Re: GNU Herds -- domains to redirect

[Dave Crossland]

On 02/03/2008, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>     Matt is suggesting someone else may soon register freesoftware.jobs
>     and use it for purposes we won't like.
>
> Maybe so.  But aren't there hundreds, even thousands, of domain names
>  that might be equally relevant to us, which someone else might get and
>  use for things we would not approve of?

There are many which might be relevant to us, but they are not of
equal value. Most are only tangentially relevant, a few dozen perhaps
are relevant, and a handful are worth paying for.

>  It does not make sense to try to buy all those domains.

It does not.

> Is there a special reason to buy this one?

Matt suggested it, but I agree it is a good domain name and would be
2nd in my list, after gnu.jobs :-)

Its not a large amount of money so I would happily register 2 or 3 and
donate them to the FSF or the Herds association.

You are right that there would be no jobs in the near future to
warrant setting up a federation of job sites, so I would initally use
them as kinda fun "easter egg" domains, and would have them redirect
to relevant areas of the canonical site.

eg www.gpl.jobs -> www.gnuherds.org/jobs/category/gpl (hypothetical URL)

Perhaps a well written proposal on gnu-misc might pull up a few more
GNU project contributors willing to share the cost of donating these
domain registrations.

>     I think having the gnuherds webapp 'federate' with other sites (like
>     xmpp/jabber or gnutella federates in a p2p network) would allow
>     jobs.gnu.org to be a job site for jobs on gnu project software,
>
>  We would not want to have a job site only for jobs on GNU packages.
>  There are not enough such jobs to make that site interesting.

Not right now, no. Might there be?

Canonical's use of its proprietary Launchpad webapp for coordinating
the development of Ubuntu seems to be working very well for them. I
think a similar approach for GNU, using free webapps for coordinating
its development (like Savannah today) would be beneficial. Savannah
does not do all the basic things Launchpad does, including bounties,
which is the gap GNU Herds fills, it seems to me.

I imagine a feature for Savannah that allows people to attach
individually backed funding proposals or pledge banks for larger ones
to existing bugs/feature-suggestion tickets in the Savannah task
tracker.

Eg, I recently filed a feature suggestion for Gnash and it is
considered "someday maybe" by the core developers. I'd like to be able
to respond on such Savannah tickets by inputting a $foo amount, which
would relay "I'm willing to pay a freelance hacker $foo to do this
feature sooner than than later," to GNU Herds/jobs.gnu.org/etc.

If there was such infrastructure, would people use it? Would this help
the development of GNU?

>  We want to put all the jobs in one site so that it will have a larger
>  number of jobs available.
>
>  I have nothing against this sort of "federation" feature as such.  but
>  I doubt that there is a need application for it, so why work on
>  implementing it?  There are other features to be implemented.

Probably it is a "someday maybe" feature.

One big application I can see for it is the GNOME project; this has
become seemly estranged from the GNU project, but it seems a prime
candidate for running their own jobs webapp; I can imagine GNOME and
GNU wanting to federate their jobs listings.

-- 
Regards,
Dave