Twisted sprint grants

Thanks to Linux Australia we have some grant money for the Sydney Twisted sprint being held in two and a half weeks. Check it out if you're coming:

• airfare subsidies;
• accommodation subsidies; and
• a sprint dinner.

The cut direct

Rusty Russell is not happy about John Quiggin's embrace of Creative Commons' Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License as a kind of a good default for allowing other people use of your creative work.

Russell slams Quiggin:

That Quiggin takes this path despite training as an ecomonist [sic, original author's emphasis] demonstrates either a lack of deep thought on this issue, or that he uses economics to justify his leftist dogma, rather than to examine issues. (This paragraph was about as polite as I could make it).

I can't say that I'm too much of a fan of the phrase "leftist dogma." It's about as meaningful to me as saying "fropbutz dogma" — ie I tend to prefer attacks on political positions on a particular issue rather than attacks on them because of other political positions that they've been known to be associated with. (What are the pragmatics of the word 'leftist'? I read it as having exclusively hostile connotations, that is, that a position or group of positions is only described as 'leftist' — as opposed to 'left', 'socialist', 'communist' — by people who oppose it.) To be fair, this is what the rest of Russell's piece does, I'm just having a go at the 'leftist' ending.

But that wasn't what struck me enough to write an entry about it. I was struck more by the emphasised part: "despite training as an economist". This strikes me as a cutting line indeed. Quiggin's relationship to economics isn't that he trained in it: it's that he is an economist. Russell is implying that his economic positions would be foolish from someone with an undergraduate major. It would be like saying that Russell is a remarkably bad coder for someone who's met a few kernel developers.

On starting a FOSS project

My theory on this is that you should:

• pick an implementation language;
• pick all the surrounding software (mailing list manager, revision control system, CMS for the website if necessary);
• write and release something that works (or is pretty).

Only then do you indulge in even the smallest bit of community building.

Then you can avoid the six month long startup argument about which tools to use to write the vapourware. These arguments even trump the 'what features should we do first' arguments!

I'm really enjoying Bazaar 2.0 as compared to GNU Arch. There's a lot of things I could say about Bazaar 2.0 as version control, but let's leave it as ah, that's why I originally liked the idea of distributed version control.

Now that that's out of the way, I have something more pressing to communicate! Bazaar 1.0 has a commandline program baz, pronounced like the first syllable of bazaar (I note in passing that until I saw that commandline, I thought that it was called 'bizarre' and am still disappointed). Bazaar 2.0 will have bzr. Now, people, you can't seriously be expecting me to pronounce the latter as bazaar can you? C'mon, ... try saying it. bzr. bzr. BZR. It doesn't quite have the Australian neutral vowel in it, but I'm determined and ready to fight for it to be pronounced buzzer. You can have all kinds of really nerdy jokes about hitting the buzzer. Now get with the program.