[sf-lug] Introduction

[Asheesh Laroia]

I've been coming to the last couple of SF-LUG meetings, so I thought I'd 
introduce myself to the list.  I'm a technology intern at Creative Commons 
this summer, and I'm heading back to Rochester, NY, on August 12.

Creative Commons is an SF-based non-profit that offers licenses to content 
creators in much the same way that the Free Software foundation offers 
licenses to software creators: to build a commonly available, 
usable-without-asking-permission body of work the community can build 
upon.  Our website is at http://creativecommons.org/.  We offer more 
degrees of freedom than FSF, believing strongly in creators' choices as to 
how much control they want to retain.  The project was founded by Larry 
Lessig of Stanford, if any of you know the name.

One neat thing we offer is a search portal for freely-reusable content; 
that's available at http://creativecommons.org/find/.

I've been working in Python mostly.  Lately I've had to cross-reference 
Squid logs against Apache ones to build a profile of how people are using 
our search tools.  My major project has been querying search engines to 
see how our licenses are being used and building a flexible reporting 
engine for that data.  All the work I've done is available in the cctools 
SourceForge repository under the GPL version 2; I'll mail the list once 
more when the results of our license usage survey are on the Web.

Also, I wanted to say thanks to the gracious soul who drove me back from 
the BayLISA event at Yahoo! last week.  I lost your email address, so 
please email me off-list. (-:

In early September I'll be returning to university in Baltimore.  I'm on 
the board of http://www.acm.jhu.edu/ , and we also plan to run a Software 
Freedom Day event; hopefully we can cross-pollinate ideas!

-- Asheesh.

-- 
You learn to write as if to someone else because NEXT YEAR YOU WILL BE
"SOMEONE ELSE."