Re: [Social-discuss] The Case for Branching Elgg?

[Story Henry]

On 6 Apr 2010, at 03:33, Jason Self wrote:

> I have spent time playing around with gnusocial.me today. I like what I see so
> far. More work seems to be needed, but Elgg could make for a good start. I 
> also
> have two questions:
> 
> 1. Plugins appear to be licensed separately. Is there a way to ensure that 
> Elgg
> plugins will only be free software? Since GNU Social is official GNU software 
> it
> seems important not to use other software that might recommend non-free 
> software
> (like how Firefox does through non-free plugins, hence the need for Icecat.)
> 
> 2. I thought that one of the reasons for creating something from scratch was 
> so
> that the FSF could hold the copyright (see "Why not use existing free software
> social networking code?" at [1].) If Elgg is used it seems that the FSF would
> not hold the copyright on the entire thing?
> 
> [1] http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social

In my opinion the point of trying out Elgg is to learn from something that 
already
exists, and try out some ideas. Elgg is free software so you won't be doing 
something
bad by trying it out. If it works, then you can slowly re-implement Elgg, by 
finding
the pieces that most need changing and working on. For example replacing the 
mysql
database with an RDF DB would probably open up a lot of possibilities....

Henry