EU

Here's the step-by-step guide.

Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.

Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.

To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.

Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.

This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.

There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.

Europe needs a paradigm shift, not an ethical Amazon Web Services replica.

One rare topic where I strongly disagree with Bert Hubert is the need for a European Cloud.

One does not win by copying the incumbent

Whatever European clones of AWS may come to existence, they will be worse than AWS. Look at Azure and Google Cloud. These are essentially clones of AWS, each of them have own strengths and weaknesses, but on average, AWS is a clear winner.

I'd argue that the same pattern applies to many situations, and the history of S3 and Google Docs come to mind as the obvious examples.

S3 over POSIX-compatible file systems

For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. I remember the hassle of setting up Glusterfs and Ceph for a small business. It was undoubtfully a daunting task to sell POSIX-compatible filesystems as a service until Amazon rolled out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enabled so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.

Google Docs over Microsoft Office

Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original. Until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration. Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition

There's been very few laws that I followed closely, but all of them had a direct impact on my life, so I took this seriously. I didn't actually follow laws, but rather legislative processes because I either wanted a change or I was averse to it. In both cases, the object of interest was not a law itself, but its evolution.

You should already know that most laws are hand-crafted patches applied to previous laws. There are virtually no laws that are written from scratch, one notable exception is the constitution. Other laws refer to past laws.

For example, today's law that extends the powers of the Belgian intelligence service is a patch applied to the law that created the service in 1996, and it says literally this:

• Go the the article 3 of the past law and append this extra paragraph
• commit your changes in the legislative branch
• push to the executive branch

If you go and search for the original law, you won't find it that easily, because laws were digitized back to 1998, while the original law dates from 1996. If you are lucky, you'll have free online access to the so-called 'consolidated' version of the law. That is, a version with all the patches applied. However:

Here is an excerpt of the Legal aspects of free and open source software workshop notes. Every phrase is a masterpiece.

"When the public agency has decided that open source requirements are particularly important for a specific software acquisition case, the process described in this section can be followed. This process would end in the agency downloading open source software itself, with no fee paid whatsoever. Separately, commercially provided services and support, if required, may be acquired by publishing calls for tender. Note that this process can be abandoned at any point - for instance, if the software cannot be found easily, or evaluated, or once downloaded is found unsuitable for any reason. At that point, the other approach described in the next section can be followed, namely, publishing a call for tender for open source software."

Remember my story about Neelie Kroes hacking EU-Azerbaijan relations? I made a Freedom of Information request to DG Connect, and they replied that there is no forensic report whatsoever that studied this "hacking" attempt. We may thus safely assume that there was no hacking whatsoever. See the attached reply below.