Quite recently there has been a policy change in the free software host Savannah. Now it is no longer good enough to license documentation under the GNU General public license anymore. You either license it under the GNU free documentation license or a compatible license or take your code somewhere else! They do allow dual-licensing, but that IMHO isn’t good enough. Having two different licenses complicates matters for users (COPYING_GPL, COPYING_FDL?) where complication is not really needed. According to the debian free software guidelines/social contract the FDL isn’t even allowed into Debian main, see http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement for a draft of Debian’s statement to this or http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq#GFDL for the FAQ covering this topic.

What this can do in my opinion is push people towards SourceForge.net. Which means that they (the FSF) are essentially pushing people away from free software (Savane) towards non-free software (SourceForge). This is imho a classic example of humans thinking they have more power than they have, or possibly feeling more of an urge to control. It is sad.

When I first said I wanted to blog about this the response I got was that I better not or I will be shut out of the savannah IRC channel or they will close it down completely. Threats does NOT work! However, now you can read it on their website too, so it really is no secret.

Now this is not the only place I disagree with the GNU-project. I for instance hate info-manuals, so my projects could not have become parts of the GNU project anyway, so let me license my documentation under my chosen free software license (GPL), thank you very much.

I, for one, will register my new projects at Gna! in the future (they have subversion too, so it might have an advantage other than licenses too). Gna! is a free alternative to Savannah.

“Unix doesn’t prevent you from doing something dumb, because this might prevent you from doing something smart.”

• Unknown source

CCP 0.3 is out! The major new feature in this release is the addition of automatic uncommenting support. CCP will now try to detect which options the user has uncommented from –oldfile and automatically uncomment them in the resulting –newfile. This should greatly decrease the amount of oprhaned options that occurs. Also added is an automatic testsuite to avoid regressions between versions and a –bug option that outputs a file containing useful information that can help fix a bug or solve a problem.

CCP can be downloaded from http://ccp.nongnu.org/download.html

Now this is quite cool, Davide Duina (I think I spelled it right! :) of http://mandrakeitalia.org/ has posted an Italian translation of my SSH tips and tricks.

Original at: http://zerodogg.iamaturtle.org/index.php?type=docs&page;=sshtips Italian at: http://www.mandrakeitalia.org/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=151

Here’s a music video for the band Grandaddy written by some guy using an Apple 2! It’s located at: http://www.stewdio.org/jed/MEDIA/jed_movie.mov

Or, for the oh-so-lazy of you: cd /tmp/; wget http://www.stewdio.org/jed/MEDIA/jed_movie.mov; mplayer -fs ./jed_movie.mov; rm -f ./jed_movie.mov

This version contains multiple bugfixes, some which could cause various configuration files to not upgrade correctly. Among others, it fixes bug #15364. In other news, the first package using CCP in Mandriva is out - which is squirrelmail :)

“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”

• Rich Cook

CCP version 0.1 has been released! It can be downloaded from http://ccp.nongnu.org/download.html.

It’s also in Mandriva Linux (cooker) contrib. The first package to use it is squirrelmail, which I updated today.

CCP can now autogenerate the templates, so it’s pretty much ready for real-life testing. Here’s the same example used in earlier posts.

[0 zerodogg@drizzt ccp]$ cat example.conf
# Example configuration file
SystemVersion = 0.1
Mode = public
Extensions = off

[0 zerodogg@drizzt ccp]$ cat example.conf.rpmnew
# Example configuration file
SystemVersion = 0.1
Mode = private
Extensions = on
AllowUsers = yes

[0 zerodogg@drizzt ccp]$ ./ccp --oldfile example.conf --newfile example.conf.rpmnew
Merging changes between "example.conf" and "example.conf.rpmnew"...done

[0 zerodogg@drizzt ccp]$ cat example.conf
# Example configuration file
SystemVersion = 0.1
Mode = public
Extensions = off
AllowUsers = yes
[0 zerodogg@drizzt ccp]$

I wish you all a happy new year, and try to be nice to each other when it’s not christmas too.