Why I use a non-commercial license.

Submitted by naught101 on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 11:54

There's a huge wave of open-licensing sweeping the 'net, and it's starting to get into the real world. This is definitely a good thing - freedom of information is a great. The most common licenses, such as the GNU FDL, or the Creative Commons BY-SA stipulate that anyone can use the works, as long as they acknowledge the author, and that they keep it free (usually by using the same license). The last tactic has been called "viral" by numerous capitalists, and they are correct, it is. Eventually it will take over the world, or at least a large part of it. I can't wait.

Creative Commons, and perhaps a few other licences, give people the option to license their work with a "non-commercial" (NC) clause, This is strongly derided amongst the free software movement particularly, as economic exploitation by a creator is considered a freedom and a right. This is argued well on the Freedom Defined wiki.

There are two main arguments against using an NC license, the first is economic, the second in a matter of compatibility. A third minor argument against the CC-BY-NC-SA, is an argument against creative commons itself. I will deal with these in the above order.

Recovering files on ext3 the easy and shoddy way

Submitted by naught101 on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 09:22

I just deleted about 100 photos from an ext3 external hard drive that I really would have preferred to keep. With shift+delete (do not pass the trash, do not collect $200). So I went looking for an answer.

If you've looked around the 'net for a way to recover files from an ext3 partition, you've probably found lots of people saying "it can't be done, because the inodes get wiped". Well that's true.

To keep the Internet?

Submitted by naught101 on Wed, 11/28/2007 - 08:44

In wanting to create a new society, I have a few obvious "core" values (quote marks due to our ex-prime minister's bastardisation of the word in the phrase "core promises") .

These consist of:

  • Best practice environmentalism (not best as in better than everyone else, but best as in as good as possible).
  • Autonomy/self governance for groups and individuals
  • Freedom of information

In that order. These are fairly solid for me, and I won't really bother discussing why in this piece. I think that the second point is basically my ideal for best practice social organisation.

So how to go about the third? I think the internet might be the answer.

A fall from grace for one man, a step forward for the rest.

Submitted by naught101 on Sun, 11/25/2007 - 10:12

Howard is gone.

Not only have the libs lost the election, by an avalanche, but it's pretty certain that Howard has lost his seat as well. Fucking good riddance.

Not that Rudd will be much better. He's definitely got some things going for him over Howard, but his acceptance speech contained a few things that I'm definitely a bit uncomfortable about.

Anarchy and open source.

Submitted by naught101 on Mon, 11/12/2007 - 10:27

Richard Monson-Haefel's "Open Source Is Anarchy, Not Chaos" on Biosmagazine.co.uk is an interesting article, but it misses some major points, and gets one completely wrong:

Richard is quite right about open source being anarchistic, but is way off in his description of how.

Let's start with:
"All open source projects have a leader who is frequently, but not always, the founder of the project. This is well aligned with anarchy as defined above;"
Leadership is almost directly antonymic of anarchism.

Embiggen this!

Submitted by naught101 on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 10:55

I've just started the Big List of Environmental issues - on Envirowiki. You should add to it. Hopefully, after a few decent edits, this page will list all the big issues, and after a few more related issues.

The reason that all the links are red is that those pages haven't been created yet. Click on the links to start editing!

Did I mention that I love linux?

Submitted by naught101 on Sat, 10/06/2007 - 14:29

I just upgraded from Ubuntu Feisty to Ubuntu Gutsy (which is still in beta). about 6 hours later, a couple of hiccups, and one or two fixes required for problems that I caused myself (and due to running out of hard drive space part way through), I'm running the new version. With all the same software still installed, and all my preferences and options exactly the same as before. Damn that's nice.

The really beautiful thing? Barely any thing's changed.