Posted by Whitney Young
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 07:52:00 GMT
A lot of good things have happened recently around here. Senuti 0.29 won both a Playlist Plays of the year award from playlistmag.com as well as an Eddy from the kind folks over at Macworld. If you couldn’t guess, I’m extremely excited that Senuti was given these great honors. Right around the same time version 0.29 became the most downloaded version of Senuti with over 100,000 downloads.
So what do you do when things are going well? Make them better! Version 0.30 of Senuti has a lot of changes under the hood that will allow Senuti to do some of the things I’ve always wanted it to. Underneath of Senuti is now a great little library called libgpod which is the same library at the core of gtkpod for GNU/Linux. This might not mean a lot to many users, but it means a lot to me. There could be a very exciting future for Senuti!
Tags linux, open source, senuti | no comments
Posted by Whitney Young
Fri, 11 Nov 2005 03:16:00 GMT
Copyrights have been around for a long time. I think the first time I really had the idea behind the legal issues behind copyrights was when I was in sixth grade. It was when writing a paper for school. I doubt everyone is told about copyrights for papers in 6th grade, but I would assume that many if not most people learned about them during high-school. Why? Again, research papers.
Having to write countless bibliographies or works cited pages has gotten tedious through the years. It’s not that hard to do, though. It takes about ten seconds to find all of the information that you need from a book and write it down. The point? To give the author credit for the work. I’ve written a good number of things in my life, some of them might not be all that impressive, but they are my words, my thoughts put out there on paper (or online if you please). I have never filed with the US Copyright Office and registered any of my pieces of writing, but I don’t have all that much reason to. Technically my writings are copyrighted the second that they’re written. According to law, in fact, they are.
In addition, according to law, all you have to do to avoid copyright infringement is cite your source. (At least that’s what I learned in high-school… seems to be accurate, though, since textbooks cite their sources.) Doesn’t seem to hard to do, does it? I did a search today to look for sites that might be promoting Senuti. There are a good number. Some of them have some nice things to say. I was reading one that seemed fairly familiar, though. Familiar to the point that I thought I might have written it. Oh wait, I did. Interesting.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that, but it was the first time that I had continued to read and not seen one word that was not my own. In fact, there were self-references on the page that were references to me. That got me thinking, though. Are there other places online that do the same thing? Copy and paste? Answer: yes.
I did a Google search for “There are many good reasons that someone would have to transfer music”. It’s the first line on the features page for Senuti. Interestingly, Google turned up more than just my own website. In fact, many results were filtered out because the page content was so similar. After looking through the unfiltered results and opening many of the pages, I was amazed to find a good number of sites that used my words. Exactly my words.
A good number of them link to my site, which I guess to some extent lets people know where the information is coming from. The problem, though, is that I have the right to change my website at any time. If I do, and they keep their content the same, then no one knows that they were in fact my words. Copyright infringement? I think so. Illegal? Very.
The reason this upsets me so much is not because someone stole the content of what is on my website. It’s the fact that it is my work that I don’t particularly want someone else to have credit for. It’s more the fact that I have a lot of source code that is also copyrighted available for download on my website. (It’s under a license, too, which I’ll probably write about at a later date.) It is extremely easy to cite a source. It also will potentially save you a lot of hassle in the future.
The copyright at the bottom of this page means something. Please respect it.
Tags gpl, open source, thoughts | no comments
Posted by Whitney Young
Fri, 19 Aug 2005 04:39:00 GMT
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish the project I was working on this summer. I’ve been working on creating a site for the person who hosts the Ambitious Lemon server (and my site).
The website is a user-driven site through which artwork can be shared. There are a lot of sites that do this already, but some great ideas have been thrown around for this project. I’ll be going back to school soon and working part time as well, so I won’t have time to keep working on it, but I’m hoping that someone might want to keep the project going.
If there’s anyone who is looking to improve his or her PHP and MySQL skills or even just likes coding for fun, let me know. I’ve had a lot of fun working on the project, and don’t really want to see it die. I’d love to keep working on it, but I just don’t have the time. E-mail me if you’re interested!
Tags open source, software, website | no comments
Posted by Whitney Young
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 16:32:00 GMT
Ok, so I decided to fix up my site sooner than expected. The entire site should now be valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS. I believe it will also display correctly on IE 6.0 (which is remarkable since IE doesn’t comply with web standards).
All of the content remains the same, though. It needs an update as well. It will take me longer to get around to that. Since I know it will take me a while to update, I’ll give a little more information about my previous post.
As stated before, 10% of all donations I receive will in turn be donated. The causes I plan on donating to currently are breast cancer and lupus research. Equal amounts will be donated to both causes and will be done on a quarterly schedule. That’s pretty much the gist of it, but I will eventually put information somewhere else on the site.
Tags donations, open source, website | no comments
Posted by Whitney Young
Wed, 01 Jun 2005 16:28:00 GMT
Google is running a program called Google Code. The goal is to give students some experience, get a few more Open Source developers out there, and to give students a little cash in the process. If I didn’t have so much going on this summer, I would definitely sign up, but I already have too many deadlines. Check it out. $4500 isn’t a bad way to start off an Open Source project. The signup deadline is June 14th.
Tags open source | no comments
