Other Planet GNOME issues

planet.gnome.org (or Pogo as I will be referring to it as in an attempt to make it stick (teehee) and its a much cuter and easier to pronounce name than pgo or p.g.o or whathaveyou) has other interesting problems. I personally don’t care about who gets added to the planet at all, people say I should be there but I don’t want to be.

*I ALSO DON’T WANT TO BE ON Planet FIDO (my cute name for freedesktop.org come on people keep up here) IF YOU’RE READING THIS DANIEL!*

Anyway, man of the moment, Mr Rodney “Dobey” Dawes complained that his copyright was being infringed by his blog being aggregated there: “Since the planet software intentionally violates my copyright and freedom of speech by filtering content.” We’ll ignore the freedom of speech issue giving Rodney the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t really mean that.

He also created a wiki page to track issues with Pogo so that “we can catalogue  requests and track them more easily,(sic) rather than relying on Jeff’s personal mail, (sic) which he obviousy has problems replying to.”

Now, violation of copyright is a serious issue and so it was duly added to the wiki page so that we could track the issue along with other important issues like changing some icon to a different one, yaknow the important earth shattering maintainship stuff. But, it seems that although Rodney is happy to complain and rant about this issue, claiming, like Chicken Licken that the sky is falling on the idea “a sane web”, he doesn’t want to track this issue, reverting all attempts to add it and ignores all attempts to discuss it (I’ll not go into the threats of physical violence made because I don’t believe they were serious and I’m not too worried about Rodney trying to kick me in the groin but he can always join the queue if he wants behind the KDE guy who’s “stalking” me and the GPSD guys who’re pissed off with me too (and they may have guns)) Personally I think that allegations of copyright violation is far more serious than some French guy not having his blog added to Pogo.

There is a point to this though so bare with me. As I said above I don’t care who is on Pogo. I don’t care if Rodney’s blog is there or not. If it is then I’ll read it if I think its interesting or I’ll ignore it if I think that he’s talking shite. But you have to wonder about someone’s motivations if on one hand they’re screaming blue murder about copyright and free speech violations, but on the other they don’t want to do anything to stop these violations. People need to look carefully when choosing spokesmen for their cause…

Incidently, and this may shock some, I agree with Rodney on the copyright violations and think that the Planet concept has the potential to be a legal minefield. How do you get around having no-deriv licensed blogs on a Planet, which is clearly creating a derivative? And how do you have a share-alike blog aggregated with a more restrictive licensed blog? And in the case of Rodney’s blog there is no license which would mean that doing anything with his blog feed is in violation of his copyright.

Anyway enough of this frivolity can OSNews and ITWire write an article on me now please? I want my cheque of internet money!