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. Fediverse: @kfogel@kfogel.org  ·  Blog (old school): rants.org  ·  Blog (via Fediverse): @kfogel@rants.org Work I am a partner at Open Tech Strategies, LLC. We help organizations — for-profit, non-profit, and govermental — reach their goals through open source software collaboration and development. I'm also a co-founder of Kersnootz, the steganographic kitten-placement service that uses machine learning to leverage decentralized social network graphs to help our users optimize feline overlays within a blockchain-based content-driven affiliate network. Watch this space for news about our upcoming ICO. Non-profit: I founded 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 served a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative and was for two years an Open Internet Tools Project Fellow at the New America Foundation (stepping down from both in 2014, in order to handle our growing business at Open Tech Strategies). I am a member of Software in the Public Interest and of the Apache Software Foundation, and served for five years on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee. Bio and photos: Here are some biographical blurbs and conference photos.

Time passed since I gratuitously copied this cool timer from Daniel Stenberg (who used it to time the 937 days it took for the U.S. government to issue him a visa — I cannot explain why our government denied Daniel permission to enter the U.S. for so long):

00 days, 00 hours, 00 minutes and 00 seconds

• 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 in a print edition from the publisher, O'Reilly Media; also available online and freely licensed 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.

• Dissecting The Myth That Open Source Software Is Not Commercial
  A 2016 article for for the IEEE Software blog, examining the origins of the prevalent (but mistaken) belief that open source software is not commercial.

• 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.

• 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 https://playogg.org/.

• Privacy Apps Like Snapchat Make a Promise They Can't Keep
  A piece for the Future Tense series (of Slate.com and the New America Foundation), about why apps that claim you can send "self-deleting" messages and data to other people are making a promise they can't keep.

• 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 in a print edition from the publisher, Paraglyph Press; also available online and freely licensed at cvsbook.red-bean.com.

• 5 Not-So-Easy Questions
  Interview (with Jurgen Appelo of noop.nl).

• Rants.org
  My blog. You remember what blogs are, right?

• Various OTS projects (also some here)
  Open source projects that we work on at Open Tech Strategies, LLC. I don't get to write code as often as I used to; my involvement in these projects is more... uh, spiritual than technical these days. Sic transit gloria techie.

• ots-tools
  These I do get to work on, happily. These are utilities we use to make life easier at OTS, all published as free software. The ones I hack on the most often are:
  

  • find-dups: Find duplicate files within a directory tree.
  • dmgrep: Like grep, but prints delimited blocks, instead of lines, as the output. Very useful when you're looking through, say, git log output and want your search results to be full commits instead of individual lines.
  • opass: A system for managing shared secrets among team members.
  • oref: A system for putting quick, lightweight, easy-to-navigate cross-references in plaintext documents.
  
  But there are many others in there. Your Mileage May Vary. Enjoy.

• ots-doctools
  Our document production environment at OTS (LaTeX-based).

• ots-bookkeeping
  Tools we use for plaintext-based bookkeeping.

• memetype
  A command-line tool for putting text on an image in that meme-y way.

• Label Nation
  LabelNation is a free software command-line tool for making address labels, business cards, or anything else involving regularly-arranged rectangles on a printer-ready sheet. It is written in Python 3.

• mailaprop
  Modern autofill behavior for email addresses in Emacs.

• yank-match
  Yank matches for a regular expression from the kill ring in Emacs, cycling through the matches one by one.

• urlete
  Dynamic URL completion for Emacs, based on arbitrary table-of-contents web pages.

• cvs2cl
  A script to convert CVS repository history to ChangeLog format, in case you still need to do that.

• HenrysRecords.org
  A user-friendly database of classical music on records. Search it online, or download the raw data files (and code) 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 Emacs-based editor for genetic sequence data.

• Subversion
  A open source centralized version control system.

• My .emacs file
  No, seriously. My .emacs file is thirty-some years old and over ten thousand lines long. It has been patched by friends and strangers, appeared in a blog post and at least one dissertation, spawned a few Reddit threads, 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 GPG public key.)