Hello, I'm not very familiar with the "gnusenet" but based on reading the description of the groups hopefully this is the right place to ask --
1. First, I'm looking to build a coalition of ethical programmers and activists for progressive/"radical demoratic" social change. Is there a usenet newsgroup, mailing list, web forum, or other places you could refer me to? The "radical democratic" part refers to seeking programmer partners not for reform projects (worthy as those certainly are) like software for nonprofits dealing with "symptoms" like homelessness/hunger, but rather instead, for software projects that change the power balance and system itself -- an example would be the GNU project itself which led to a new operating system GNU/linux, or ogg vorbis, etc (another example would be the invention/implementation of gnutella and freenet and other decentralized techologies not controllable by central governmental/corporate entities. I have some other ideas I'd be happy to share but don't wish to make those proposals the focus of attention here) The focus would be nonviolent and would not be illegal excepting for facilitating civil disobedience roughly in the spirit of the civil rights movement. The above are just to give some general parameters as general background.. A bit more background -- I've been a supporter of GNU since the late 80s (contributed as a non-programmer, as a user, some ideas for features for emacs back around 1991..) ..regardless of how you feel about the parameters outlined, I'm not looking to convince anyone, just hoping for a few helpful pointers of people, organizations, newsgroups/maliinst lists/forums where such a coalition might either exist in some form or which would be the proper place for a Call for Collaboration to be posted. 2. My second and only partially related question -- can someone advise me on copylefting some general ideas. I'm hoping my ideas are not copyrightable, not patendable...but in case they are, is there a way of pre-emptively copylefting them so that a corporate/commercial entity doesn't grab the ideas and try to own/control them? Obviously I don't want to spill the full details here precisely to protect against that..but let's say I had some ideas like a gnutella with a few technical specs..or I had some ideas basic to today's social networking...or...there are some other ideas and applications of existing technology...Is there a way of protecitvely pre-emptively copylefting it so it remains in the public domain? Or a place where I can get some descriptions (understandable by non-lawyers like myself) about the scope of which types of ideas are safe from patent/copyright (my understanding is that in today's surreal world, the answer is "very little", hence the first half of this latter question). Many thanks in advance for leads and help with these issues. I'm happy to take responses by email to barzilai at gmail dot com or to this group. Harel _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
