Reading

Created
Thu, 05/08/2010 - 18:30

Conferences are often ephemeral. I've been going to FLOSS conferences since before there were conferences specifically for the topic. In the 1990s, I'd started attending various USENIX conferences. Many of my career successes can be traced back to attending those conferences and meeting key leaders in the FLOSS world. While I know this is true generally, I can't really recall, without reviewing notes from specific conferences, what happened at them, and how specifically it helped me personally or FLOSS in general. I know they're important to me and to software freedom, but it's tough to connect the dots perfectly without looking in detail at what happened when.

Created
Thu, 15/07/2010 - 17:54

I've written before about the software freedom issues inherent with Android/Linux. Summarized shortly: the software freedom community is fortunate that Google released so much code under Free Software licenses, but since most of the code in the system is Apache-2.0 licensed, we're going to see a lot of proprietarized, non-user-upgradable versions. In fact, there's no Android/Linux system that's fully Free Software yet. (That's why Aaron Williamson and I try to keep the Replicant project going. We've focused on the HTC Dream and the NexusOne, since they are the mobile devices closest to working with only Free Software installed, and because they allow the users to put their own firmware on the device.)

Created
Wed, 07/07/2010 - 15:45

I sought out the quote below when Chris Dodd paraphrased it on Meet The Press on 25 April 2010. (I've been, BTW, slowly but surely working on this blog post since that date.) Dodd was quoting Frank Rich, who wrote the following, referring to the USA economic system (and its recent collapse):

As many have said — though not many politicians in either party — something is fundamentally amiss in a financial culture that thrives on “products” that create nothing and produce nothing except new ways to make bigger bets and stack the deck in favor of the house. “At least in an actual casino, the damage is contained to gamblers,” wrote the financial journalist Roger Lowenstein in The Times Magazine last month. This catastrophe cost the economy eight million jobs.

Created
Thu, 24/06/2010 - 04:55

(These days, ) I generally try to avoid the well-known terminology debates in our community. But, if you hang around this FLOSS world of ours long enough, you just can't avoid occasionally getting into them. I found myself in one this afternoon that spanned three identica threads. I had some new thoughts that I've shared today (and even previously) on my identi.ca microblog. I thought it might be useful to write them up in one place rather than scattered across a series of microblog statements.

Created
Sat, 12/06/2010 - 02:31

A few years ago, I was considering starting a Free Software project. I never did start that one, but I learned something valuable in the process. When I thought about starting this project, I did what I usually do: ask someone who knows more about the topic than I do. So I phoned my friend Loïc Dachary, who has started many Free Software projects, and asked him for advice.

Before I could even describe the idea, Loïc said: you don't have a URL? I was taken aback; I said: but I haven't started yet. He said: of course you have, you're talking to me about it, so you've started already. The most important thing you can tell me, he said, is Where are the bytes?

Created
Sat, 08/05/2010 - 22:40

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced yesterday a campaign to collect a clear list of OpenOffice.Org extensions that are FaiF, to convince the OO.o Community Council to list only FaiF extensions, and to find those extensions that are proprietary software, so that OO.o extension developers can focus of their efforts on writing replacements under a software-freedom-respecting license.

Created
Thu, 22/04/2010 - 03:40

I wrote 15 months ago thanking Canonical for their release of Launchpad. However, in the interim, a part of the necessary codebase was made proprietary, namely the authentication system used in the canonical instance of Launchpad hosted by Canonical. (Yes, I still insist on using canonical in the canonical way despite the company name making it confusing. :). I added this fact to my list of reasons of abandoning Ubuntu and other Canonical products.

Created
Wed, 07/04/2010 - 17:45

There are lots of evil things that proprietary software companies might do. Companies put their own profit above the rights and freedoms of their users, and to that end, much can be done that subjugates users. Even as someone who avoids proprietary software, I still read many proprietary license agreements (mainly to see how bad they are). I've certainly become numb to the constant barrage of horrible restrictions they place on users. But, sometimes, proprietary licenses go so far that I'm taken aback by their gratuitous cruelty.

Apple's licenses are probably the easiest example of proprietary licensing terms that are well beyond reasonableness. Of course, Apple's licenses do the usual things like forbidding users from copying, modifying, sharing, and reverse engineering the software. But even worse, Apple also forbid users from running Apple software on any hardware that is not produced by Apple.

Created
Fri, 26/03/2010 - 17:45

Seven and a half years ago, I got this idea: the membership of the Free Software Foundation should have a chance to get together every year and learn about what the FSF has been doing for the last year. I was so nervous at the first one on Saturday 15 March 2003, that I even wore a suit which I rarely do.

The basic idea was simple: the FSF Board of Directors came into town anyway each March for the annual board meeting. Why not give a chance for FSF associate members to meet the leadership and staff of FSF and ask hard questions to their hearts' content? I'm all about transparency, as you know. :)

Created
Mon, 15/03/2010 - 20:29

Most of you are aware from one of my previous posts that It's a Wonderful Life! is my favorite film. Recently, I encountered something in the software freedom community that reminded me of yet another quote from the flim:

Picture of George Bailey whispering to Clarence at the bar

GEORGE:
Look, uh … I think maybe you better not mention getting your wings around here.
CLARENCE:
Why? Don't they believe in angels?
GEORGE:
I… yeah, they believe in them…
CLARENCE:
Ohhh … Why should they be surprised when they see one?

Created
Fri, 05/03/2010 - 02:05

I started using GNU/Linux and Free Software in 1992. In those days, while everything I needed for a working computer was generally available in software freedom, there were many components and applications that simply did not exist. For highly technical users who did not need many peripherals, the Free Software community had reached a state of complete software freedom. Yet, in 1992, everyone agreed there was still much work to be done. Even today, we still strive for a desktop and server operating system, with all relevant applications, that grants complete software freedom.

Created
Thu, 18/02/2010 - 03:25

I read with interest today when Linux Weekly News linked to Greg DeKoenigsberg's response to Mark Guzdial's ACM Blog post, The Impact of Open Source on Computing Education (which is mostly a summary of his primary argument on his personal blog). I must sadly admit that I was not terribly surprised to read such a post from an ACM-affiliated academic that speaks so negatively of FLOSS's contribution to Computer Science education.

Created
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 20:50

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.

Created
Wed, 03/02/2010 - 01:45

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”.)

Created
Mon, 01/02/2010 - 23:30

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.)

Created
Tue, 26/01/2010 - 21:10

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.

Created
Thu, 14/01/2010 - 23:04

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.

Created
Sun, 06/12/2009 - 19:50

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.