Karl Fogel I usually work on Free things. "Free" doesn't just mean zero cost; it means the freedom to copy, to share, to modify and redistribute without arbitrary restrictions. For more details, see this article on the surprising history of copyright and the promise of a post-copyright world. Share the article with anyone — it's Free. Are you having trouble sending me email? If I failed to respond to your message, it may be that it simply got lost in all the spam (or, perhaps, that my spam filters accidentally ate it). Click here to find out how to send me a message that will get through my spam filters and be noticed. identi.ca: @kfogel  ·  twitter: @kfogel  ·  blog: rants.org Work I am a partner at Open Tech Strategies, LLC. We help organizations — for-profit, non-profit, and govermental — launch and participate in open source projects. I'm also a co-founder of Kersnootz, the steganographic kitten-placement service that leverages social network graphs to optimize feline overlays within a content-driven affiliate network. Check us out. Non-profit: I work at QuestionCopyright.org, a U.S. 501(c)3 non-profit organization that promotes public understanding of the history and effects of copyright, and encourages freedom-based distribution methods that are appropriate for a networked world in which the cost of sharing information has gone to zero. I'm also an Open Internet Tools Project Fellow at the New America Foundation, a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and an advisory board member at the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. You're probably beginning to detect a pattern here.

• The Promise of a Post-Copyright World
  An article about the history and future of copyright.

• Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
  A book about how open source projects work. Available commercially from the publisher, O'Reilly Media, also available online under open copyright at producingoss.com.

• Teams and Tools
  Chapter 21 of the book Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders, published by O'Reilly Media. This chapter is released under a free license (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0). You can purchase the entire book from O'Reilly or in book stores. All royalties from O'Reilly's sales of the treeware go to PlayPumps International.

• Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology
  Chapter 2 of the book Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think, published by O'Reilly Media. This chapter is released under a free license (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0). You can purchase the entire book from O'Reilly or in book stores. All royalties from O'Reilly's sales of the treeware go to Amnesty International.

• What Is Free Software?
  An article explaining the free software movement.

• Why Audio Format Matters
  An article aimed at audio producers, advocating free audio formats like Ogg Vorbis, instead of non-free, patent-encumbered ones like MP3. See also http://playogg.org/.

• Burn In 1: How I Got Into Computers
  Title says it all. This is part of Nat Torkington's Burn In series.

• Open Source Development With CVS
  A book about using CVS in open source projects. Available commercially from the publisher, Paraglyph Press, also available online under open copyright at cvsbook.red-bean.com.

• Rants.org
  My blog.

For detailed open source activity, see my account at the aggregator ohloh.net.

• Launchpad
  A project hosting service whose code is open source and actively developed by its community. See dev.launchpad.net for more.

• Subversion
  An open source version control system, intended to replace CVS.

• HenrysRecords.org
  A user-friendly database of classical music on records. Search it online, or download the raw data files directly.

• LabelNation
  Software for printing mailing and return address labels.

• OneTime
  Open source encryption software that implements the One-Time Pad algorithm in a moderately user-friendly way.

• GNU Emacs
  The world's most extensible text editor. I help maintain the bookmark.el, mail-hist.el, and saveplace.el packages.

• Ale
  An editor for genetic sequence data.

• cvs2cl
  A script for generating ChangeLogs from CVS log data.

• My .emacs file
  No, seriously. My .emacs file is twenty years old and over four thousand lines long. It has been patched by friends and strangers, appeared in a blog post and in at least one dissertation, and is listed as a U.N. World Heritage Site. If you're looking for new tricks for your .emacs, check it out. (It descends from Jim Blandy's still-more-ancient .emacs, but I don't think he keeps his online.)

There is no blueprint for this Web site, but the overall plan is best described by this wonderful quote from architect Eliel Saarinen:

He was applying that principle to architecture, but it's also the perfect philosophy for arranging a Web site... or an Internet.

I sometimes program computers (but please don't ask me if I can help you with your computer, because I probably can't).

What's so great about the Internet? Thomas Jefferson said it best in this 1813 letter to Isaac MacPherson:

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

Now you've almost reached the end of the page, and I'm running out of novelties. In a desperate attempt to change the subject, may I suggest you visit the Golosá web site, where is to be found excellent Russian choral music, both folk and liturgical? Or check out the web pages of some friends: Ben Collins Sussman (who has a most unusual receipt, but then so does Kate), Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Pilato, Jim Blandy, or Noel Cragg.

Email: kfogel@red-bean.com

(You can send me GNUPG-encrypted messages using my public key.)