October 6, 2010

Bradley and Karen announced that the Software Freedom Law Show is over. Karen and Bradley announced a new show, called Free as in Freedom, that is a joint effort by Karen (still at the SFLC) and Bradley (no longer at SFLC).

Running time: 00:32:32.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:28)

• Bradley mentioned OsamaK is not happy at Bradley and Karen for not having a new oggcast for a month. (00:45)
• Bradley no long works at the Software Freedom Law Center. He now works full time at the Software Freedom Conservancy. (02:00)
• Bradley thinks everything related to FLOSS should be called “Software Freedom”. (03:10)
• Karen and Bradley mention that many people in the software freedom world are involved in multiple organizations. (04:00)
• Karen is an officer and lawyer to Software Freedom Conservancy. (04:30)
• Conservancy provides non-profit infrastructure and services. (05:10)
• Conservancy helps software freedom projects focus on development, and aggregate projects into one place. (06:20)
• Conservancy will be expanding its service plan now that Bradley is full time. (06:46)
• Conservancy will try do copyright assignment in a community-focused way, only if the developers want it. Conservancy will also do much more GPL enforcement than it has previously. (07:20)
• Bradley mentioned that Matthew Garrett has been doing some GPL enforcement, and Bradley thanked him for it publicly. (07:50)
• Karen thinks we'll see more enforcement over time, by more people. (08:14)
• Bradley wants to help Conservancy's member projects do more fundraising for initiatives to fund software development activity. (08:40)
• Bradley mentioned that Matt Mackall is doing Mercurial development funded through Conservancy. (09:20)
• As of earlier this year, Bradley is a volunteer director of the FSF, and now has additional volunteer work that he needs to do, while Conservancy (his former volunteer work) becomes his day job. (11:09)
• Bradley mentions that once you start doing something in the software freedom world, it's hard to stop once people start to rely on your work. (12:30)
• Conservancy handles a lot of “boring” but essential stuff for developers to continue in their project. (14:20)
• Bradley mentioned that his early volunteer work at FSF was also doing the boring stuff, and indeed a lot of his work has been willing to do the boring stuff (15:30)
• Karen mentions that no one fights over the work that just needs to get done. (16:30)
• Bradley discussed the fact that for-profit corporate control of projects is dangerous, and one of the things Conservancy and similar non-profits offers is an opportunity to have a non-profit with the public interest at heart in the center of their community. (17:39)
• Bradley mentioned the LibreOffice by the Document Foundation (18:03)
• Karen points out that for-profit and non-profit go hand-in-hand. But, Bradley argues that steward of a FLOSS project should always be a non-profit. Karen agrees. (19:00-19:30)
• Bradley doesn't really believe that there are projects that would “never happen” without a for-profit company starting it. Karen disagrees.
• The Software Freedom Law Show is over This is the last episode of the Software Freedom Law Show. (21:10)
• Karen will make sure that the SFLC RSS feeds remain valid. Bradley points out that there are new RSS feeds for both the mp3 version and the ogg version of the new show, Free as in Freedom (21:33, 22:41)
• The new show is basically just the Karen and Bradley show, now named Free as in Freedom, hosted on faif.us. (23:43)
• Bradley mentioned that everywhere he's ever worked, he always had root on most of the boxes. He doesn't know what it's like to work somewhere and not have root. (27:50)
• Karen got in trouble at her first law firm job for installing software on computers. (28:21)
• Dan Scott sent a gift to Bradley and Karen Soap with 20-Ds in them.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, sflc, conservancy, non-profits

Send feedback and comments on the oggcast to <oggcast@softwarefreedom.org> or <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with the SFLC on our IRC channel, #sflc on irc.freenode.net, and by following SFLC on identi.ca.

Other Oggcasts...