Fred Beneson:
As far as I understand it the GPL, (like most other licenses including CC, etc.) doesn’t require prosecution explicitly in the case of a violation of its terms, so much as it requires a cessation of distribution of the binaries or offending files.

Copyright law never requires prosecution.  It only allows for it.  Historically, GPL’ed projects have requested cessation of distribution or an opening of the source as out of court settlement.  The GPL cannot really require this, however, it can only specify the terms under which one can use the copyrighted work.  Thus, suing for damages is a right under law of the copyright holders on GPL’ed code when the GPL is violated, same as it is for copyright holders on All Rights Reserved works.  All other (more common) results are just projects being “nice” and handling out of court settlements.

IANAL. TINLA.

After getting the answers I needed from the OAuth list, I decided to go back to hacking at getting OAuth to play nice with AtomPub on my host.  I am pleased to report that it now works!  It requires a two-line patch to WordPress (for my host anyway, YMMV), and I had to change the wp-oauth plugin a bit (lastest in SVN), but I have successfully posted to my test blog using a remote AtomPub script authenticated using OAuth.

See some example code.  The future is bright!

You have probably realised by now that I’m very interested in forms of communication and the best ways to go about improving them.  What about communications from those you *do not* know?  I can get telephone calls, SMS messages, emails, and Twitter @replies (among other things) from people who have not been whitelisted (aren’t in my address book / on my friends list).  Is this useful? What forms of communication suit it best?  This poll started on Twitter, and I’m continuing it here and on PollDaddy.

I have released an update to my Picoformats plugin. This update changes the logic so that posts are not modified in the database (thanks, @aditya!), but on the fly. It will also link to the local profile/archive of a user (thanks, @als!) that has no URL set in their profile. Also, if you use an @ reply from inside a comment and use the (one-word) name of a comment poster, it will recognize this (if they have whitespace in their name, just take it out when writing the @ reply). @ replies in comments also do not check Twitter usernames anymore, since this is expensive and breaks common use.

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This plugin is totally an experiment inspired in part by @techcrunch, and in part by how useful I have found some of this stuff to be on @Twitter, and also just to see the different ways one can use WordPress. (Update: this plugin seem to only work on WP2.5, so I’ve upgraded.)

If you haven’t guessed already, you soon will. Yes, I’ve implemented @ replies for WordPress. It looks in the local users (usernames and nicknames, like @singpolyma) first, then in the names and descriptions on blogroll links, the it checks if you are trying to use a URL (like @singpolyma.net) and, finally, if none of those yield a result it checks if the string is a valid Twitter username. It produces semantic markup for an @ reply and “person tag”:

<span class="reply vcard tag">@<a class="url fn" href="URL">NICKNAME</a></span>

Then, the plugin sends trackback pings to the URLs, to let the people know you’re talking about them. The plugin also implements trackback receiving on the WordPress main page so that users can receive these pings.

Not to stop so short, the plugin also implements #hashtags. What that does should be fairly obvious.

These features work in posts *and* comments.

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