______ _ _ ______ _ _
(_____ \(_) | | (_____ \(_) | |
_____) )_ __| |_____ ____ _____) )_ __| |_____ ____
| __ /| |/ _ | ___ |/ ___) | __ /| |/ _ | ___ |/ ___)
| | \ \| ( (_| | ____| | | | \ \| ( (_| | ____| |
|_| |_|_|\____|_____)_| |_| |_|_|\____|_____)_|
_______ _ _
(_______) | | _ (_)
_____ _ _ ___ | | _ _ _| |_ _ ___ ____
| ___)| | | / _ \| || | | (_ _) |/ _ \| _ \
| |_____\ V / |_| | || |_| | | |_| | |_| | | | |
|_______)\_/ \___/ \_)____/ \__)_|\___/|_| |_|
Richard Stallman's rider has been a cause of amusement, bemusement and
confusion for many conference and lecture organisers who have hosted him.
It has even drawn the attention of the press[0].
But what is the story behind this complex beast? When were certain clauses
added, and why? We hope that with enough data regarding when modifications
were made, we may be able to shed some light on the why's.
If you have a copy of RMS's rider we would love to include it in this archive.
You can mail me a copy personally if you do not want your identity attached to
this project. I can be e-mailed at: David.Dolphin at skynet.ie
If you want to upload a copy via github please do the following:
==Preparation==
You most likely received the rider via e-mail. Copy the full text of the rider
to a text file. Name the file after the date you received the mail, in the
format yyyymmdd.txt .
Please ensure that you strip any mail headers. If the mail was forwarded to you
remove the forwarding headers and any signatures. If the rider was included in
a reply then remove any opening angle brackets and whitespace from the start of
each line (it's trivial to do this in vi(m) with :%s/^\s*\(>\s*\)*// ). Trim
all blank lines from the start and end of the file. See examples of well
formatted riders in the fulltext folder.
==Fork + Pull==
Github are able to describe the process of merging a change in, far better than
we can. See their docs[1].
When you have a local repo set up you want to run:
./build.sh 20050101.txt
where 20050101.txt is the name of your full rider. The build script will insert
the relevant diffs for you in the diffs directory.
==License==
Curiously, I've never seen a GFDL tag attached to RMS's rider. As such I assume
that all fulltext riders are Copyright of RMS, as he is the author. Unless you
consider the rider to be a part of the speaking engagement, for which RMS would
have been paid. In that case it may be fair to assume that the riders are part
of a work for hire, and without explict declaration of copyright each rider is
copyright of the organisation who hosted the event.
The code in build.sh is licensed under a BSD license.
The text in this file is public domain.
[0] http://gizmodo.com/5853729/please-do-not-buy-richard-stallman-a-parrot-and-other-rules
[1] http://help.github.com/send-pull-requests/