[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]
On last Thursday, Christoph Hellwig and his legal counsel attended a hearing in Hellwig's VMware case that Conservancy currently funds. Harald Welte, world famous for his GPL enforcement work in the early 2000s, also attended as an observer and wrote an excellent summary. I'd like to highlight a few parts of his summary, in the context of Conservancy's past litigation experience regarding the GPL.
I've been making the following social observation frequently in my talks and presentations for the last two years. While I suppose it's rather forward of me to do so, I've decide to name this principle:
For some time now, this paradoxical principle appears to hold: each day, more lines of freely licensed code exist than ever before in human history; yet, it also becomes increasingly more difficult each day for users to successfully avoid proprietary software while completing their necessary work on a computer.
I believe this paradox is primarily driven by the cooption of software freedom by companies that ostensibly support Open Source, but have the (now extremely popular) open source almost everything philosophy.
[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]
I've had the pleasure and the privilege, for the last 20 years, to be either a volunteer or employee of the two most important organizations for the advance of software freedom and users' rights to copy, share, modify and redistribute software. In 1996, I began volunteering for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and worked as its Executive Director from 2001–2005. I continued as a volunteer for the FSF since then, and now serve as a volunteer on FSF's Board of Directors. I was also one of the first volunteers for Software Freedom Conservancy when we founded it in 2006, and I was the primary person doing the work of the organization as a volunteer from 2006–2010. I've enjoyed having a day job as a Conservancy employee since 2011.
I have probably spent more time dealing with the implications and real-world scenarios of copyleft in the embedded device space than anyone. I'm one of a very few people charged with the task of enforcing the GPL for Linux, and it's been well-known for a decade that GPL violations on Linux occur most often in embedded devices such as mobile hand-held computers (aka “phones”) and other such devices.
This experience has left me wondering if I should laugh or cry at the news coverage and pundit FUD that has quickly come forth from Google's decision to move from the Apache-licensed Java implementation to the JDK available from Oracle.
[ This post was crossposted on Conservancy's website. ]
I first met Ian Murdock gathered around a table at some bar, somewhere, after some conference in the late 1990s. Progeny Linux Systems' founding was soon to be announced, and Ian had invited a group from the Debian BoF along to hear about “something interesting”; the post-BoF meetup was actually a briefing on his plans for Progeny.
Many of the details (such as which conference and where on the planet it was), I've forgotten, but I've never forgotten Ian gathering us around, bending my ear to hear in the loud bar, and getting one of my first insider scoops on something big that was about to happen in Free Software. Ian was truly famous in my world; I felt like I'd won the jackpot of meeting a rock star.
Sky Arts have made a documentary, following Shane as he gets his new dental implants. The documentary, entitled Shane MacGowan: A... Read more »
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If you've noticed my blog a little silent the past few weeks, I've been spending my blogging time in December writing blogs on Conservancy's site for Conservancy's 2015: Year in Review series.
So far, these are the ones that were posted:
I have something to say that I'm sure everyone is going to consider controversial. I've been meaning to say it for some time, and I realize that it's going to get some annoyance from all sides of this debate. Conservancy may lose Supporters over this, even though this is my personal blog and my personal opinion, and views expressed here aren't necessarily Conservancy's views. I've actually been meaning to write this publicly for a year. I just have to say it now, because there's yet another event on this issue caused yet another a war of words in our community.
[ A version of this blog post was crossposted on Conservancy's blog. ]
I'm quite delighted with my career choice. As an undergraduate and even in graduate school, I still expected my career extend my earlier careers in the software industry: a mixture of software developer and sysadmin. I'd probably be a DevOps person now, had I stuck with that career path.
Instead, I picked the charity route: which (not financially, but work-satisfaction-wise) is like winning a lottery. There are very few charities related to software freedom, and frankly, if (like me) you believe in universal software freedom and reject proprietary software entirely, there are two charities for you: the Free Software Foundation, where I used to work, and Software Freedom Conservancy, where I work now.
[ A version of this blog post was crossposted on Conservancy's blog. ]
Would software-related scandals, such as Volkswagen's use of proprietary software to lie to emissions inspectors, cease if software freedom were universal? Likely so, as I wrote last week. In a world where regulations mandate distribution of source code for all the software in all devices, and where no one ever cheats on that rule, VW would need means other than software to hide their treachery.
The issue of software freedom is, not surprisingly, not mentioned in the mainstream coverage of Volkswagen's recent use of proprietary software to circumvent important regulations that exist for the public good. Given that Volkswagen is an upstream contributor to Linux, it's highly likely that Volkswagen vehicles have Linux in them.
Thus, we have a wonderful example of how much we sacrifice at the altar of “Linux adoption”. While I'm glad for some Free Software to appear in products rather than none, I also believe that, too often, our community happily accepts the idea that we should gratefully laud any company that includes even a tiny bit of Free Software in their product, and gives a little code back, even if most of what they do is proprietary software.
[ This post was cross-posted on Conservancy's blog. ]
In this post, I discuss one example of how a choice for software freedom can cause many strange problems that others will dismiss. My goal here is to explain in gory detail how proprietary software biases in the computing world continue to grow, notwithstanding Open Source ballyhoo.
Most of you by now have probably seen Conservancy's and FSF's statements regarding the today's update to Canonical, Ltd.'s Ubuntu IP Policy. I have a few personal comments, speaking only for myself, that I want to add that don't appear in the FSF's nor Conservancy's analysis. (I wrote nearly all of Conservancy's analysis and did some editing on FSF's analysis, but the statements here I add are my personal opinions and don't necessarily reflect the views of the FSF nor Conservancy, notwithstanding that I have affiliations with both orgs.)
I'm seeing plenty of people, including some non-profit organizations along with the usual punditocracy, opining on the USA Supreme Court's denial for a writ of certiorari in the Oracle v. Google copyright infringement case. And, it's not that I expect everyone in the world to read my blog, but I'm amazed that people who should know better haven't bothered to even read the lower Court's decision, which is de-facto upheld upon denial by the Supreme Court to hear the appeal.
I've been otherwise impressed with John Oliver and his ability on Last Week Tonight to find key issues that don't have enough attention and give reasonably good information about them in an entertaining way — I even lauded Oliver's discussion of non-profit organizational corruption last year. I suppose that's why I'm particularly sad (as I caught up last weekend on an old episode) to find that John Oliver basically fell for the large patent holders' pro-software-patent rhetoric on so-called “software patents”.
Apple announced last week that its Swift programming language — a currently fully proprietary software successor to Objective C — will probably be partially released under an OSI-approved license eventually. Apple explicitly stated though that such released software will not be copylefted. (Apple's pathological hatred of copyleft is reasonably well documented.) Apple's announcement remained completely silent on patents, and we should expect the chosen non-copyleft license will not contain a patent grant. (I've explained at great length in the past why software patents are a particularly dangerous threat to programming language infrastructure.)
I watched the most recent Silicon Valley episode last night. I laughed at some parts (not as much as a usual episode) and then there was a completely unbelievable tech-related plot twist — quite out of character for that show. I was surprised.
When the credits played, my draw dropped when I saw the episode's author was Dan Lyons. Lyons (whose work has been promoted by the Linux Foundation) once compared me to a communist and a member of organized crime (in, Forbes, a prominent publication for the wealthy) because of my work enforcing the GPL.
I find that in most situations where any mishap is involved, especially with any large institutions in the picture, Hanlon’s razor tends to apply, and is a good working model to base assumptions on.
This has been the case with most Internet censorship debates in Poland, for instance. Assuming malice really wasn’t helping to get our point across.
This is why I am flabbergasted with NSA’s (and the rest of the gang, too) insistence on gathering as much data as they can. Sure, for most regular Jacks or Jills, “you need the haystack to find the needle” might sound about right. A bit more observant person might however do a double-take: “wait, what?”. When I’m searching for a needle, the last thing I want or need is an ever-larger haystack. Something’s fishy.
I’ve been ramping up my running lately. It’s a type of meditation. Sometimes I just run. Other times I run and listen to music or podcasts.
Yesterday I went for a tempo run in the rain. I listened to the album, “Rave On Andy White” and entered my …
I know this decision is tough, as all the candidates in the list deserve an award. However, I hope that you'll chose to vote for my friend and colleague, Karen Sandler, for the 2015 Red Hat Women in Open Source Community Award. Admittedly, most of Karen's work has been for software freedom, not Open Source (i.e., her work has been community and charity-oriented, not for-profit oriented). However, giving her an “Open Source” award is a great way to spread the message of software freedom to the for-profit corporate Open Source world.
My Ma recently arrived home in chilly Totnes. I loved having her staying with us for the tail end of our summer.
We had lots of fun cycling and walking around the beaches, town and village. I had been worried she’d be too hot but I think it was …
It's amazing what we let for-profit companies and their trade associations get away with. Today, Joyent announced the Node.js Foundation, in conjunction with various for-profit corporate partners and Linux Foundation (which is a 501(c)(6) trade association under the full control of for-profit companies).
Joyent and their corporate partners claim that the Node.js Foundation will
be neutral
and provide open governance
. Yet, they don't
even say what corporate form the new organization will take, nor present
its by-laws. There's no way that anyone can know if the organization will
be neutral and provide open governance without at least that information.
It was the Saltwater Freshwater Festival yesterday. Suzy and I enjoyed it, we were volunteering to help out. Rodney and Agrippa took Zaida with them. I found myself hosting the tent for the tribal elders. A french woman kept coming into the tent and leaving her kids there for me …