July 20, 2010

Eben talks about "When Software is in Everything: Future Liability Nightmares Free Software Helps Avoid" to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law (SSCL) in Edinburgh, Scotland on June 30. Karen and Bradley introduce the talk to listeners.

Running time: 00:52:06.

Show Notes

Segment 0

• The transcript of Eben's speech is available on our website.
• Karen refers one of the OpenBSD songs.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, moglen, Europe, medical-devices

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June 29, 2010

Dan Ravicher joins Karen and Bradley to discuss the Bilski case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Running time: 1:14:22.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• At the time of the recording, the U.S. Supreme Court has just published the decision in the Bilski case.(01:30)
• Dan Ravicher is the legal director at SFLC. He also teaches patent law at Cardozo School of Law and is the President and Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation. (2:48)
• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled en banc, in October of 2008. That decision is available here(5:12).
• Bradley reminds listeners and Karen that the Court of Appeals decision was discussed on the oggcast with Scott Peterson in Episode 0x01: The Engineer and the Lawyer. (6:33)
• SFLC filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, which we discussed on the oggcast in Episode 0x18: Re Bilski’s Briefs.(7:01)
• The transcript from the Supreme Court oral argument from November is available here. You can hear UCLA law students reading the transcript aloud on the IP Colloquium blog. (10:56)
• The Bilski decision was published on the last day of the Supreme Court's term. (11:10)
• The "slip opinion", which Dan reads from, is available on the Supreme Court's website here. (15:02)
• Stare decisis is the principle by which legal precedent is established.(16:31)
• SFLC published a highlighting some of the amicus briefs filed in Bilski on either side. (29:30)
• You can read the text of Section 101 on the patent office's website.(31:14)
• Aaron and Bradley discussed the Supreme Court patent history, including the Benson and Flook cases, on the oggcast in Episode 0x18: Re Bilski’s Briefs. (31:50)
• Bradley, Dan and Karen all looked up the definition of pellucid. (44:45)
• Dan talks about the book Patent Failure by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer. (55:51)
• Dan recommends that Breyer's opinion, which is the last few pages of the decision publication, is the place to go if you want to only read a few pages of the opinions. (1:00:30)
• Bradley discusses the difference between i.e. and e.g. (1:04:30)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, patents, bilski, ravicher

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June 22, 2010

Karen and Bradley briefly talk about waiting for the Bilski case to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Running time: 08:39.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:35)

• SFLC's office was under construction so Bradley and Karen were in different places, which is why Karen sounds like she is underwater. Producer Dan made it sound a lot better than the original audio! (01:02)
• Karen referred to the SCOTUS blog(01:26)
• Karen and Bradley agree to go on hiatus until Bilski (04:02)
• Karen was not arguing that with Bradley (07:27)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, bilski

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June 8, 2010

Karen, Bradley and Aaron talk about SFLC's motion for default judgment against Westinghouse Digital Electronics, a defendant in the ongoing lawsuit concerning GPL violations of BusyBox.

Running time: 38:15.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley quoted from Act I Scene II of Hamlet, in which he once played Bernardo in a college production. Karen never played Bernardo (01:02)
• Aaron mentioned Shakespeare's son Hamnet. (01:53)
• The play Karen quotes from is indeed Julius Caesar. She forgot that she also had the lines: “My lord?” and “I will, my lord. ”(02:25)
• The Bilski decision once again did not come out this week. The Supreme Court publishes all decisions on its website. The SCOTUS blog provides up to date information about the court schedule, including a live blog on the mornings when decisions are announced.(03:03)
• Karen thinks that Aaron and Bradley do not know that the cake is a lie. (03:54)
• Karen mentions patent number 3,987,541: Cutting guide for layered cake. (04:39)
• SFLC filed a motion in the Southern District of New York against Westinghouse Digital Electronics, a defendant in the ongoing lawsuit concerning GPL violations of BusyBox. (05:10)
• The original complaint in the ongoing case can be found here. (08:05)
• The motion for default judgment or summary judgment can be found here. (09:00)
• Shira Scheindlin is not related to Judge Judy, at least to the best of our knowledge. (10:23)
• Karen mentioned Serving Sara, so we provide the obligatory IMDB link. Other sources for how service should be provided would probably be more reliable. (15:30)
• Sewer service, as described by Aaron, is invalid service. Or you can use google, but that will mostly teach you about sewers and their maintenance. (18:46)

Tags: compliance, copyrights, gpl, aaronw, bkuhn, karen, sflc, conservancy

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May 25, 2010

Karen and Bradley play Dan Ravicher's speech from a conference held by Freedom to Innovate South Africa (FTISA) in Pretoria on software patents.

Running time: 52:51.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Karen and Bradley thank listeners for providing ideas for future episodes. (01:05)
• Dan Ravicher, our “elusive” guest, is the Legal Director of SFLC. (02:40)
• The Bilski decision did not come out this week. The Supreme Court publishes all decisions on its website. The SCOTUS blog provides up to date information about the court schedule, including a live blog on the mornings when decisions are announced.(03:34)
• Karen mentioned Patent Absurdity, a short movie that features Dan (Karen's also interviewed). (06:21)
• Bradley points out the previous episodes about patents: Episode 0x18: Re Bilski's Briefs and Episode 0x0C: Patently False. (06:43)

Segment 1 (07:06)

• Slides for the talk are available here.

Segment 2 (50:11)

• The audio for the speech is also available on PubPat's website. (50:35)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, patents, ravicher

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May 11, 2010

Karen and Bradley discuss their views on software freedom advocacy.

Running time: 49:48.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley and Karen discussed the term “evil” in Episode 0x26. (00:39)

Segment 1 (03:39)

• Karen participated in Model Congress when she was in high school, but not Model U.N. Bradley happened to encounter a Model U.N. in his hotel following the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit this year. (04:46)
• Karen mentions that free and open source software is pointed to as a recruitment tool. (11:41)
• Bradley thinks long term, but not necessarily as long term as some. (12:21)
• Karen and Bradley agree that it's worthwhile to teach kids about software freedom. (13:03)
• Bradley mentioned SugarLabs. (13:28)
• Bradley mentioned Andy Hertzfeld. (14:30)
• Karen mentions that proprietary software causes fear amongst users. (16:04)
• Bradley referred to the Star Trek episode “Errand of Mercy”. He also refers to the Information Society song “What's on Your Mind” (26:24)
• Bradley and Karen discuss whether Leonard Nimoy will retire. (27:12)
• Bradley refers to the term “Fauxpen” that Tarus Balog uses in his speeches. (33:29)

Segment 2 (37:44)

• Bradley and Karen ask for input from listeners as to what they would like to hear on the show.

Tags: bkuhn, karen

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April 27, 2010

Bradley and Karen discuss whether or not proprietary software is “evil”, mention the new documentary film about patents, and discuss briefly new non-profit filing requirements.

Running time: 00:49:56.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Bradley tends to use the greeting “ahoy hoy” rather than “hello”, because Thomas Edison promulgated the word “hello”, whereas Bell preferred “ahoy hoy”. Most people know the phrase “ahoy hoy” from its use by the Montgomery Burns on the Simpsons. Bradley failed to mention his reason he thinks they didn't do enough research: Burns clearly would prefer the patent-monger Edison to the more scientifically focused Bell, and therefore would say “hello”. While both Bell and Edison did seek patents on their inventions, Edison institutionalized corporate control of patents. (00:42, 01:30)
• Edison also created one of the earliest End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs). (01:30)
• I say, Foghorn Leghorn is, I say, an anthropomorphized rooster from, I say, them there Warner Brothers cartoons. (04:12)
• Bradley was on a panel entitled Web Services, The Desktop and Free Software at the Linux Collaboration Summit 2010, where he used the words “evil” and “insidious”, which seemed to upset some attendees. (06:30)
• Bradley raised the issue on the panel that Canonical, Ltd. keeps the server side of UbuntuOne as proprietary software. (07:57)
• Bradley believes in Kantian ethics and categorical imperatives rather than utilitarianism or Randian “philosophy”. (08:59, 09:13, 09:32)
• Karen caused an early invocation of Godwin's law in the discussion (09:40).
• Karen explains that the term “ethics&rdquo has a specific meaning in the context of legal ethics. 16:39
• Ben Franklin made a daily score card to catalog his virtues and offenses against these virtues. (22:45)
• Bradley mentioned his old speeches that cover his experiences with the “evils” of proprietary software, and Karen mentioned these were also covered on Episode 0x00 (33:10, 33:47)
• Karen mentioned a rather troubling study on medical devices (35:40)

Segment 1 (41:12)

• Karen appears in the new documentary, Patent Absurdity. (41:40)
• Organizations that taken in less than USD$25,000 must file a 990-N (aka the “990 e-postcard”). (45:22)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, evil

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April 13, 2010

Karen and Bradley interview Sean Egan of the Pidgin project.

Running time: 00:37:04.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley mentioned that Oprah Winfrey gave cars to members of her audience (1:05).
• Karen hadn't heard about the car giveaway, nor about the resulting tax snafu (1:30).
• Karen installed a Mozilla add-on to display face images in message headers (2:54).
• People now advocate for a Face header instead of X-Face (3:34).

Segment 1 (05:30)

• Karen and Bradley interview with Sean Egan.
• Pidgin was originally called gaim (6:37).
• Gaim was started by Mark Spencer (8:58).
• Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. is the nonprofit home of Pidgin (19:25).

Segment 2 (26:24)

• Karen and Bradley wrap up from the interview
• Karen mentions Hot Tub Time Machine (27:40).
• John Cusack was also in Say Anything, Better Off Dead, High Fidelity and Being John Malkovich (29:20).
• Karen and Bradley agree that Back to the Future is a great movie (34:36).
• UPDATE: Karen went to see Hot Tub Time Machine, and calls it "highly enjoyable".

Tags: bkuhn, karen, trademarks

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March 30, 2010

Bradley and Karen discuss the obligations and details of serving on a Board of Directors of a not-for-profit organization. Following that, they briefly discuss The Open Source Business Conference and LibrePlanet conference.

Running time: 01:00:18.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Bradley mentioned the older RFC 822 but, probably meant RFC 821 could not remember that RFC 2821 is the RFC that supersedes it. (02:14)
• Bradley was voted onto the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation. (05:10)
• The IRS now asks non-profits directly if they have whistle-blower policies. (25:44)

Segment 1 (35:30)

• Karen attended and spoke at OSBC and LibrePlanet. Bradley attended and spoke at LibrePlanet. (36:00)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, non-profits

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March 16, 2010

Aaron, Karen and Bradley discuss issues around the public domain and how it relates to copyright in general and copyrights on software in particular.

Running time: 00:58:13.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:36)

• Aaron, Bradley, and Karen consider Aaron's status as a “special host”. Bradley wondered if that meant Aaron hosted a parasite. (Aaron subsequently got sick two days after recording, and is now playing the role of a biological “special host”.)
• Bradley joked that copyright never expires in the USA due to retroactive extensions enacted by Congress. Aaron noted the Sony Bono 1998 Copyright Extension Act was the most recent act to do this. (05:47, 06:28)
• Public domain dedications are relatively easy in the USA, but moral rights issues in European jurisdictions make public domain dedications difficult. (17:19)
• The Berne Convention respects the issue of public domain, insofar as something definitely in the public domain in one country doesn't fall under copyright restrictions in other countries, but doesn't do much more than that regarding public domain. (17:30)
• Creative Commons wrote CC0 to attempt to harmonize public domain dedication around the world. (18:53)
• Bradley pointed out that the “WTFPL” license FAQ points out that it exists in part because of difficulties in putting things in the public domain in some jurisdictions. (25:36)
• Karen looked up the word merchantability in Black's Law Dictionary. (30:07)

Segment 1 (29:52)

• Bradley was apparently wrong, saleable is a word, and some few online dictionaries say sailable is a word (30:30)
• Aaron mentioned the Typography for Lawyers website, which has a good section on using all-caps text. (33:27)
• Bradley encouraged use of \textsc{} in LaTeX instead of writing in all caps, but laments that lawyers he's talked to about it can't be convinced. (34:30)
• Black's Law Dictionary says public domain is the rule; intellectual property is the exception. Bradley lamented that he wishes that were actually true. (35:17)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, aaronw, public domain

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March 2, 2010

Karen and Bradley discuss some basic issues regarding trademarks for Free Software projects.

Running time: 00:58:13.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• The Chaos Computer Club was founded in Berlin on September 12, 1981. (03:30)
• Bradley mentioned the Heinrich Böll's short stories, Dr. Murke's Collected Silence. (06:45)
• Bradley mentioned the Samuel Beckett's play, Breath. (08:42)
• Karen spoke about trademarks at Scale 8x. (11:30)

Segment 1 (14:06)

• Karen mentioned the slides of her talk would be on the SFLC website. (14:20)
• Trademark rights originate when you use a certain name and/or logo. (15:30)
• You have to use the mark “in commerce” (though for a short period of time you can file for registration with “intent to use”); to have the mark; however, the rules and lingo seem a bit “old fashioned” when focused on online publication and distribution of free software. (16:30)
• The most obvious benefit of registering a trademark is that registration is clear notice that the mark is being used, and creates a presumption of notice and ownership. (18:15)
• There are other Karen Sandlers, such as a Romance novelist and HIV researcher and doctor. (19:49)
• There is a Brad Kuhn (not Bradley) race car driver and a Bradley Kuhn killed in Arizona in 2008. (20:17)
• Bradley mentioned an issue of Sony's Restaurant in Baltimore in 1987, which was Bradley's first introduction to trademark law. (22:23)
• The Madrid Protocol is a treaty that helps people who have registered trademarks in one country to easily obtain registrations in other countries. (27:05)
• Trademarks are indefinite. A trademark can be kept as long as you maintain it and continue to use it. Copyrights, by contrast, are supposed to be limited by how long they can be held (but in reality don't seem to be, due to copyright extension lobby). (37:15)
• The GNU name actually carefully avoid trademark infringement of Unix by having the name say explicitly: GNU's Not Unix. (39:50)
• The classic example of a genericized trademark is “xerox” becoming a verb to mean “to photocopy”. (41:43)
• Bradley used a Used a vi implementation called vile on MS-DOS before he had a Unix-like system on his computer. (45:10)
• Karen recommends that Free Software projects adopt explicit trademark policies that explicitly permit all the types of uses that the project wants to permit. (47:13)
• Trademark implies some sort of quality control; “naked licensing” refers to giving a license without monitoring quality. (48:50)
• Trademark policy statements can be good tools to help handle “naked licensing” issues. (52:10)
• Bradley briefly mentioned the Iceweasel rename of Firefox in Debian. (52:40)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, trademarks

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February 16, 2010

Karen and Bradley welcome Laura Moy, who joins them in studio to discuss the issues of software freedom with medical devices.

Running time: 00:50:54.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:32)

• Bradley missed the opportunity to point out the classic “man in the street” interview has a Latin phrase to describe it, vox populi. Bradley could not find a definitive link that describes the origins of the “man in the street” interview, but did find references to it in the 1950s, and therefore it predates the origin date mentioned on the show (02:02)
• Some medical heart devices have a wireless interface. (08:14)
• Karen mentioned the Medical Device Research Center but meant the Medical Device Security Center. The paper describing how the center was able to communicate remotely with an ICD is called, Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses. This page shows a "programmer" in use. (08:35)
• Karen talks about contacting the major heart device manufacturers: Medronic, Boston Scientific and St. Jude. (14:03)
• As Karen mentioned, Medronic has a lot of patents, including System and method for remote programming of an implantable medical device, System and method of communicating between an implantable medical device and a remote computer system or health care provider and even Identifying patients at risk for life threatening arrhythmias. (15:15)

Segment 1 (18:17)

• Karen explained that an electrophysiologist is a doctor who specializes in the electrical activity of the human heart. (20:58)
• The FDA is the Food and Drug Administration which must approve all medical devices for use in the USA. (26:59)
• Karen and Laura have filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information how the FDA reviews these devices. (30:40)
• Bradley only buys ECC RAM because it's actually possible and even common for RAM to be impacted by cosmic rays as discussed in this blog post. (33:10)
• Bradley mentioned the importance of software freedom for medical devices, citing the Therac 25 case in the 1980s (36:32)
• Karen discussed a recent series of articles in the New York Times about fatal radiation treatments. (37:22)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, lmoy, medical-devices

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February 2, 2010

Karen and Bradley discuss an update on the Google Books Settlement, some follow up from 0x1F regarding feedback on the mobile phones show, and discuss Karen's new position as General Counsel.

Running time: 00:48:24.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:28)

• A listener wrote in to say that the the A7 Model of the FreeRunner is still available. (04:20)
• Bradley mentioned an identica discussion with Evan Prodromou. (04:47)
• In the last show, we forgot to mention the Mer project, which is trying to build a fully Free Software system for the N900 and related devices. (07:02)
• Bradley mentioned a story linked to by Glyn Moody on identi.ca that showed how much dominance of the “smart phone” market Research in Motion has over other alternatives. (08:58)
• The Defective by Design campaign has a petition against DRM on the iPad. (13:17)
• Bradley mentioned that Amazon removed the book 1984 from some people's Kindle's, an ironic example of DRM. (13:37)
• Bradley mentioned prcutler's comment about the iPad. (15:32)
• Bradley mentioned they have purposely slowed sales of iPhones in New York City. (16:03)

Segment 1 (19:20)

• FSF made another objection to the (now amended) Google Books Settlement with the help of the SFLC. (20:10)
• Bradley mentioned the historical positions on the importance of Free as in Freedom documentation. (03:40)

Episode 0x16 discussed the Google Books Settlement in more depth. (32:10)

Segment 2 (33:30)

• Karen discussed what she does as General Counsel does for SFLC.
• Karen mentioned the show where we discussed Form 990s for non-profits (40:20)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, documentation, mobile, android

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January 19, 2010

Aaron Williamson, Karen Sandler, and Bradley M. Kuhn discuss the issues of software freedom on mobile telephone devices.

Running time: 00:47:32.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:32)

• SFLC experimented first with using the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner. (06:12)
• Aaron noted that the Android system is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, although Google is the primary force behind it. (07:35)
• Harald Welte wrote a blog post about Android that talks about some of the that he sees with it. (07:58)
• Greg Kroah-Hartman has discussed that various Android-related Linux work has been dropped from staging. (08:43)
• Android does not use uClibc nor the GNU C library, but rather a BSD-forked C library called bionic. This was probably done to avoid the LGPL. (08:55)
• Bradley took the AP Computer Science exam in Pascal, taught it in C++ in the mid-1990s, but the course moved to Java in the late 1990s. There was an announcement about AB exam disappearing, among other things. (11:58)
• Aaron and Bradley launched the Replicant project to investigate the possibility of a fully Free Software build on the HTC Dream. (14:45)
• Bradley mentioned that the OpenBTS project is workking on a FLOSS GSM stack. (15:52)
• There have been many Cease and Desist letters from Google to people who redistributing proprietary firmware remixes. (16:54)
• Aaron built a list of the proprietary libraries on the HTC Dream Android/Linux default install. (18:12)
• Bradley mentioned mcgrof (aka Luis Rodriguez), who works for Atheros and helped make sure the ath5k and ath9k are fully Free Software driven. (22:38)
• There is a long list of proprietary components needed for the Maemo platform to work. The Cool900 blog has an updated list and thorough breakdown. (23:35)
• Bradley mentioned that there is a #replicant IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (26:56), and a Replicant mailing list. (27:32)
• We briefly discussed Symbian and that fact that someday it's supposed to be fully freed. However, Bradley mentioned that the governance is fully corporate controlled and they don't even have a working build that can be installed on a modern phone using Free Software yet. (31:10)
• Graziano build a list of known FLOSS applications for Android/Linux. (39:15)
• Here is another list of GPL'd Android/Linux applications available at the Application Market. (41:12)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, aaronw, mobile, android

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January 5, 2010

Karen and Bradley interview this show's first-ever second-time guest, Richard Fontana, who is an Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat.

Running time: 00:49:44.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:29)

Bradley and Karen introduce the guest, Richard Fontana.

Segment 1 (00:58)

• Richard Fontana, who is an Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat. Richard Fontana is an Open Source Licensing and Paten Counsel at Red Hat. (01:44)
• Our discussions with Fontana stemmed from his OSCON 2009 talk, Improving Legal Certainty in FOSS: Best Practices for Upstream Projects. He provided his slides from that talk to us and our listeners. The are Copyright © 2009, Red Hat. Inc., licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 USA license. (01:50)
• Fontana and Bradley discussed at length the “folk wisdom” about LGPLv2 that differs from the letter of the terms, and how it compares to LGPLv3. Specifically, the text in LGPLv2§3 that reads:

  To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License.

  (13:19, 15:24)
• Fontana compared the legal interpretation and practices around Free Software to the medieval “lex mercatoria” (18:56)
• Fontana pointed out that the lex mercatoria is, in some ways, the basis of the Uniform Commercial Code. (19:50)
• Fontana referenced one of the early GPL enforcement efforts regarding the Objective C front end to GCC (23:03)
• Bradley referenced the debian-legal debate regarding the AGPLv3. (31:20)
• Fontana mentioned that the Fedora licensing policies require that licenses meet the FSF's Free Software Definition (32:39)
• Bradley discussed that developers tend to dislike CC-0 due to its complexity because they prefer simpler (although perhaps less effective) public domain dedications. (40:38)

Segment 2 (44:19)

• Karen points out that license interpretation is often an exercise in risk analysis. (45:02)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fontana, red hat, copyrights, gpl

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December 22, 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss enforcement of the GNU General Public License, and in particular the lawsuits recently filed by SFLC against various violators of the GPL.

Running time: 00:33:11.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:32)

• Bradley mentioned that FLOSS Weekly had a proprietary software guest, Ubuntu One. (01:02)
• Bradley and Aaron Williamson were interviewed on Linux Outlaws about the GPL violation lawsuit. (01:20)
• Listeners will know Aaron Williamson from when he sat in for Karen on Episode 0x18, and was interviewed on Bradley and Karen on the very special episode about SFLC's amicus brief in Jacobsen v. Katzer. (01:25)
• SFLC announced that it filed a lawsuit regarding GPL enforcement. (02:03)
• Bradley misspoke that Tom Hanks (as a guest on Saturday Night Live) played Mr. No Depth Perception. It was, in fact, Kevin Nealon.
• Karen mentioned Bradley's blog post about finding one violation per day. (08:24)
• Bradley mentioned the WRT54G enforcement against Linksys that spawned communities like OpenWRT. (11:36)
• Bradley mentioned that getting build instructions and scripts to control compilation and installation of the executable (GPLv2), or Installation Information (v3). (16:57)

Segment 1 (17:50)

• SFLC's A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance outlines requirements commonly asked of violators when bringing them back into compliance. (18:02)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, sflc, gplv3, copyrights, gpl

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December 8, 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss Eben Moglen's letter to the European Commission regarding the Oracle acquisition of Sun.

Running time: 00:44:03.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:30)

• Karen talked about Sun's 2009-11-09 8K SEC filing that broke the story about the European Commission raising questions about the Sun/Oracle merger.(02:15)
• Karen and Bradley talked about Eben Moglen's personal comments to the European Commission regarding the Oracle/Sun merger. (05:21)
• Bradley mentioned that Sun's original product, SunOS, was based on BSD. (06:30)
• Bradley mentioned the Sun acquisition of MySQL AB. (07:10)
• Bradley referred to a previous Software Freedom Law Show where he and Karen discussed “Open Core” business models and centralized copyright. (09:16)
• Karen mentioned that Eben has also formally requested to appear as independent expert before the European Commission on this matter. (11:09)
• Bradley criticized Oracle for their predatory proprietary licensing business practices, and has tried to stop people from using Free Software. (13:00)
• Karen mentioned that we have talked about the dual licensing/proprietary relicensing confusion discussed on a previous show. (15:29)
• Bradley pointed out that RMS coined the term “barely legitimate” for proprietary relicensing. (17:09)
• Bradley referred to his blog post about how “Open Core” is problematic for advancing Free Software. (17:44)
• Bradley thinks the proprietary relicensing business model that Michael Widenius supports is on that has run its course and probably should not be used anymore (20:54)

Segment 1 (22:16)

• Bradley said that if it were up to him, all published and deployed software in the world would be Free Software, and he wishes that the European Commission would require that for the merger to go through, but it's not their mandate to do such things. (23:50)
• Bradley said if he could make a wish, that he'd wish the European Commission would put the MySQL code base into a non-profit entity chartered to never make MySQL proprietary, and to release it under GPLv3-or-later. (25:45)
• Bradley pointed out that it might be good if before that, Oracle releases MySQL under GPLv3 to get the extra patent assurances, although Karen points out Eben's letter raises the issue that there is an implicit patent assurance from the GPLv2 release of MySQL already. (26:01)
• Bradley talked briefly off-topic about the file, Double Indemnity. (26:30)
• Bradley mentions Oracle's ownership of MySQL copyrights is dangerous because Oracle's goal is to take away software freedom from the world with regard to databases, by trying to get all users to switch to proprietary databases, and that they are likely to use the MySQL codebase toward this horrible mission. (29:40)
• Bradley pointed out that any organization that isn't committing to releasing all its software as Free Software is a dangerous place for centralized copyright of a FLOSS codebase. (32:04)
• Karen is skeptical about for-profit corporate control of Free Software because they will always focus on shareholder value over software freedom principles. (36:08)
• Bradley tries not to start sentences with Look, but does so accidentally sometimes. (36:53)
• Bradley pointed out that he believes the software freedom world would be better off if Oracle had not ported their proprietary databases to GNU/Linux. (38:00)
• Bradley and Karen mentioned that the one year anniversary on 2009-11-11. (41:31)
• Bradley mentioned Bashpodder and gpodder (42:00)

Tags: Europe, Oracle, anti-trust, gpl, for-profit, bkuhn, karen, Sun

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November 19, 2009

Bradley and Karen interview Jeremy Allison of the the Samba Team.

Running time: 00:55:38.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:11)

Bradley and Karen let folks know that we are releasing the podcast early so that folks traveling for the holiday in the USA can get it early and listen to it while traveling.

Segment 1 (01:35)

• Bradley mentioned PRI as well as NPR to be fair to Ira Glass. (02:20)
• This episode is somewhat of a follow up to Episode 0x10 with Carlo Piana. (04:31)

Segment 2 (05:47)

• Jeremy Allison from the Samba Project is our guest. (06:20)
• Jeremy noted that the Active Directory support has been the most easily implemented technical outcome of the EU agreement. (07:03)
• Jeremy noted that the documentation from Microsoft received through the EU has somewhat taken the fun out of development of Samba, since network analysis is less necessary. (07:47)
• Jeremy mentioned his colleague Tridge's very good article describing the French café technique of protocol analysis. (08:10)
• Jeremy wrote a column called Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard, which talks about some of the technical details that were uncovered after the EU agreement. (09:25)
• Jeremy discussed that he resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft/Novell deal. (19:33)
• Jeremy discussed his a video released on the FSF website. (45:20)

Segment 3 (49:20)

• Karen corrected Bradley's misconception regarding how statutory damages work under copyright law. (49:43)
• Karen encouraged people to just comply with the GPL since it's easy, and look at A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance. (52:00)
• Bradley mentioned he was a judge at the quiz bowl where Jeremy imitated Steve Balmer. (53:00)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, microsoft, anti-trust, gpl, Jeremy Allison

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November 10, 2009

Bradley and Karen interview Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons .

Running time: 00:49:21.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:28)

• Bradley and Karen discuss whether 0x1A is a “landmark” in hex. (01:00)
• Dan Lynch, SFLS Producer, is a host of Linux Outlaws. (02:25)
• Bradley quoted Larry Wall from one of his 1999 State of the Onion speech. (03:45)

Segment 1 (05:48)

• Our guest is Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons. (06:05)
• Mike is the longest serving employee of Creative Commons. (06:56)
• CC-by-SA is the most popular Creative Commons license with the software freedom crowd. (13:40)
• CC-Attribution is another license type that Mike mentioned (14:00)
• Mike quoted from various sections of CC-by-SA to make the point that there are methods to avoid misrepresentation (19:15)
• Mike pointed out fair use can even be used to misrepresent a person's views, so prohibiting derivative works for that purpose sometimes doesn't even help. (24:00)
• Mike, Bradley, and Karen discussed the Wikipedia move from FDL to CC-By-SA. Mike pointed out that a “one magnet” need in copyleft. (26:12)
• Mike mentioned that the Fedora project recently switched to CC-By-SA for their documentation and wikis. (27:17)
• Mike, Bradley and Karen discussed issues related to autonomo.us. (33:00)

Segment 2 (38:47)

• Mike and Karen will follow up to discuss whether CC-By-SA would be a better license for the Software Freedom Law Show or other works by lawyers. (39:20)
• Bradley changed the license of his website to CC-By-SA. (40:10)
• Bradley and Karen discussed identi.ca. (42:00)
• Donald Knuth organized his kitchen around the trash can. (46:00)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, numbering, copyrights, creative-commons

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October 27, 2009

Bradley and Karen discuss the USA IRS Form 990, which non-profit donors can use to understand and check up on the activities of charitable organizations in the USA.

Running time: 00:49:26.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:34)

• We have confirmed that John Sullivan does not have H1N1. (01:58)
• Bradley mentioned that on the 2008-06-21 episode of NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me covered the salacious issues regarding former Broadcom executives. (06:35)
• Bradley mentioned GuideStar, which is a place you can find Form 990s at no charge for non-profits in the USA. Bradley noted that you have to sign up for an account to use their search, but the 990 downloads are at no charge. (10:15)

Segment 1 (12:24)

• Bradley mentioned the SNL skits that make fun of Clear Channel morning radio shows and their …And We're back! catchphrase. (12:52)
• Bradley further noted that a Family Guy episode included a similar gag. (13:05)
• Listeners may want to follow along on Conservancy's FY 2008 Form 900 (PDF). (14:26)
• Bradley mentioned that the Boost Project, a member project of Conservancy, has has an annual conference, the revenue from which appears on Line 2 of the Conservancy's Form 990. (21:23)
• Karen mentioned Form 990 Line 3 is usually large for 501(c)(6) organizations, since most of their funds come from membership fees (23:30)
• Bradley mentioned that the Twisted project had work funded that was blogged about publicly. Here's an example of that from February 2009. (32:30)
• Bradley mentioned he was previously the Clerk of the Free Software Foundation, which can be confirmed by looking at the Annual Report Commonwealth of Massachusetts filings for FSF in 2003 and 2004. (35:19)

Segment 2 (43:38)

• Organizations have to file a form with the State or Commonwealth where the organization is incorporated. (43:55)
• New York has more requirements than many states and commonwealths. New York organizations often need a limited review or an audit by an accounting firm. Conservancy made its New York State FY 2008CHAR-500 (PDF) available as well (44:32)
• Bradley uses jwiegley's program, Ledger to keep Conservancy's books. (44:55)
• Bradley mentioned you can get annual reports for Massachusetts non-profits at the Massachusetts Secretary of State website. (46:30)
• Bradley mentioned the discussion we had with Stormy Peters about giving more to non-profits that support FLOSS. (47:50)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, conservancy, non-profits