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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June 23, 2009

Karen and Bradley interview Carlo Piana, a lawyer who has worked extensively in the E.U. Microsoft Anti-Trust case.

Running time: 00:44:49.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Karen mentioned she owned a thinkgeek shirt that has a visual joke about number base systems. (01:13)
• Bradley misspoke saying that 10 in binary would make it the second show. Of course, it would make it the third show if we numbered in binary, since we start numbering at zero. (01:50)
• Bradley mentioned that the Software Freedom Law Show crowd sources its marketing. (03:30)
• Bradley mentioned that the US Antitrust case against Microsoft, which included both the federal government in the USA, and many State/Commonwealth Attorneys General, many of which settled separately. (05:17)
• This show discussed the EU Antitrust case against Microsoft. (08:30)

Segment 1 (11:18)

• Carlo mentioned that materials about the EU/Microsoft Antitrust case takes up 4-5 square meters of his office. (14:20)
• The EU case started with an ancient complaint by Sun Microsystems. (15:10)
• Carlo mentioned Novell was more dominate historically in Europe than in the USA, and Novell had been more Unix-friendly and compatibility-friendly. As Microsoft became dominant, Sun complained. (15:50)
• The integration of Windows Media Player into Windows was one of the issues raised in the EU case. (16:50)
• EU required Microsoft to provide timely and complete interoperability information so that competitors can create working replacements. This made Samba the natural client for Carlo in this case. (17:56)
• Microsoft challenged the decision, saying that it would give a “free ride” to their competitors, (19:45) and claimed the information wasn't necessary to achieve interoperability, because they could just reverse engineer or implement from standards documents. (20:18) Microsoft sited Samba as an example of how reverse engineering could work. (20:45) Carlo called this a lame excuse. (21:10)
• Carlo said that the EU entirely rejected Microsoft's excuses. (22:46)
• With the help of SFLC, Carlo was able to negotiate licensing conditions that were GPL-compatible. This was necessary because EU allowed RAND licensing of the protocol information, which is often problematic for GPL-compatibility (which typically requires RF licensing). (25:55)
• The compromise required that USD$10,000 be paid by the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, and after that GPL-compatible licensing for the protocol information was available generally to Samba and the entire community. (26:3)
• Unfortunately, patent claims held by Microsoft are outside of the agreement. Carlo continues to make efforts on this. (27:23)
• Carlo is also working on the OOXML issue (31:10), which Carlo says is clearly an antitrust violation. (33:30)
• In the EU third parties interested can be heard by the Commission early in the process. (34:20)
• Carlo mentioned that the participation and testimony of the Samba team, in particular Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell, was central to make a convincing case to the EU court. (36:25)

Segment 2 (39:29)

• Bradley believes that the most important people in the Free Software world are doing things that no one else is willing to do. (39:40)
• Karen pointed out that the international nature of Free Software means that the success in the EU helps developers around the world. (42:30)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, numbering, microsoft, anti-trust