SJ's Longest Now » Not so popular http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj One Longnow per Human Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:08:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5.2 en hourly 1 FSF outreach getting behind GPL projects http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2007/01/23/fsf-outreach-getting-behind-gpl-projects/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2007/01/23/fsf-outreach-getting-behind-gpl-projects/#comments Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:25:12 +0000 longestnow http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/metasj/2007/01/23/fsf-outreach-getting-behind-gpl-projec

Ethan says in a recent review of SL’s relicensing announcement:

I am arguing that someone like Charlie Nesson – who otherwise supports
open standards and open code – would be better off supporting open
alternatives to Second Life.

How about a group like the Free Software Foundation, which also emphatically supports open standards and open code?  [Note: they would surely prefer to replace "open" with "free" in that statement, for historical reasons] They are enthusisatic about the move by Linden, and are promoting it directly.  Do we need standards for how deeply one supports the tenets of freedom — the ability to split and recreate a system elsewhere — the way we needed standards for what it means to be “free software”?

Finally, a debate which hilariously highlights the troubles with Second Life, courtesy of Berkman luncheons and YouTube: Charlie v. Ethan, Round 1

]]> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2007/01/23/fsf-outreach-getting-behind-gpl-projects/feed/ 2 Wikipedia content *sometimes* available http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2006/10/29/wikipedia-content-sometimes-available/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2006/10/29/wikipedia-content-sometimes-available/#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 03:09:45 +0000 longestnow http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/metasj/2006/10/29/wikipedia-content-sometimes-available/

The last available dump of the entire English Wikipedia is 10 weeks old.  Many dumps have been attempted since then, all have failed.  There is currently no way for an individual to sign up for incremental updates from the site, so the only option for updating one’s local dump/mirror/archive/testing-ground is to retrieve the entire thing from download.wikimedia.org.

XML dumps are not available from Wikimedia servers; you have to get a massive tarball — even though many people and most researchers will convert this to xml before doing anything further with it.  Other useful but unavailable dumps include: randomized subsets of en:wp and other languages, a dump of all commons images, a dump of all images used on en:wp or other language wp’s, whether on commons or not, a dump of any media uploaded in the past 11 months (latest dump here).  Worth noting: the images/ subdirectory on download.wikimedia.org isn’t officially linked to from anywhere.

There are limits to use of information.  One is free copyright, one is free format, but before all of those is discovery and access to any version at all.  I hope these oversights are remedied soon.

Wikipedia content *sometimes* available …

]]> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2006/10/29/wikipedia-content-sometimes-available/feed/ 1 Amazing WTO blog http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2005/12/19/amazing-wto-blog/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2005/12/19/amazing-wto-blog/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:21:11 +0000 longestnow http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/metasj/2005/12/19/amazing-wto-blog/

An amazing week-old blog with pages of content and links to some fabulous photo galleries, covering the Hong Kong WTO gathering, the public response, and the many facets of their repercussions.

Amazing WTO blog …

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…

On anonymous contribution …

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