-> A reply to bashing against Defective By Design.

I was a rabid MacUser 5 years ago.

Then I learned about DRM, TPM and privacy. And I left Apple because they put in TPM chips into developer machines.

Today I'm a happy GNU/Linux user and I contribute from time to time to Gentoo, KDE and Mercurial.

(my way from Apple to GNU/Linux:
- http://bah.draketo.de/ (Broken Apple Heart in German)
- http://draketo.de/english/songs/light/broken-apple-heart (in english) )

What !oog is

The Out of Group group is a way to request leading an overboarding discussion out of group (so you don't spam all the people who are in the group where the discussion started, but who simply want news).

Motto

Please discuss out of group. You can wrap up the discussion afterwards (link to the context) and add a group tag then.

How To

Some of my answers to basic questions

Written in a survey about attitudes towards free software.

Is proprietary (=unfree) software immoral or unethical?

it isn't immoral (moral = what's the current stance of mainstream society), but it is unethical.

In a society where people are used to being forbidden to give bread to a starving child, giving bread you'd otherwise throw away to that child instead could well be immoral.

To keep my Gentoo up to date, I use daily and weekly update scripts which also always run revdep-rebuild after the saturday night update :)

My daily update is via pkgcore to pull in all important security updates:

pmerge @glsa

That pulls in the Gentoo Linux Security Advisories - important updates with mostly short compile time. (You need pkgcore for that: "emerge pkgcore")

Also I use two cron scripts.

-> an answer to Blog posts are no replacement for documentation by flameeyes.

Hi flameeyes,

I kinda know your problem: It's far easier to write a number of Blog posts than to write a structured book up front - and I think two major parts of that are, that a weblog provides many more "Yes, I've done it!" moments than a book and that a blog has a much lower barrier to entry.

It's often said, that Gentoo is all about choice, but that doesn't quite fit what it is for me.

The highest ability to choose is Linux from scratch, after all, and I can have any amount of choice in every distribution by just going deep enough (and investing enough time).

What really distinguishes Gentoo for me is that it makes it convenient to choose.

I just thought a bit about the restrictions the GPLv3 allows, and I think I just understood their purpose and effect for the first time (correct me, if I'm wrong :) ).

What are the restrictions?

The GPLv3 allows developers (=copyright holders) to add selected restrictions, like forbidding the use of a certain brand name or similar.

The catch with them is, that any subsequent developer who adds anything is free to simply strip off the restrictions.

What is their effect?

Comment to is the web too good for us on a BBC blog:

But the web was not really free in the beginning. While its structure was open for everyone and websites bloomed and blossomed by copying code and design from others, the content of sites stayed closed by copyright.

There were many thoughts of freedom in the original web, but the structure gave more freedom than the law, and the easy copying inside the new medium still didn't reach the slow legal body of our offline communities.

From the Gentoo Forums:

    I agree that spreading a positive message is good, 
    but I've always been nervous to send thank you notes 
    out to people I've never met.  Worse, I don't want to 
    potentially overload an inbox with a message that
    isn't going to help all that much.  
    Hopefully it would be received in a positve way. 

I try to remember to send "thank you"s from time to time.

Goal

A workflow where the repository gets updated only from repositories whose heads got signed by at least a certain percentage or a certain number of trusted committers.

Requirements

Mercurial, two hooks for checking and three special files in the repo.

The hooks do all the work - apart from them, the repo is just a normal Mercurial repository. After cloning it, you only need to setup the hooks to activate the workflow.

Extensions: gpg

Hooks: prechangegroup and pretxnchangegroup