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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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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February 2, 2010

Karen and Bradley discuss an update on the Google Books Settlement, some follow up from 0x1F regarding feedback on the mobile phones show, and discuss Karen's new position as General Counsel.

Running time: 00:48:24.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:28)

• A listener wrote in to say that the the A7 Model of the FreeRunner is still available. (04:20)
• Bradley mentioned an identica discussion with Evan Prodromou. (04:47)
• In the last show, we forgot to mention the Mer project, which is trying to build a fully Free Software system for the N900 and related devices. (07:02)
• Bradley mentioned a story linked to by Glyn Moody on identi.ca that showed how much dominance of the “smart phone” market Research in Motion has over other alternatives. (08:58)
• The Defective by Design campaign has a petition against DRM on the iPad. (13:17)
• Bradley mentioned that Amazon removed the book 1984 from some people's Kindle's, an ironic example of DRM. (13:37)
• Bradley mentioned prcutler's comment about the iPad. (15:32)
• Bradley mentioned they have purposely slowed sales of iPhones in New York City. (16:03)

Segment 1 (19:20)

• FSF made another objection to the (now amended) Google Books Settlement with the help of the SFLC. (20:10)
• Bradley mentioned the historical positions on the importance of Free as in Freedom documentation. (03:40)

Episode 0x16 discussed the Google Books Settlement in more depth. (32:10)

Segment 2 (33:30)

• Karen discussed what she does as General Counsel does for SFLC.
• Karen mentioned the show where we discussed Form 990s for non-profits (40:20)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, documentation, mobile, android

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January 19, 2010

Aaron Williamson, Karen Sandler, and Bradley M. Kuhn discuss the issues of software freedom on mobile telephone devices.

Running time: 00:47:32.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:32)

• SFLC experimented first with using the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner. (06:12)
• Aaron noted that the Android system is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, although Google is the primary force behind it. (07:35)
• Harald Welte wrote a blog post about Android that talks about some of the that he sees with it. (07:58)
• Greg Kroah-Hartman has discussed that various Android-related Linux work has been dropped from staging. (08:43)
• Android does not use uClibc nor the GNU C library, but rather a BSD-forked C library called bionic. This was probably done to avoid the LGPL. (08:55)
• Bradley took the AP Computer Science exam in Pascal, taught it in C++ in the mid-1990s, but the course moved to Java in the late 1990s. There was an announcement about AB exam disappearing, among other things. (11:58)
• Aaron and Bradley launched the Replicant project to investigate the possibility of a fully Free Software build on the HTC Dream. (14:45)
• Bradley mentioned that the OpenBTS project is workking on a FLOSS GSM stack. (15:52)
• There have been many Cease and Desist letters from Google to people who redistributing proprietary firmware remixes. (16:54)
• Aaron built a list of the proprietary libraries on the HTC Dream Android/Linux default install. (18:12)
• Bradley mentioned mcgrof (aka Luis Rodriguez), who works for Atheros and helped make sure the ath5k and ath9k are fully Free Software driven. (22:38)
• There is a long list of proprietary components needed for the Maemo platform to work. The Cool900 blog has an updated list and thorough breakdown. (23:35)
• Bradley mentioned that there is a #replicant IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (26:56), and a Replicant mailing list. (27:32)
• We briefly discussed Symbian and that fact that someday it's supposed to be fully freed. However, Bradley mentioned that the governance is fully corporate controlled and they don't even have a working build that can be installed on a modern phone using Free Software yet. (31:10)
• Graziano build a list of known FLOSS applications for Android/Linux. (39:15)
• Here is another list of GPL'd Android/Linux applications available at the Application Market. (41:12)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, aaronw, mobile, android