Reading

I first met the original group of VLC developers at the Solutions GNU/Linux conference in 2001. I had been an employee of FSF for about a year at the time, and I recall they were excited to tell the FSF about the project, and very proud that they'd used FSF's premier and preferred license (at the time): GPLv2-or-later.

What a difference a decade makes. I'm admittedly sad that VLC has (mostly) finished its process of relicensing some of its code under LGPLv2.1-or-later. While I have occasionally supported relicensing from GPL to LGPL, every situation is different and I think it should be analyzed carefully. In this case, I don't support VideoLan's decision to relicense the libVLC code.

As I've written about before, I am always amazed when suddenly there is widespread interest in, excitement over, and focus on some particular GPL violation. I've spent most of my adult life working on copyleft compliance issues, so perhaps I've got an overly unique perspective. It's just that I've seen lots of GPL violations every single day since the late 1990s. Even now, copyleft compliance remains a regular part of my monthly work. Even though it's now only one task among many that I work on every day, I'm still never surprised nor shocked by some violation.

On last Friday 20 July 2012, I received an O'Reilly Open Source Award, in appreciation for my decade of work in Free Software non-profit organizations, including my current daily work at the Software Freedom Conservancy, my work at the FSF (including starting FSF's associate membership program), and for my work creating and defending copyleft licensing, including such things as inventing the idea behind the Affero clause, helping draft AGPLv3, and, more generally, enforcing copyleft.

I generally try to avoid schadenfreude, but I couldn't resist here, because I think it proves a point that the problem of sexism in the software industry isn't confined to the Free Software community.

With my colleague Karen Sandler I've talked on our Free as in Freedom audcast. a few different shows about problems of sexism in the Free Software community. I've long maintained and written in a blog post that the sexism problem is computer-industry-wide, not just in Free Software.

As most readers might have guessed, my work at Software Freedom Conservancy has been so demanding in the last few months that I've been unable to blog, although I have kept up (along with my co-host Karen Sandler) releasing new episodes of the Free as in Freedom oggcast.

Today, Karen and I released a special episode of FaiF (which is merely special because it was released during a week that we don't normally release a show). In it, Karen and I discuss in detail Conservancy's announcement today of its new coordinated compliance program that includes many copyright holders and projects.

I'd like to thank Harald Welte for his reasoned and clear blog post about GPL enforcement which I hope helps to clear up some of the confusions that I also wrote about recently.

I've had the interesting pleasure the last 36 hours to watch people debate something that's been a major part of my life's work for the last thirteen years. I'm admittedly proud of myself for entirely resisting the urge to dive into the comment threads, and I don't think it would be all that useful to do so. Mostly, I believe my work stands on its own, and people can make their judgments and disagree if they like (as a few have) or speak out about how they support it (as even more did — at least by my confirmation-biased count, anyway :).

This blog post is mostly just informational about a few oggcast releases and my upcoming talks and conference trips.

Today Karen Sandler and I released Episode 0x20 of the Free as in Freedom oggcast (available in ogg and mp3 formats). We discuss in that oggcast the issue of gender inequality in the software freedom community and in computing generally (which I made reference to in a blog post I wrote about a year ago.

Over on Conservancy's blog, I just published a blog post entitled It May Be Boring, But Worth Reading Anyway. It discusses Conservancy's FY 2010 Form 990, FY 2010 Independent Auditor's report and our FY 2010 NYS CHAR-500 that were released on this past Saturday.

Today Karen Sandler and I released Episode 0x1E of the Free as in Freedom oggcast (available in ogg and mp3 formats). There are two important things discussed on that oggcast that I want to draw your attention to:

Over on Conservancy's blog, I just published a blog post entitled What's a Free Software Non-Profit For?. It responds in part to what was written last week about non-profit homes for Free Software projects.

Most folks outside of technology fields and the software freedom movement can't grok why I'm not on Facebook. Facebook's marketing has reached most of the USA's non-technical Internet users. On the upside, Facebook gave the masses access to something akin to blogging. But, as with most technology controlled by for-profit companies, Facebook is proprietary software. Facebook, as a software application, is written in a mix of server-side software that no one besides Facebook employees can study, modify and share. On the client-side, Facebook is an obfuscated, proprietary software Javascript application, which is distributed to the user's browser when they access facebook.com. Thus, in my view, using Facebook is no different than installing a proprietary binary program on my GNU/Linux desktop.

One of my favorite verbal exchanges in an episode of The West Wing occurs in S03E08, The Women of Qumar. In the story, after President Bartlet said at a fundraiser: Everything has risks. Your car can drive into a lake and your seatbelt jams, but no one's saying don't wear your seat belt, someone had a car accident while not wearing a seatbelt and filed a lawsuit naming the President as a defendant. Sam, the Deputy Communications Director, thinks the White House should respond preemptively before the story. Toby, the Communication Director, instead ignores Sam and then has this wonderfully deadpan exchange with the President:

Those of you that follow my blog have probably wondered we're I've been. Quite frankly, there is just so much work going on at Conservancy that I have almost had no time to do anything but Conservancy work, eat and sleep. My output on this blog and on identi.ca surely shows that.

The one thing that I've kept up with is the oggcast, Free as in Freedom that I co-host with Karen Sandler, and which is produced by Dan Lynch.

Since I last made a blog post here, Karen, Dan and I released four oggcasts. I'll discuss them here in reverse chronological order:

I've not been particularly good at keeping up with this blog here, although I have generally kept up with the oggcast that I co-host with Karen Sandler, Free as in Freedom, which is released every two weeks.

Episode 0x18 was a recording of my OSCON 2011 talk, 12 Years of Compliance: A Historical Perspective, which may be of interest to those who enjoy hearing about stories of GPL enforcement. It's available in ogg and mp3, and the slides are available if you want to follow along while you listen.

I realize nearly ten days after the end of a conference is a bit late to blog about it. However, I needed some time to recover my usual workflow, having attended two conferences almost back-to-back, OSCON 2011 and Desktop Summit. (The strain of the back-to-back conferences, BTW, made it impossible for me to attend Linux Con North America 2011, although I'll be at Linux Con Europe. I hope next year's summer conference schedule is not so tight.)

I was pretty sure there was something wrong with the whole thing in fall of 2009, when they first asked me. A Nokia employee contacted me to ask if I'd be willing to be a director of the Symbian Foundation (or so I thought that's what they were asking — read on). I wrote them a thoughtful response explaining my then-current concerns about Symbian:

• the poor choice of the Eclipse Public License for the eventual code,
• the fact that Symbian couldn't be built in any software freedom system environment, and
• that the Symbian source code that had been released thus far didn't actually run on any existing phones.

Unfortunately, Edward Naughton is at it again, and everyone keeps emailing me about, including Brian Proffitt, who quoted my email response to him this morning in his article.

As I said in my response to Brian, I've written before on this issue and I have nothing much more to add. Naughton has not identified a GPL violation that actually occurred, at least with respect to Google's own distribution of Android, and he has completely ignored my public call for him to make such a formal report to the copyright holders of GPL violations for which he has evidence (if any).

At the 2000 Usenix Technical Conference (which was the primary “generalist” conference for Free Software developers in those days), I met Miguel De Icaza for the third time in my life. In those days, he'd just started Helix Code (anyone else remember what Ximian used to be called?) and was still president of the GNOME Foundation. To give you some context: Bonobo was a centerpiece of new and active GNOME development then.

Out of curiosity and a little excitement about GNOME, I asked Miguel if he could show me how to get the GNOME 1.2 running on my laptop. Miguel agreed to help, quickly taking control of the keyboard and frantically typing and editing my sources.list.

Debian potato was the just-becoming-stable release in those days, and of course, I was still running potato (this was before my experiment with running things from testing began).

fabsh was the first to point me at a slashdot story that is (like most slashdot stories) sensationalized.

The story, IMO, makes the usual mistake of considering a GPL violation as an earth-shattering disaster that has breached the future of software freedom. GPL violations vary in degree of the problems they create; most aren't earth-shattering.

Update on 2014-06-10:While this article is about a specific series of attempts to “unify” CLAs and ©AAs into a single set of documents, the issues raised below cover the gamut of problems that are encountered in many CLAs and ©AAs in common use today in FLOSS projects. Even though it appears that both Project Harmony and its reincarnation Next Generation Contributor Agreements have both failed, CLAs and ©AAs are increasing in popularity among FLOSS projects, and developers should begin action to oppose these agreements for their projects.

Identi.ca Summary, 2011-06-26 through 2011-07-04

• In response to my summary last week, @fontana started a subthread about multiple copyright holders solving proprietary relicensing issues (or, in his view, lack thereof). I complained that @fontana shouldn't have started that subthread in the meta-thread for the summary itself. He disagreed.

Famously, the Gilligan's Island theme song, in its first season, left out mentioning the Professor and Mary Ann characters by name, simply including …And the Rest in that lyric where their names later were heard. Mystery Science Theater 3000 even spoofed this issue during screening of This Island Earth, in which the actor Russell Johnson (The Professor) appeared. When Johnson first appears on screen while viewing This Island Earth, MST3K's Mike says over the film: Hey, what's this …And the Rest Crap!?!. Indeed, what's that all about?

Identi.ca Summary, 2011-06-19 through 2011-06-26

• The conversation that I mentioned last week about GPL for Javascript libraries continued in a new thread this week.

In November 2010, after I informed the GNOME Foundation that I'd like to submit some names of potential Executive Director candidates, Germán Póo-Caamaño invited me to serve on the GNOME Foundation's Executive Director Hiring Committee. We agreed that the Committee's work would remain confidential (as any hiring process is wrought with complicated and frank discussions). I usually prefer open processes to confidentiality, but with things like hiring, confidentiality is somewhat of a necessity.