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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.

How do I go about filling three pages of foolscap from within a text editor? Do I write it longhand count the words and compare it the same number of words on the screen? I’m not sure if it matters. I do not want to write it longhand. I …

I have a sore eye. Actually they are both sore one is worse. Red and inflamed, I’m sure they don’t look too good. The dust from the tree bark I was shovelling today is the culprit. That and the dry wind and sun.

I should go to sleep …

Dear Spike,

I am not sure you will read this. This is me, Ben. We grew up together. Your mum does not think you will remember anything. You cannot forget this and I have to tell you. You need to know everything.

We were just little boys when we met …

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 …

Dear Z,

Thank you so much for your package, it is lovely and I shall treasure it.

You surprised me. I felt you were exactly the person I remembered but the lens of time and the walls of distance left me ignorant of the truth. I feel so stupid that …

Back in the summer, there was a widely covered story about Judge Alsup's decision regarding copyrightablity in the Oracle v. Google case. Oracle has appealed the verdict so presumably this will enter the news again at some point. I'd been meaning to write a blog post about it since it happened, and also Karen Sandler and I had been planning an audcast to talk about it.

Richard Fontana, Tom Marble, Karen Sandler, and I will reprise our roles as co-coordinators of the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom for FOSDEM 2013. The CFP for the FOSDEM 2013 Legal & Policy Issues DevRoom is now available, and the deadline for submission is 21 December 2012, about 18 days from now.

I want to put a very specific call out to a group of people who may not have considered submitting a talk to a track like this before. In particular, if you are a Free Software developer who has ideas about the policy/licensing decisions for your project, then you should consider submitting a proposal.

[ I usually write blog posts about high-minded software freedom concepts. This post isn't one of those; it's much more typical personal blog-fare, so please stop reading here if you're looking for a good software freedom essay; just move on to another one of my blog posts if that's what you want. ]

I heard something really odd today. I was told that a relatively large group of people find me untrustworthy and refuse to work or collaborate with me because of it. I heard this second-hand, and I asked for more details, and the person who told me really doesn't want to be involved any further (and I don't blame that person, because the whole thing is admittedly rather silly, and I'd walk away too if it wasn't personally about me).

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.