They’re held online, on irc.spi-inc.org (the OFTC network). The agenda for the meeting is open and available at http://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/agendas/2012/2012-02-09/ and there’s been a bit of discussion of back office support on the SPI email list.

I’ll link to a meeting summary from the comments in this blog post after it happens.

Once again, some websites have taken themselves offline and caused great inconvenience to their supporters.

This is really annoying. Protesting about threats to take websites offline by taking websites offline is as stupid as protesting against a ban on kissing by not kissing. It just demonstrates that you can do without your websites/kisses if you must.

I feel it’s much better to use websites to distribute information and call people to action, like this epetition for UK citizens and residents, or by asking your associations and suppliers to oppose these measures and their supporters.

Wikipedia is probably a bit to blame. Although it called its action a blackout, it wasn’t one and there were still many ways to access its information. In fact, if you use NoScript, the banner didn’t even display and there’s only a line on the front page to say anything is happening.

The one that really annoyed me was identi.ca, which even turned off its API so clients just started spewing errors everywhere (I returned to my desk to a stack of retry questions). That stopped some of my websites from distributing a link to the anti-SOPA epetition because they read from my identi.ca stream – how much other anti-SOPA activism was hindered?

I’ve been told that Evan held a vote, but I didn’t see it, so I didn’t vote and I don’t know the turnout or anything. How many people voted for the blackout because they use other sites like twitter more anyway?

Banners: yes; Blackouts: no.

The next meeting is this evening at 20:30 UTC (21:30 UK) in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org and there are a couple of resolutions, inviting the Drizzle database and Arch Linux distribution projects to associate, so that SPI can collect and process funds for them. Please, pop in and see how the new board members perform.

SPI is the developer association that supports debian, OpenWrt and many other projects. SPI meetings are held on irc.spi-inc.org (the OFTC network). The agenda for the meeting is available at http://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/agendas/2011/2011-07-13/

There are currently no resolutions on the agenda, but there should be some annual reports.

The agenda for the meeting is available on the web. A single resolution regarding ankur.org.in joining as an SPI associated project has been received.

Please, come along and support SPI and thank its volunteers for their efforts.

At the time of writing, there’s a single resolution regarding Jenkins joining as an SPI associated project. Jenkins (formerly known as Hudson until the Oracalypse) monitors execution of jobs like software builds or scheduled tasks. Its website is http://jenkins-ci.org/

Why not come along and wish Jenkins well? Or just see if I’m awake after a #koha meeting at 3am UK time?

What do you think of that, then? SPI supporting both LibreOffice and OpenOffice? A balanced position, fence-sitting or something else?

The agenda has been posted and the reports really ought to be included by the time this blog post appears. Come along and see FOSS project support infrastructure do its thing, then maybe chat a bit afterwards.

I’m sorry it’s pretty late notice, but you might like to come along and let the board know what you think they should be doing, or offer to help out with the new website.

“The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. [...] has sent a number of questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The questions are hypothetical, but clearly designed to test the waters and figure out where this line falls.”

Now will this re-affirm what I’ve always been told, that copyright’s border is between ideas and expressions, and copyright only covers expressions? Or will it draw a different boundary?

It seems that those most likely to be affected are those who are at the edges of acceptability of licences like LGPL, or trying to provide workalikes of hostile proprietary companies, but please, read it for yourself.