March 29, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss two debates going on in the free and open source software community. One recent and seemingly inflated, and one long and confusing.

Running time: 00:43:18.

Show Notes

Segment 1 (03:12)

• Bradley wrote a blog post about the Bionic issues that were raised. (03:44)
• On the old oggcast, Karen and Bradley discussed the Android/Linux system and Bionic specifically. (04:09)
• Karen mentioned an old oggcast where permissive vs. copyleft licensing was discussed. (06:19)
• Jake Edge wrote an LWN article that discussed Bionic (07:58)
• Bradley mentioned Raymond Nimmer's blog that started the debate (10:52)
• Bradley also mentioned Edward Naughton's blog post and paper on Bionic. (11:38)
• Raymond Nimmer is not David Nimmer, who is known for writings on copyright (18:10)
• There is now an disturbing group on identica, which is more disturbing than a tag about disturbing. (19:15)
• Joe Brockmeier did some research on Edward Naughton's ties to Microsoft. (20:05)
• Karen mentioned a paper on deep legal analysis of header files and on originality requirements in copyright (24:40)

Segment 2 (26:07)

• Karen wanted to clear up some confusion about the discussion last episode about the “Open Source” and “Free Software” terminology.

Tags: fontana, copyrights, gpl, android, linux, bkuhn, karen, fsf, google

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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