Open Source Against SOPA and PIPA
It’s been hard to go online this week and not encounter protests against the SOPA and PIPA laws which the U.S. Congress has been considering.
There was a huge amount of pushback from online organizations, and open source projects led the way. Here’s how some of the biggest reacted:
WordPress.com
WordPress.com doesn’t mention the word SOPA on their frontpage, but instead blacked out the area where blog posts normally appear. Click on the Censored boxes and you’ll be taken to http://sopastrike.com/strike. They have also written a blog post on their protest.
WordPress.org
WordPress.org has an even more comprehensive protest than WordPress.com. The entire frontpage is blacked out and you need to scroll all the way to the bottom to access the main site. There’s a list of plugins which will take your site offline and a blog post explaining their position.
Joomla
Joomla.org has a banner across the top of their site and a blog post explaining their opposition. A template was available to help you join the strike.
PHP
PHP.net has completely shut down their site frontpage and replaced it with an anti-SOPA message. There’s no way to reach the main PHP site today from the frontpage, but you can access internal pages directly.
Free Software Foundation
The FSF has provided much of the legal thought and support behind the success of open source projects. It’s not surprising that they took a strong stand against the law and entirely blacked out: FSF.org.
Mozilla
Mozilla.org went black on their frontpage but allowed people to proceed to the main site via a footer link.
Other Projects
- Drupal made a SOPA protest module available.
- Concrete5 provided a theme.
[url=http://PHP.net]PHP.net[/url] is functioning fine. Only the home page is down. All of the other pages, including the auto-search feature work fine. To see what I mean, try going to [url=http://www.php.net/strpos]www.php.net/strpos[/url] it does work…
Thanks Anthony – I updated the [url=http://PHP.net]PHP.net[/url] details.
Great things. Sadly Drupal and Joomla popped in quite late. Too late too few imho. But they reacted and that’s a positive. Thanks for the overview Steve.
Can’t help mentioning [url=http://opentranslators.org]opentranslators.org[/url] who took action and made some ‘noise’ out there too 😉