December 9, 2008

In this episode of the Software Freedom Law Show, Bradley and Karen interview Brett Smith, the Licensing Compliance Engineer at the Free Software Foundation.

Running time: 00:30:57.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:26)

• Bradley mentioned that the FSF is the one of the oldest non-profit organizations in the Free Software space. The FSF was founded on 4 October 1985. (01:25)
• Karen and Bradley mentioned the GPLv3 Process.

Segment 1 (03:42)

• Both Bradley and Brett used to order CD's from Cheap Bytes in the 1990s, which Bradley was amazed to learn is still in business today. (04:37)
• Bradley and Brett used to run Fedora when it was still called Red Hat. (04:47)
• We believe Brett was referring to RMS' lecture at KTH in Sweden on 30 October 1986, which inspired Brett to get involved with Free Software. (05:03)
• Brett and Bradley meet at the Cincinnati GNU/Linux Users' Group. (06:45)
• Brett mentioned David “novalis” Turner who used to work at the FSF in the position Brett now holds.
• Brett mentioned the GPL Compliance Lab at the FSF. (08:25)
• Brett mentioned the Affero GPL. (09:35)
• Bradley mentioned his blog post about the “Eternal September” of GPL compliance. (10:45)
• Brett keeps a Compliance case stats box on the FSF Licensing page. (11:36)
• We spoke a few times about the GPL FAQ, which includes info about other FSF-published licenses as well. (08:15, 12:30).
• Brett mentioned RMS' essay on why to upgrade to GPLv3. (14:35)
• Brett's Quick Guide to GPLv3 discusses some of the changes in GPLv3, including ones discussed on the podcast. (16:00)
• We discussed GPLv3's anti-DRM provision for User Products, at the end of Section 6. (16:03)
• We discussed GPLv3's Termination Provision. (17:12)
• We discussed GPLv3's Additional Terms provisions, which allows for Apache license compatibility. (19:11)
• Brett briefly mentioned GPLv3's patent provisions. (21:41)
• Brett mentioned the GNU Simplified Free Documentation License, for which the drafting process is ongoing. (23:18)
• Brett mentioned the FSF's release of the FDL version 1.3. RMS has written in detail about it since our recording took place. Bradley also made a blog post about it. (23:37)
• Brett and Bradley discussed how old and ground-breaking the FDL was. FDL was first released in March 2000. Bradley didn't have a chance to tell his story as to why the first version was 1.1; maybe he will sometime. :)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fsf, gplv3, agpl, smith

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