 | |
Type of site | Community site and social network site for free software developers |
|---|---|
| Created by | Raph Levien |
| URL | www |
| Launched | 1999 |
| Current status | inactive |
Advogato was an online community and social networking site dedicated to free software development and created by Raph Levien. In 2007, Steve Rainwater took over maintenance and new development from Raph. In 2016, Rainwater's running instance was shut down and backed up to archive.org.
Advogato described itself as "the free software developer's advocate." Advogato was an early pioneer of blogs, formerly known as "online diaries", and one of the earliest social networking websites. Advogato combined the most recent entries from each user's diary together into a single continuous feed called the recentlog, directly inspiring the creation of the Planet aggregator somewhat later.[ citation needed ]
Several high-profile members of the free software and open source software movements were users of the site, including Richard M. Stallman, Eric Raymond, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, and Jamie Zawinski.
Because Advogato was the first website to use a robust, attack-resistant trust metric and to release the underlying code for that trust mechanism under a free software license, it has been the basis of numerous research papers on trust metrics and social networking (see the list below for specific examples). Advogato's early adoption of an XML-RPC interface led to its use as an example of how such interfaces could be used by web programmers. [1]
Advogato saw use as a testbed for social networking and semantic web technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, who was an Advogato user himself, included Advogato in a short list of sites notable for their early adoption of the FOAF as a method of exporting user RDF URIs. [2]
The motivating idea for Advogato was to try out in practice Levien's ideas about attack-resistant trust metrics, having users certify each other in a kind of peer review process and use this information to avoid the abuses that plague open community sites. Levien observed that his notion of attack-resistant trust metric was fundamentally very similar to the PageRank algorithm used by Google to rate article interest. In the case of Advogato, the trust metric was designed to include all individuals who could reasonably be considered members of the Free Software and Open Source communities while excluding others.
The implementation of this trust metric was through an Apache module called mod_virgule. mod_virgule is free software, licensed under the GPL and written in C.
Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato were gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution was faulty. [3]
Misunderstanding of the purpose of Advogato's trust metric was common, which often led to the assumption that it should exclude specific individuals on the basis that they were known cranks. [4]
Slashdot is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.
Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, for the display or printing of document pages, and the conversion between PostScript and PDF files.
Kuro5hin was a collaborative discussion website founded by Rusty Foster in 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot. Articles were created and submitted by users and submitted to a queue for evaluation. Site members could vote for or against publishing an article and once the article had reached a certain number of votes, it was published to the site or deleted from the queue. The site has been described as "a free-for-all of news and opinion written by readers". Around 2005, its membership numbered in the tens of thousands.
Pango is a text layout engine library which works with the HarfBuzz shaping engine for displaying multi-language text.
mod_perl is an optional module for the Apache HTTP server. It embeds a Perl interpreter into the Apache server. In addition to allowing Apache modules to be written in the Perl programming language, it allows the Apache web server to be dynamically configured by Perl programs. However, its most common use is so that dynamic content produced by Perl scripts can be served in response to incoming requests, without the significant overhead of re-launching the Perl interpreter for each request.
Sodipodi was an open-source vector graphics editor, discontinued in 2004. It is the predecessor to Inkscape.
A shell account is a user account on a remote server, traditionally running under the Unix operating system, which gives access to a shell via a command-line interface protocol such as telnet, SSH, or over a modem using a terminal emulator.
Nagios Core, formerly known as Nagios, is a free and open-source computer-software application that monitors systems, networks and infrastructure. Nagios offers monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications and services. It alerts users when things go wrong and alerts them a second time when the problem has been resolved.
In psychology and sociology, a trust metric is a measurement or metric of the degree to which one social actor trusts another social actor. Trust metrics may be abstracted in a manner that can be implemented on computers, making them of interest for the study and engineering of virtual communities, such as Friendster and LiveJournal.
SlashNET is a medium-sized, independently operated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Originally sponsored by Slashdot and founded in 1998, in 1999 SlashNET split off to become its own entity. A few well-known communities and projects maintain an IRC presence at SlashNET, including #g7, #totse (Totse), #idiots-club, #mefi, various Penny Arcade-related communities, #Twitterponies, and #rags. As of 2012 it is ranked in the top 40 networks by IRC.Netsplit.de, with an estimated relatively constant 1700 users, and #25/737 by SearchIRC.com.
Raphael Linus Levien is a software developer, a member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript. From 2007 until 2018, and from 2021 onwards, he was employed at Google. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He also made a computer-assisted proof system similar to Metamath: Ghilbert. In April 2016, Levien announced a text editor made as a "20% Project" : Xi.
Linux for PlayStation 2 is a kit released by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2002 that allows the PlayStation 2 console to be used as a personal computer. It included a Linux-based operating system, a USB keyboard and mouse, a VGA adapter, a PS2 network adapter, and a 40 GB hard disk drive (HDD). An 8 MB memory card is required; it must be formatted during installation, erasing all data previously saved on it, though afterwards the remaining space may be used for savegames. It is strongly recommended that a user of Linux for PlayStation 2 have some basic knowledge of Linux before installing and using it, due to the command-line interface for installation.
The Buffalo TeraStation network-attached storage series are network-attached storage devices.
Adequacy.org was a satirical web site. It featured articles on politics, religion, technology, history, and sociology, as well as the "Linux Zealot" cartoon series. The site shut down on September 11, 2002, but has since made its archives available.
A Sybil attack is a type of attack on a computer network service in which an attacker subverts the service's reputation system by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The name was suggested in or before 2002 by Brian Zill at Microsoft Research. The term pseudospoofing had previously been coined by L. Detweiler on the Cypherpunks mailing list and used in the literature on peer-to-peer systems for the same class of attacks prior to 2002, but this term did not gain as much influence as "Sybil attack".
The criticism of Linux focuses on issues concerning use of operating systems which use the Linux kernel.
Opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. In response, various mechanisms have been tried to defuse the perceived problem.
Criticism of desktop Linux is a history of comment on the perceived shortcomings of the Linux operating system when installed on desktop computers. These criticisms have been aimed at the plethora of issues and lack of consistency between Linux distributions, their usefulness and ease of use as desktop systems for general end users, driver support and issues with multi-media playback and audio development.
Desura was a digital distribution platform for the Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X platforms. The service distributed games and related media online, with a primary focus on small independent game developers rather than larger companies. Desura contained automated game updates, community features, and developer resources. The client allowed users to create and distribute game mods as well.
Twister is a decentralised, experimental peer-to-peer microblogging program. The system uses end-to-end encryption to safeguard communications. It is based on both BitTorrent- and Bitcoin-like protocols and has been likened to a distributed version of Twitter.