BigBang-dev October 2016

bigbang-dev@sudoroom.org

3 participants
6 discussions

by Sebastian Benthall

Hello, It seems as if a few emails from this list did not make it into the archive because of an error in the import. This is no big deal; those emails weren't that important. http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/bigbang-dev/2016-October/thread.html But I thought it would be a good opportunity to send a reminder about why we use mailing lists with public archives. The reason is that this is important for handling community growth. Our archival record is what will make it easier for new contributors to get involved and get an understanding of the history of the project. Please see Karl Fogel as a reference http://producingoss.com/en/growth.html#using-archives All best, Seb

7 years, 6 months

BigBang Goverance Process -- DRAFT

by Sebastian Benthall

It's my pleasure to share with you this draft of the BigBang Governance Process bylaws: https://github.com/datactive/bigbang/wiki/Governance I hope it's also self-explanatory as possible. Please don't hesitate to raise any questions and concerns about it. I encourage you to review the references in the Precedent section for more information about where particular policies have come from. I expect that other forms of self-regulation will come up over time. For example, details of how we do code review or manage a release cycle. I think these decisions can be deferred and left off the bylaws for now, and documented later as guidelines. All best, Seb

7 years, 6 months

Changing BigBang license to Affero GPLv3

by Sebastian Benthall

Hello, I have just changed the software license of BigBang from GPLv2 to AGPL-3.0. Soon, I won't have the ability to make such a decision unilaterally. This sort of decision will only be made by community agreement. You may all soon decide to reverse this decision and if so I won't block the change. However, I wanted to "nudge" the project in this way and explain my reasoning. When we started the BigBang project years ago, we had to address the question of software licensing. For Free Software principles, I wanted to copyleft the software. This got push back from some potential contributors in industry and people interested in partnering with the project commercially. In the end I decided to stay with the GPL license because of a project mission that is related to Free Software: the educational mission of open and reproducible research. One reason to build BigBang is to create a platform for data science education that is available to everybody. Open data from the projects that around foundational to the Internet, including standards and protocols, as well as software, are part of the historical record of how our world has become what it is. As much as any legal or cultural history, an understanding of this technical history is essential to our competence as world citizens. It is our shared inheritance. BigBang is designed to make this technical history available to scholars and students in the interest of an informed digital citizenry. The GNU copyleft philosophy is aligned with this educational mission. My hope is that as contributors to BigBang, we will be conscious of our work being a contribution to global, civil, and collective self-understanding. This self-understanding cannot be proprietary; it must be held in common. GNU licenses prevent "forks" or downstream development work on the project from being incorporated into proprietary systems. This will give us peace of mind: our work will be harder to coopt for the kind of private interests that would make our civil understanding of technology even more difficult. We met an obstacle early on in committing to these goals through our software license. This project began at UC Berkeley. And while Berkeley has a long history of contributions to open source software, we discovered that it was not an environment compatible with Free Software principles. I have to give Nick Doty tremendous credit for his patient navigation of Berkeley's bureaucracy to get an answer to some questions about intellectual property. Among his findings were that Berkeley permits use of GPLv2, but forbids use of GPLv3. This is most likely because Berkeley would like to reserve the right to patent software created by its students, even if that software is originally licensed open source. Therefore one of the motivations for moving the BigBang project to DATACTIVE infrastructure is to position the software as a project of the University of Amsterdam, rather than of UC Berkeley. I have to ask our contributors from UvA to follow up on this point. But my hunch is that UvA is less aggressive about defending its privilege of software patenting than UC Berkeley. As the likelihood of Berkeley making any claim to patent contributions to BigBang is in fact quite low, I must admit that this change in licensing and the timing of it is perhaps as much a symbolic gesture than a substantive one. Putting the project under the auspices of DATACTIVE is in more ways than one a commitment of this project to the public interest. It may even be a way of steering the project towards a more European vision of the public interest than a Californian one. All these questions will ultimately be up to the community to decide. Thanks for your patience with this long email. More information about GNU licenses can be found here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#AGPL Cheers, Seb

7 years, 6 months

Official project website changed to http://datactive.github.io/bigbang/

by Sebastian Benthall

As part of our transfer of the project over to Datactive, the official website of the project has now changed. It's URL is: http://datactive.github.io/bigbang/ This website can be edited by editing the Jekyll templates of this branch of the git repository: https://github.com/datactive/bigbang/tree/gh-pages More info here: https://pages.github.com/ You will note that many of the links on this website are now *broken*, since they point erroneously to the sbenthall/bigbang project. These links have to be fixed as part of this ticket: https://github.com/datactive/bigbang/issues/264 Is there anyone willing to take on this issue of updating the website? All best, Seb *p.s. I've been copying the NOW DEPRECATED bigbang-dev(a)lists.sudoroom.org <bigbang-dev(a)lists.sudoroom.org> on these changes, because I haven't wanted to lose anybody in this period of rapid transition. However, soon I will not send any more updates to the old list. If you are interested in participating in BigBang development and have not already done so, please subscribe to:* *http://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/bigbang-dev <http://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/bigbang-dev>* *Thanks!*

7 years, 6 months

IMPORTANT: Transferring sbenthall/bigbang project to datactive/bigbang

by Sebastian Benthall

Hello, This is an *important* update regarding BigBang. We are in the process of *transfering* the GitHub project to a new location. This means we are moving the issues, milestones, and wiki of the project. This is in order to facilitate moving the project infrastructure into a place where it can be managed by the community. (Big thanks to Harsh Gupta for suggesting this!) The project currently located at : https://github.com/sbenthall/bigbang will be moved to the new location: https://github.com/datactive/bigbang Because there is already a *fork* of bigbang in the *datactive* organization, this is a little tricky. I will be *deleting the fork* so that there's no conflict when I *transfer the project*. In preparation for this, I have copied the issues from datactive/bigbang to sbenthall/bigbang, so that history is preserved. I'll be doing these steps momentarily. This email is to make it clear what I'm doing so nobody is surprised.

7 years, 6 months

Officially changing BigBang mailing lists to @data-activism.net

by Sebastian Benthall

Hello everyone! I'm excited to announce that we are officially changing our mailing list hosts. To stay involved in the BigBang project, please subscribe to this mailing list: *bigbang-dev(a)data-activism.net <bigbang-dev(a)data-activism.net>* https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/bigbang-dev This change is the first in several that mark the transition of core BigBang infrastructure into the stewardship of the DATACTIVE <https://data-activism.net/> research collective, and the expansion of our community. Big thanks to Niels for setting up these lists. The archives from the old lists have been transferred to the new Mailman instance, hosted by GreenHost. Thanks to Sudo Room (Max, cc'ed) for setting up the original lists. Cheers, Seb

7 years, 6 months

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BigBang-dev October 2016