Comments for The Goldfish Chronicles

Comment on “Public Domain” licenses by Hen

Hen — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:22:12 +0000

The quotation marks basically imply that I’m getting the same mixed messages you get.

“You can’t public domain” mixed with the obvious success of everyone who says they’re public domaining. These new licenses seem to be an attempt to resolve that - I’m just sad we have to have more than one of them.

Comment on “Public Domain” licenses by Rich

Rich — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:31:40 +0000

I am getting very mixed messages about the concept of Public Domain. Certain people assert that it is impossible for me to disclaim copyright on a work. Others say, sure you can, and here’s how. On the one hand, it seems rational that I should be able to say “here, just take it.” On the other hand, this seems a way for me to legally say “that’s not my responsibility, it’s your problem now” and thus evade liability … assuming there ever was any to begin with.

Are these licenses legally binding in any meaningful sense? Are you implying, with your quotation marks, that there’s no such thing as the ‘public domain,’ as others have asserted?

And, behind all these questions, I find that I have an abiding perplexity as to why it’s this complicated. Can it really be this hard to say “do with this as you like”?

Comment on AtlasCamp + JIRA 4.0 by Hen

Hen — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:27:44 +0000

JIRA 4.0 release notes:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+4.0+Release+Notes

Comment on Wordle… by Benjamin Smedberg

Benjamin Smedberg — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:12:25 +0000

IANAL, but I have been told this by lawyers:

In the United States, fonts are not copyrightable by law and legal precedent. However, the digital representation of a font is copyrightable. So if you send somebody a digital copy of something with embedded font data, you have to have a license for the font: but if you print it out or convert it to a bitmap, you don’t.

In other countries the legal landscape is very different: in France, fonts are copyrightable.

I happen to know this because the French Abbey of Solesmes claims copyright on the shapes of Gregorian neumes which they have invented over the years. Their books can be reprinted freely in the United States, but not in Europe!

Comment on Open Source 2020 - An alternative future by Bertrand Delacretaz

Bertrand Delacretaz — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:19:02 +0000

Brilliant - I’ll be happy to have a beer with you in 2020 and discuss all this

Comment on “You wouldn’t steal a car!” by Jon

Jon — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:01:20 +0000

I hear you on the region encoding thing. We moved from the UK to Australia and got hit by it straight away. It makes my blood boil every time I consider it.

Ok - I’m off for a nice calming walk now.

Jon

Comment on Spam and the Turing test by Danny

Danny — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:15:02 +0000

Lol! How apt Henri,
Today a client of mine, with whom I exchange email on a daily basis, failed said test, and no, there were no images or attachments, just a brief note of work related guff.
I would certainly say business people failing the tests adds weight to your argument, spam filters *are* intelligent decision makers and some human communication doesn’t reach the bar. Thank you for this

Comment on AIG etc by Phil Staudt

Phil Staudt — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:42:06 +0000

Now that we know all about what happened to 1/1000th of the taxpayer money given to AIG, we can assume that the other $169.8b has been managed just as wisely. But the media and AIG and Geithner are doing a good job of keeping us from looking at that.

Comment on ASF JIRA Upgrade planned by Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:32:48 +0000

Thanks Hen!

Comment on Open Source + Trademarks by Aaron Farr

Aaron Farr — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:29:07 +0000

Another approach is to have one group owning the trademark but providing a TCK or something similar that allows use of the trademark. That way you can be reasonably sure that something which says it’s Ruby or Firefox or Linux acts in an expected way.