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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May 10, 2011

This episode is a recording of Jeremy Allison's talk, Why Samba Switched to GPLv3 from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.

Running time: 01:00:51.

Show Notes

Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), Bradley was at Samba XP with Jeremy the day this show was released. So, there he wasn't able to get show notes together in detail for this show.

However, Jeremy's slides from the talk are available (in PDF), and also ODP format. So, you can follow along with it in the talk.

Also, you may be interested to read Bradley live-dent'd Jeremy's talk, so the discussion there might be useful to read as well.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, gpl, gplv3, Jeremy Allison, samba, conferences, or-later

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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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March 1, 2011

Bradley and Karen discussed the Windows Phone 7 Application Store terms and conditions which prohibit GPL'd and other copylefted software in the application store.

Running time: 00:38:13.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:35)

• Karen and Bradley discussed the Microsoft Phone Marketplace agreement, which was heavily covered in news and blogs. (02:50)
• Karen quoted directly from the § 1(l) from the Windows Phone Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (03:20)
• Bradley credited Jello Biafra with coining the term “punditocracy”, but it seems to have been first used by Charles Reynell in The Economist in 1989 and popularized by Eric Alterman in his 1992 book, Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy.
• Bradley mentioned the brouhaha about the order of succession after Regan was shot in 1981. (Bradley incorrectly said 1980 on the show.) (09:47)
• Karen and Bradley previously discussed the Apple Online Store agreement on FaiF Episode 0x03.
• Bradley mentioned that the arm port of Windows 7 isn't even done (21:30)
• According to a Canalys study quoted on Wikipedia's Smartphone entry, RIM is only 14% of the market now, when it was previously much larger. Symbian is still the largest, surprisingly. (25:21)
• K-9 Mail is a fork of the last Free Software version of Google's Android Mail application. (30:21)
• Bradley compared what's happening with Android to the history of X Windows
(31:40)
• Bradley joked about the naming length controversy for the Windows Phone 7. (33:00)
• Steve Ballmer strangely kept saying: The operating system is called Windows while talking to market analysis back in July 2010. (36:04)

After the show was recorded, there was an announcement that Microsoft would allow employees to build their own companies writing Windows 7 Series Windows Mobile applications.

Tags: gplv3, microsoft, gpl, mobile

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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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February 1, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss non-commercial-only commons licenses, particularly the CC-By-NC license, and how they compare to Free Culture and Free Software licenses, and why some authors pick NC licenses instead of Free Culture/Software ones.

Running time: 00:49:32.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:36)

• Listeners seeking a show on how to select a Free Software license, differences between copyleft and non-copyleft, and how they interact with copyright are encouraged to listen to episode 0x08 of the old Software Freedom Law Show which covered these topics. Please write in again if that show doesn't cover your questions on the issue. (02:10)
• Bradley reminisced about the crass “Brian and O'Brien” show on Baltimore's B-104 Gary Huddles who was notorious locally in Baltimore because he was implicated in Maryland's version of the 1980s Savings and Loan scandals. (03:30)
• Karen mentioned that freedomdefined.org is the source for the Free Culture definition that defines what licenses are Free Culture licenses. (12:54)
• Bradley suggested listening to some of the old versions of RMS' Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks. In fact, there is an audio recording of the one at MIT on 19 April 2001 that Bradley attended, and an audio recording of the one that Bradley heard at Cardozo Law School. There is audio of the Q&A session, wherein RMS engages in that discussion Bradley mentioned with Free Culture activists. (10:10, 14:04)
• Bradley mentioned that Linus Torvalds switched to GPL for Linux because he realized non-commercial restrictions weren't appropriate. (Search the string GPL on that link to find Linus' answer on that.) (19:00)
• Karen mentioned that Creative Commons did a study considering what people understand commercial vs. non-commercial to mean. (20:43)
• Karen and Bradley discussed the text of CC-By-NC. (23:00)
• Karen mentioned various CC-By-SA licensed derivatives that had been made from Sita Sings the Blues. (38:24)
• Bradley discussed the Harry Potter Lexicon case and Karen mentioned the so-called IP Colloquium discussion on it. (44:30)
• Bradley mentioned Memory Alpha, which is a CC-By-NC wiki regarding Star Trek, which is tolerated by Paramount. (45:20)

Tags: copyrights, creative-commons, gpl, bkuhn, karen, fsf, free-culture, non-commercial

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January 18, 2011

Bradley and Karen discuss a few corrections from previous shows, and then discuss misunderstandings about the GPL regarding “revocation” of the GPL.

Running time: 00:44:45.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:34)

• Bradley issued a correction regarding FaiF 0x06. Christopher Allan Webber mentioned that FSF sometimes accepts copyright assignments in cases where the entire code base is not assigned. (02:40)
• Karen issued a correction regarding FaiF 0x04 about women being hired to be at the party, but in fact that was not the case, despite being mentioned in this article.
• Karen's paper on Medical Devices was linked to from a ZD Net UK blog. (05:48)
• Bradley mentioned this Android bug regarding mis-sent SMS, which was widely covered in the press. Apparently the bug has been resolved upstream, somewhat disproving Bradley's point. (08:40)

Segment 1 (12:19)

• Bradley is quoted in an article about revocation of the GPL (12:35).
• The story was originalyl covered on slashdot. (13:17)
• The WinMTR site now says: By popular request, WinMTR will be available under GPL v2. (19:50)
• Karen mentioned the FSF's GPL FAQ. (29:27)
• Bradley mentioned the four rationale documents There's also one for AGPLv3 draft 2 and LGPLv3 draft 2. (30:13)

Tags: bkuhn, copyrights, gpl, medical-devices, conferences, karen, sflc, fsf, correction, revocation

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August 17, 2010

Karen and Bradley discuss the enforcement activities of the Software Freedom Conservancy, recent conferences and medical devices.

Running time: 35:21.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley is President of the Software Freedom Conservancy, and Karen is one of the Conservancy's pro bono lawyers. Karen is also an officer of the Conservancy, and Bradley is a director of the FSF. Got that?(03:17)
• Thanks for sending us your ideas!(06:22)
• The SFLC is not the EFF, despite what slashdot says.(09:18)
• To learn more about the default judgment you can read the court's opinion or listen to Episode 0x29.
• If you liked Episode 0x21, you should check out the paper that SFLC published about software transparency on medical devices (25:05).

Tags: compliance, gpl, medical-devices, bkuhn, karen, sflc, fsf, conservancy

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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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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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September 29, 2009

Bradley and Karen give the ath5k talk that they previously gave at the Linux Collaboration Summit in April 2009.

Running time: 00:41:12.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Bradley looked for a web reference on the “you'll know it is time to turn the page, when … “, but could find none.

Segment 1 (04:03)

• Follow along with the slides for this talk. (Javascript required for full effect)

Segment 2 (36:55)

• Bradley mentioned his desire to keep a good bridge between the copyleft and non-copyleft communities. (38:35)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, copyrights, gpl, linux

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August 18, 2009

Bradley and Karen discuss a few different types of for-profit business models that are common around codebases licensed under the GPL.

Running time: 00:30:45.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:30)

• Bradley mentioned Monty's blog post about the licensing of MySQL (01:10)
• Bradley pointed out that “dual licensing” is a misleading term for a proprietary relicensing business model, as discussed on the Your Questions podcast. (02:33)
• Bradley mentioned that he'd been making money as an independent consultant, which he wrote about in 2001 during the original Microsoft attacks on the GPL. (04:42)
• Bradley mentioned Cygnus Solutions as a good model of a Free Software, GPL-based company. (06:54)
• Bradley also mentioned Codesourcery as another example of a good GPL-based company (13:24)
• Bradley mentioned Dave Neary's talk at OSCON, Does Working with Free Software Have to Be So Hard? (23:52)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, for-profit, gpl