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Submission + - MediaGoblin and FSF successfully raise funds for federation, privacy features

Submitted by paroneayea
paroneayea writes: GNU MediaGoblin and the Free Software Foundation have jointly run a campaign for privacy and federation on the web. The campaign is in its last day but has already passed the first two funding milestones, and is hoping to raise more with the possibility of bringing in multiple dedicated resources to the project. The project has also released a full financial transparency report so donors can know how they can expect their money to be used!
The Internet

Submission + - Cosmetic Carbon Copy, a new standard in email (ietfng.org)

Submitted by
paulproteus
paulproteus writes: "Say you have an email where you want to send an extra copy to someone without telling everyone. There's always been a field for that: BCC, or Blind Carbon Copy. But how often have you wanted to do the opposite: make everyone else think you sent a copy to somebody without actually having done so? Enter the new IETF-NG RFC: Cosmetic Carbon Copy, or CCC. Now you can conveniently email all of your friends (with a convenient exception or two...) with ease!"
Media

Wikipedia's Assault On Patent-Encumbered Codecs 428

Posted by timothy from the because-they-hate-the-march-of-progress dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia, asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles. (Good, encyclopedia-style videos only!) Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to 'strike a blow for freedom' against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations."
Bug

What Aspects of Open Source Projects Do You Avoid? 344

Posted by timothy from the don't-you-want-to-cuddle? dept.
paulproteus writes "I'm a Debian developer and a part-time contributor to a few smaller projects. I do a lot of free software-y and open source-y things. Sometimes, though, I don't do them. I figure some other Slashdotters might have similar hang-ups — we contribute to a project, but there are parts that we really dread thinking about. So I wrote a post about having these hang-ups, and I made a place on the web to share how others can help your project. What are the parts that, in your projects, you would be relieved if someone else looked at for you?"

Submission + - What in open source are you avoiding working on? (openhatch.org) 1

Submitted by paulproteus
paulproteus writes: I'm a Debian developer and a part-time contributor to a few smaller projects. I do a lot of free software-y and open source-y things. Sometimes, though, I don't do them. I figure some other Slashdotters might have similar hang-ups — we contribute to a project, but there are parts that we really dread thinking about.

So I wrote a post about having these hang-ups, and I made a place on the web to share how others can help your project. What are the parts that, in your projects, you would be relieved if someone else looked at for you?

Comment Re:my experience (Score 1) 8

by mlinksva (#30396806) Attached to: License For Textbooks — GNU FDL Or CC?
Great summary. Two tiny things:

Another possibility would be dual-licensing with CC-BY-SA and GFDL, but that's probably not worth the extra work unless you've identified materials you want to use that are under GFDL.

If the things they want to use are GFDL-only and the product is an adaptation of those then they don't have the option of dual licensing. You may have meant "you want your work to be incorporated into that are under GFDL."

Only do CC-BY if you simply want to make a gift to the world, and you don't care if your work is repackaged into something non-free by other people.

CC-BY isn't quite a pure gift -- it could be used by a selfish licensor if that person only cares about maximizing the amount of credit they get -- incorporating CC-BY works into non-free works still requires giving credit.

Comment do you want copyleft or not? (Score 2, Interesting) 8

by mlinksva (#30396290) Attached to: License For Textbooks — GNU FDL Or CC?

The GFDL and CC-BY are rather different licenses. The first is a copyleft license (requires adaptations to be distributed under the same license), the latter is a permissive license (do anything you want so long as you give credit, roughly).

If you don't want copyleft, CC-BY is your choice.

If you do want copyleft, it would make sense to choose between GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which you can think of as the copyleft version of CC-BY. Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia sites) migrated from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA as their primary content license in June, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15411

Thanks for not considering a more restrictive license. :)
Books

License For Textbooks — GNU FDL Or CC? 8

Posted by timothy from the compare-and-contrast dept.
An anonymous reader writes 'I'm a college professor who is putting together an open-source textbook. I'm trying to decide between using the GNU Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. I don't really understand the difference between these, though it seems with the Free Documentation License I need to include a copy of the license in my text. Which do you advise using?'

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