Pauses Café

There’s a raging debate today between the FSF and the Linux kernel developpers due to the upcoming release of the GPL v3 and the refuse of most developpers, including Linus Torvalds, to use it.

It seems that there are many things both camps got wrong (you can read more on Luis Villa’s blog, here, here and here).

FOSS licensing starts to be a mess. Here we have 2 groups with radically different reasons to use the same license. I think that most of it comes to down to interpretation and intent. Linus chose the GPLv2 at the time because it was the one that matched best its intent: to force a source code contributor to give back. It’s mostly a protection for developpers. But the FSF sees the GPL as its tool to enforce long term software freedom. It’s mostly a protection for users. When the FSF fears new things might affect user’s freedom (e.g. DRM), they have to adapt the license. The developpers feel the user’s freedom (i.e. the use of the software) is decoupled from the developpers freedom. So they don’t have to follow the licensing change proposal.

That’s why I like the Creative Commons set of licenses: because you chose them by intent.

If only the world was not made of people trying to abuse every situation, or use any corner case of a somewhat obsolete document, we wouldn’t need complex licenses and laws and would only rely on intent. But today, depending on lawyers and legal munjo jumbo is the best approximation that works. Fortunately (by all meanings of the word) for the members of the Bar…

In the past months, that blog was not showing nicely under IE, while it worked well under firefox and opera. I finally took the time to fix the issue. I didn’t want to tackle the issue until I knew what was going on.

Today I’ve found out that IE finally as a good DOM explorer. Using it helped me to quickly identify the issue (related to width and auto-wrapping of text in pre blocks.

Tim Bray is afraid of Wikipedia proeminence in the search engine results.

The question is valid, but I do not worry.

When you look at a wiki-pedia entry, the first thing you should look at are References and External Links. For example for information on the Prince Edward Canadian province
you will find the information from Canadian Statistics which is mostly what Tim was looking for.

Wikipedia is to me an aggregator, a non-official mini-resource summary of external information. If you are really want the official data you have to go one link further.

As for vandalism, maybe can they implement some sort of detection mecanism to catch most of it. Or maybe can they implement tools that are able to validate a piece of data in a page against information found in an external page. That could also be used to show the information’s origin.

With regard to resistance, there will be one for sure: other encyclopedia will have to adapt their models and propose some information for free on the web. Then we will have multiple sources for total (but shallow) information.

There’s another solution, which is I believe the future: micro-resources web sites. But I’ll maybe talk about that in a future post…