kfogel

Joined 15 years ago

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Feb 25

Please see http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/kfogel; my proof: https://keybase.io/kfogel/sigs/NDRSwIKZuU77ZYQwuoFxHTEXc2vlFbadEl1Wp3ciD_Q ]

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Comment · 3 days ago

Thank you for this informative comment, and I agree with the general idea in your Chesterton's Fence point.

When the HOLC provides wording, they do so in response to a request from an elected member or that member's staff, right? What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter whether provenance is found via the commit author or via some other change-associated metadata -- the key thing is making precise change provenance trackable and (perhaps after some predefined delay) public. This would mainly aid journalists.

Is the HOLC currently functioning as an anonymizing service for changes to in-progress legislation? And if so, is that by design, or more by gradual and organic evolution?

Fundamentally, if we can't get at that provenance information in a reliable way right now at all, then version-control-style tracking would be a pretty big qualitative change in how things are done: information that wasn't available, except through unofficial channels, would now be available (again, maybe with some time delay or whatever, but in the long run it would be available). On the other hand, if that information is currently obtainable but is just not easy to obtain, then this would be more of an incremental improvement: since journalists and others with the requisite know-how could get the information right now, but maybe have to jump through hoops to do so, this would just reduce the number or height of the hoops.

I don't know which of those two scenarios best describes reality, but maybe you do?

Comment · 3 days ago

NYT, 2007:

"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.

At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."

(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )

Comment · 1 month ago

I will be paying the new rate, and with pleasure. LWN is great.

Comment · 8 months ago

Can't believe they didn't call it VouchDB.

Comment · 1 year ago

We are happy to be providing this public service :-). I wish the term were better known outside tech; it's useful in so many contexts.

Comment · 1 year ago

So many stories like this about Slack.

We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

Open Source JobHub opensourcejobhub.com

2 kfogel 1 year ago 0 comments

Comment · 1 year ago

Wow. This project was the cause of a very long and intense discussion about mis-use of the term "open source". See https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-5397146... for details (lands mid-thread -- you might want to scroll back to see the start, and if you read the whole thing to the end then you deserve some sort of award!).

TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but while using a non-open-source license. After much discussion, he kept the license but stopped using the label "open source", to the relief of many people.

That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term "open source" matters.