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[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]

Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don't mean that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend at FOSDEM 2016, where he and I co-organize the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues, Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).

Student debt is another set of debt that isn’t really a debt. So just cancel it all

The cover picture of the recent Doctor Who Magazine (issue 501) about Tom’s era as Doctor Who is now available to purchase as an autographed quality print.

Tom fills more than 60 pages in the current issue of Doctor Who Magazine.  As from tomorrow we will have autographed copies, which can also be personalised with a dedication of your choice, available here in our

Shane MacGowan has teamed up with Les Cronins (brothers Johnny and Michael Cronin) and comedian Joe Rooney (Father Damo from... Read more »

The post SHANE MACGOWAN, CRONIN BROTHERS AND JOE ROONEY CREATE EURO 2016 ANTHEM FOR IRELAND appeared first on Shane MacGowan.

Tom launched the first issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine with a tour in October 1979. Recently Tom was interviewed for the 500th issue which sees the Twelfth Doctor, Peter Capaldi, recreating Tom’s cover photo from the

One person’s high density may be another’s sprawl; the same tall building may be experienced as oppressive or exhilarating; a “good crowd” for one can be “overcrowded” for another.

I've posted in the past about the Oracle vs. Google case. I'm for the moment sticking to my habit of only commenting when there is a clear court decision. Having been through litigation as the 30(b)(6) witness for Conservancy, I'm used to court testimony and why it often doesn't really matter in the long run. So much gets said by both parties in a court case that it's somewhat pointless to begin analyzing each individual move, unless it's for entertainment purposes only. (It's certainly as entertaining as most TV dramas, really, but I hope folks who are watching step-by-step admit to themselves that they're just engaged in entertainment, not actual work. :)

I'm finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using this this USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I've been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she's at work, and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did discover this bug after it had already been closed but had to pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn't moved to testing.

Last weeks, I read many varying opinions on my website. What was especially surpising for me is that there are … More

Curbing negative gearing will help get empty housing onto the market. This could go some way to bringing life back to relatively dense urban centres that are oddly lacking intensity of public life.

[ 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.

This article is to reply to some points made by publishers as well as some librarians who don’t like what … More

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:

Kuhn's Paradox

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.

Kuhn's View On Motivations & Causes of Kuhn's Paradox

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 »

The post SHANE DOCUMENTARY SKY ARTS appeared first on Shane MacGowan.

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:

• Karen Sandler Speaks about IRS Charity Issues
• Bradley M. Kuhn Speaks About Future of Copyleft
• Bradley and Karen Speak at FOSDEM 2015
• Conservancy Wins DMCA Exception for Smart TVs

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.)