It makes me mad!

If there's one thing in this world that makes me mad (and there isn't, there's loads of things) it's the portions of the Free/Libre/Open Source Software community who assume that anything to do with the law is inherently evil.

Every time I see this is riles me - from the anti-GFDL people in the Debian community, through the "me too" boys who decry the GPL (and especially the GPL3) as being "less free" than BSD licenses without understanding the effect of either, right down to those whom, even with the best of intentions, make statements like this. So often people make ludicrous assertions in areas where there is either no choice, or a serious ill effect to be incurred by slavishly sticking to a misinterpreted principle.

I'm a serious supporter of free software, a member of the FSF, I care deeply about this and I'll say it clearly - simply choosing to ignore the practical application of the law, or choosing not to protect Free Software Developers from events over which they have no control to satisfy some ill-defined idea of "purity" in freedom is not the way to promote free software or freedom in general.

If Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Larry Lessig and Theo de Raadt, all of whom are smarter and more passionate about free software than you are (I guarantee it), can see this and accept it why can't you?

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr......

ZFS,... again

I continue to be totally blown away with ZFS. This post covers a lot of the reasons why. Every time I explore a feature it's better than I was expecting. The fact that you can send incremental snapshots (essentially the binary different between two points in time) is exciting me currently. There must be the basis of so many applications there - distributed version control and package management are just two ideas that spring to mind.

To that end I've started looking a little at /usr/include/libzfs.h with a view to maybe wrapping it for python and/or some kind of scheme. Shouldn't be too onerous task so long as I can find a decent amount of free time.

Anaïs Mitchell house concert, Turners Hill

Wow. This is turning out to be a good weekend. I've just seen the best concert I've seen in quite some while and tomorrow I'm flying to Lisbon for a weeks holiday.

House concerts are always so intimate that they can make anyone with anything reasonably intelligent to sing about sound like Joni, Dar or Ani. Anaïs is something else though she writes songs that are both beautiful and cut to the heart of the great wrongness of the western world right now. Put that in the context of a house concert and you've got something amazing.

Sat in the front row, a matter of inches from a singer who is so totally absorbed in the act of making music that her whole body writhes around the guitar, or marches on the spot, is an experience unmatched in the world of music. It takes me back to the days when I made music with talented people and we sat and talked and played all night.

Anaïs is on tour in the UK for a while more, you can see her tour dates here.