Slashdot Mirror
New York City Examines Law Mandating Open Source
An anonymous submitter writes "The New York Council held a hearing on the 'SOFTWARE WARS.' The Select Committee on Technology in Government, chaired by Council Member Gale A. Brewer (D-Manhattan), held a public hearing Tuesday on software procurement practices by state and local governments. Representatives from the City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Microsoft, as well as numerous local software companies testified. Newsforge is carrying the testimony at the hearing of Tony Stanco, Director of The Center of Open Source & Government." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
FP WHOHOO
Time to toss my salad.
Let me be the first to congratulate you! Job well done my friend!
Michael Sims, Domain Hijacking and Moral Equivalency
by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net
How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.
The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.
Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.
Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.
After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.
I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to delete my name from the site if he wasn't going to transfer the domain. Again, I received no reply.
In November 2000, Sims took the Censorware Project site offline again, with a message saying "Due to demands from some of the people who contributed, in however minor a fashion, to this site, it has been taken down." Judging from some email I received from him at the time, this meant me.
Its a sad thing, both because we got some good work done and because some of the other members of the group were eager to continue and in fact have continued working, while deprived then of the Censorware Project site, name, email aliases and public recognition. Within a few months after, we relaunched the site, with the original
They are doing it becuase the city is COMPLETELY BROKE.
The new york budget is FUCKED!
Maybe instead of invading Iraq you could have helped us with our budget asshole Bush.
Ya you really care about New York and its families by leaving the city in a total financial disaster while you persue conquest in the middle east.
Piles of charred Iraqi corpses and miles of pristine oil field may give Bush a woody but it doesn't keep the buses running or city workers from being laid off. (this includes those firefighters bush and everyone else claims to love)
Oh well if open source can help keep the budget from being a total disaster that would be a nice start.
Software Wars, Star Wars, War On Drugs, War On Terrorism..
You're one war crazed people.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
"Piles of charred Iraqi corpses"
Still trying to spread the Big Lie, eh Ivan?
Ya you're right!
No one died in this war. Thousands of bombing runs dropping millions of tons of explosives on huge Iraqi cities didn't actually kill anyone!
All those Iraq soldiers and civilians just happened to die of old age and accidently burn themselves up by coincidence at the same time the 5,000 pound bombs where dropping!
Oh my God, are people that fucking stupid that they think no one died in this war!
IT'S A WAR! THOUSANDS HAVE DIED!
What a fantasy world some people live in, sheesh.
Have American's become so gullible and blind that they can actually believe no one actually dies in their wars?
What can't handle the truth that Bush doesn't give a squat about the working class people of New York?
She's such a tiny little slut. Did you see Along Came A Spider? She was the girl who played the kidnapped little bitch. Well guess what? Mika Boorem has grown up.
Check her out on the left in this pic, observe the cute little titties and flat belly - good lord, she's perfect. Then take a look at this pic, she's just amazing. Finally have a peek at this pic (she's on the left again), those beautiful young titties are representing her total sexuality.
She was born in August '87 which means she's 15 delicious years old now. That's very well old enough to have sex with.
I WANT TO FUCK YOU, MIKA!
But, see, we spend all this money on the military and all the really badass toys that they have, so we just GOTTA use em. Otherwise, hell, we'd just be spending money for no good reason! So don't you worry your pretty little head. We'll protect you. Merka's enemies are legion.
By the way, have you seen the Global Hawk? Neat! There was a show about it on PBS last night. Love those military toys! Mmmmmboy! That's geek friendly propaganda right there!
must you Americans turn everything into a war? (yeah yeah, cheap shot ;^)
Cheap shot? More like an astute observation, if you were to ask me.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Is OSDN a cause for concern? Read this journal entry and see what you think.