Free Projects COMMUNITY

An up-to-date look at and its makers PROJECTS ON THE MOVE Free software has been confronted with many an accusation in its time, but could it conceivably infringe on weapon export regulations? SourceForge is facing legal issues, and Jajuk steps in as a DJ and statistics

expert. BY CARSTEN SCHNOBER

n an attempt to stay friends with less SourceForge [1] (Figure 1) and the com- tion algorithms could be sufficient to cyber-friendly voters, politicians as- pany that runs it, Geeknet Inc. [2], legal qualify. The best-known example of a Isert that the Internet must be gov- hassles since the beginning of the year. legal case of this kind concerns PGP erned by laws. The age-old populist trick SourceForge offers programmers scope (Pretty Good Privacy) [3]. US customs is employed of spreading fear, predicated for collaborative development, docu- accused developer Phil Zimmermann of on the idea that the Internet is a chaotic mentation, and publication of free soft- infringing on weapon export law by re- place, where only the fittest survive and ware projects. The list of freebies also in- leasing the program free of charge in the weak are left to the mercy of the ele- cludes access to the CVS versioning 1991. ments. server, discussion forums, a bug tracker, More recently, SourceForge’s Lee Informed readers are likely to be shak- and web space. This extensive package Schlesinger admitted this January that ing their heads right now. After all, pop- has made the service one of the most the portal operator has been forced to ulist claims like this are both a deliberate popular sites for open source developers block contacts from IP address in coun- attempt to manipulate people and a clear and users. tries subject to the embargo [4]. Al- demonstration of ignorance of the sub- though the service doesn’t actually de- ject matter, not simply because the claim Targeted Blockade velop the projects hosted on its servers, is incorrect, but because it spectacularly The operators of SourceForge were re- many of which did not originate in the pretends to champion what is actually cently treated to a clear demonstration of US, downloading from servers based in already the status quo. The Internet how the Internet really isn’t the US is still viewed as a US export, never has been a lawless place; in fact, lawless. Under US law, ex- no matter what the previous history the same laws apply online as offline. ports of weapons and tech- of the software might be. Border-agnostic sales channels exist nologies possibly suited to Because SourceForge is an im- for publications, services, and goods of building weapons are for- portant part of the open source all kinds, and have for a long time, but bidden to countries such community’s infrastructure, the the special thing about the Internet is as Cuba, Iran, North community was, as you might ex- that it makes everything so much easier. Korea, Sudan, and Syria. pect, fairly disgruntled. Complaints You can migrate a homepage to a server The embargo also cov- piled up accusing the operators of in a different country in a matter of min- ers security software; censorship and failing to respect the utes, and without anything changing for even the use of encryp- principles of free software. Other the user. Imports and exports occur stakeholders pointed out that it without the customs people even notic- would make more sense to address ing. complaints to the people who made This easy export vector is what has caused the web portal Ben Heys, 123RF

June 2010 ISSUE 115 93 COMMUNITY Free Software Projects

all participating countries apply equally is unrealistic. Because there is no such thing as a globally applicable legal sys- tem, we will have to make do with in- terim solutions based on the Source- Forge model, which is infinitely prefera- ble to filtering the Internet to force it into compliance with legal systems in indi- vidual countries. Desktop Jukebox Whether private, digital collec- tions are legal or not is still a question of much dispute. The fact is that many users face a flood of musical data, and navigating it is typically a far bigger problem than the threats the entertain- ment industry throws in the direction of its potential customers. Finding your fa- vorite song is not typically the biggest Figure 1: Many programmers use SourceForge to manage their projects. The web portal inte- obstacle, but retrieving those forgotten grates a huge number of open source applications, including GNU Mailman, CVS, and SVN. greats slumbering in the depths of your hard disk can be daunting. the laws that Geeknet has to keep. The cause they are probably blissfully un- Large volumes of data need a statis- people behind SourceForge said from the aware of the legal situation in the US tics-based solution. The approach taken outset that they were unhappy with the and inaccessible to US authorities. Hav- by Jajuk [6] music player (Jajuk is an situation, but didn’t have any alterna- ing said this, things seem to be fairly abbreviation of Java Jukebox) is reminis- tives at the time. peaceful right now, and the SourceForge cent of the classic KDE tools [7] The harsh criticism leveled at Source- user community seems to be happy with and JuK [8]. The program offers a num- Forge by its users, who went so far as to the new feature. ber of perspectives – that is, different compare the situation with censorship in Whatever the outcome, this case goes views – of a collection of tracks. China, was part of the reason Source- to show that the Internet isn’t and never The standard view (Figure 2) offers Forge looked for alternatives. has been lawless; different countries just basic functionality: Users see a list of have different laws. And if politicians in available titles, which they can play by Self Control any particular country call for stricter double-clicking. The program makes In February, Schlesinger presented a so- laws on the Internet, they are actually suggestions in the top part of the win- lution [5] that gave project administra- trying to apply their own legal system to dow, such as the most popular, latest, or tors the ability apply export restrictions the whole of the world. least frequently played tracks. Jajuk will themselves. To allow this to happen, the Having said this, trying to run a world- optionally search Last.fm [9] for tracks SourceForge developers added an Export wide network for which all the laws of similar to your taste. Control button to the web platform and enabled it by default for all projects. Ad- ministrators who don’t think that their projects are subject to US export restric- tions can simply disable the function and allow citizens of “rogue nations” free access to the files they publish. On initial appraisal, it might look as though the SourceForge operators had taken the easy way out and just passed the buck; however, it is in fact quite a bold and one that takes SourceForge into unknown legal territory. Right now, nobody can be certain whether or not the provider might still be held legally responsible in case of a dispute on illegal software exports. Realistically, you can’t expect foreign Figure 2: Jajuk sees itself as a player for demanding listeners: On the basis of a number of administrators will be held to blame be- statistical functions, the jukebox guides the user through a collection of music.

94 ISSUE 115 June 2010 Free Software Projects COMMUNITY

manually and automatically defined rat- ings. The automated part evaluates vari- ous factors, such as how often a track is played or if the user cancels playing a track. Various types of DJ base their lists on user-defined properties. For example, if you have a transition-based DJ, you need to tell it exactly what kind of tracks from which genres you would like to lis- ten to and in which order. Alternatively, you can simply specify what percentage of tracks of a certain style you would like to listen to and leave the order up to the DJ. Finally, the Ambience DJ has noth- ing to do with the musical genre of the same name, it simply plays songs of the same kind. To define ambiences, you as- sign specific genres to them. Figure 3: Create a manually (lower left) from your Files table. For this song, the album The Jajuk developers place much em- cover was pulled from the web. phasis on the fact that their player is platform independent. The Java program Two tree views give the user direct ac- shows you background information on will run on , Windows, and Mac cess to the filesystem or to a hierarchical the band or album currently playing – OS X systems. A Java webstart version structure organized by artist and album. both courtesy of the free encyclopedia. runs without installation for users who Alternatively, the Jajuk interface will Finally, the Statistics view presents a want to try before they install. juxtapose existing albums. If needed, the graphical analysis of your music collec- The Jajuk team is looking for support player automatically creates , tion (Figure 3). Users can freely arrange to help with ongoing development. Right with your most frequently played songs, and combine these views. now, they don’t have enough Mac OS X current new entries, or tracks from a users willing to test the automatic juke- specific genre. Alternatively, users can Turntable Statistics box on their systems, but Linux users are compile manual collections. In the Jajuk picks up the idea of fully auto- also welcome to create packages for Player view, Jajuk shows you the text mated playlist creation and adds a whole their distributions, enhance the some- and album cover for the track currently new aspect. Users can create virtual DJs what Spartan documentation, or trans- playing. The player searches the web, or that provide musical entertainment. To late the program into their local lan- your disk, for the cover image; images do so, the DJs randomly create playlists guage. n from ID3 tags are not currently sup- on the basis of certain rules. Users can ported. define a quality standard for their tracks INFO Jajuk developers have also integrated in line with Jajuk’s internal rating sys- [1] SourceForge: Wikipedia access. The Information tab tem, which in turn is a combination of http://www.​­ sourceforge.​­ net​­ [2] Geeknet: http://geek.​­ net​­ [3] PGP Corporation: http://www.​­ pgp.​­ com​­ [4] SourceForge announcement of blocking of IP addresses: http://sourceforge.​­ net/​­ blog/​­ clarifying​­ ‑sourceforgenets‑denial‑of‑site‑ac‑ cess‑for‑certain‑persons‑in‑accor‑ dance‑with‑us‑law [5] SourceForge blog entry on remov- ing blocking: http://​­sourceforge.​­net/​ ­blog/some‑good‑news‑sourceforge‑​­ removes‑blanket‑blocking [6] Jajuk: http://www.​­ jajuk.​­ info​­ [7] Amarok: http://amarok.​­ .​­ org​­ [8] JuK homepage: http://​­developer.​ ­kde.org/​­ ~wheeler/​­ juk.​­ html​­ [9] Last.fm: http://www.​­ last.​­ fm​­ Figure 4: The Jajuk statistics view gives you statistical information on your music collection.

June 2010 ISSUE 115 95