April 26, 2011

This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.

Running time: 01:02:48.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:34)

Bradley is still recovering from a rhinovirus which he didn't take care of and also made him sicker, which explains the problems with his voice. In fact, the coughing in the background during Fontana's talk is all Bradley. He apologizes. (00:50)

This show is Richard Fontana's Linux Collaboration Summit 2011 talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement. (03:24)

Segment 1 (03:48)

Richard Fontana's slides for his talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement are available on his website. (04:29)

Bradley was live-denting Fontana's LCS talk. (04:31)

Richard Fontana is the purveyor of the disturbing group on identi.ca. (04:30)

Fontana makes reference to a Bradley's blog post on switching back to Debian from Ubuntu. (05:55)

Fontana pointed out that the GNU Manifesto deals a lot with how !Free Software is completely compatible with many business models. (12:30)

Fontana pointed out that many of the relationships between companies in FaiF software have great variability in level of transparency. (16:00)

In the background, you hear Bradley saying something. He's giving Josh Berkus credit for the phrase throw code over the wall, a phrase which both Fontana and Bradley now use regularly. (32:28)

Segment 2 (48:25)

Fontana made an interesting analogy to commissioned art and its similarity to FLOSS. (50:33)

Fontana noted later on identi.ca that he does support non-profit as solution to entanglement problem. (54:48)

Bradley mentioned the 60 Minutes story about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (CAI) (55:30)

Fontana now talking about GE/NBC relationship, but Bradley was surprised that . Fontana didn't mention Ben Bagdikian's book, The Media Monopoly. (18:26, 56:30)

Bradley was glad that Fontana called proprietary relicensing illegitimate. Bradley points out that sometimes community members, including himself, have too easily forgiven business models on the edges of software freedom. (25:13, 30:50 58:30)

Tags: fontana, red hat, non-profits, conferences, governance

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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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July 7, 2009

Bradley and Karen discuss the community debate regarding C# and Mono, and its inclusion in GNU/Linux distributions.

Running time: 00:37:23.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:30)

• Karen pointed out that some of the recent arguments about C# started due to RMS' statements on the matter. Others have also blogged. (04:24)
• Bradley mentioned the launch of the DotGNU project (04:30), which included Portable.NET (05:04)
• Bradley mentioned that C# descends from J++ work inside Microsoft, which became a point of contention between Sun and Microsoft. (06:50)
• Bradley mentioned his blog post that has the same topic as this podcast. (11:17)
• Meanwhile, back at the point is a reference to LUG Radio, which is based on the phrase Meanwhile, back at the ranch. The origins of the latter phrase is likely unclear, although an unsourced Wikipedia article claims it was a phrase frequently used by narrators of black & white American cowboy movies and TV shows of the 1940s and 1950s. (12:18)
• Bjarne Stroustrup (15:09) published his first article on C++ in February 1983 (15:21). His paper on C++ history tells the story of its creation.

Segment 1 (16:05)

• Bradley mentioned John Case, his Theory of Computation professor from graduate school, who always does proofs by “cases” (16:32).
• Bradley and Karen mentioned they used to have the SFLC phone system hooked up to Zoip. (17:39)
• Bradley mentioned that we should End Software Patents.(20:35)
• Bradley mentioned the TomTom case, which he's blogged about and was the topic of Episode 0x0B. (26:15)
• Debian now includes Mono in its base install (28:03), and Ubuntu published a position statement, which Karen read from in the show (26:30). There is an Ubuntu wiki page opposing it. Fedora has included it for some time.
• Bradley mentioned AT&T antitrust divestiture. (30:10)
• Bradley mentioned that very few companies have made an overreaching promise to licenses all their patents in a way acceptable for Free Software. Red Hat is one of them, although their promise isn't perfect, it has some value. (33:34)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fsf, red hat, patents, gnome

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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