Stet (software)

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The correct title of this article is stet (software). The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

stet is a free software package for gathering comments about a text document via a webpage. It was written in early 2006 by Free Software Foundation (FSF) for a public consultation for the updating of the GNU General Public License - a free software licence which defined terms under which a large portion of free software could be distributed.

For someone to add a comment, they must select a few words or a sentence from the text before entering their comment. This requirement, it was hoped, would increase the specificity in comments about the document. Also, all the previous comments are visible to each user, and heavily commented-on parts are highlighted by light to dark color-coding of the text according to the number of the comments.

This design is fairly unique, and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation has high hopes for it:

The way in which we use highlighting in a document to represent the comments, the intensity of the commenting, to allow people to navigate the commenting on a single document I actually think is a useful collaboration tool for 21st century public deliberation. We noticed that some people are beginning to pick up the software and make other use of it.

— Eben Moglen ^[1]

So we’re attempting to create a kind of 21st century consultative structure in which people from all around the world in different social locations can use the net to cooperate with one another to discuss the terms on which they live. And the GPLv3 process is in my mind, therefore, a very primitive example of a kind of social activity which I think is going to be much more common in the 21st century – a kind of global democratic event.

— Eben Moglen ^[2]

stet is implemented in JavaScript, XSLT and Perl, using parts of Request Tracker. It was developed by Orion Montoya for the Free Software Foundation for the drafting of version three of the GNU General Public License, via the webportal gplv3.fsf.org.