Reading

I was intrigued to read Greg Kroah-Hartman's analysis of what's gone wrong with the Android fork of Linux, and the discussion that followed on lwn.net. Like Greg, I am hopeful that the Android platform has a future that will work closely with upstream developers. I also have my own agenda: I believe Android/Linux is the closest thing we have to a viable fully FaiF phone operating system platform to take on the proprietary alternatives like the BlackBerry and the iPhone.

I could not think of anything but the South Park quote, They took our jobs! when I read today Black Duck's announcement of their patent, Resolving License Dependencies For Aggregations of Legally-Protectable Content.

I've read through the patent, from the point of view of someone skilled in this particular art. In fact, I'm specifically skilled in two distinct arts related to this patent: computer programming and Free Software license compatibility analysis. It's from that perspective that I took a look at this patent.

(BTW, the thing to always remember about reading patents is that the really significant part isn't the abstract, which often contains pie-in-the-sky prose about what the patent covers. The claims are the real details of the so-called “invention”.)

In an interview with IT Wire, Mark Shuttleworth argues that all copyright assignment systems are equal, saying further that what Intel, Canonical and other for-profit companies ask for in the process are the same things asked for by Free Software non-profit organizations like the Free Software Foundation.

I've written about this before, and recently quit using Ubuntu in part because of Canonical's assignment policies (which are, as Mark correctly points out, not that different from other for-profit company's assignment forms.)

I suppose that I should have applied years ago to be a member of the GNOME Foundation. I have served since 2001 as the Free Software Foundation's representative on the GNOME Advisory Board, and have worked hard the last nine years to maintain a good relationship between the FSF and the GNOME Foundation. Indeed, I was very glad and willing when FSF asked me to continue to serve in this role as a volunteer after I left employment of the FSF in 2005.

By the end of 2004, I'd been running Debian ‘testing’ on my laptop since around early 2003. For almost two years, I'd lived with periodic instability — including a week in the spring of 2003 when I couldn't even get X11 started — for the sake of using a distribution that maximally respected software freedom.

I'd had no trouble with ‘potato’ for its two year lifespan, but after 6-8 months of woody, I was backporting far too much and I couldn't spare the time for upkeep. Running ‘testing’ was the next best option, as I could pin myself for 3-6 months at a time on a particularly stable day and have a de-facto “release”. But, I slowly was unable to spare the time for even that work, and I was ready to throw up my hands in surrender.

I probably won't comment too much on the specifics at this point, but I wanted to make sure everyone saw that Software Freedom Conservancy filed a lawsuit against fourteen GPL violators today (with Erik Andersen). A PDF copy of the complaint is available.

I'd like to congratulate Rafael Rivera on his successful GPL compliance work regarding the Microsoft WUDT software, which is apparently used to make ISOs from stuff you downloaded from Microsoft software.

I've been thinking the last few weeks about the evolution of the GPL violation. After ten years of being involved with GPL enforcement, it seems like a good time to think about how things have changed.

Roughly, the typical GPL violation tracks almost directly the adoption and spread of Free Software. When I started finding GPL violations, it was in a day when Big Iron Unix was still king (although it was only a few years away from collapse), and the GNU tools were just becoming state of the art. Indeed, as a sysadmin, I typically took a proprietary Unix system, and built a /usr/local/ filled with the GNU tools, because I hated POSIX tools that didn't have all the GNU extensions.

In one of my favorite movies, Office Space, Tom Smykowski (one of the fired employees) has a magic-eight-ball-style novelty product idea: a “Jump to Conclusions” mat. Sometimes, I watch discussions in the software freedom community and think that, as a community, we're all jumping around on one of these mats.

I find that people are most likely to do this when something seems novel and exciting. I don't really blame anyone for doing it; I do it myself when I have discovered an exciting thing that's new to me, even if it's well known by others. But, often, this new thing is actually rather mundane, and it's better to check in with the existing knowledge about the idea before “jumping” to any conclusions. In other words, the best square on the mat for us to land on is the one that reads: Think again!

Harald Welte knows more about development of embedded systems than I ever will. So, I generally defer completely to his views about software freedom development for embedded systems. However, as you can tell by that opening, I am setting myself up to disagree a little bit with him just this once on the topic. :)

I agree pretty completely with Harald Welte's comments regarding Symbian. I encourage everyone to take a look at his comments.

We are in a very precarious time with regard to the freedom of mobile devices. We currently have no truly Free Software operating system that does the job, and there are multiple companies trying to get our attention with code releases that have some Free Software in them. None of these companies have pro-software-freedom motives about these issues (obviously, they are for-profit companies, who focus solely on their own profits). So, we have to carefully analyze what these proprietary software companies are up to, why they are releasing some code, and determine if we'll be successful forking these platforms to build a fully software freedom phone platform.

[ I originally wrote this essay below centered around the term “Open Core”. Despite that even say below that the terms is somewhat meaningless, I later realized this term was so problematic that it should be abandoned entirely, for use instead of the clearer term “proprietary relicensing”. However, since this blog post was widely linked to, I've nevertheless left the text as it originally was in October 2009. ]

For the last decade, I've regularly seen complaints when we harder-core software freedom advocates spend some time criticizing proprietary software in addition to our normal work preserving, protecting and promoting software freedom. While I think entire campaigns focused on criticism are warranted in only extreme cases, I do believe that denouncement of certain threatening proprietary technologies is a necessary part of the software freedom movement, when done sparingly.

Denouncements are, of course, negative, and in general, negative tactics are never as valuable as positive ones. Negative campaigns alienate some people, and it's always better to talk about the advantages of software freedom than focus on the negative of proprietary software.

Our first night in Chiang Mai was pretty stressful but the rest of our trip has been awesome.

Riding around Northern Chiang Mai today I passed this:

I woke the owner up, he spoke a little english and said that we open source people …

Microsoft has received much undeserved press about their recent release of Linux drivers for their virtualization technology under GPLv2. I say “undeserved” because I don't particularly see why Microsoft should be lauded merely for doing something that is in their own interest that they've done before.

Most people have forgotten that Microsoft once had a GPL-based product available for Windows NT. It was called Windows Services for UNIX, and AFAICT, remains available today (although perhaps they've transitioned in recent years to no longer include GPL'd software).

Our first night in Chang Mai was pretty much a gi-normous stuff up. Ev and I got seperated in a crowd and did not manage to find each other again for about 4 very scary hours. The Chiang Mai tourist police, who are volunteers that work closely with the normal …

July 2009

My 14 year old son and I travelled to Thailand to explore the country, experience the culture and meet the locals. Read on for an account of our stravages..

Thursday, July 23, 2009 - 12:27

Well, we survived the flight and made it into Bangkok, we stayed at …

I think this news item from yesterday mostly speaks for itself, but I could not let the incident go by without blogging briefly about it.

There has been so much talk in the last two weeks that Microsoft has changed with regard to its patent policy toward Free Software. We fool ourselves if we trust any of the window-dressing that Microsoft has put forward to convince us that we can trust them in this regard. Indeed, I spoke extensively about this in my interview on the Linux Outlaws show this week.

In an essay last Friday entitled Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#, RMS argued a key point that I agree with: the software freedom community should minimize its use of programming language infrastructure that comes primarily from anti-software-freedom companies, notwithstanding FaiF (Free as in Freedom) implementations. I've been thinking about an extension of that argument: that language infrastructure created in a community process is likely more resilient against attacks from proprietary software companies.

[ This post was not actually placed here until 2011-11-16, but I've put it in proper sequence with when the bulk of it was written. (Some of you may find it new in your RSS feeds as of 2011-11-16, however.) I originally posted it as a comment on an NTEN Blog post. NTEN got really sneaky over the years after I posted this comment. First, somewhere in late 2011, they removed the comments from the blog post which originally appeared on their website. Then, in August 2015, after I found an archive.org link that showed the original article, they seem to have made sure the original content was removed from archive.org (which a website owner is technically allowed to do, although it's sneaky behavior).

Ev my teenage son is growing up. He dyes his hair and listens to loud music. It beats pooping his pants and chucking tantrums at the sweety counter. I think he is pretty cool. He did not want me to take this picture he knew I was up to something …

I don't think we talk enough in the FLOSS community about the importance of individual support of FLOSS-related charitable organizations. On a recent podcast episode, Karen and I discuss with Stormy Peters how important it is for geeks — who may well often give lots of code to many FLOSS projects — also should consider giving a little bit of financial funding to FLOSS organizations as well.

Of course, it's essential that people give their time to the charities and the causes that they care about. In the FLOSS world, we typically do that by giving code or documentation to our favorite FLOSS project. I think that's led us all into the classic “I gave at the office” feeling. Indeed, I know that I too have fallen into this rut at times myself.

I have faced with much trepidation the news of Oracle's looming purchase of Sun. Oracle has never shown any interest in community development, particularly in the database area. They are the largest proprietary database vendor on the planet, and they probably have very simple plans for MySQL: kill it.

That's why I read with relief this post by Monty (co-founder of the MySQL project) this week, wherein Monty plans (and encourages others, too) to put their full force behind a MySQL “fork” that will be centered outside of Oracle.

Monty is undoubtedly correct when he says I don't think that anyone can own an open source project; the projects are defined by the de-facto project leaders and the developers that are working on the project. and that [w]ith Oracle now owning MySQL, I think that the need for an independent true Open Source entity for MySQL is even bigger than ever before.

There has been a lot of press coverage about the Microsoft/TomTom settlement. Unfortunately, so far, I have seen no one speak directly about the dangers that this deal could pose to software freedom, and what our community should consider in its wake. Karen and I discussed some of these details on our podcast, but I thought it would be useful to have a blog post about this issue as well.

Dave Neary found me during breakfast at the Linux Collaboration Summit this morning and mentioned that he was being flamed for a blog post he made, Copyright assignment and other barriers to entry. Or, as some might title it in a Computer Science academic tradition: Copyright Assignment Considered Harmful. I took a look at Dave's post, and I definitely think it's worth reading and considering, regardless of whether you agree with it or flame it. For my part, I think I agree with most of his points.