User:Simsimt

Welcome
Hello. My name is Usamah M. Ali. I'm a PHP developer from Sudan, which is in Africa &#x2014;in case you don't know. I hope to be helpful in internationalization and localization issues in StatusNet and other developing aspects as well.

My main work in the web is with Drupal, the open source, award-winning CMS. Now developing an interesting module for creating online debates. I'm also pretty much interested in wiki technologies, and work occasionally with MediaWiki. I like Wikipedia and think that, contrary to what some people are wishfully thinking, it is going to stay around for a very, very long time.

You can of course, find me denting using the same username (@simsimt) on identi.ca (tweeting with the same username as well).

StatusNet's openness vs. Twitter's ownership
I wholeheartedly support the openness of projects such as StatusNet. If you happen to read the terms of service of Twitter, you're almost going to be terrified. They say: "You are what you tweet", which seems more like a passage extracted from George Orwell's 1984, and few paragraphs later they explain, ironically under section "Your Rights": "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."

So in the lights (or darks) of "you are what you tweet", could the mentioned above description of users' rights be read: "...you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to own you"?

Shut up Big Twitter!