August 16, 2011

Bradley and Karen play and comment on a talk recording of Aaron Williamson's and Karen's presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled Legal Basics for Developers.

Running time: 00:53:53.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley mentioned the birthday attack when explaining to Karen how likely it might be that the number of the show might match the number of the day. (01:38)
• This show is a recording of Aaron and Karen's OSCON 2011 talk, Legal Basics for Developers. (02:20)

Segment 1 (05:53)

• The slides for the Legal Basics for Developers are available to follow along with the recording (05:53)

Segment 2 (49:36)

• Richard Fontana gave at a talk at OSCON as well, which was recorded, and Karen and Bradley have asked for his permission to play it. (50:45)
• Bradley asked folks to ping Richard on identi.ca to ask him to allow us to use his audio on the oggcast. (51:05)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, non-commercial, sflc, oscon, fontana, creative-commons, aaronw, patents, copyrights, trademarks, public domain, license compatibility, compliance, non-profits, gnome, questions, conferences, gpl

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February 15, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss types of copyleft generally and introduce the basics of license compatibility and -or-later clauses.

Running time: 00:41:57.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:38)

• This show discusses copyleft and basic issues of license compatibility (04:09)
• Karen mentioned an episode of the old Software Freedom Law Show, Episode 0x08, where Bradley and Karen discussed selecting a FLOSS license and what the various options are. (04:45)
• license compatibility 06:28
• Bradley incorrectly said that the original Emacs license didn't have the word General in it. However, the other explanations appear to be correct. There's a useful history page that someone wrote about the history of GPL. It appears the non-general GNU copylefts existed from 1984-1988. (06:57)
• Karen noted that the Library GPL was renamed to the Lesser GPL which happened in 1999. (09:30)
• Bradley mentioned that when he and RMS worked on the GNU Classpath Exception, Bradley suggested it be called the Least GPL. (10:38)
• GPL doesn't have a choice of law clause. If a another copyleft does, it surely is incompatible with the GPL. (14:17)
• AGPLv3 § 13 and GPLv3 § 13 explicitly make themselves compatibility with each other, which Bradley calls compatibility by fiat. (15:40)
• Karen mentioned that the Mozilla Public License § 13 has a section about multiple licensed code (16:50).
• Bradley mentioned that Mozilla Firefox uses a combinatorial license: (GPL|LGPL|MPL), which is a disjunctive tri-license. (19:00).
• Bradley mentioned that the old Software Freedom Law Show Episode 0x17 discussed compatibility of permissively licensed software and copylefted software. (20:22 )
• Apache Software License 2.0 was likely the first FLOSS license to have an explicit patent licensing provision (23:40)
• Bradley and Karen discussed the fact that -only vs. -or-later are options with the GPL, while they are not with other copylefts, such as CC-By-SA. (30:11)

Tags: agpl, license compatibility, copyrights, gpl, bkuhn, gplv3, karen, sflc, fsf, mpl, or-later

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September 15, 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss issues surrounding the licensing of software documentation, and FSF's objection to the Google Books Proposed Settlement.

Running time: 00:50:41.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Bradley mentioned the topic for this show was suggested on identi.ca (01:15) by Dan Scott (01:39) who works on a project called Evergreen (02:36)
• Dan had asked earlier about FaiF documentation licenses. (03:04) Bradley met him at FSOSS, which is held at Seneca at York. (Bradley misspoke during the podcast and confused Seneca and York.) (01:30)
• Bradley talked about this history of the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). (04:40)
• Bradley mentioned the (mostly) defunct Open Publication License. (05:37)
• Karen referenced the Debian decision about FDL. (06:20)
• The FDL allows for invariant sections. (10:50)
• Debian decided that invariant sections are not DFSG-free. (11:20)
• FSF released GNU FDL 1.3 to allow relicensing of some FDL works under CC-By-SA. FSF's announced this in November 2008 and Bradley blogged about it. (19:00)
• FSF does have a discussion draft of the GNU Simpler Free Documentation License available. (22:03)
• Bradley recommends licensing documentation under (GPLv3-or-later|CC-By-SA-2.0-or-later) or (GPLv3-or-later|FDL-2.1-or-later|CC-By-SA-2.0-or-later). (28:00, 32:05)
• Bradley restated his hatred for the term “dual licensing” because of its ambiguity. He refers to the above as “disjunctive dual licensing” (30:10)
• Bradley and Karen mentioned they will talk about public domain eventually, but for the moment, people should look at CC-0. (32:30)
• Karen says we'll do the public domain show before Episode 0xDEAD, which would be our 57,006th show.

Segment 1 (33:47)

• Karen talked about the SFLC helped the FSF file an objection to the Google Books settlement. (34:50)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, license compatibility, documentation

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March 17, 2009

In this episode of the Software Freedom Law Show, Karen and Bradley interview Karen F. Copenhaver of the Linux Foundation and Choate, Hall, & Stewart, LLP, and also answer a listener's question.

Running time: 00:42:51.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Karen (Sandler) just returned from speaking at the Bossa Conference 2009. (00:50)
• Bradley just returned from the Free Software Poker Conference. (01:13)
• Outside of his work for the Conservancy and the SFLC, Bradley also contributes to the Pokersource project. (01:27)
• Karen (Sandler) mentioned a type of non-profit organization called trade associations, aka 501(c)(6)'s. (02:50)
• Karen (Copenhaver) works for the Linux Foundation. (03:52)

Segment 1 (04:09)

• Karen (Copenhaver) noted that she thinks of Richard Fontana as a national treasure. Fontana was previously a guest (on episode 0x04). (09:40)
• Karen (Copenhaver) mentioned that conversations among lawyers about Free Software licensing issues are very important. Listeners may be interested to know about open-bar, which is a mailing list for exactly that. (15:26)
• Karen (Copenhaver) pointed out that Scott Peterson is an invaluable resource to other lawyers. Scott was previously a guest (on episode 0x01). (16:17)
• Karen (Copenhaver) pointed out that she isn't the attorney for any kernel developers or the member companies of the Linux Foundation, and that her primary role is for education on legal issues related to the kernel named Linux. (17:32)
• Both Karens discussed the differences between trade associations (aka 501(c)(6)'s), and 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. The latter is more common in the FLOSS world, but Linux Foundation is the former. Stormy Peters wrote an excellent blog post on the differences between the two. (18:50)
• Karen (Copenhaver) pointed out that The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) was the predecessor organization to the Linux Foundation. (Linux Foundation was formed by the merger the ODSL and the Free Standards Group (FSG) in early 2007.) (20:40)
• Some of the key kernel developers, such as Andrew Morton, Linus Torvalds, and Ted T'so work for the Linux Foundation. (21:20)
• Karen (Copenhaver) said that the Linux Foundation has a small number of employees, although at ten, it is actually about the same size, or, in most cases, bigger more than most non-profits in the FLOSS space. She was likely primarily comparing the size of the Linux Foundation to its member companies. (22:25)
• Jim Zemlin is the CEO of the Linux Foundation. (24:54)
• The Linux Foundation has planned a number of events for 2009. (31:15)

Segment 2 (34:06)

• The FSF FAQ as a pretty good definition of license Compatibility. (37:00)
• The the license compatibility matrix is also in the GPL FAQ. The matrix was written by Brett Smith, who was a guest on Episode 0x02.(38:19)
• The FSF License List indicates whether or not each license is compatible with the GPL. (40:00)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, linux foundation, Karen Copenhaver, license compatibility