November 10, 2009

Bradley and Karen interview Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons .

Running time: 00:49:21.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:28)

• Bradley and Karen discuss whether 0x1A is a “landmark” in hex. (01:00)
• Dan Lynch, SFLS Producer, is a host of Linux Outlaws. (02:25)
• Bradley quoted Larry Wall from one of his 1999 State of the Onion speech. (03:45)

Segment 1 (05:48)

• Our guest is Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons. (06:05)
• Mike is the longest serving employee of Creative Commons. (06:56)
• CC-by-SA is the most popular Creative Commons license with the software freedom crowd. (13:40)
• CC-Attribution is another license type that Mike mentioned (14:00)
• Mike quoted from various sections of CC-by-SA to make the point that there are methods to avoid misrepresentation (19:15)
• Mike pointed out fair use can even be used to misrepresent a person's views, so prohibiting derivative works for that purpose sometimes doesn't even help. (24:00)
• Mike, Bradley, and Karen discussed the Wikipedia move from FDL to CC-By-SA. Mike pointed out that a “one magnet” need in copyleft. (26:12)
• Mike mentioned that the Fedora project recently switched to CC-By-SA for their documentation and wikis. (27:17)
• Mike, Bradley and Karen discussed issues related to autonomo.us. (33:00)

Segment 2 (38:47)

• Mike and Karen will follow up to discuss whether CC-By-SA would be a better license for the Software Freedom Law Show or other works by lawyers. (39:20)
• Bradley changed the license of his website to CC-By-SA. (40:10)
• Bradley and Karen discussed identi.ca. (42:00)
• Donald Knuth organized his kitchen around the trash can. (46:00)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, numbering, copyrights, creative-commons

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July 21, 2009

Bradley and Karen discuss their panels at OSCON 2009.

Running time: 00:29:30.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:14)

Bradley mentioned that you can hear a follow up to the C#/Mono and patented language issue, which Bradley and Karen discussed on SFLS 0x11 in an interview with Bradley on Linux Outlaws 102.

Segment 1 (01:35)

• Bradley and Karen are presenting at OSCON 2009.
• After the recording of the show, Bradley and Aaron were asked to present the GPL enforcement talk that Karen and Bradley discussed. The talk is open to the public, so you can come by if you are in San Jose.
• Bradley is moderating a panel at OSCON, With Software as a Service, Is Only the Network Luddite Free?.
• Karen mentioned Bradley's previous talks on the subject.
• Bradley mentioned the Conan O'Brien joke, YouTwitFace.
• Karen is moderating a panel at OSCON, What's in a Name: Can Trademarks be Helpful to Free Software Projects?.
• Bradley told the story of naming GNU Classpath.
• Karen helped in the naming of Pidgin due a trademark dispute.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, numbering, agpl, trademarks, oscon

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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

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November 11, 2008

The Software Freedom Law Center is proud to announce its new podcast, The Software Freedom Law Show. Hosted by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler, this bi-weekly podcast will bring interviews and explanations on legal issues related to Free, Libre and Open Software Software (FLOSS).

Our first episode introduces the format and the hosts interview each other so you can get to know them better.

Running time: 00:32:39.

Show Notes

Our first episode introduces the format and the hosts.

Segment 0 (at 00:23)

• Numbering of the Episode
  • Dijkstra's article, Why numbering should start at zero.(00:49)
  • Karen mentioned the Zeroth law of Thermodynamics (00:52)
  • Bradley referred to the laws of robotics, to which Asimov added a Zeroth Law in his later books (making the law the first in priority of application, if not first in order of appearance). (00:52)
  • Bradley is a “Podcast Monitor”, not a “Hall monitor”. (01:30)
• SFLC
• An article announcing the founding of SFLC in March 2005 (02:43).
• The team of SFLC (04:50)
• Karen mentioned attorney client privilege which may be a term unfamiliar to our hacker listeners. (07:16)
• We mentioned that SFLC (and Conservancy) are each 501(c)(3) charities in the USA. (07:37)
• If your not-for-profit FLOSS project needs legal help, write to <help@softwarefreedom.org>.
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• An article that announced formation of the Conservancy.
• Karen mentioned that Conservancy helps projects handle their Google Summer of Code funds. (08:46)
• A discussion of umbrella organizations is contained in SFLC's legal primer. (12:11)
• Conservancy's Board of Directors is different from SFLC's, since they are separate organizations. (15:13)
• If your not-for-profit FLOSS project is looking for a non-profit, incorporate organizational home, write to <conservancy@softwarefreedom.org>.

Segment 1 (at 16:17)

• For the curious: NYC Noise Ordinance regarding emergency vehicles. (16:30)
• Hiawatha Bray often called the FSF Cambridge-based, as he did in this article about the SCO law suit. (17:20)
• Bradley's first Unix system was an AT&T 3B2/600. It ran System V R3, which didn't have streams (the SYSV equivalent to sockets). (18:18)
• The vi Lovers homepage says it's pronounced “vee eye”. Bradley doesn't love vi, so he'll go back to saying “vye”. (18:40)
• Bradley couldn't find a good web page that discussed the full history of Backspace vs. DEL in Emacs, but the Emacs Wiki hints at the controversy. (19:30)
• Bradley briefly mentioned the Xemacs fork. (19:40)
• Bradley mentioned The GNU Manifesto. (20:07)
• Bradley probably had his dates mixed up of his first GNU/Linux install. 0.99pl12 came out in early 1993, so he probably installed SLS in early 1993 during his sophomore year in college. He found his Xconfig file from his old laptop with a filedate of 15 December 1993. (Remember when you had to write Xconfigs by hand and they would break your monitor if you did it wrong?) (20:44)
• Bradley mentioned helping RMS start the license list. Here's the earliest known web archived version and its modern decendent. (21:28)
• Bradley stopped using Quicken in 2000 in favor of Gnucash, but he actually uses Ledger now. (22:30)
• Karen indicates Fortan is still relevant, and the Wikipedia entry seems to agree. (24:21)
• Chairman of SFLC's Board, and its Director-Counsel, Eben Moglen, is also a law professor at Columbia University, and was Karen's professor in Law School. (25:28)
• Karen mentioned doing a “Choose your own essay” program in C for Eben when she was law school, based on the idea of Choose Your Own Adventure books, which both Karen and Bradley read as children. (25:43)
• Bradley mentioned Eben and Larry Wall both being influenced by APL. Bradley is sure, although it doesn't seem to appear in the transcripts, that during one of his early State of the Onion speeches, Larry joked that he'd use Unicode Perl operators to reinvent APL. (26:20)
• Bradley mentioned his Master's thesis and the Parrot project. (26:42)
• We mentioned that law school is extremely expensive. (27:50)

Trackbacks

(Done by hand, currently. ;)

• Our producer, Dan Lynch, blogged about the start of the show, and also started a thread in the Linux Outlaws forum.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, numbering, fsf, sflc, conservancy