel met anderen. Je hoeft geen account aan te maken. Beertjes Weblog by Peter Franken

$5 milIion,would you sold yourself /your love

Do you remember the film "Indecent Proposal"? In it a man offers a couple a $1 million to sleep with the wife. Lets up rate it for inflation to $5 million. Would you?

I knew that grovelling would be bad for me

I have a blister on the very tip of my tongue.
A nasty white thing that is driving me nuts!
It won't kill me and I doubt that it will cause any significant deterioration in my enjoyment of life. But it is a blooming nuisance.
So sorry, if you want me to grovel and lick your boots tonight I'm not going to! What little health issues are annoying you at the moment?

The Order of the Blue Polo

As many of you know, the OpenNMS project is run by a super-secret cabal of ex-Illuminati called the Order of the Green Polo. The membership requirements are pretty stringent (and the initiation process is obscenely biological) and thus only the clinically dedicated tend to be involved. However, we know that there are others out there that simply enjoy using OpenNMS to solve their management needs (or at least enjoy downloading it - our servers post several days with greater than 300 GB of traffic every time we do a release) and now we want to hear your story. Becoming a member of The Order of the Blue Polo is simple: write to us a testimonial about why you like OpenNMS and how you use it. It would also be cool if you tell us the size of your network (number of devices, interfaces, and services). In exchange we’ll send you a super limited edition, very nice Royal Blue polo shirt embroidered with the OpenNMS logo. This is open to anyone on any size network in any country, subject to a few small requirements: 1) We get to print your testimonial on our website. 2) We get to print your name on our website. 3) We get to print the name of your company on our website. In our experience that last requirement is a bit of a sticky one. We have some commercial support clients in the financial sector that make us sign NDAs where we can’t even acknowledge they exist (seriously). To make things easier, we won’t use your company’s logo, and the header of the Order of the Blue Polo page will include the text: These testimonials reflect the opinions of the people writing them and not their employer. This should not be considered an official endorsement or recommendation by any of the companies listed. Think of these as director’s commentaries you find on DVDs with the same disclaimer that the movie studios use (and we all fast-forward through) at the beginning of the film. We need that information for two reasons: first, these shirts are really nice and they are not cheap, and second we are doing this to raise a greater awareness of how OpenNMS is being used, so we want to show that it is being used by real companies and not just some guy in his basement (although to all you guys in your basements using OpenNMS - we still love you, just not enough to send you a shirt). To join, send your testimonial to bluepolo@opennms.com along with your shirt size and a mailing address. We’ll have your shirt to you within three to four weeks. If you send us a picture of you wearing your shirt, we’ll be more than happy to add it to the website. Finally, we reserve the right to limit the number of members in the OBP (we don’t have unlimited money to spend on this joint). It will be first come, first served. -T Size Neck Chest Small 14 (36) 34 (86) - 36 (91) Medium 15 (38) 38 (97) - 40 (102) Large 16 (41) 42 (107) - 44 (112) XLarge 17 (43) 46 (117) - 48 (122) XXL 18 (46) 50 (127) - 52 (132) 3XL 19 (48) 54 (137) - 56 (142) size in inches (centimeters)

Three Dollar Amaretto

During my sophomore year in college my dad got transferred to sleepy Aviano, Italy. For the Christmas holidays in 1984, my fiancé (now wife) and I visited them for two weeks and saw the sights. We hit Rome, Florence, and Venice in addition to the family holiday festivities. Just before we returned to school, I went down to the base liquor store and loaded up on Amaretto Di Saronno®. They were three bucks each and I crammed four bottles into my carry-on bag. Since my dad was military I had to fly back on one of those over-crowded charter airlines that contract to the Department of Defense for moving military families back and forth. I think it was called ScreamingBabyAir or something. Anyways, I missed my connection in Philadelphia and the airline put me up in a motel for the night with a complete stranger. The next morning we took a hotel van shuttle back to the airport. Before I could run around back to get my bags, the driver had tossed them onto the curb shattering one of the bottles. All I could do was race to the airport bathroom and pour spilled liqueur out of the bag and fish all the glass shards out of the bottom. For the rest of the trip my luggage reeked of boozy almonds. Amaretto quickly became my favorite after dinner drink. Our wedding cake was amaretto flavored and was the best wedding cake I have ever had. At fancy restaurants I cringe when I order my little snifter of amaretto neat and it costs more than double or triple what I paid for those bottles from Italy. Nearly twenty-five years later, I am now down to just a finger or two left in the last remaining bottle. Today my wife and I will be winging our way back to Italy for our Spring Break vacation because it's time to pick up some more Amaretto. Somehow I doubt I can find such a good deal this time

Flat Stomach Tips - Tips For Getting a Flat Stomach

Your belly or stomach is just a portion of your body and unless you work out your whole body and strip the fat from all portions of your overweight physique/figure, how can you even think of losing fat from your belly? To flatten you abs and lose the tiers of fat from around your tummy which give rise to ugly paunches, you have to perform exercises which will target your whole body and then after rigorously going in for full body exercise, you may think of spot training and do a few specific exercises targeted at trimming your abs.

So obviously, you cannot escape from the swimming, cycling, jogging routine coupled with resistance training, weight lifting, muscle building, turbulence training exercises. Give cardio a miss for it is not beneficial in losing weight. Then for some spot training, you can do the different types of crunches which will tone up the abdominal muscles and tighten the abdominal wall.

One more belly buster that you should try out is torso twist. To tone your belly fast, you should regularly twist your body from the trunk upwards, once towards the right and once towards the left and you should increase your speed with practice. You can even perform these trunk twists and other ab flattening exercises in the water to create greater resistance because you have to work really hard to overcome the resistance exerted by water and besides it is difficult to cheat the water.

Side bends and front bends are also helpful in giving a workout to your stomach. In fact there are gymming equipments available called twisters which you may use to perform the twists and they are extremely helpful in shedding the extra calories from your tummy.

ylmoon

Have you ever seen the yellow moon?