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Have you heard of pgmodeler?

PostgreSQL Database Modeler, or simply, pgModeler is an open source tool for modeling databases that merges the classical concepts of entity-relationship diagrams with specific features that only PostgreSQL implements. The pgModeler translates the models created by the user to SQL code and apply them onto database clusters from version 8.0 to 9.1. **

Top page of https://github.com/ opens currently from within China (happened to be in transit in Shanghai airport when I read the /. article).

It's funny, I've hosted customers that had sites blocked by China, and the blocks were always very specific.

So the blocks would affect the main target with urls like this https://github.com/chinesedissident/* but didn't affect our other customers like this one https://github.com/otherguy/* even if those other customers were using the same domain name.

In this case however, github makes it so easy to fork/clone the same project, and it's so widely used, the censors probably can't keep the block list up-to-date because the same project can get forked so many times under different name spaces. They probably just gave up and blocked everything.

In any case, if I was a Chinese-based programmer right now, I'd be very angry. There is bound to be some backlash because of this.

It's funny, I've hosted customers that had sites blocked by China, and the blocks were always very specific.

So the blocks would affect the main target with urls like this https://github.com/chinesedissident/* but didn't affect our other customers like this one https://github.com/otherguy/* even if those other customers were using the same domain name.

In this case however, github makes it so easy to fork/clone the same project, and it's so widely used, the censors probably can't keep the block list up-to-date because the same project can get forked so many times under different name spaces. They probably just gave up and blocked everything.

In any case, if I was a Chinese-based programmer right now, I'd be very angry. There is bound to be some backlash because of this.

I find it amusing that this is news but what about LuaForge? It allows you to do Minecraft stuff in Lua, a language that can't be easier to learn, and is also pretty fast out of the box.

streamline.js, a JavaScript preprocessor, does almost exactly the same thing for JavaScript. So this feature isn't unique but it is splendid.

No it does not. It uses *promises* which admittedly does make async coding simpler and more robust. It compares to task based parallelism of both C# and Java (fork-join).

But you still cannot *compose* the async flow like you can in C#. The promise is a closure which can access local/captured variables, but what it *cannot* do is terminate a loop, a branch (if-then-else) or an exception handler block which was started *outside* of the promise closure. To achieve that with promises you would have to always turn the rest of the method into a promise closure and rewrite loops, branches and exception blocks into state machines.

Not saying it cannot be done, but so far not even js does not have anything akin to C# async/await.

Android shouldn't tell the user that an App is "trying to access the network", it should tell the user what data the app is trying to send where, whether it will do so once or again in the future (or continuously), etc.

I was thinking about updating the Android Firewall app to do this. Block connections by default, monitor iptables logs and pop up a dialog box allowing temporary/permanent connections to the remote host/any host. Of course, it would be better if it was built into the system and connections could be delayed instead of dropped initially.

streamline.js, a JavaScript preprocessor, does almost exactly the same thing for JavaScript. So this feature isn't unique but it is splendid.

> fauxgrammers and brogrammers

You mean like the Linux project? Yeah, they're just a bunch of posers.

What I like is that it cuts down on the effort required to manage different projects. The 14 projects that I now have on github all used to have different makefiles used for building tarballs and posting them publicly. Each used to have a web page saying stuff like "the current version is 3.1.5," which had to be edited when I put out a new version. Now all of that stuff is automatic. I just do a git tag and a git push, and bam, it's there. I had material on the individual web pages which is now in each project's README.md file on github. When I want to change it, I just edit README.md, and then next time I do a push, it'll be there on github.

It's a shame that github's web interface isn't 100% open source, but many parts of it are (e.g., https://github.com/github/linguist ), and there is no major vendor lock-in, either. They're just hosting my git repo. If I fall out of love with them, I still have my repo and can just host it somewhere else.

I'm "mth" and I'll answer as many of your questions as I can.

The devices are built in China by a factory who have done this sort of thing before. I don't know all the details, but while the yield of the first batch wasn't great, it also wasn't worse than what one would expect from a first production run. Justin has been a reseller of devices like the Dingoo A320 for several years, so he has practical experience in distribution.

Regarding the software, we build the root file system using buildroot with as few customizations as needed. Our SDL is using the Linux framebuffer for graphics and ALSA for audio, no acceleration is implemented but it's not necessary either: pushing pixels at 320x240 or synthesizing stereo audio at 44.1 or 48 kHz can easily be done by the CPU.

We do want to add acceleration for OpenGL ES. We're working to get the proprietary driver from Vivante up and running in our system (this wasn't trivial because we're using uClibc instead of glibc). We're also looking at the open source etna_viv project, but that's in an early stage of development, so it will be a while before it is usable as a full driver replacement. Note that the GPU renders from memory to memory; the framebuffer is handled by the LCD controller and that part is already fully open source, so if you want a fully open kernel you can run SDL applications just fine today.

All sources can be found on github. This includes the kernel, buildroot, the boot loader, the image generation tools and more.

I'm "mth" and I'll answer as many of your questions as I can.

The devices are built in China by a factory who have done this sort of thing before. I don't know all the details, but while the yield of the first batch wasn't great, it also wasn't worse than what one would expect from a first production run. Justin has been a reseller of devices like the Dingoo A320 for several years, so he has practical experience in distribution.

Regarding the software, we build the root file system using buildroot with as few customizations as needed. Our SDL is using the Linux framebuffer for graphics and ALSA for audio, no acceleration is implemented but it's not necessary either: pushing pixels at 320x240 or synthesizing stereo audio at 44.1 or 48 kHz can easily be done by the CPU.

We do want to add acceleration for OpenGL ES. We're working to get the proprietary driver from Vivante up and running in our system (this wasn't trivial because we're using uClibc instead of glibc). We're also looking at the open source etna_viv project, but that's in an early stage of development, so it will be a while before it is usable as a full driver replacement. Note that the GPU renders from memory to memory; the framebuffer is handled by the LCD controller and that part is already fully open source, so if you want a fully open kernel you can run SDL applications just fine today.

All sources can be found on github. This includes the kernel, buildroot, the boot loader, the image generation tools and more.

Offline version is already available: https://code.google.com/p/oxygenguide

Work is beginning on an Open-Source Android app to easily view/update this offline data: https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/OxygenGuide-Android

• Does not force to introduce OO concepts from the start; non strict OO viewpoint.
• Makes flow visible by tracing of the program flow; the -x command line option instructs the interpreter to trace each statement and evaluation results + intermediate values.
• A focus on readability and clarity in syntax and semantics
  • no statement delimiters - no semicolons
  • all function parameters are passed as named parameters;
  • all variables declared in function are local;
• Variable must be defined before use, similar to strict mode in Perl; variable is defined if value is assigned to a name.
• The language has closures and can do objects by prototyping; has higher order functions like map/fold/filter .
• If a non local variable is referenced, then it must have the prefix outer . ; references to global variables from a function must have prefix global . ; object member references must have prefix this .
• the Pooh language has green threads / co-routines / generators like Lua; so there are nice for loops like in Python. The local variety of this idea is called Pooh routine.

Thank you for your attention.

https://gist.github.com/4502333

I'm working through a "Teach Yourself to Program" book right now. Figured I'd give it a try. What do you think, want to hire me? :D

But no, seriously, I'm interested in feedback.

https://gist.github.com/4502183

This one is quite a serious flaw, and the data this website in question deals with is very important data (citizen IDs), so I'm not surprised they're taking it seriously. The service being down for a day or two is probably better than millions of ids getting hacked. Perhaps the fix breaks something on their website, and they have to fix that before they can take it back up again? It has produced issues like this I think:

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/8831

Most sites (like Slashdot) really don't matter if they are hacked and could just stay up, but something dealing with identity like this deserves special attention, and I'm sure they have good reasons if they have taken the site down while they look at workarounds. Perhaps it'll mean they get more money devoted to securing the site after this has blown over - time spent testing the site and looking at security is probably more important than the specific technology used (almost every major framework has regular security problems like this), contrary to the righteous flaming and trolling for asp.net/perl/php/other tech which is bound to erupt in the wake of your post.

It is supposed to be a simple but modern language designed for teaching . Here is a list of the main features:

• Does not force to introduce OO concepts from the start; variables like strings/lists/hashes are not objects; this is the non strict OO viewpoint.
• Makes flow visible by tracing of the program flow; the -x command line option instructs the interpreter to trace each statement and evaluation results + intermediate values.
• A focus on readability and clarity in syntax and semantics
  • no statement delimiters - no semicolons
  • all function parameters are passed as named parameters;
  • all variables declared in function are local;
• Variable must be defined before use, similar to strict mode in Perl; variable is defined if value is assigned to a name.
• The language has closures and can do objects by prototyping; has higher order functions like map/fold/filter .
• If a non local variable is referenced, then it must have the prefix outer . ; references to global variables from a function must have prefix global . ; object member references must have prefix this .
• the Pooh language has green threads / co-routines / generators like Lua; so there are nice for loops like in Python. The local variety of this idea is called Pooh routine.

Thank you for your attention.

Please take a look at my side project - the Pooh programming language

It is supposed to be a simple but modern language designed for teaching;

Some of the features:

1. Does not force to introduce OO concepts from the start; non strict OO viewpoint.
2. Makes flow visible by tracing of the program flow; the -x command line option instructs the interpreter to trace each statement and evaluation results + intermediate values.
3. A focus on readability and clarity in syntax and semantics
   • no statement delimiters - no semicolons
   • all function parameters are passed as named parameters;
   • all variables declared in function are local;
4. Variable must be defined before use, similar to strict mode in Perl; variable is defined if value is assigned to a name.
5. The language has closures and can do objects by prototyping; has higher order functions like map/fold/filter .
6. If a non local variable is referenced, then it must have the prefix outer . ; references to global variables from a function must have prefix global . ; object member references must have prefix this .
7. the Pooh language has green threads / co-routines / generators like Lua; so there are nice for loops like in Python. The local variety of this idea is called Pooh routine.

Thank you for your attention.

The PDF viewer in Firefox, PDF.js is an amazing piece of software. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the same sandbox in which a webpage runs. So it is very safe. The layout accuracy and speed of PDF.js are simply amazing. Text selection happens just like it does in the browser. Some PDF viewers only allow you to draw a rectangle on which to do OCR. PDF.js simply lets you select the glyphs.

This viewer has been available as an add-on for a while already.

someone wrote a emacs interface to the telephony system on the openmoko phones
https://github.com/paulfertser/fso-el/wiki

By your metric, JavaScript is the most popular:

http://www.dodgycoder.net/2011/11/stackoverflows-programming-language.html

https://github.com/languages

Ah, Vigil! What a wonderfully amusing language...

https://github.com/munificent/vigil

But isn't a language that deletes code crazy?

No, wanting to keep code that demonstrably has bugs according to its own specifications is crazy. What good could it possibly serve? It is corrupted and must be cleansed from your codebase.

Vigil will do this for you automatically.

Vigil deleted a function. Won't that cause the functions that call it to fail?

It would seem that those functions appear to be corrupted as well. Run Vigil again and it will take care of that for you. Several invocations may be required to fully excise all bugs from your code.

The nouveau driver supports everything from NV04 upwards - NV01 and NV03 (NV02 never made it to production) are very different. In particular, PFIFO (the engine on the card that submits command the GPU) on NV01 doesn't support DMA at all, and NV03 has broken DMA. For that (and other) reasons, if support were desired for these cards, it would be in a separate driver. However such a driver would essentially be of academic interest, since these cards only accelerate simple shapes (like triangles and curves).

That having been said, one of the nouveau developers has done some reverse engineering of the NV01, the finiding of whic hare in the envytools notes.

They moved the bug reporting to Github. The nothing-downloaded issue is well-known, however.

Why convert? UNIX is C, period.

It's a lot of C, but not all C. According to the FreeBSD mirror on GitHub the FreeBSD distribution contains the following types of code:

C 78.2%
C++ 12.9%
Shell 5.1%
Perl 1.2%
Other 2.4%

https://github.com/omegamoon/rockchip-rk30xx-mk808

I use a tiny script: https://github.com/bronson/sshkeys

Makes the easy even easier.

Stress testing hard disks is a particular bugbear of mine, after having some really bad luck with early hard disks. Over the 15 years that I've been doing it I've had to send back loads of hard disks and flash cards because they failed my tests, either breaking completely or returning single bit errors in your data. Mostly the manufacturers will take disks back if you can get their stupid Windows program to return an error code. Sometimes it takes a bit of arguing but ultimately the manufacturers want to keep you happy. Flash disks with single bit errors are the hardest to send back in my experience.

Here is the latest generation of my stress testing code (re-written in Go recently): https://github.com/ncw/stressdisk

(Interestingly the stressdisk program sometimes finds bad ram in your computer too!)

I generally thrash every new hard disk or memory card for 24 hours to see if I can break it before trusting any data to it!

I also run a long smart test too.

Somewhat paranoid, yes, but I really, really hate losing data!

I'm writing Python in Sublime Text 2 and use the SublimeLinter plugin. Follow basic coding standards like Python's PEP-8 or pylint is trivial as uncompliant code is highlighted as I type. When it's so easy to comply, why on earth not?

I would mod you up if I could. Russian seems like it has more good information in it.

If anyone cares, I've made a program to help memorize Russian words. It goes along with and contains the vocabulary from this book.

In my own coding, I tend to *gasp* make mistakes. Sometimes, really, really dumb ones.

One of the biggest problems with my coding, is that I am often the only real coder looking at it. Even my FOSS work seldom gets reviewed by coders.

I can't say enough about peer review. I wish I had more. It can really suck, as one thing that geeks LOVE to do, is cut down other geeks. However, they are sometimes right, and should be heard.

Negative feedback makes the product better. Positive feedback makes the producer feel better.

I prefer a better product, but that's just me.

I had an interesting bug just the other day in my FOSS project. It's an iOS (iPhone/iPad) app that uses the MapKit Framework API.

The bug was on this line.

The original code is here.

So that folks don't have to look at a whole bunch of source, here's the problematic two lines:

[mapSearchView addAnnotation:myMarker]; [mapSearchView setDelegate:self];

When iOS 6 came out (with Apple's...wonderful...new maps), the black marker suddenly started showing as the default marker (this only works on iPads, so no one seemed to see it).

I went nuts trying to figure it out (actually, I've been nuts for a long time, but now I have something to blame it on).

I traced into the callbacks, and saw that they were being called with an empty annotation. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Then, just for s's and g's, tried this:

[mapSearchView setDelegate:self]; [mapSearchView addAnnotation:myMarker];

Damn if that didn't fix it.

It was a case of an ambiguous API contract. The Apple maps call the annotation setup as soon as the annotation is set, and the old Google API waited until a few things were set up, so the delegate call set after the annotation worked.

I could rail against the framework, but it was really my own fault, and I am just glad I figgered it out.

In my own coding, I tend to *gasp* make mistakes. Sometimes, really, really dumb ones.

One of the biggest problems with my coding, is that I am often the only real coder looking at it. Even my FOSS work seldom gets reviewed by coders.

I can't say enough about peer review. I wish I had more. It can really suck, as one thing that geeks LOVE to do, is cut down other geeks. However, they are sometimes right, and should be heard.

Negative feedback makes the product better. Positive feedback makes the producer feel better.

I prefer a better product, but that's just me.

I had an interesting bug just the other day in my FOSS project. It's an iOS (iPhone/iPad) app that uses the MapKit Framework API.

The bug was on this line.

The original code is here.

So that folks don't have to look at a whole bunch of source, here's the problematic two lines:

[mapSearchView addAnnotation:myMarker]; [mapSearchView setDelegate:self];

When iOS 6 came out (with Apple's...wonderful...new maps), the black marker suddenly started showing as the default marker (this only works on iPads, so no one seemed to see it).

I went nuts trying to figure it out (actually, I've been nuts for a long time, but now I have something to blame it on).

I traced into the callbacks, and saw that they were being called with an empty annotation. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Then, just for s's and g's, tried this:

[mapSearchView setDelegate:self]; [mapSearchView addAnnotation:myMarker];

Damn if that didn't fix it.

It was a case of an ambiguous API contract. The Apple maps call the annotation setup as soon as the annotation is set, and the old Google API waited until a few things were set up, so the delegate call set after the annotation worked.

I could rail against the framework, but it was really my own fault, and I am just glad I figgered it out.

The writers of Repetier-Host are writing Repetier-Server that can be run on a RaspberryPi to remote your 3D printer of choice. See here for the plans https://github.com/repetier/Repetier-Host/issues/64

But does it run Linux?

NO!
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/42
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/43
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/58
Mostly stemming from this 10+ year old GNOME bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

I was an early widescreen Linux adopter and these bugs drove me nuts. Now Unity is optimized for widescreen monitors. KDE and XFCE also work fairly well w/ vertical task bars.

But does it run Linux?

NO!
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/42
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/43
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/58
Mostly stemming from this 10+ year old GNOME bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

I was an early widescreen Linux adopter and these bugs drove me nuts. Now Unity is optimized for widescreen monitors. KDE and XFCE also work fairly well w/ vertical task bars.

But does it run Linux?

NO!
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/42
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/43
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/58
Mostly stemming from this 10+ year old GNOME bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

I was an early widescreen Linux adopter and these bugs drove me nuts. Now Unity is optimized for widescreen monitors. KDE and XFCE also work fairly well w/ vertical task bars.

Of course, he did use an alternate libc!

2. Regarding the last kernel version to run on the 386:

2.4.37.11 (Dec 18, 2 years ago) was the last release of 2.4.x, but the last commit in the 2.4.x branch was in October this year.

Linux through 3.7 used 486 emulation when compiled for the 386. ISTR that Willy Tarreau had some patches providing 586 emulation...

I've only used Ubuntu in it, but a colleague set up something with RedHat. I think he made the base box himself, rather than using something publicly available. That is, he made an extremely minimal install of RedHat, then followed the instructions on what's required -- adding a specific username with an SSH key and adding VirtualBox guest tools so it can mount a directory from the host. (Possibly removing certain temporary files -- I think Ubuntu caches the network card MAC address, so that file needs removing.) Vagrant can then package that up.

There's also a list of community-made ones here: http://www.vagrantbox.es/ (I've not used any of these.)

You might find Veewee useful if you want to generate a base .box yourself. The colleague got this working, I think quite easily, but we don't really need it so I didn't look myself.

I've copied most of this from a reply I made to the Phoronix thread.

There's a lot of work involved in going from Apple's source releases to working cross compilers and then a lot more work involved in going from working cross compilers to well tested ones that generate the same binary code that the native versions generate (and allow things like code-signing) You can use my fork of toolchain4 to avoid this work if you want:

Binaries:
https://mingw-and-ndk.googlecode.com/files/multiarch-darwin11-cctools127.2-gcc42-5666.3-llvmgcc42-2336.1-Linux-120724.tar.xz
https://mingw-and-ndk.googlecode.com/files/multiarch-darwin11-cctools127.2-gcc42-5666.3-llvmgcc42-2336.1-Windows-120614.7z

Source:
https://github.com/mingwandroid/toolchain4

Using these you can build both iOS and OSX software using either gcc or llvmgcc on either Linux or Windows. You need to bring your own SDK of course. I've not yet looked into the feasibility of building Darwin libc or any of the other system libs (nor the legality of distributing these). I think there's definitely a gap for the OSX/iOS equivalent of MinGW-w64.

My build scripts and patches are a bit untidy, I'm currently engaged in an effort to merge this work into crosstool-ng which will force me to clean things up.

That's available through an extension on Thunderbird called "Thunderbird conversations". See here: https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/wiki

Haha. Nice try. That's how I used to do it. Source code available != portable to Linux easily. These days, it's much harder, but is doable, at least for 10.6-compatible binaries: https://github.com/Tatsh/xchain/

A google search showed me that apparently they publish their Facebook API's to GitHub... Link

Doesn't make it any less fishy, but it's more info about them...

Using the "optimus" bit is also perfectly possible with bumblebee.

https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ

Where did the name "Bumblebee" come from?

There is more to it than meets the eye. Nvidia's technology is called "Optimus". Dave Airlie's work for supporting Optimus hardware is named "PRIME", which, in all likelihood, was a clever play on words; Within the settings of the fictional Transformers universe, the name "Prime" is a title bestowed upon the leader of the Autobots, and "Optimus Prime" was one such character. Second, from a technological perspective, it forms the basis for an apt analogy; For, like the Transformers characters, whom are "robots in disguise" (typically masquerading themselves as ordinary mechanical objects until a transformation into their alternative form is needed), a laptop with Optimus technology, while visually unsuspecting from the outside, is actually capable of greatly transforming its graphics performance and power draw characteristics on a situational basis.

Martin Juhl initially named the idea for this project "PRIME-NG", but since it was by no means a real solution nor better idea for PRIME, it was renamed to "Bumblebee"; which just so happens to be a character name from the Transformers lore. Likewise, Martin's eventual fork project, "Ironhide", is also the name of a Transformers character, and thus further continued the association.

I'm confused about so many projects (MrMEEE/Bumblebee, Ironhide, TBP/Bumblebee). Which one should I install?

See the History of the project page, which hopefully will give you a solid overview of TBP/Bumblebee and its differences with MrMEEE's projects

NEXT!

Oh, please. Whenever you browse a GitHub repo, not one but three URIs are prominently displayed in the center of your screen. Those URIs are intended for copy/pasting into a git client for local cloning. They are completely unnecessary for making a "GitHub fork". See also GitHub's documentation on forking a repo.

And right next to these URIs on every repo, what's this? Why, it's a button to download the source as an archive! It's almost like the entire concept of GitHub involved explicitly allowing anyone to download/compile/play with source code published to public repos!

TL;DR: The license to fork a repo, by any reasonable interpretation, does not place a limit on which machine the fork resides.

You're sounding much less like someone who's actually worked with open source software and much more like someone who will fight to the pedantic bitter end to deny the facts that have been spelled out for them.

by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

Last I checked, forking involves copying files.

See especially JP Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

BTW, some social semantic desktop ideas to consider for Tonika (but in Java): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623

Something to cosider on social organziation: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Se also on new economic balances my "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

If you use source code found on github, it's going to be hard for the author to win a copyright lawsuit. This is a non-issue. They've basically allowed you to fork the code (with the implication that you're going to modify it). I don't see them in any way being able to recover punitive or even statutory damages.

The real danger with github, as with all open source, is ensuring that the project's owner hasn't stolen proprietary code from somewhere else. Imagine if Linus had grabbed some files from Unix, then IBM would have been in a lot more difficulty during the SCO case. Fortunately the only things Linus copied were semicolons and braces.

But if you use someone's code through an open source project, you can be liable, even if you got the code under the GPL or BSD license, because the project's owner didn't have the right to give you that code.

Github doesn't claim to provide a repository for open source software

Agreed, although it does claim to be a platform for "social coding," and that it is "the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers," having been founded "to simplify sharing code."

I am not reading the article as anything more than "if GitHub wants to promote sharing of code, make it easier for a developer to specify licensing terms" — and that seems imminently sensible to me.

You should look into the Web Experience Toolkit: https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew/.

The Web Experience Toolkit is an open source framework for developping Web sites that was created by the Canadian government, and is now developped by a community that spans various levels of government, the private sector and the open source community. It integrates with various CMSs, including Drupal (https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew-drupal) and WordPress (https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew-wordpress). This gives you the flexibility of using whatever platform suits your needs to host your site. It also allows you to create themes to adapt the layout and visual look and feel to your needs and branding and uses responsive Web design to make sites mobile-friendly.

You can see the various components of the Web Experience Toolkit in action on the Working Examples page: http://wet-boew.github.com/wet-boew/demos/index-eng.html. You can also see the responsive views in action using the responsive emulator: http://wet-boew.github.com/wet-boew/test/responsive-emulator.html.

For examples of Web sites currently using the Web Experience Toolkit, see:
Industry Canada: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/icgc.nsf/eng/home
Service Canada: http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/home.shtml
Get Cyber Safe: http://www.getcybersafe.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx
City of Ottawa: https://ottawa.ca/en
Open Source Alliance of Canada: http://www.osacan.org/