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