rants.org

Tip o’ the hat to @dbentley and @therealfitz: Originals here: http://cl.ly/5nAo (PNG) http://cl.ly/5mJm (PDF) http://cl.ly/5mfg (Graffle source)

This past week Mike Godwin, Jim Jagielski and I were elected to the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), replacing the term-limited Danese Cooper and Russ Nelson and adding one more board seat. We haven’t had our first board meeting yet, but it’s an honor and a delight to serve in such [...]

My old choir from Chicago, Golosa, is coming to New York City on Tuesday, March 22nd, as part of their East Coast tour. They’ll be performing a free concert, at 8pm at Shrine World Music Venue in Harlem (map). If you’re in New York City, come! Golosa rocks. Don’t take my word for it — listen for [...]

This is not gimp’d or photoshopped after the fact — Comedy Central actually flashed it (for one frame only!) over Stephen Colbert’s face as he interviewed Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald about Anonymous, the inchoate online group that, among other things, attacks those who attack Wikileaks. Got all that? Good. My friend Micah Anderson has sharp eyes: he [...]

Okay, okay, I know. This birthday’s significance depends entirely on our use of the decimal system. Still, a quirk of natural selection (ten fingers) has lent a certain conventional weight to the passage of decades, and I won’t pretend complete indifference at turning forty in a couple of days. Furthermore, I intend to use this [...]

One of the best things to happen to my book “Producing Open Source Software” was that people came along and translated it, notwithstanding the rather poor translation tool support provided by the book’s site. Now I’ve gotten word that the French translation is not only finished — they wisely imported the book into the Framalang wiki translation [...]

    Thought I’d start off the New Year with a genuine rant: A company whose programmers participate in Apache Subversion development has apparently decided it is somehow steering the whole project. Don’t ask me where WANdisco, Inc got this idea: they’ve been part of Subversion development for nearly two years now — they hired some [...]

A project I’ve been working on for a few months (with support from O’Reilly Media) is now public, and I’m really excited about it — it’s a good cause, and also has the potential to become a very interesting piece of software. First, the good cause part. From Carl Malamud’s post on O’Reilly Radar: The Law.Gov movement [...]

There’s about to be an outcry over the possibility that U.S. Internet service providers might start charging by the byte — so-called “pay as you go” Internet service. Before the hard-headed economic realists duke it out with the participatory democracy free-speech propeller heads (I’m in both camps, so I say all that with love), here’s a modest [...]