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 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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January 4, 2011

Bradley and Karen discussed the inclusion of ZFS code now included in GRUB, as the GRUB Project announced and was covered at LWN by Jonathan Corbet.

Running time: 00:47:58.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:35)

• It's not mandatory that GNU projects have assignment to the FSF. The GNU Maintainer's guide discuss the requirements when items are assigned to FSF (14:40)
• FSF requires that the entire codebase be assigned once GNU project maintainers choose to assign copyrights. Conservancy's policy on copyright assignment differs here; Conservancy will accept partial copyright assignment. (16:07)
• Bradley mentioned the COBOL front end to GCC that is not in the main GCC codebase because it is not copyright assigned to FSF. (17:40)
• Bradley and Karen discussed the Squeak relicensing last call. (25:49)
• Bradley posted a comment to Corbet's article. (32:30)

Final (45:45)

• The calendar Bradley was thinking of was the International Fixed Calendar, which Wikipedia confirms, with a sourced link, was used by the Eastman Kodak Company from rom 1928 to 1989.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fsf, conservancy, gplv3, copyrights

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November 23, 2010

Karen and Bradley discuss the debates regarding Apple's online store restrictions that make it impossible to distribute GPL'd software via Apple's store. Then, they discuss question the usefulness of the term “Open Core”

Running time: 00:45:04.

Show Notes

Note: Bradley's audio was too low compared to Karen's on this episode. We're still sorting out our recording issues, and apologize for this. This is completely Bradley's fault: don't blame Producer Dan. :)

Segment 0 (00:34)

• Karen mentioned first Brett's statement on the VLC mailing list, although that is toward the end of the story that was covered last month. (05:30)
• Bradley mentioned that the story started with FSF's enforcement regarding Apple's distribution of GNU Go in Apple's application store. (05:54)
• Don't confused GNU Go (the game) with Google Go (the programming language). Bradley pointed out that Google did assign some of its copyright on the language Go, for the GCC frontend for the Go language. (06:51)
• Bradley mentioned that the game Go has been around thousands of years, although according the Go Wikipedia entry, it's been around for approximately 2,500 years. (08:21)
• Bradley pointed out that the primary goal of GPL enforcement is to get compliance, not to get companies to cease distribution, but sometimes the companies prefer to cease distribution rather than complying with the license. (09:57)
• There was disagreement in the VLC community about the enforcement action (11:50). There's an original thread on the VLC mailing list that discussed this (12:35), and then Brett's response on that list. (13:25)
• GPLv2 requires in § 6 that you cannot impose terms that restrict the downstream more than GPL otherwise does. (15:40)
• FSF made a statement that linked this issue to the DRM issue, which caused some confusion. It's our view that what Apple is doing against GPL software is part of their initiative to put DRM (both for software and more traditional content) onto devices. (17:20)
• Bradley mentioned that Apple lawyers have a pathological hatred of GPL, which he believes comes directly down from Steve Jobs, who began his dislike of GPL when he tried, while at NeXT, to distribute a proprietary front-end for GCC for Objective-C. (RMS discussed the story briefly in his essay Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism.) (23:45)

Segment 1 (27:40)

• Bradley has decided that the term “Open Core” is so confusing that it's now useless.
• The Gnus IMAP backend is being rewritten, and Joel Adamson mentioned that he's using Emacs development mainline and the new IMAP implementation is working well. (29:58)
• Alexandre Oliva started a project called Linux Libre, to remove proprietary software from Linux. (31:31)
• There is a file called WHENCE in Linux that is a long list of proprietary software included inside Linux. Richard Fontana linked the WHENCE file on identi.ca (31:02)
• Alexandre made an announcement calling Linux an “Open Core” project. (32:56)
• Bradley mentioned that Alexandre appears to have been convinced that Open Core is a problematic term in this context (during this identica conversation). Alexandre seems to be favoring the term “Free Bait” now. (35:16)
• Karen mentioned Nina Paley's intellectual pooperty cartoon. (38:39)
• Bradley mentioned the softer side of Sears marketing campaign, which was used as a cruel joke by Cordelia in the pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to make fun of Willow's clothes. Sears apparently dropped the campaign in 1999. (40:23)
• Join us on #faif on freenode and the !FaiFCast group on identi.ca (43:47)

Tags: fsf, gplv3, smith, mobile, Apple, vlc

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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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April 28, 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss the intersections of software patents with FLOSS licenses. They give a general overview of how patents generally interact with FLOSS, and then discuss the patent provisions of specific FLOSS licenses.

Running time: 00:46:50.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:35)

• Bradley suggests that more knowledgeable listeners might want to skip the first segment. (02:22)
• RMS rightly dislikes the term “intellectual property”. He's written about it often. (02:58)
• Karen noted that the USPTO uses term property to describe patents, which Bradley points out isn't actually accurate. (03:10)
• RMS didn't invent, although he did popularize the phrase , “perpetual copyright on the installment plan”. (05:08)
• The USPTO website confirms that the term limits on patents are 20 years. (05:25)
• Bradley mentioned that RSA Data Security, Inc. liberated the RSA a patent a few weeks before it expired. (05:40)
• Bradley and Karen explained what patent trolls are. (08:50)
• The patent section of SFLC's legal guide explains the interactions of FLOSS with the patent system, including covering issues such as what a patent is and what willful infringement is. (10:36)
• Bradley mentioned that Jeremy Allison gave an award reading FATtest Patent Troll to Sam Ramji at the Linux Collaboration Summit, although the only URL we could find documenting this is a identica statement by Bradley himself. (14:25)

Segment 1 (15:08)

• Bradley noted that GPL is a copyright license. This is discussed in detail in the Copyright section of SFLC's legal guide. (16:03)
• GPLv2§6 and GPLv2§7 are the two sections that might interact with patent issues, particularly §7. (20:30)
• Our colleague, Dan Ravicher, has often spoken about the implied patent license GPLv2 grants, including in seminars run by the FSF itself. (21:20)
• Bradley attempted to concisely explain the patent provisions of GPLv3 (mostly in §11). (27:20)
• Bradley mentioned the discussions in the GPLv3 Drafting committees, such as Committee B and Committee C (29:53).
• Ultimately, Bradley took 8 minutes exactly, not counting Karen's 28 second interruption. That's pretty concise, he thinks.
• GPLv3§12 is nearly identical to GPLv2§7. (37:18)

Segment 2 (38:20)

• Bradley explained the patent provisions of the Apache 2.0 license.
• Bradley and Karen discussed SFLC's work against the Blackboard patent. There were news items on SFLC's site when the reexam was filed and when the USPTO ordered the reexam. (42:05)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, sflc, gplv3, patents

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April 14, 2009

Bradley and Karen discuss the settlement of the Microsoft/TomTom law suit and the implications for the software freedom community.

Running time: 00:34:36.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:29)

• Bradley and Karen were in San Francisco attending the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit (00:46)
• “Producer Dan” is Dan Lynch of half baked media. (01:10)
• Bradley mentioned Nehru jackets, notably worn by Ricardo Montalbán as Khan in Star Trek. (01:23)
• On 30 March 2009, Microsoft and TomTom settled their patent dispute. (2:30)
• Bradley mentioned two articles on 29 December 2008 and on 29 January 2009 in SD Times where he and Sam Ramji debated Microsoft's policies toward the FLOSS community. (04:20)
• Karen and Bradley talk about Microsoft's historic patent threats against Linux. Bradley refers to Microsoft's assertions just 16 months before its aggression with TomTom. (4:29)
• Bradley mentions that many agree that Microsoft's FAT file patent should not be considered a valid patent. (6:30)
• Karen discusses periodic filings required by the U.S. securities laws and thresholds of materiality for information to be included in those filings. (12:34)
• Bradley mentioned Section 7 of GPLv2. (14:20)

Segment 1 (17:53)

• Karen discusses the Edgar system, which has since been succeeded by IDEA. The filings that Karen mentions of Novell's agreements with Microsoft (with confidential treatment) are available here and here. (21:40)
• Bradley explained the date in Section 11 of GPLv3 that puts companies on notice that side patent deals after that date would violate GPLv3. (23:18)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, gplv3, patents

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March 31, 2009

This episode is primarily composed of a recorded speech that Bradley made on complying with the GPL. An introduction and wrap-up segment with Bradley and Karen is included.

Note: The audio available for this podcast between 06:06 and 10:45 US/Eastern on 31 March 2009 had a mono/stereo issue. That has been corrected. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Running time: 00:56:26.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:29)

• Bradley mentioned being a member of ΥΠΕ (aka UPE), the Computer Science Honors Society, and that their year of founding appears on the seal in binary. Bradley was correct about this, but said the wrong year during the show. The year is actually 1967, which is 11110101111. (01:30)
• The Mayan numbering system was actually base 20, which is close enough to 10 that Bradley's point probably isn't valid, and he awaits for the 2, 8 or 16 base culture to be founded. (02:38)
• Bradley mentioned using the NATO alphabet to read off hexadecimal numbers. (05:53)

Segment 1 (06:53)

You can follow along with the slides during this segment.

To follow along with the slides, note the time indices at the end of each bullet point. When the time on the podcast reaches the index listed at the end of a given bullet point, it is time to switch to the next bullet point (with space). The slides should work in any Javascript-enabled browser.

Segment 2 (52:58)

The Compliance Guide has since been made available since the talk was recorded. (53:56).

Tags: bkuhn, karen, sflc, gplv3, compliance

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March 3, 2009

Bradley and Karen discuss the issues and considerations for a FLOSS project selecting a license.

Running time: 00:40:30.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:25)

• Bradley mentioned license proliferation. (02:50)
• Karen mentioned the FSF License List. (04:40)
• Although they are saying it too fast, Bradley and Karen are saying the word “Affero”, referring to the Affero GPL. (06:50)
• Bradley and Karen discussed weak copyleft, such as the Lesser GPL. (16:00)
• Bradley mentioned thisSoftware Freedom Law Show: blog post of his where he says most developers have traditionally seen a licensing decision as something you think about once and never revisit!. (22:35)
• Karen mentioned the SFLC Primer.
• Bradley mentioned checking if a license is on the FSF License List, on the OSI License List and if it's DFSG-Free before using it. (27:21)

Segment 1 (28:15)

Karen and Bradley debate various issues about license selection.

Tags: agpl, patents, trademarks, copyrights, bkuhn, karen, fsf, gplv3

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February 3, 2009

In this episode, Karen and Bradley discuss the issue of licensing exceptions: texts written that give additional permissions beyond the standard permissions that come automatically with existing FLOSS licenses.

Running time: 00:39:57.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:45)

• Bradley mentioned the FSF approved license list and the OSI approved license list. (02:23)
• Bradley mentioned the concept of license proliferation, and explained how the issue of exceptions is orthogonal to it. (03:08)
• Bradley mentioned the horribleness of Visual Basic. (04:47)
• The Wikipedia entry on the GPL linking exception is not completely accurate, but it's a pretty good introduction.
• Bradley and Karen discussed in detail Section 7 of GPLv3, which discusses the “Additional Permissions” possibilities (16:15)
• Bradley compared the possibility of representing any Free Software licenses as GPLv3 plus additional permissions to the representing all programs as Turing machines or with Gödel numbering. (18:30)
• Bradley mentioned the LGPLv3. (22:35, 37:37)

Segment 1 (23:44)

• SFLC's announcement for the GCC Runtime Library Exception; Bradley mentioned his blog post about it. (24:15)
• Bradley spoke about the intermediate representation used by the compiler. (27:34)
• The text of the GCC Runtime Library Exception, and the FAQ. (32:45)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, gplv3, exceptions

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January 6, 2009

Richard Fontana, Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel from Red Hat, joins us for an in-depth interview.

Running time: 00:33:52.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:43)

• Bradley mentioned that the Fedora Project is sponsored by Red Hat, where Richard Fontana works. (01:50)
• Fontana was involved in the GPLv3 Process.

Segment 1 (11:58)

Interview with Richard Fontana.

• Fontana mentioned “intellectual property” Boutique law firms. (08:52)
• Fontana mentioned the historical concerns in the Free Software community about the term “intellectual property”, such as those raised by RMS. (09:00)
• Fontana mentioned how the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit drew much attention to the intersection of legal issues and Free Software. (13:39)
• Fontana helped draft the various rationale documents during the GPLv3 drafting process.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, gplv3, fontana, red hat

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December 9, 2008

In this episode of the Software Freedom Law Show, Bradley and Karen interview Brett Smith, the Licensing Compliance Engineer at the Free Software Foundation.

Running time: 00:30:57.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:26)

• Bradley mentioned that the FSF is the one of the oldest non-profit organizations in the Free Software space. The FSF was founded on 4 October 1985. (01:25)
• Karen and Bradley mentioned the GPLv3 Process.

Segment 1 (03:42)

• Both Bradley and Brett used to order CD's from Cheap Bytes in the 1990s, which Bradley was amazed to learn is still in business today. (04:37)
• Bradley and Brett used to run Fedora when it was still called Red Hat. (04:47)
• We believe Brett was referring to RMS' lecture at KTH in Sweden on 30 October 1986, which inspired Brett to get involved with Free Software. (05:03)
• Brett and Bradley meet at the Cincinnati GNU/Linux Users' Group. (06:45)
• Brett mentioned David “novalis” Turner who used to work at the FSF in the position Brett now holds.
• Brett mentioned the GPL Compliance Lab at the FSF. (08:25)
• Brett mentioned the Affero GPL. (09:35)
• Bradley mentioned his blog post about the “Eternal September” of GPL compliance. (10:45)
• Brett keeps a Compliance case stats box on the FSF Licensing page. (11:36)
• We spoke a few times about the GPL FAQ, which includes info about other FSF-published licenses as well. (08:15, 12:30).
• Brett mentioned RMS' essay on why to upgrade to GPLv3. (14:35)
• Brett's Quick Guide to GPLv3 discusses some of the changes in GPLv3, including ones discussed on the podcast. (16:00)
• We discussed GPLv3's anti-DRM provision for User Products, at the end of Section 6. (16:03)
• We discussed GPLv3's Termination Provision. (17:12)
• We discussed GPLv3's Additional Terms provisions, which allows for Apache license compatibility. (19:11)
• Brett briefly mentioned GPLv3's patent provisions. (21:41)
• Brett mentioned the GNU Simplified Free Documentation License, for which the drafting process is ongoing. (23:18)
• Brett mentioned the FSF's release of the FDL version 1.3. RMS has written in detail about it since our recording took place. Bradley also made a blog post about it. (23:37)
• Brett and Bradley discussed how old and ground-breaking the FDL was. FDL was first released in March 2000. Bradley didn't have a chance to tell his story as to why the first version was 1.1; maybe he will sometime. :)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fsf, gplv3, agpl, smith