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GNU is Not Unix Open Source Software Entertainment

MediaGoblin 0.7.0 "Time Traveler's Delight" Released 73

paroneayea (642895) writes "The GNU MediaGoblin folks have put out another release of their free software media hosting platform, dubbed 0.7.0: Time Traveler's Delight. The new release moves closer to federation by including a new upload API based on the Pump API, a new theme labeled "Sandy 70s Speedboat", metadata features, bulk upload, a more responsive design, and many other fixes and improvements. This is the first release since the recent crowdfunding campaign run with the FSF which was used to bring on a full time developer to focus on federation, among other things."
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MediaGoblin 0.7.0 "Time Traveler's Delight" Released

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  • Eh, what? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Can you add more buzzwords in the summary please? It's too easy to read.

  • I can't play the video so I'm not quite sure what kind of media platform it is...other than it can't handle the /. effect.

  • by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2014 @04:19PM (#47759987)

    MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      There needs to be an "open source project bullshit bingo".

    • Your post is more informative than the whole summary.

      • If you would have clicked the link to the product page you would see that the op copied it from there. The very first line of the content.
    • The difference between what you wrote and what the summary said: "their free software media hosting platform" is that you give some examples. I don't think that justifies a title of "because the summary won't tell you".

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Is this spam? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NoImNotNineVolt ( 832851 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2014 @04:40PM (#47760137) Homepage
    The last time this paroneayea fellow posted a comment on slashdot was Sunday February 10, 2013.

    Since then, it's been nothing but a bunch of story submissions, mostly about MediaGoblin. I wouldn't consider paroneayea to be a member of the slashdot community, and the singleminded focus on MediaGoblin suggests some undisclosed relationship with MediaGoblin.
    • Mediagoblin put out a release. It doesn't really matter who brought it to the attention of Slashdot. This is news that the members of the tech community may want to know. In fact, I hadn't even heard of Mediagoblin until today. Perhaps there is some relationship between the poster and the project. So what? Were you under the impression that people involved in a project cannot post submissions? Would you be complaining if Ingo Molnar, Linus Torvalds, or Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted a link to a story ab
      • Would you be complaining if Ingo Molnar, Linus Torvalds, or Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted a link to a story about the Linux kernel?

        Yes, I would be, if they're not members of the slashdot community. Last I checked, this was supposed to be a community site, where the content is submitted by the community.

        If you have no issue with this being an advertising platform where arbitrary people from across the world can drop in to advertise their products (free or otherwise) in the name of community interest, then so be it. Personally, that's not what I thought slashdot was. Maybe I was wrong.

        • by swv3752 ( 187722 )

          Are you new here? Your ID would indicate otherwise, but your attitude seems incongruous.

          I fully expect there to be postings about interesting Free Software products. (And something from the GNU project is definitely Free Software).

        • by Anonymous Coward
          News for nerds. Stuff that matters. Nothing in there that says, only posted by people with greater than x number of comments, or, only posted by members whose user ID is less than y. If it is cool, post it. If it makes it through the fire hose, it's worthy. So shut the fuck up.
        • You are quite wrong on a number of levels, and seem to think that one has to have an account to submit a story. This is a community of sorts, but there are also plent of lurkers and people who come and go. None of that matters, because the other mistake you are making is believing that people "post" stories (i.e. "drop in to advertise their products".) News and links to news / project announcements get submitted. They get reviewed. I don't always agree with what gets posted, and I wouldn't expect you t
          • None of that matters, because the other mistake you are making is believing that people "post" stories (i.e. "drop in to advertise their products".) News and links to news / project announcements get submitted.

            I refer you to the post you replied to, where I said: "Last I checked, this was supposed to be a community site, where the content is submitted by the community."
            My original post on the subject also clearly talks about "a bunch of story submissions, mostly about MediaGoblin", so I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps you're replying to the wrong post?

            judging a message by the nature of the messenger is just flat stupid

            Sure, and the fable of the boy who cried wolf seeks to teach young children not that people judge a message by the nature of the messenger, but that

            • "Perhaps you're replying to the wrong post?"

              No. I'm defininately replying to the guy who spewed a bunch of ridiculous drivel, compaining that some people should be able to suggest stories and other news items to slashdot and others should not. The same post that now has numerous people trying to explain to yo why your post was idiotic.

              "Sure, and the fable of the boy who cried wolf seeks to teach young children not that people judge a message by the nature of the messenger, but that wolves eat sheep."

              Take

              • No. I'm defininately replying to the guy who spewed a bunch of ridiculous drivel, compaining that some people should be able to suggest stories and other news items to slashdot and others should not. The same post that now has numerous people trying to explain to yo why your post was idiotic.

                You're displaying an unwillingness to admit that your accusation was mistaken. I suppose the name-calling is intended to distract me from that? In any case, I don't remember ever making any claims about who "should be able to suggest stories" and who should not. I was merely informing readers about the submitter of this story. I did explicitly state my assumptions about the nature of this site, although I don't see how you could mistake that for a value judgement regarding certain submitters.

                Take the boy who cried wolf, change it so there really is a wolf every time, and let me know what that story teaches.

                I suppose such

                • "That's a strong argument. Actually, I'm kidding; you've left the realm of reason and turned instead to rhetoric."

                  You never entered the realm of reason, so it didn't make much sense to stay there to try and communicate with you now did it. I think by now you realize what an idiot you actually are for posting what you did, and are now trying to save fae, but even if you haven't figured it out yet I don't really care since it is pretty clear you relish idiocy above reason. Cue the "OMG ad hominem Blah Blah B

    • I'm not sure being an active participant on an open-source project like this counts as "undisclosed relationship".
      • I'm not sure being an active participant on an open-source project like this counts as "undisclosed relationship".

        In a literal sense, it most definitely does. Being a participant on an open-source project is inarguably a relationship of some sort. If this relationship isn't disclosed, it's an undisclosed relationship.

        Whether or not such an undisclosed relationship matters in any meaningful sense, well, that's a subjective matter. I'd guess that it probably doesn't matter to most people. The responses I've gotten so far would corroborate that. Most people seem to think it matters so little that they're upset with me f

    • Undisclosed?

      • undisclosed, adj., not revealed or made known publicly.
        • The definition I found was:

          Not disclosed; kept secret.

          I didn't know it was kept secret.

          • Did you also not know that it was not disclosed? Or are you always this dense?
            • I have seen it on different places, so I tend to think it was disclosed. Maybe I'm always this dense. Also, I'm not a native speaker, and I may be losing some connotations and meanings, but I did not thing something to be disclosed has to be explained every time in the same page.

              I don't know if it's my denseness, or my poor English skills, but I interpreted that when you used the word "undisclosed" you wanted to imply he was purposely keeping secret his affiliations.

              • I interpreted that when you used the word "undisclosed" you wanted to imply he was purposely keeping secret his affiliations.

                I don't know if he was keeping secret his affiliations purposely or incidentally. I only know that none of paroneayea's submitted stories about MediaGoblin (of which this is the fifth consecutive one since 2013) have mentioned any affiliation whatsoever. Therefore, as far as slashdot story submissions go, there has been no disclosed relationship between paroneayea and MediaGoblin, despite his posting history suggesting otherwise. All I'm saying is that paroneayea seems to be affiliated with MediaGoblin, yet

                • paroneayea is Christopher Allan Webber, the core developer.

                  • As I suspected. See, I didn't mean to suggest that there's some ulterior motives or malicious intent in not explicitly disclosing his relationship to the project. I merely wanted to convey that there is often an expectation of full disclosure of relationships, and that (especially in industry) even potential (although clearly nonexistant) conflicts of interest are disclosed simply in the name of transparency and good faith. For example, let's look at this arbitrary post [slashdot.org], where a researcher feels compelled t
  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2014 @04:58PM (#47760275) Homepage

    The Slashdot article doesn't tell me what MediaGoblin does, or what it's for. Nether does the MediaGoblin site. The documentation, in typical Gnu syle, starts out with "how to participate" and continues with installation instructions.

    It's sort of like Wordpress, but with different features and support for streaming media. There's a list of sites that use it. [mediagoblin.org] Of the public sites listed, all but one are demos of MediaGoblin. The first site on the list that isn't a a demo and works is this set of baby pictures. [haise.ca] There's one site that lets you upload stuff. [goblinrefuge.com] It's a collection of uploaded pictures with no organization.

    This seems to be a publishing system for people with nothing to say.

    • > This seems to be a publishing system for people with nothing to say.

      Facebook and Twitter are now officially concerned about this newfangled competition.

    • This is one thing that annoys me with a lot of projects. You may have been working on it for weeks, months or even years, but always assume it's completely unknown to new visitors. The very first thing you need to do is describe on the front page of your Website what your project is.

      • by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2014 @06:35PM (#47760989) Journal

        The very first thing you need to do is describe on the front page of your Website what your project is

        In non-technical terms. Everyday language an average computer user can understand, free of jargon. More than one or two sentences, with pictures. Think extra long user story written by an end user who is going to use the output, not the one installing it. You can have as many other web pages you wish to get esoteric with.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The Slashdot article doesn't tell me what MediaGoblin does, or what it's for. Nether does the MediaGoblin site.

      The VERY FIRST SENTENCE IN THE SUMMARY includes:

      free software media hosting platform

      The VERY FIRST LINE OF TEXT on the MediaGoblin site explains:

      MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.

      What websites were you reading?

  • by slaker ( 53818 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2014 @07:29PM (#47761295)

    I have a number of Plex servers. Plex also allows me to publish images, music and video online, albeit to a select group of people. Were I seeking a wider audience, I'd have the options of Vimeo or Xtube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp or Flickr to put my content online.

    I also have a bunch of web servers. What's stopping me from using the dozens of web content galleries, if I'm going to be using my own disk space and bandwidth instead of Google's or Yahoo's?

    Seriously, what is this doing that those things aren't?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It's free, under your own control, you can make it private (try THAT on facebook) and doesn't require shitty licenses like Plex does. Some people value free & freedom more than you apparently.

    • From a brief glance, Plex appears to be for streaming existing content. MediaGoblin is for hosting content you create.

      Were I seeking a wider audience, I'd have the options of Vimeo or Xtube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp or Flickr to put my content online.

      And if you don't want to turn your own content over to third parties, and thereby be subject to their licenses, and often arbitrary censorship/takedown decisions, you could use an instance of MediaGoblin to replace any or all of those services.

      What's stopping m

  • The thrust of MediaGoblin is its decentralization. The video posted here does a good job explaining what they are trying to achieve and why: MediaGoblin campaign video [mediagoblin.org].

    Since this is a 0.7 release, I don't expect they have accomplished all the states goals yet, but the progress is promising.

  • It is still kind of hard to get a sense of what this project is. To be honest, I didn't even fully get it until I'd managed to get it installed and play with it a little. This is my understanding of the project, someone who is more closely involved can probably correct any errors I might be making here.

    MediaGoblin is a backend system for hosting "media". Part of the big idea is that "media" potentially includes any kind of thing you want to host. It's first incarnation was really just for photos/still images (like piwigo or gallery), but now also handles video, audio, "raw" images, PDF, .stl 3d models, Ascii Art, and apparently blog-style HTML text. I'm not sure if it's planned, but I'd expect it to also end up with support for .svg graphics, additional document formats (.odf, etc) and various others as interest develops. I, personally, would love to see .epub support.

    MediaGoblin's main purpose is to take uploaded media and catalog it, tag it, generate "thumbnail"images, and perform any additional processing needed (such as producing legally-free format media for streaming and/or download - this IS a GNU-affiliated project after all.) It also handles authentication, access control, generation of the HTML for the pages that present the media, and so on. It is NOT (really) the frontend - they assume you have your own webserver. (There is a minimal python web-server script included can be used but it's not really intended for more than basic testing.

    There is currently a focus on developing federation, meaning people can run their own individual hosts with their own login accounts, but be able to use and share media between different hosts without needing separate accounts on all of them. This will make it easy to spread out the hosting and mirroring of media across different servers in different places, which will be useful for load-spreading (like bittorrent) and for "censorship-resistance". (For a large organization with a worldwide spread of MediaGoblin instances, it could be like a Streisand-effect amplifier...)

    The buzzword version of the description goes something like this: it's a unified (because this one system handles more or less all types of "content"), decentralized (because multiple independent servers can allow data-sharing and authentication with each other to prevent loss of one server from stopping access to media), federated (that's the buzzword for "one server can be told to trust another server's authentication" thing) system for hosting any "content" (or "media" if you prefer) that you want.

    The short version is that it does the same sort of thing as flickr(/piwigo/gallery/picasa...), youtube(/vimeo, etc), soundcloud(/jamendo etc), wordpress, and various others, but it does it all in one interface in a way that the owners have control over so that (for example) some buttnugget can't shut off your video by just telling Google that the sound of birds in the background of your video is pirated music [boingboing.net].

    It'll currently mostly be of interest to people who are capable of operating their own servers rather than "end-users", though it seems obvious that the expectation is that people will end up using this system to set up hosting for said "end-users", whether for the general public or for use by members of some organization or other. I could imagine a university using it for inter-departmental or inter-campus media sharing and hosting, or an activist organization setting up federated instances in several countries for storing and sharing media, or a commercial start-up basing a multi-media Jamendo-style hosting company on the platform, for example.

    My personal opinion: in its current state it's still too difficult install to be worthwhile for, say, a photo-gallery site (piwigo was a much simpler install on my existing webserver), but I don't know of anything similar for hosting video, audio,

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