Dear friends, just wondering if your group had non-technical intro's about your work and goals ...
Michel ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sepp Hasslberger <[email protected]> Date: Sun, May 3, 2009 at 8:07 PM Subject: Re: launch of code depository for authentic free network services To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> Dear Michel, I have looked at this two or three times - trying to understand what exactly it is. Sorry to say that - also for me - this is too tech specific. Maybe in the future, someone will come up with a description of what they are doing that is accessible to us not-so-technical people ... Kind regards Sepp On 12/apr/09, at 07:45, Michel Bauwens wrote: Dear Sepp, the following is an announcement on the launch of a free network service depository, by the autonomous group, which seems an important development for open standards, but too technical for me to report on. if you ever have time, I would appreciate if you could at least announce it, say something about their principles for inclusion and mention the 3 services that seem to pass the test, listed here just below, Michel [1] Fossil SCM http://www.fossil-scm.org [2] Bcfg2 http://bcfg2.org [3] dotCloud http://bitbucket.org/dotcloud/dotcloud/wiki/Home ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Daniel Clark <[email protected]> Date: Apr 12, 2009 10:26 AM Subject: [Autonomo.us] = code.autonomo.us: take 2 proposal version 1.0 = To: [email protected] = code.autonomo.us: take 2 proposal version 1.0 = == History of take 1 == The first version of code.autonomo.us was started very quickly at the Libreplanet 2009 conference, in the spirit of getting hacking done; it created some useful discussion that has lead to this proposal for a new concept for a second version of the service, one that I hope is more in line with the ideals of the autonomo.us project. The first version was based on the idea of using Trac plus a project that provided some amount of automation around the creation of new Trac projects. The plan was to work towards exposing all of the used Trac code, configuration and data (except for authentication tokens), so people could in theory replicate the entire system and also host on computers they controlled if they decided to do so; however the fact that Trac was not designed to be a free network service would have made it cumbersome, and other issues such as non-support for any version control systems other than SVN in the stable version of Cluemapper, the Trac project software chosen after evaluating 3 alternatives (none of which supported anything but SVN either), made it unattractive for many people. Also, it came to light on the mailing list that a closely aligned project, the Open Knowledge Foundation, was already running such a service (that was not found in the initial evaluation period) called kforge or knowledgeforge, so the added value of having autonomo.us host such a service was diminished. == Take 2 proposal: overview == The proposal is for take 2 to be based on software that actually conforms to our principles on a technical level (although sadly in no cases using our chosen license to avoid being screwed, AGPLv3 - if there is software I haven't found that is AGPLv3 I would love to hear about it). This has 3 elements: 1. Require that each project have ultimate control over its services, by requiring that each project control its own DNS domain. We will request but not require that each project have "hosted by code.autonomo.us" (with a link to http://code.autonomo.us) displayed on each web page somewhere, or at least on the front page. Logos for this would be welcomed. 2. Only use software that allows users to easily maintain control over their project's data, configuration, and code; in practice without legal shenanigans this would seem to mean that they can work with their project the same way locally, using only resources on a machine they own, as when on the network, and are only dependent on the network as an easy-to-use display mechanism for other people (and are not dependent on the continued existence of code.autonomo.us for that purpose, as they can switch their DNS to use another server at any time.) 3. Expose the entire configuration of code.autonomo.us, so that users are also not dependent on code.autonomo.us for its aggregation features (as they could easily replicate them themselves). This information will be included in the code.autonomo.us Fossil SCM [1] instance, which will be the only project that is actually hosted by the code.autonomo.us service using an autonomo.us domain. Plan is to do this with Bcfg2 [2] and maybe dotCloud [3]. [1] Fossil SCM http://www.fossil-scm.org [2] Bcfg2 http://bcfg2.org [3] dotCloud http://bitbucket.org/dotcloud/dotcloud/wiki/Home == Take 2 proposal: technical details == === code.autonomo.us meta-project === code.autonomo.us website becomes a Fossil SCM instance * Main page is a DOAP [4,5] aggregator; very simple, just a script that runs from cron, looks for the latest page (say code.autonomo.us/admin/projects-list.wiki) that is signed by one of a defined set of GnuPG keys, and then processes the DOAP URLs in that document, and spits out an HTML page that gets checked back in to fossil. * Page will indicate type of hosting * Will need to use PGP-signed DOAP [6] * PGP-Singed DOAP page will control other things hosting does as well (eg make backup copies of other DVCS repos perhaps) * All scripts and config (eg Bcfg2 repo) will also be in this Fossil SCM repo. With this one file, you will be able to completely recreate the entire service (except for some auth info). * Small number of already externally linked to pages can have redirect at the apache level (look through logs and/or use google to find these) [4] DOAP: Description Of A Project http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap [5] DOAP A Matic http://crschmidt.net/semweb/doapamatic/ [6] PGP Signing FOAF Files (should be applicable to DOAP as well) http://usefulinc.com/foaf/signingFoafFiles === Hosted projects === With both choices you are required to control your own domain name. Explain why this is important for autonomy (I think someone on the list wrote a good summary of this at one point; just need to find it). We can point to some registers; gandi.net, namecheap.com, etc (and also recommend against some, like GoDaddy). ==== Recommended choice ==== All-in-one with Fossil SCM; this will include replication across at least 3 geographically distributed servers (need to contact FSF France and Joyent to accept their offers; I think this will get us the US (FSF), Canada (Joyent), and Europe (FSF France) to start off with). For communications I almost think we should set up usenet as the main service with a gateway to mail; usenet's architecture seems closer to the FNS concept than mailing lists. Where possible things that are not integrated into Fossil SCM (such as usenet / mailing list archives and configuration) will be inserted into the hosted project's Fossil SCM repo with simple scripts run from cron. The idea is that everything having to do with a project will be on each developer's personal box, since it will be there as a side-effect of the process of checking in and out code. The project should have no dependence on code.autonomo.us's continued existence at any given moment to retain all of its code, documentations, and bug database information (perhaps behind a few hours, which shouldn't be crippling to any project). We may want to do some kind of load balancing / geographical redirection service to make code.autonomo.us automatically redirect to or transparently use us.code.autonomo.us, fr.code.autonomo.us, ca.code.autonomo.us. Reason that Fossil SCM would be recommended over a la carte service is that a big part of what makes web services so attractive is ease of use; Fossil SCM is very easy to use locally (one executable, one data file, build-in web server, works on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows), whereas using a la carte service options locally would require significantly more local software setup. ==== A la carte service ==== Mix-n-match: * DVCS: Your DVCS of choice (Bazaar / bzr, darcs, git, Mercurial / Hg, monotone, svn / svk) hosted elsewhere (list the common sites - bitbucket.org for Hg, launchpad.net for Bzr, etc.) with transparent proxy from the domain of your choice, hosted by code.autonomo.us (so you can tell people to check out from for example http://hg.yourproject.org instead of http://yourproject.bitbucket.org; the transparent proxy would be handled by code.autonomo.us, however since you control yourproject.org you chould change that to a server you control at any point). * Wiki: ikiwiki [7], Ajatus CRM [8] or Fossil SCM * Bug/Ticket tracking: Best Practical SD [9] or Fossil SCM * Search across resources: TBD [7] ikiwiki http://ikiwiki.info/ ikiwiki [8] Ajatus CRM http://www.ajatus.info [9] SD http://syncwith.us/sd/using ==== Totally external recommendations ==== Mention that if you really want to use Trac, look at KnowledgeForge [10] (and also eventually config.fsf.org if you want a do-it-yourself example, as well as whatever bkuhn sets up for SFLC). Mention the more freedom-respecting traditional services (eg the FSF's Savannah, FSF France's service I'm forgetting the name of at the moment; please make suggestions...) [10] KForge (project of The Open Knowledge Foundation) http://www.knowledgeforge.net/ -- Daniel JB Clark | Sys Admin, Free Software Foundation pobox.com/~dclark <http://pobox.com/%7Edclark> | http://www.fsf.org/about/staff#danny _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI Volunteering at the P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net - http://p2pfoundation.ning.com Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN, http://www.shiftn.com/ -- Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI Volunteering at the P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net - http://p2pfoundation.ning.com Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN, http://www.shiftn.com/
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