stet

Stet is a software system designed to collect, organize and grok comments on texts made available online for public comment. It is primarily an AJAX application, written in Javascript and Perl. (Calling it a "Web 2.0" system would be anachronistic at this point, as the original stet was started in 2005 before the term was coined; however, it is a pretty Web-2.0-y application already, and will be moreso soon (see below).) It uses the Request Tracker (RT) system for tracking comments and responses and resolutions to comments.

The Software Freedom Law Center designed and implemented stet originally for its client, the Free Software Foundation. The first instance of stet ran the GPLv3 (and related licenses) comment process.

Stet was originally written by Orion Montoya on contract with the Software Freedom Law Center. The timeline on this site has more-or-less accurate dates for the historical development, if you are interested in that. Work has now picked up for the Google SoC student working on making stet better (see below).

Copyright and License

Most of stet is copyrighted by the Software Freedom Law Center. The license of stet is AGPLv3 plus an exception to allow linking with the Request Tracker (RT) system. The license notice is as follows:

This software gives you freedom; it is licensed to you under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License, along with the additional permission in the following paragraph.

This notice constitutes a grant of such permission as is necessary to combine or link this software, or a modified version of it, with Request Tracker (RT), published by Jesse Vincent and Best Practical Solutions, LLC, or a derivative work of RT, and to copy, modify, and distribute the resulting work. RT is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

Current Situation

SFLC does not currently have staff assigned to work on stet, but we are happy to host this Trac site, and hope that other developers become interested. Also, via the Software Freedom Conservancy (an organization that works closely with the SFLC), we have a Google SoC student working on making stet better this summer!

Mailing List

If you would like to work on stet, or wish to follow its progress, please contact and/or join the Stet Developers email list <stet-dev@lists.softwarefreedom.org, which is a Mailman list, with a web interface.

Source Repository

The canonical source repository for stet is the SVN tree hosted here. You can browse the source online or check it out anonymously:

svn co http://code.softwarefreedom.org/svn/stet

IRC

Stet developers usually congregate on #conservancy on irc.freenode.net, since the Conservancy is the organizational sponsor for the Google SoC this year. We may eventually make a #stet. BradleyKuhn? wants to but JoshuaGay? and MatthewHarrison? talked him out of it. ;)