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

---

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

---

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