Archive for the ‘Visual Flavor’ Category
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Response to Linux.com Accusations
Recently, Linux.com posted an article called “When open source projects close the process, something’s wrong.” It starts out as a seemingly generalized complaint about open source projects not being so open, but after the first two sentences you realize that it’s just accusing two groups in particular.
The first case accuses the Oxygen Project, which is associated with KDE, of not being open because two of their developers complained in their blog about some guy publishing their icons before them. The second case is about the GIMP, which is sorta-kinda associated with Gnome, not being open because they apparently told somebody that they didn’t have any spots on the team available for them.
With the KDE team, I don’t actually see the issue. They did not demand that it be taken down. They simply pointed out that in a more decent world, they’d be the ones who would get to release first, and that it was kind of an asshole move to take away the first final publication privilege. No actual demand though. See, just because you can take advantage of something, doesn’t mean you aren’t being annoying if you do. The KDE team didn’t actually do anything but say that they thought it was annoying. There is no clause in the GPL or CC license that says they can’t post to their blog when people do annoying things, even if those annoying things happen to be license compliant.
As for the GIMP thing, we’d definitely need more information. No FOSS project that I’m aware of gives final commit abilities to anybody that asks, not even Kernel.org, which is the most famous. However, most of the better ones will still definitely allow people who give a contribution to be on the team, most likely with their own separate SVN or CVS branch or something until they earn commit access to the big thing (notice all the small fish on Kernel.org). So if the guy was flat out turned away and told that they didn’t have room for him as a contributor, then that’s no good. But if they merely didn’t give him commit access, or if he didn’t actually contribute anything but still wanted his own SVN or CVS or whatever branch, that’s also understandable. The article really should have told us exactly what the person offered those GIMP developers.
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Artist’s Copyright Licenses
Got an email from Christopher Villareal today about this, noting that if we were serious about Visual Flavor, we’d probably have to address it. To summarize the article he was referring to, artists have been in a little bit of a pickle because some of the most popular open licenses (namely the Creative Commons licenses and the GNU GPL) aren’t compatible, even if you try to dual-license a work.
I sent Chris my response a few hours ago, but I now realize that I probably should have stuck it on here to begin with for any of the people monitoring the progress of Visual Flavor since licensing is certainly going to be a big issue for us down the road. After all, any serious artist should care about licensing, and if we don’t deal with it, then no serious artist will use us, frankly. So without further delay, here’s my response to Chris’ email, which says what the plan is.
Chris,
I ran into these concerns the first time I made a web site. I wanted to license it under the GNU GPL, but I was confused because of how it was so geared toward software programs.
That experience in mind, I’ve actually thought about drafting licenses that would be called the “Visual Flavor Artist’s GNU License,” “Visual Flavor Artist’s BSD License,” and “Visual Flavor Artist’s MIT License,” which would be adaptations of their respective licenses such that the terminology is more appropriate for things that aren’t software, and thus more comfortable for the rest of us to use. Of course, I’ve also considered making some licenses that aren’t clones or derivatives at all of other licenses specifically for artists, because let’s face it, the free software licenses don’t fit artists perfectly (and they shouldn’t, because their drafters should stay focused on free software concerns).
However, writing these licenses, while on Visual Flavor’s development to-do list, is definitely going to have to be at the bottom of the list. A good time for me to start on them would probably be my personal downtime when my design is finally handed over to the programmers to be coded, validated, debugged, and tested. We’ll need to find a lawyer or a law student or something to at the very least review whatever I make though, and then I probably will want to further purify it through the “wiki process” too.
But yeah, when the site first starts, the users will just have to make do with choosing from the regular assortment of copyright licenses, methinks.
Sincerely,
James Laslavic
a.k.a. “Square Bottle”Heh, it’s much more professional looking than most of our emails, don’t you think, Chris? To remedy this, imagine me reading it with my cranky old man impersonation and ending it with, “Meh, Gnome menus!” :P
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Two Weeks
I’m going to be getting ready to fly back up to Montecito Sequoia on Thursday, August 23 until Friday, September 7. It’s only a two week thing, but this is exciting because I’ll be getting a paycheck and I’ll get to say that my first “real” job was as an archery director.
I can already hear a few of you grumbling, especially from the working side of things. No, we’re not going to get Visual Flavor up and running by the end of August like we wanted to, and sorry about that. However, I’m going to be bringing my laptop up the mountain with me and work on it during my off time. If they got the T1 internet connection set up like they should have, then you might very well still see me online a good bit!
In any case, I’m thinking that we should aim to have Visual Flavor make its debut by the end of December so that I can make my trips to San Francisco and New York later this year without feeling too bad.
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Talked to Daniel Robbins!
And yes, this is totally worth blogging about. For those of you who don’t know, Daniel Robbins is the founder of the Gentoo Linux (more info here), so he’s kind of a big deal. I had emailed him about Visual Flavor, and then a few days later, there we were, talking over Jabber. What a genuinely good guy (he asked about my health, and even recommend that I give grapefruit seed extract a shot).
Anyway, he thought that Visual Flavor sounded like an excellent idea. In fact, I guess he liked it enough that he offered to write about it on his blog whenever we’re ready to make our debut.
All I need to do now is crack some knuckles and catch up with Visual Flavor work. Heh heh.
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Feedback: OSNews vs DistroWatch
This is my feedback on the scuffle between DistroWatch’s founder and leader Ladislav Bodnar and OSNews’s managing editor Tom Holwerda regarding the recent release of the distribution of Linux called Elive. You can see Mr. Holwerda’s blog entry here, and Mr. Bodnar’s response here.
Looks like Mr. Holwerda bit off a little more than he could chew this time. If a distro is going to claim to be free and open, then they shouldn’t be terribly surprised when they’re held to it. Having a tiered download system doesn’t bother me, but when your free download server is down for weeks (or days, when you’ve got as many contacts as Elive) and you decide to go ahead with making a new release anyway, there’s something slightly icky going on. Seems to me like DistroWatch was simply assuming that Elive meant what it said about being freely downloaded and was holding them to it.
And really, Mr. Howerda can resort to the argument about using up bandwidth if he feels the need to, but for a free and open project, using that bandwidth for downloads is exactly how it should be used. If Elive has not lost site of their goal of being freely distributed and if OSNews has not lost site of its goal of seeing that free and open distros grow and get downloaded as much as possible, they should both be thanking DistroWatch for getting Elive attention and for making it nice and easy for everybody to grab a copy.
If they did in fact email Mr. Bodnar and ask him to not post direct download links, then perhaps Mr. Bodnar should not have done that. Only the Elive team and the DistroWatch team will know if those emails ever were sent and received. I personally hope that those emails were never sent and that Mr. Howerda was mistaken, because the alternative would mean that Elive knowingly issued a release when their free download server was down and expected DistroWatch to just shepherd people over to their pay-per-download server while having DistroWatch list them as free and open. That would be very, very disappointing on the part of Elive, and would also reflect rather poorly either on Mr. Holwerda’s or OSNews’s journalistic credibility. A little analysis would’ve probably been a good idea before running the smear against DistroWatch.
But hopefully, this was all just a simple technical error on Elive’s part and they’re willing to say “Thank you” to Mr. Bodnar for providing a working download link during a new release’s debut, and hopefully Mr. Holwerda and OSNews will say “Sorry” and review their methods so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
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