While I was in the process of editing this article my good friend and co-founder Max Ogden told me he had just been asked to take down http://archive.couchdb.org, an IRC log and search utility he wrote for the IRC and Mailing List messages of the CouchDB project. [strike]It's unclear which esoteric Apache rule this tool violates, other than being useful and not being hosting at Apache, but[strike] he was told it's a "privacy violation" which is odd considering it only logs public IRC and Mailing List messages.
[Update] It has been clarified that the request to take down archive.couchdb.org was made by an ASF committer, possibly with the support of other #couchdb users, but is not a violation of ASF rules and the request was made on their own behalf and not the ASF. The only policy that has been metioned is the freenode guidlines which caution against logging but do not ban it outright.
Thank you for your comments.
This isn't censorship. If I send you a private email and ask you not to publish it, that is not censorship. If I prevent you from publishing your own emails, that is censorship. I am speaking on behalf of the channel when I ask other people to remove private IRC logs. We could publish the old logs, but we would need to get every person who's spoke in the channel in the last year to consent to them, or else redact those lines.
Agreed. But just because it is a public channel does not mean that it is publicly archived. Whether or not a channel is "on the record" or "off the record" is another matter entirely. Freenode advises that channels notify users that a channel has public logs. We have never done that, so it is unreasonable to assume that every person who spoke in the channel is okay with the logs being made public.
Yes, I guess my example is flawed.
In real life, you can be in a public situation, and a nosey person can come to sit next to you and start recording your conversation, or taking notes. It's flawed because in real life, this behaviour is very obvious, and allows you to compensate for it.
On IRC, where any one of the hundreds of nicks could be a logging bot, you have to rely on network convention and trust. In our case, we have never advertised that we archive the logs and publish them, and so doing so at this point would break that bond of trust.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that everything you say there has to be permanently on the public record.
This isn't censorship, as I explained above.
We also have private mailing lists, opt-outs for Google's cache, opt-outs for the Internet Archive, and unlogged IRC channels.
I'm not, but it's my channel, so I'm going to do my best to enforce our policies.
I never said that.
I am following them, because I think they make a lot of sense. I never said I had to, against my better judgement.
I am not responsible in the sense that Freenode are going to get angry with me. I am responsible in the sense that it is my channel, and I want to run it a certain way. I was stressing this part to distance the policy, and my actions, from the Apache Software Foundation. In Mikeal's original post, he suggests that the request was made because the public archive violated some mysterious Apache policy, which is false.
Technicalities.
Can you clarify?
I have emailed Chris Schneider with a take-down request.