As a frequent contributor to various open source projects, I find that I often want to know just how much I have contributed over the years, and to which projects. With enough time, I could figure out every bug that I've filed, every comment I've posted, every patch that I've submitted (there aren't many), and every contribution I've made. But it would take me a LOT of effort, and after not too long, I'd be knee deep in records and notes of where I had been.

For people that contribute and work on such projects, knowing these kinds of things is valuable in forming an online reputation. This lets people know whether you are a helpful person, what you find interesting, and where your expertise may be. If you're looking for work in such a field, it's great to be able to point to a record of contribution, and say, "Yes, I am interested in this field, and I have a track record to prove it." It creates competition amongst contributors.

But since the current eco-system of online contribution is so diversified, it becomes very challenging to determine a person's online reputation. Some sites do admirable work building in algorithms to calculate the value of users, and this is good. But if you're a person that has been interested in many applications, or that has been working on open-source projects for a long time, it's more likely than not that such systems fall short.

What we need is an aggregated, centralized system that uses public APIs to build global "meta"-reputations. This is likely not that hard, since many of the more-common systems for tracking user contributions already have APIs and RSS feeds for so many things. I'm sure it's more complicated than simply plugging into an API, but creating such a system might not be that hard, and would create great value for the open-source community.

Today I finally finished an article I have been writing for Wikipedia, as part of my IP Law class. The professor for this class is the same as the one that taught the Cyberlaw class I took in the Spring, and once again, he has asked us to work on Wikipedia as part of our classwork.

We were able to choose an article on Wikipedia that was related to the class, and I chose to work on the article on Jacobsen v. Katzer, which is a very important case as it relates to open source licensing, patent law, copyright, DMCA, and just about every other possible IP law issue.

Ultimately, it was a very complicated case because Katzer has attempted to throw the book at Jacobsen (and vice versa). The court has not yet resolved all the issues, but from reading through about half of the court documents that Jacobsen has posted, it appears that Katzer has:

• Patented technology that was not his to patent
• Attempted to get licensing fees from Jacobsen for those patents
• Stolen the intellectual property of an open source project, stripped it of its license and then incorporated it into his own commercial project
• Attempted to sue Jacobsen for copyright violation for something - I'm not even sure what
• And more - see the article for details

In short, it's a nasty, nasty case, but ultimately it should work out for Jacobsen, and he should come out the better (or at least none the worse). At a minimum, he has to prove that the patents are invalid, Katzer stole his IP, and that he didn't steal Katzer's IP - a walk in the park.

Clearly, that's easier said than done, but he's fighting what appears to be the good fight, and it looks like if he keeps at it, he will win in the end.

For the past five years or so, I've been using a feed reader of one kind or another to read RSS feeds. For those who don't know what these are, they're great. What they allow you to do is "subscribe" to web sites, so that if the site is updated, you know pretty much immediately. I have about 40 of these subscriptions, which are mostly to friends' blogs, news sites, or some other sites I like to keep track of. It's really convenient: I don't have to monitor some 40 sites, I just check my feed reader, and it will do the legwork for me on all of the sites.

Anyway, I digress. One of the feeds I subscribe to is Ars Technica, Open Ended, which is supposed to be their journal of open source news. It's usually top notch news, but I have noticed that occasionally certain open source news items don't make it to into Open Ended. I mentioned this to them yesterday, and today they have created a new RSS feed for open source news.

Talk about service. They're officially the bomb. The new feed is arstechnica.com/oss.rssx.

Check it out. Pretty slick, I must say.