Chris Hermansen

7191 points
Chris Hermansen portrait Temuco Chile
Vancouver, Canada

Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.

On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.

Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.

Authored Comments

Hello again bergentroll. A helpful Bandcamp person responded to my query by stating that multiple keyword searches aren't supported but offered a workaround:

What I usually suggest (and have been known to do myself on occasion) is to use a site specific Google search instead by adding "site:bandcamp.com" to your Google search query like so:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abandcamp.com+%22creative+commons…

Thanks for the very detailed and informative comments, bergentroll.

I've written to bandcamp to ask about combining tags in search. let's see what comes back!

On lack of licensing info on archive.org; just my luck the few I tried had licenses. I've gone back to check and now found some that don't state their terms. Perhaps there is a default - if the artist doesn't specify, then it's XXXYYYZZZ?

I had not downloaded anything from musopen; just listened to clips and looked at music. I don't like the constant upselling from behind (maybe the same as you); I'd rather they laid out "site terms of use" transparently and up-front.

With respect to the NC license, I agree that it's problematic with its blanket prohibition of commercial intent. As the link you provide points out, there may be an entire category of "commercial intent" that SHOULD be permitted (for example, distributing for free but covering the cost of storage media). On the flip side, I can see a musician thinking "ok I'll let anyone listen to this, give copies to their friends to listen to, whatever, but since I'm not making any money from doing this, I don't want anyone else to make money from it either". Granted that's contrary to the spirit of "true libre", but (in my opinion at least) it's understandable.

Great comments, again thank you!