I’m still not going to talk about my attack on the forge infrastructure problems quite yet; the software is coming along nicely, but I intend to announce only after it handles its fourth forge type (yes, that was a tease). But I will say this: I now think I know what the future of forges… Continue reading The future of software forges
Month: October 2009
Hacker superstitions about software licensing
Hackers have a lot of odd superstitions about software licensing. I was reminded of this recently when a project maintainer asked me whether he needed to get a sign-off from each and every one of his contributors before switching from Apache v1 to Apache v2. Here’s what I told him: My opinion is this. Under… Continue reading Hacker superstitions about software licensing
Fearing what might be true
I am not generally unhappy with my model of how the universe works. Yes, it would be pleasant if there really were a beneficient creator-god and an afterlife; it would be nice if “good government” were actually a sustainable possibility rather than a fond but deluded hope in the minds of statists; it would be… Continue reading Fearing what might be true
Public Space in Cyberspace
Following my post Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves, a great many people took me for task for trying to make a principled distinction between public space and private space, and tangled that up with a lot of confusion about the distinction between “public” and “state-owned” space. Here I’ll attempt to shed some light on the… Continue reading Public Space in Cyberspace
Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves
Thomas Paine once wrote: “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Paine’s truth is not idealistic handwaving, it is brutal pragmatism. Justifications for censorship, even the best-intentioned kind, have a way of… Continue reading Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves
How Not To Tackle the Mess around Forges
In my previous two posts I have diagnosed a significant weakness in the open-source infrastructure. The architecture of the code behind the major SourceForge-descended hosting sites is rotten, with all kinds of nasty consequences — data seriously jailed, poor or completely absent capabilities near scripting and project migration. I said I was going to do… Continue reading How Not To Tackle the Mess around Forges
Looking Deeper into Forges, And Not Liking What I See
In my previous post, Three Systemic Problems With Open-Source Hosting Sites I identified some missing features that create serious brittleness in or project-hosting infrastructure. The question naturally arises, why don’t existing hosting systems already have these facilities? I have looked into this question, actually examining the codebases of Savane and GForge/FusionForge, and the answer appears… Continue reading Looking Deeper into Forges, And Not Liking What I See
Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites
I’ve been off the air for several days due to a hosting-site failure last Friday. After several months of deteriorating performance and various services being sporadically inaccessible, Berlios’s webspace went 404 and the Subversion repositories stopped working…taking my GPSD project down with them. I had every reason to fear this might be permanent, and spent… Continue reading Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites