Reading

(Spoiler alert: spoilers regarding a 1950s science fiction short story that you may not have read appear in this blog post.)

Mitchell Baker announced today that Mozilla Corporation (or maybe Mozilla Foundation? She doesn't really say…) will begin implementing proprietary software by default in Firefox at the behest of wealthy and powerful media companies. Baker argues this serves users: that Orwellian phrasing caught my attention most.

[ Update on 2014-05-13: If you're more of a listening rather than reading type, you might enjoy the Free as in Freedom oggcast that Karen Sandler and I recorded about this topic. ]

I have a strange relationship with copyright law. Many copyright policies of various jurisdictions, the USA in particular, are draconian at best and downright vindictive at worst. For example, during the public comment period on ACTA, I commented that I think it's always wrong, as a policy matter, for copyright infringement to carry criminal penalties.

That said, much of what I do in my work in the software freedom movement is enforcement of copyleft: assuring that the primary legal tool, which defends the freedom of the Free Software, functions properly, and actually works — in the real world — the way it should.

“Open Source as Last Resort” appears to be popular this week. First, Canonical, Ltd. will finally liberate UbuntuOne server-side code, but only after abandoning it entirely. Second, Microsoft announced a plan to release its .NET compiler platform, Roslyn, under the Apache License spinning it into an (apparent, based on description) 501(c)(6) organization called the Dot Net Foundation.

Today, Conservancy announced the addition of Karen Sandler to our management team. This addition to Conservancy's staff will greatly improve Conservancy's ability to help Conservancy's many member projects.

This outcome is one I've been working towards for a long time. I've focused for at least a year on fundraising for Conservancy in hopes that we could hire a third full-time staffer. For the last few years, I've been doing basically two full-time jobs, since I've needed to give my personal attention to virtually everything Conservancy does. This obviously doesn't scale, so my focus has been on increasing capacity at Conservancy to serve more projects better.

[ Please keep in mind in reading this post that while both FSF and ">Conservancy are mentioned, and that I have leadership roles at both organizations, these opinions on ebb.org, as always, are my own and don't necessarily reflect the view of FSF and/or Conservancy. ]

Most people know I'm a fan of RMS' writing about Free Software and I agree with most (but not all) of his beliefs about software freedom politics and strategy. I was delighted to read RMS' post about LLVM on the GCC mailing list on Friday. It's clear and concise, and, as usual, I agree with most (but not all) of it, and I encourage people to read it. Meanwhile, upon reading comments on LWN on this post, I felt the need to add a few points to the discussion.

Apparently, the company that makes my hand lotion brand uses coupons.com for its coupons. The only way to print a coupon is to use a proprietary software browser plugin called “couponprinter.exe” (which presumably implements some form of “coupon DRM).

So, as for, I actually have a price, in dollars, that it cost me to avoid proprietary software. Standing up for software freedom cost me $1.50 today. :) I suppose there are some people who would argue in this situation that they have to use proprietary software, but of course I'm not one of them.

The interesting thing is that this program has a OS X and Windows version, but nothing for iOS and Android/Linux. Now, if they had the latter, it'd surely be proprietary software anyway.

On New Years Day each year Sawtell is host to the Sawtell Fun Day. This year I was on the old Garford fire engine with Alan. That’s me on the right …

[ This post of mine is cross-posted from Conservancy's blog.]

I came across this email thread this week, and it seems to me that Node.js is facing a standard decision that comes up in the life of most Open Source and Free Software projects. It inspired me to write some general advice to Open Source and Free Software projects who might be at a similar crossroads⁰. Specifically, at some point in the history of a project, the community is faced with the decision of whether the project should be housed at a specific for-profit company, or have a non-profit entity behind it instead. Further, project leaders must consider, if they persue the latter, whether the community should form its own non-profit or affiliate with one that already exists.

I read with interest Ashe Dryden's blog post entitled The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community⁰, and I agree with much of it. At least, I agree with Dryden much more than I agree with Hanson's blog post that inspired Dryden's, since Hanson's seems almost completely unaware of the distinctions between Free Software funding in non-profit and for-profit settings, and I think Dryden's criticism that Hanson's view is narrowed by “white-male in a wealthy country” privilege is quite accurate. I think Dryden does understand the distinctions of non-profit vs.

I was disturbed to read that Canonical, Ltd.'s trademark aggression, which I've been vaguely aware of for some time, has reached a new height. And, I say this as someone who regularly encourages Free Software projects to register trademarks, and to occasionally do trademark enforcement and also to actively avoid project policies that might lead to naked licensing. Names matter, and Free Software projects should strive to strike a careful balance between assuring that names mean what they are supposed to mean, and also encourage software sharing and modification at the same time.

I recently upgraded to Debian wheezy. On, Debian squeeze, I had no problem using the stock Perl module Business::PayPal::API to import PayPal transactions for Software Freedom Conservancy, via the Debian package libbusiness-paypal-api-perl.

After the wheezy upgrade, something goes wrong and it doesn't work. I reviewed some similar complaints, that seem to relate to this resolved bug, but that wasn't my problem, I don't think.

I'm thankful for Christopher Allan Webber for pointing me at this interesting post from Guillaume Lesniak, the developer of Focal (a once fully GPL'd camera application for Android/Linux), and how he was (IMO) pressured to give a proprietary license to the new CyanogenMod, Inc.

A friend of mine died last night, John was an old fellow who lived up Coro Ave. Eighty five years old he was. We became friends after he mentored Choppy and I down on the sand dunes. He was passionate about regenerating the foreshores of our local beach, he showed …

Many have been asking for my comment on the relicensing by Oracle of Berkeley DB under AGPLv3.

I ultimately just put my thoughts into a post on debian-legal in the thread discussing what Debian should do about the relicensing of BDB under AGPLv3. (There's also an alternative link to the post.

I'd like to congratulate Harald Welte on yet another great decision in the Berlin court, this time regarding a long-known GPL violator called Fantec. There are so many violations of this nature that are of course so trivially easy to find; it's often tough to pick which one to take action on. Harald has done a great job being selective to make good examples of violators.

Just as a bit of history, I first documented and confirmed the Fantec violation in January 2009, based on this email sent to the BusyBox mailing list. I discovered that the product didn't seem to be regularly on sale in the USA, so it wasn't ultimately part of the lawsuit that Conservancy and Erik Andersen filed in late 2009.

Suzy,

It’s Sunday lunchtime. I’ve been writing utter rubbish all day. Trying to batter my brain into essay writing action with coffee. Now I am shaky and sick. I wanted to text you but you left your phone on the bed and Mike left his bag with phone …

Matthew Garrett has a good blog post regarding Mir and Canonical, Ltd.'s CLA. I encourage folks to read it; I added a comment there.

So this is what it has come to. I went into this, my initial trimester of study, in the midst of a twisted and broken relationship. I finished yesterday. Nothing has changed. I just put my feelings on pause for, how long? Three and a half months. Studying has kept …

All this past week, people have been emailing and/or pinging me on IRC to tell me to read the article, The Meme Hustler by Evgeny Morozov. The article is quite long, and while my day-job duties left me TL;DR'ing it for most of the week, I've now read it, and I understand why everyone kept sending me the article. I encourage you not to TL;DR it any longer yourself.

Morozov centers his criticisms on Tim O'Reilly, but that's not all the article is about. I spend my days walking the Free Software beat as a (self-admitted) unelected politician, and I've encounter many spin doctors, including O'Reilly — most of whom wear the trappings of advocates for software freedom. As Morozov points out, O'Reilly isn't the only one; he's just the best at it. Morozov's analysis of O'Reilly can help us understand these P.T. Barnum's in our midst.

Shit, pain and filthy fury.

Fury is an ugly filthy monster. I pretend my fury does not exist. I ignore it, down inside my dark recesses but today it got out. My calm exterior hid the boiling fury inside me. I casually hurt the one most dear to me. When …

He wants me to build him that thing, you know, only different.

“You know what I want”.

I know what I think you want. That is what I build. It is not what my customer wanted. I ask my customer to be more specific. My customer specifies what he does …

In 1991, I'd just gotten my first real programming job for two reasons: nepotism, and a willingness to write code for $12/hour. I was working as a contractor to a blood testing laboratory, where the main development job was writing custom software to handle, process, and do statistical calculations on blood testing results, primarily for paternity testing.

My father had been a software developer since the early 1970s, and worked as a contractor at this blood lab since the late 1970s. As the calendar had marched toward the early 1990s, technology cruft had collected. The old TI mainframe, once the primary computer, now only had one job left: statistical calculation for paternity testing, written in TI's Pascal. Slowly but surely, the other software had been rewritten and moved to an AT&T 3B2/600 running Unix System VR3.2.3. That latter machine was the first access I had to a real computer, and certainly the first time I had access to Usenet. This changed my life.

In mid-2001, after working for FSF part-time for the prior year and a half, I'd actually just started working at FSF full-time. I'd recently relocated to Cambridge, MA to work on-site at the FSF offices. The phone started ringing. The aggressive Microsoft attacks had started; the press wanted to know FSF's response. First, Ballmer'd said the GPL was a cancer. Then, Allchin said it was unAmerican¹. Then, Bill Gates added (rather pointlessly and oddly) that it was a pac-man that eats up your business.

Where are we going with this? I don’t know it all started because Agrippa, Choppy and I love making up stories with each other. I thought we could brainstorm some ideas. Mixed in with reality and random ideas from us, spat out here (nothing has come of it) —->

From …