USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN) [LWN.net]

USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 7:34 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN) by Duncan
Parent article: USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Hmm... until now I never even thought about the question of LWN releasing source code for its own site. Although I prefer to run free software on my own computer, if someone is just serving me a bunch of text pages I don't think it matters how they do it. Even if you did have LWN's source code, you wouldn't be able to modify it and then run it on LWN's servers, nor run it on your own server using LWN's content (which is copyrighted), so it wouldn't really give you any extra freedoms you didn't have before.

But yes, from the point of view of helping others to set up similar news sites, 'many eyeballs', and a general feeling of practising what you preach, it would be cool to download a tarball of the code that runs the LWN site. If it got packaged for Debian or whatever, it might even make the LWN site admin's job easier.

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USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Posted Jul 10, 2009 15:50 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

If you had LWN's source code, you could set up a site for some different sort of news. This is actually entirely plausible; Groklaw runs the same site source that Slashdot originally developed.

Groklaw on Slash?

Posted Jul 10, 2009 17:06 UTC (Fri) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link]

I believe that's incorrect. Groklaw, IIRC, ran on Radiolog or something like that in its early days, and it's been on Geeklog since 2003. I don't believe they've ever run Slash.

Groklaw on Slash?

Posted Jul 10, 2009 17:32 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I'm pretty sure there was discussion about moving it to Slash when it was leaving Radiolog, since PJ had previously been a frequent commenter on Slashdot before having her own site and was therefore used to it. I guess I missed the actual move being something different when it happened, and always thought it was to Slash. (Of course, the discussion of what the move should be was before the move, and therefore not in the archives, which start immediately after the move, as far as I can tell.)