Tormented by Mike Goelzer

A recent exchange with Mike that he has posted on my blog against my will:

What do you make of the fact that tonight's State of the Union speech did not address the recent controversy over GPL v3? This is an issue that has divided the open source community, with Linus and Stallman practically at each other's throats, and the president did not even mention it! Instead, he talked about issues like health care, which are only of interest to a small number of sick people who are probably still using the 0.11 kernel anyway.

This just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are with mainstream America. It's outrageous and it disgusts me.

Mike W. Goelzer

P.S. This message is protected under the "GPL v2 or later." In other words, if you have read this far, you need to send me all of your private signing keys. Please send me your blog password as well.

For the love of Gahweb (GHWB), will you please stop over-simplifying the situation. You know damn well that Linus and Stallman are not at each other's throats!

The reality is that Linus was at Stallman's throat, Stallman was after Eben Moglen, and it was Moglen who was at the throat of Mr. Torvalds. Ooh, and there is Simon Phipps! Phipps drops the hammer on Moglen while the diminutive Red Sea pedestrian is laying into Helsinki's finest. Out in the hallway, it's Bob Sutor with Chris diBona in a headlock! Wait, is that Chris diBona? No, it's Darl McBride wearing a Chris diBona mask! This could get ugly! Oh no, it's William Leibzon mixing it up with Vixie! What are they doing here? The NANOG conference isn't until April! Leibzon's got a gun! Noooooooooo!!!! Vixie is dead.

Alright, I have to go eat breakfast. Damn you.

Brndn McBride

How can you mention Darl McBride in the same digital breath as those other open source luminaries? McBride is like their antithesis; he is a black hole that absorbs the light emitted by the luminaries, thus paradoxically rendering them invisible. Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to see Richard Stallman clearly, even in broad daylight? It's because all he emits is Hawking radiation accounting for less than 1 x 10^-100 of his total luminosity.

(Notice how I put one over Googol there. Suckers!)

Seriously, though, remind me never again to challenge you on your own turf -- "your stuff," as some call it. I thought I was such an open source sophisticate because I knew that Linus had raised some objections to v3, but then you go and write back with a message listing a bunch of open source guys so fancy-pants that I've never even heard of them. I mean, Vixie, ok, fine, everyone knows that his name is on the crontab man page, but as for the rest of them... well, I guess I should stick to exchange-traded funds.

Mike

OK, fine, have it your way, dude, but here's my point. McBride was wearing a Chris diBona mask, suggesting that he was using subterfuge to infiltrate an open source cultists' event. You know of subterfuge, no? Misdirection? Michael Milken? Hello?

I didn't get your googol joke the first time I read it, as I had been set to evaluate all expressions, and my registers roll at 10^-64. Fortunately, it was flagged, and I got an SMS to my cello phane warning me of the error. Then I reread the joke, parsing it with evaluation turned off. Gahweb, that was a hilarious joke. I laughed all over the place. I Laughed Out Loud. Then I Read The Fucking Manual. Did I mention that I Am Not A Lawyer? Brndn

Oh, Mike Milken! Now I get it. You should have just used metaphors I can understand the first time around.

Also, nice one with the registers. I think this whole Googol joke thing is shaping up to be one of the funniest exchanges we've ever had. I may publish it; can you send me the admin password for your blog so I can get all the proper legal paperwork squared away to secure the copyrights? Thanks. Mike

The GPL is not viral

I was listening to a recording of Chris Messina talking about building infrastructure for the open source community at BarCamp Dallas; in the middle of the recording, a discussion started about the new version of the GNU General Public License.

Someone in the crowd claims the GPL is a "viral" license. This is a claim that has been repeated for years; unfortunately, it's a ridiculous metaphor. The GPL says that if you download code under the GPL, change the source code, and release a new version, you have to release your changes to the source as well.

A virus, on the other hand is something that infects you, despite your best efforts to avoid it. The measles virus, for example, is passed through airborne particles. Nobody gets the measles on purpose.

The GPL may seem viral—if you include GPL'd code in your proprietary program, then you have to release your entire program under the GPL. The misleading part is that while you might contract the measles despite your best efforts to avoid it, it is unreasonable to say that you will inadvertently introduce GPL code into your program.

"Oh, I accidentally went to Sourceforge, downloaded a tarball, opened it, and copied code with the exact functionality I was looking for into the correct part of my program! Oh no! Help! I'm infected with the GPL virus!"

Comma separated list to .csv for Apple Mail import

A handy command for turning a comma-separated list into a standard .csv file. I used this to convert old Eudora contacts files into a format that Apple's Mail could import.

cat input.txt | tr ',' '\012' |sed s/^/,,/ > output.csv

I believe I had to add a line at the top of each file after conversion to tell Mail what it was I was importing:

First,Last,Email (other)

I went to BarCampNYC and all I got was some lousy Flickr contacts

I returned from BarCamp in New York last night. Overall, it was more fun than educational, but that's only because it was so fun.

Some geeks in Palo Alto started BarCamp last summer as a response to O'Reilly's invite-only Foo Camp. Then came BarCamp in Amsterdam, and then BarCamp in New York. About 70 people showed up for 36 hours of geeking out in the 9th floor office of a t-shirt company. I only knew three of the people there, though as a bonus, Noah T. Winer (yes, THE Noah T. Winer) showed up on Saturday night unannounced. In general, it was very refreshing to be able to make ridiculously technical jokes and still get a few laughs.

Mike Goelzer and I presented our idea for making the entire web as unreliable as Wikipedia. It went over reasonably well.

There are a lot of pictures from the event on Flickr under the tag BarCamp or BarCampNYC. In most of the pictures that include me, I look like an idiot, but there are a couple where I look relatively normal.

Points that I want to make without taking the time to embed in standard prose:

1. It was fun to see stuff about us pop up on Flickr, people's blogs, and other websites throughout the weekend.

2. It's interesting to meet people whose blogs/websites I've read before (notably Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, and Jesse Chan-Norris).

3. New York was depressing. I'd been avoiding going there for 33 years, and it doesn't appear that I was missing much. Not going to San Francisco-- that would be missing something. I realize that experiencing New York from the 9th floor of an office building is ridiculous, but at least I can rule out the possibility that it's Nirvana.

Many thanks to Amit Gupta, Mike Goelzer, Nick Gray and everyone else who helped organize the event. You're all invited to BarCampBoston some day, unless I move to Kuujjuaq, Nunavik.