In fact, you've already met Brandon, who is the author of the email which I reposted (with his permission) a few days ago. Apparently, he decided he wasn't happy with it post-publication and attempted to "revoke" his permission, after the fact. I told him this wouldn't fly, at which point Brandon decided that I was suddenly "infringing his copyright", and went on to steal a photograph of mine which he reposted on his web site without any permission at all*.
A DMCA take-down notice persuaded him of the unreasonability of that particular course of action, but he's gone on to post no fewer than seven articles on his apparently-unread blog, and decided to get onto identi.ca, apparently purely for the purposes of harassing me. A quite entertaining flame war ensued, in which we determined that Brandon's expertise in copyright law is approximately equal to his expertise in programming**.
Given all of this, at this point I don't feel any particular obligation to go any distance to protect Brandon's anonymity, least of all from himself. I'll be posting some of Brandon's more interesting theories and statements as he's provided them (under Creative Commons license, thanks, Brandon!) in the days to come.
However I want to note that, in his latest blog entry, Brandon felt obliged to inquire, "What has Lefty contributed besides attacking free software advocates?" I provided the following response:
In response to your question about my contributions, let me give you a brief rundown.
I got Apple to make their first open source release ever, Rendezvous/Bonjour.
I’ve presented at GUADEC, the Linux Symposium, FOSTEL, Open Source in Mobile, LinuxWorld, JavaOne, InterOp, and numerous other conferences. I’ve appeared on panels at about as many, including the (invitation-only) Collaboration Summit. I’m a Fellow of the FSF-Europe, and a member of the FSF-E’s Legal and Licensing Network. I’m a member of the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board. I’ve talked about open source development, multiple times, on nationally syndicated radio.
I’ve been responsible for my organization having sponsored conferences like GUADEC (three years running now), FOSTEL and others, as well as having provided grants for open source developers to attend conferences when they couldn’t otherwise afford it.
Now, what have you contributed, Brandon?
Not only is no response on Brandon's part apparently forthcoming, but he deleted my own comment! Now, that shows character. We'll be delving more into this.
It's worth noting that Brandon is currently threatening to sue me in Canada for copyright infringement over my use of his email. I'm fervently hoping he does so: it'd be worth the trip up there just to dissect him on the stand. He's got some peculiar views on what the Canadian Copyright Act says (e.g., because of the levy on blank media, he's entitled to steal movies), and I'd be interested in hearing a judge's opinion on them.
(He should probably thank me. My posting this will likely increase the traffic on his blog by an order of magnitude or three. On the other hand, given the content there, I'm probably not really doing him any favors.)
* "Well, Alexei, it seems that one of our generals went a little...funny in the head. Y' know. Funny."—Peter Sellers as "President Merkin Muffey" in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
** When challenged, Brandon proved completely unable to answer the entry-level technical interview question, "What's the difference between a pointer and an array?"
