Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2017/07/03/Chassell.html

It’s fortunately more common now in Free Software communities today to
properly value contributions from non-developers. Historically, though,
contributions from developers were often overvalued and contributions from
others grossly undervalued. One person trailblazed as (likely) the
earliest non-developer contributor to software freedom. His name was
Robert J. Chassell — called Bob by his friends and colleagues. Over
the weekend, our community lost Bob after a long battle with a degenerative
illness.

I am one of the few of my generation in the Free Software community who
had the opportunity to know Bob. He was already semi-retired in the late
1990s when I first became involved with Free Software, but he enjoyed
giving talks about Free Software and occasionally worked the FSF booths at
events where I had begun to volunteer in 1997. He was the first person to
offer mentorship to me as I began the long road of becoming a professional
software freedom activist.

I regularly credit Bob as the first Executive Director of the FSF. While
he technically never held that title, he served as Treasurer for many years
and was the de-facto non-technical manager at the FSF for its first decade
of existence. One need only read
the earliest
issues of the GNU’s Bulletin to see just a sampling of
the plethora of contributions that Bob made to the FSF and Free Software
generally.

Bob’s primary forte was as a writer and he came to Free Software as a
technical writer. Having focused his career on documenting software and how
it worked to help users make the most of it, software freedom — the
right to improve and modify not only the software, but its documentation as
well — was a moral belief that he held strongly. Bob was an early
member of the privileged group that now encompasses most people in
industrialized society: a non-developer who sees the value in computing and
the improvement it can bring to life. However, Bob’s realization that users
like him (and not just developers) faced detrimental impact from proprietary
software remains somewhat rare, even today. Thus, Bob died in a world where
he was still unique among non-developers: fighting for software freedom as an
essential right for all who use computers.

Bob coined a phrase that I still love to this day. He said once that the
job that we must do as activists was “preserve, protect and promote
software freedom”. Only a skilled writer such as he could come up
with such a perfectly concise alliteration that nevertheless rolls off the
tongue without stuttering. Today, I pulled up an email I sent to Bob in
November 2006 to tell him that (when Novell made their bizarre
software-freedom-unfriendly patent deal with Microsoft)
Novell
had coopted his language in their FAQ on the matter. Bob wrote
back: I am not surprised. You can bet everything [we’ve ever come up
with] will be used against us. Bob’s decade-old words are prolific
when I look at the cooption we now face daily in Free Software. I acutely
feel the loss of his insight and thoughtfulness.

One of the saddest facts about Bob’s illness, Progressive Supranuclear
Palsy, is that his voice was quite literally lost many years before we lost
him entirely. His illness made it nearly impossible for him to speak. In
the late 1990s, I had the pleasure of regularly hearing Bob’s voice, when I
accompanied Bob to talks and speeches at various conferences. That
included the wonderful highlight of his acceptance speech of GNU’s 2001
achievement award from the USENIX Association. (I lament that no
recordings of any of these talks seem to be available anywhere.)
Throughout the early 2000s, I would speak to Bob on the telephone at least
once a month; he would offer his sage advice and mentorship in those early
years of my professional software freedom career. Losing his voice in our
community has been a slow-moving tragedy as his illness has progressed.
This weekend, that unique voice was lost to us forever.

Bob, who was born in Bennington, VT on 22 August 1946, died in Great
Barrington, MA on 30 June 2017. He is survived by his sister, Karen
Ringwald, and several nieces and nephews and their families. A memorial
service for Bob will take place at 11 am, July 26, 2017, at The First
Congregational Church in Stockbridge, MA.

In the meantime, the best I can suggest is that anyone who would like to
posthumously get to know Bob please read (what I believe was) the favorite
book that he
wrote, An
Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp. Bob was a huge
advocate of non-developers learning “a little bit” of
programming — just enough to make their lives easier when they used
computers. He used GNU Emacs from its earliest versions and I recall he
was absolutely giddy to discover new features, help document them, and
teach them to new users. I hope those of you that both already love and
use Emacs and those who don’t will take a moment to read what Bob had to
teach us about his favorite program.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2017/04/25/liberate-compliance-tutorials.html

[ This blog was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

I am honored to be a co-author and editor-in-chief of the most
comprehensive, detailed, and complete guide on matters related to compliance
of copyleft software licenses such as the GPL.
This book, Copyleft and the GNU
General Public License: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Guide (which we
often call the Copyleft Guide for short) is 155 pages filled
with useful material to help everyone understand copyleft licenses for
software, how they work, and how to comply with them properly. It is the
only document to fully incorporate esoteric material such as the FSF’s famous
GPLv3 rationale documents directly alongside practical advice, such as
the pristine example,
which is the only freely published compliance analysis of a real product on
the market. The document explains in great detail how that product
manufacturer made good choices to comply with the GPL. The reader learns by
both real-world example as well as abstract explanation.

However, the most important fact about the Copyleft Guide is not its
useful and engaging content. More importantly, the license of this book
gives freedom to its readers in the same way the license of the copylefted
software does. Specifically, we chose
the Creative
Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license
(CC BY-SA)
for this work. We believe that not just software, but any generally useful
technical information that teaches people should be freely sharable and
modifiable by the general public.

The reasons these freedoms are necessary seem so obvious that I’m
surprised I need to state them. Companies who want to build internal
training courses on copyleft compliance for their employees need to modify
the materials for that purpose. They then need to be able to freely
distribute them to employees and contractors for maximum effect.
Furthermore, like all documents and software alike, there are always
“bugs”, which (in the case of written prose) usually means
there are sections that are fail to communicate to maximum effect. Those
who find better ways to express the ideas need the ability to propose
patches and write improvements. Perhaps most importantly, everyone who
teaches should avoid
NIH syndrome. Education and
science work best when we borrow and share (with proper license-compliant
attribution, of course!) the best material that others develop, and augment
our works by incorporating them.

These reasons are akin to those that led Richard M. Stallman to write his
seminal
essay, Why
Software Should Be Free. Indeed, if you reread that essay now
— as I just did — you’ll see that much of the damage and many of
the same problems to the advancement of software that RMS documents in that
essay also occur in the world of tutorial documentation about FLOSS
licensing. As too often happens in the Open Source community, though,
folks seek ways to proprietarize, for profit, any copyrighted work that
doesn’t already have a copyleft license attached. In the field of copyleft
compliance education, we see the same behavior: organizations who wish to
control the dialogue and profit from selling compliance education seek to
proprietarize the meta-material of compliance education, rather than
sharing freely like the software itself. This yields an ironic
exploitation, since the copyleft license documented therein exists as a
strategy to assure the freedom to share knowledge. These educators tell
their audiences with a straight face: Sure, the software is
free as in freedom, but if you want to learn how its license
works, you have to license our proprietary materials! This behavior
uses legal controls to curtail the sharing of knowledge, limits the
advancement and improvement of those tutorials, and emboldens silos of
know-how that only wealthy corporations have the resources to access and
afford. The educational dystopia that these organizations create is
precisely what I sought to prevent by advocating for software freedom for
so long.

While Conservancy’s primary job
provides non-profit infrastructure for Free
Software projects, we also do a bit
of license compliance work as well.
But we practice what we preach: we release all the educational materials
that we produce as part of
the Copyleft Guide project
under CC BY-SA. Other Open Source organizations are currently hypocrites
on this point; they tout the values of openness and sharing of knowledge
through software, but they take their tutorial materials and lock them up
under proprietary licenses. I hereby publicly call on such organizations
(including but not limited to the Linux Foundation) to license
materials such
as
those under CC BY-SA.

I did not make this public call for liberation of such materials without
first trying friendly diplomacy first. Conservancy has been in talks with
individuals and staff who produce these materials for some time. We urged
them to join the Free Software community and share their materials under
free licenses. We even offered volunteer time to help them improve those
materials if they would simply license them freely. After two years of
that effort, it’s now abundantly clear that public pressure is the only
force that might work⁰. Ultimately, like all
proprietary businesses, the training divisions of Linux Foundation and
other entities in the compliance industrial complex (such
as Black Duck)
realize they can make much more revenue by making materials proprietary and
choosing legal restrictions that forbid their students from sharing and
improving the materials after they complete the course. While the reality
of this impasse regarding freely licensing these materials is probably an
obvious outcome, multiple sources inside these organizations have also
confirmed for me that liberation of the materials for the good of general
public won’t happen without a major paradigm shift — specifically
because such educational freedom will reduce the revenue stream around
those materials.

Of course, I can attest first-hand that freely liberating tutorial
materials curtails revenue. Karen Sandler and I have regularly taught
courses on copyleft licensing based
on the freely available materials
for a few years — most
recently in
January 2017 at LinuxConf Australia and at
at
OSCON in a few weeks. These conferences do kindly cover our travel
expenses to attend and teach the tutorial, but compliance education is not
a revenue stream for Conservancy. (By contrast, Linux Foundation generates
US$3.8 million/year using proprietary training
materials, per
their 2015 Form 990, page 9, line 2c.) While, in an ideal world, we’d
get revenue from education to fund our other important activities, we
believe that there is value in doing this education as currently funded by
our individual
Supporters; these education efforts fit withour charitable mission to
promote the public good. We furthermore don’t believe that locking up the
materials and refusing to share them with others fits a mission of software
freedom, so we never considered such as a viable option. Finally, given
the institutionally-backed
FUD that we’ve
continue to witness, we seek to draw specific attention to the fundamental
difference in approach that Conservancy (as a charity) take toward this
compliance education work. (My
recent talk on compliance
covered on LWN includes some points on that matter, if you’d like
further reading.)

⁰One notable exception to
these efforts was the success of my colleague, Karen Sandler’s (and others)
in convincing the OpenChain
project to choose CC-0 licensing. However, OpenChain has released only 68 presentation slides, and a 12-page specification, and some of the slides simply encourage people to go buy an LF proprietary training course!

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2017/02/13/Turow.html

I encourage all of you to either listen to
or read
the transcript of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Joseph
Turow about his discussion of his book “The Aisles Have Eyes: How
Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, And Define Your
Power”.

Now, most of you who read my blog know the difference between proprietary
and Free Software, and the difference between a network service and
software that runs on your own device. I want all of you have a good
understanding of that to do a simple thought experiment:

How many of the horrible things that Turow talks about can happen if there
is no proprietary software on your IoT or mobile devices?

AFAICT, other than the facial recognition in the store itself that he
talked about in Russia, everything he talks about would be mitigated or
eliminated completely as a thread if users could modify the software on
their devices.

Yes, universal software freedom will not solve all the worlds’ problems.
But it does solve a lot of them, at least with regard to the bad things the
powerful want to do to us via technology.

(BTW, the blog title is a reference
to Philip
K. Dick’s Minority Report, which includes a scene about
systems reading people’s eyes to target-market to them. It’s not the main
theme of that particular book, though… Dick was always going off on
tangents in his books.)

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2017/02/13/conservancy.html

There are a lot of problems in our society, and particularly in the USA,
right now, and plenty of charities who need our support. The reason I
continue to focus my work on software freedom is simply because there are
so few focused on the moral and ethical issues of computing. Open Source
has reached its pinnacle as an industry fad, and with it, a watered-down
message: “having some of the source code for some of your systems
some of the time is so great, why would you need anything more?”.
Universal software freedom is
however further
from reality than it was even a few years ago. At least a few of us,
in my view, must focus on that cause.

I did not post many blog posts about this in 2016. There was a reason for
that — more than any other year, work demands at Conservancy have
been constant and unrelenting. I enjoy my work, so I don’t mind, but
blogging becomes low priority when there is a constant backlog of urgent
work to support Conservancy’s mission and our member projects. It’s not
just Conservancy’s mission, of course, it’s my personal one as well.

For our 2016 fundraiser,
I wrote last
year a blog post entitled “Do You Like What I Do For a
Living?”. Last year, so many of you responded, that it not only
made it possible for me to continue that work for one more year, but we
were able to add our colleague Brett Smith to our staff, which brought
Conservancy to four full-time staff for the first time. We added a few
member projects (and are moving that queue to add more in 2017), and sure
enough — the new work plus the backlog of work waiting for another
staffer filled Brett’s queue just like my, Karen’s and Tony’s was already
filled.

The challenge now is sustaining this staffing level. Many of you came to
our aid last year because we were on the brink of needing to reduce our
efforts (and staffing) at Conservancy. Thanks to your overwhelming
response, we not only endured, but we were able to add one additional
person. As expected, though, needs of our projects increased throughout
the year, and we again — all four of us full-time staff — must
work to our limits to meet the needs of our projects.

Charitable donations are a voluntary activity, and as such they have a
special place in our society and culture. I’ve talked a lot about how
Conservancy’s Supporters give us a mandate to carry out our work. Those of
you that chose to renew your Supporter donations or become new Supporters
enable us to focus our full-time efforts on the work of Conservancy.

On the signup and renewal
page, you can read about some of our accomplishments in the last year
(including my
recent keynote at FOSDEM, an excerpt of which is included here). Our
work does not follow fads, and it’s not particularly glamorous, so only
dedicated Supporters like you understand its value. We don’t expect to
get large grants to meet the unique needs of each of our member projects,
and we certainly don’t expect large companies to provide very much
funding unless we cede control of the organization to their requests (as
trade associations do). Even our most popular program, Outreachy, is
attacked by a small group of people who don’t want to see the status quo
of privileged male domination of Open Source and Free Software
disrupted.

Supporter contributions are what make Conservancy possible. A year ago,
you helped us build Conservancy as a donor-funded organization and
stabilize our funding base. I now must ask that you make an annual
commitment to renewal — either
by renewing your contribution
now or becoming
a monthly supporter, or, if you’re just learning about my work at
Conservancy from this blog
post, reading up
on us
and becoming a new
Supporter.

Years ago, when I was still only a part-time volunteer at Conservancy,
someone who disliked our work told me that I had “invented a job of
running Conservancy”. He meant it as an insult, but I take it as a
compliment with pride. In fact, between me and my colleague (and our
Executive Director) Karen Sandler, we’ve “invented” a total of
four full-time jobs and one part-time one to advance software freedom. You
helped us do that with your donations. If you donate again today, your
donation will be matched to make the funds go further.

Many have told me this year that they are driven to give to other
excellent charities that fight racism, work for civil and immigration
rights, and other causes that seem particularly urgent right now. As long
as there is racism, sexism, murder, starvation, and governmental oppression
in the world, I cannot argue that software freedom should be made a
priority above all of those issues. However, even if everyone in our
society focused on a single, solitary cause that we agreed was the top
priority, it’s unlikely we could make quicker progress. Meanwhile, if we
all single-mindedly ignore less urgent issues, they will, in time, become so
urgent they’ll be insurmountable by the time we focus on them.

Industrialized nations have moved almost fully to computer automation for
most every daily task. If you question this fact, try to do your job for a
day without using any software at all, or anyone using software on your
behalf, and you’ll probably find it impossible. Then, try to do your job
using only Free Software for a day, and you’ll find, as I have, that tasks
that should take only a few minutes take hours when you avoid proprietary
software, and some are just impossible. There are very few organizations
that are considering the long-term implications of this slowly growing
problem and making plans to build the foundations of a society that doesn’t
have that problem. Conservancy is one of those few, so I hope you’ll
realize that long-term value of our lifelong work to defend and expand
software freedom and donate.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/10/27/gpl-feedback.html

[ This blog
was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I had the privilege
of attending Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC EU) and the OpenWrt Summit
in Berlin, Germany earlier this month. I gave a talk (for which the video is
available below) at the OpenWrt Summit. I also had the opportunity to host
the first of many conference sessions seeking feedback and input from the
Linux developer community about Conservancy’s
GPL Compliance Project for
Linux Developers.

ELC EU has no “BoF Board” where you can post informal
sessions. So, we scheduled the session by word of mouth over a lunch hour.
We nevertheless got an good turnout (given that our session’s main
competition was eating food 🙂 of about 15 people.

Most notably and excitingly, Harald Welte, well-known Netfilter developer
and leader of gpl-violations.org,
was able to attend. Harald talked about his work with
gpl-violations.org enforcing his own copyrights in Linux, and
explained why this was important work for users of the violating devices.
He also pointed out that some of the companies that were sued during his
most active period of gpl-violations.org are now regular upstream
contributors.

Two people who work in the for-profit license compliance industry attended
as well. Some of the discussion focused on usual debates that charities
involved in compliance commonly have with the for-profit compliance
industry. Specifically, one of them asked how much compliance is
enough, by percentage? I responded to his question on two axes.
First, I addressed the axis of how many enforcement matters does the GPL
Compliance Program for Linux Developers do, by percentage of products
violating the GPL? There are, at any given time, hundreds of
documented GPL violating products, and our coalition works on only a tiny
percentage of those per year. It’s a sad fact that only that tiny
percentage of the products that violate Linux are actually pursued to
compliance.

On the other axis, I discussed the percentage on a per-product basis.
From that point of view, the question is really: Is there a ‘close
enough to compliance’ that we can as a community accept and forget
about the remainder? From my point of view, we frequently compromise
anyway, since the GPL doesn’t require someone to prepare code properly for
upstream contribution. Thus, we all often accept compliance once someone
completes the bare minimum of obligations literally written in the GPL, but
give us a source release that cannot easily be converted to an upstream
contribution. So, from that point of view, we’re often accepting a
less-than-optimal outcome. The GPL by itself does not inspire upstreaming;
the other collaboration techniques that are enabled in our community
because of the GPL work to finish that job, and adherence to
the Principles assures
that process can work. Having many people who work with companies in
different ways assures that as a larger community, we try all the different
strategies to encourage participation, and inspire today’s violators to
become tomorrow upstream contributors — as Harald mention has already
often happened.

That same axis does include on rare but important compliance problem: when
a violator is particularly savvy, and refuses to release very specific
parts of their Linux code
(as VMware did),
even though the license requires it. In those cases, we certainly cannot
and should not accept anything less than required compliance — lest
companies begin holding back all the most interesting parts of the code
that GPL requires them to produce. If that happened, the GPL would cease
to function correctly for Linux.

After that part of the discussion, we turned to considerations of
corporate contributors, and how they responded to enforcement. Wolfram
Sang, one of the developers in Conservancy’s coalition, spoke up on this
point. He expressed that the focus on for-profit company contributions,
and the achievements of those companies, seemed unduly prioritized by some
in the community. As an independent contractor and individual developer,
Wolfram believes that contributions from people like him are essential to a
diverse developer base, that their opinions should be taken into account,
and their achievements respected.

I found Wolfram’s points particularly salient. My view is that Free
Software development, including for Linux, succeeds because both powerful
and wealthy entities and individuals contribute and collaborate
together on equal footing. While companies have typically only enforce the
GPL on their own copyrights for business reasons (e.g., there is at least
one example of a major Linux-contributing company using GPL enforcement
merely as a counter-punch in a patent lawsuit), individual developers who
join Conservancy’s coalition follow community principles and enforce to
defend the rights of their users.

At the end of the session, I asked two developers who hadn’t spoken during
the session, and who aren’t members of Conservancy’s coalition, their
opinion on how enforcement was historically carried out by
gpl-violations.org, and how it is currently carried out by Conservancy’s
GPL Compliance Program for Linux Developers. Both responded with a simple
response (paraphrased): it seems like a good thing to do; keep doing
it!

I finished up the session by inviting everyone to
the join
the principles-discuss list, where public discussion about GPL
enforcement under the Principles has already begun. I also invited
everyone to attend my talk, that took place an hour later at the OpenWrt
Summit, which was co-located with ELC EU.

In that talk, I spoke about a specific example of community success in GPL
enforcement. As explained on the
OpenWrt history page,
OpenWrt was initially made possible thanks to GPL enforcement done by
BusyBox and Linux contributors in a coalition together. (Those who want to
hear more about the connection between GPL enforcement and OpenWrt can view
my talk.)

Since there weren’t opportunities to promote impromptu sessions on-site,
this event was a low-key (but still quite nice) start to Conservancy’s
planned year-long effort seeking feedback about GPL compliance and
enforcement. Our next
session is
an official BoF session at Linux Plumbers Conference, scheduled for
next Thursday 3 November at 18:00. It will be led by my colleagues Karen
Sandler and Brett Smith.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/09/21/lf-elc-eu.html

[ This blog
was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

Last month, Conservancy made a public commitment to attend Linux-related
events to get feedback from developers about our work generally, and
Conservancy’s GPL Compliance Program for Linux Developers specifically. As
always, even before that, we were regularly submitting talks to nearly any
event with Linux in its name. As a small charity, we always request travel
funding from the organizers, who are often quite gracious. As I mentioned in
my blog posts about LCA 2016
and GUADEC 2016, the organizers
covered my travel funding there, and recently both Karen and I both received
travel funding to speak at LCA 2017
and DebConf 2016, as well as many
other events this year.

Recently, I submitted talks for the CFPs of Linux
Foundation’s Embedded
Linux Conference Europe (ELC EU) and the Prpl
Foundation’s OpenWRT Summit. The
latter was accepted, and the folks at the Prpl Foundation graciously
offered to fund my flight costs to speak at the OpenWRT Summit! I’ve
never spoken at an OpenWRT event before and I’m looking forward to the
opportunity getting to know the OpenWRT and LEDE communities better by
speaking at that event, and am excited to discuss Conservancy’s work with
them.

OpenWRT Summit, while co-located, is a wholly separate event from LF’s ELC
EU. Unfortunately, I was not so lucky in my talk submissions there: my
talk proposal has been waitlisted since July. I was hopeful after a talk
cancellation in mid-August. (I know because the speaker who canceled
suggested that I request his slot for my waitlisted talk.)
Unfortunately, the LF staff informed me that they understandably filled
his open slot with a sponsored session that came in.

The good news is that my OpenWRT Summit flight is booked, and my friend
(and Conservancy Board Member Emeritus)
Loïc Dachary (who lives in Berlin) has agreed to let me crash with
him for that week. So, I’ll be in town for the entirety of ELC EU with
almost no direct travel costs to Conservancy! The bad news is that it
seems my ELC EU talk remains waitlisted. Therefore, I don’t have a
confirmed registration for the rest of ELC EU (beyond OpenWRT Summit).

While it seems like a perfect and cost-effective opportunity to be able to
attend both events, that seems harder than I thought! Once I confirmed my
OpenWRT Summit travel arrangements, I asked for the hobbyist discount to
register for ELC EU, but LF staff informed me yesterday that the hobbyist
(as well as the other discounts) are sold out. The moral of the story is
that logistics are just plain tough and time-consuming when you work for a
charity with an extremely limited travel budget. ☻

Yet, it seems a shame to waste the opportunity of being in town with so
many Linux developers and not being able to see or talk to them, so
Conservancy is asking for some help from you to fund the $680 of my registration
costs for ELC EU. That’s just about
six new Conservancy supporter
signups, so I hope we can get six new Supporters before Linux
Foundation’s ELC EU conference begins on October 10th. Either way, I look
forward to seeing those developers who attend the co-located OpenWRT
Summit! And, if the logistics work out — perhaps I’ll see you at ELC
EU as well!

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/09/02/ksummit-discuss.html

There are plenty of mailing list threads to read, and I don’t actually
recommend the one that I’m talking about. I think it went on too long, was
far too “ad hominem” rather than real policy. Somewhere
beneath the surface there was a policy discussion being shouted down; if
you look close, you can find find it underneath.

As he always does, Jon Corbet did an excellent
job finding
the real policy details in the “GPL defence” ksummit-discuss
thread, and telling us all about it. I am very hard on tech
journalism, but when it comes to reporting on Linux specifically, Jon and
his colleagues at lwn.net have been, for nearly two decades, always been
real, detailed, and balanced (and not in the Fox News way)
tech journalism.

The main reason I made this blog post about it, though, is that I actually
spent as much time on a few of my posts on the list as I would on any blog
post, and I thought readers of my blog might want the content here. So I
link to
two
posts
in the thread that I encourage you to read. I also encourage you to read
these
two
posts
that my boss at my day job, Karen Sandler, made, which I think are very good
as well.

And, to quote the fictional Forrest Gump: That’s all I have to say
about that.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/08/16/guadec-2016.html

Last Friday, I gave the first keynote at GUADEC 2016. I was delighted for
the invitation from the GNOME Foundation to deliver this talk, which I
entitled Confessions of a command line geek: why I don’t use GNOME
but everyone else should.

The Chaos Computer Club
assisted the GUADEC organizers in recording the talks, so you can see
here a great recording of my talk here (and
also, the slides).
Whether the talk itself is great — that’s for you to
watch and judge, of course.

The focus of this talk is why the GNOME desktop is such a central
component for the future of software freedom. Too often, we assume that
the advent of tablets and other mobile computing platforms means the laptop
and desktop will disappear. And, maybe the desktop will disappear, but the
laptop is going nowhere. And we need a good interface that gives software
freedom to the people who use those laptops. GNOME is undoubtedly the best
system we have for that task.

There is competition. The competition is now, undeniably, Apple. Unlike
Microsoft, who hitherto dominated desktops, Apple truly wants to make
beautifully designed, and carefully crafted products that people will not
just live with, but actually love. It’s certainly possible to love
something that harms you, and Apple is so carefully adept creating products
that not only refuse to give you software freedom, but Apple goes a step
further to regularly invent new ways to gain lock-down control and
thwarting modification by their customers.

We have a great challenge before us, and my goal in the keynote was to
express that the GNOME developers are best poised to fight that battle and
that they should continue in earnest in their efforts, and to offer my help
— in whatever way they need it — to make it happen. And, I
offer this help even though I readily admit that I don’t need
GNOME for myself, but we as a community need it to advance
software freedom.

I hope you all enjoy the talk, and also check
out Werner
Koch’s keynote, We want more centralization, do we?, which
was also about a very important issue. (There was
also an
LWN article about Werner’s keynote if you prefer to read to watching.)
And, finally, I thank the GNOME Foundation for covering my travel expenses
for this trip.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/08/13/does-not-kill.html

The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric
used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.

There was a catalyst that convinced me to finally speak up. I heard a
talk today from a company representative of a software supplier for the
automotive industry. He said during his talk: putting GPLv3 software in
cars will kill people and opening up the source code to cars will
cause more harm than good. These statements are completely disingenuous.
Most importantly, it ignores the fact that proprietary software in cars is at
least equally, if not more, dangerous. At least one person has already been
killed in a crash
while using
a proprietary software auto-control
system. Volkswagen decided to
take a different route; they decided to kill us all slowly (rather than
quickly) by using proprietary software to lie about their emissions and
illegally polluting our air.

Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3
software that has harmed anyone. If you have such an example, email it to
me and I promise to add it right here to this blog post.

So, to the auto industry folks and vendors who market to/for them: until
you can prove that proprietary software assures safety in a way that FLOSS
cannot, I will continue to tell you this: in the long and sad tradition of
the Therac
25, your proprietary software has killed people, both
quickly and slowly, and your attacks on GPLv3 and software freedom are not
only unwarranted, they are clearly part of a political strategy to divert
attention from your own industry’s bad behavior and graft unfair blame onto
FLOSS.

As a side note, during the talk’s Q&A session, I asked this company’s
representatives how they assure compliance with the GPLv2 —
particularly their compliance with provision of scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable, which are so often
missing for many products, including vehicles. The official answer
was: Oh, I don’t know. Not only does this company publicly claim
security through obscurity is a viable solution, and accuse copyleft advocates
of endangering the public safety, they also seem to have not fully learned
the lessons of making FLOSS license compliance a clear part of their
workflow.

This is, unfortunately, my general impression of the status of the
automotive industry.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/08/04/lca2016.html

[ This blog
was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).

Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.

I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.

Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.

But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).

One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.

LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).

I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of
LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)

Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.

Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:

[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.

I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.

And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/05/13/classpath.html

I’ve posted in
the past
about the Oracle vs. Google case. I’m for the moment sticking to my habit
of only commenting when there is a clear court decision. Having been
through litigation as the 30(b)(6) witness for Conservancy, I’m used to
court testimony and why it often doesn’t really matter in the long run. So
much gets said by both parties in a court case that it’s somewhat pointless
to begin analyzing each individual move, unless it’s for entertainment
purposes only. (It’s certainly as entertaining as most TV dramas, really,
but I hope folks who are watching step-by-step admit to themselves that
they’re just engaged in entertainment, not actual work. 🙂

I saw a lot go by today with various people as witnesses in the case.
About the only part that caught my attention was that Classpath was
mentioned over and over again. But that’s not for any real salient reason,
only because I remember so distinctly, sitting in a little restaurant in
New Orleans with RMS and Paul Fisher, talking about how we should name this
yet-to-be-launched GNU project “$CLASSPATH”. My idea was that
was a shell variable that would expand to /usr/lib/java, so,
in my estimation, it was a way to name the project “User Libraries
for Java” without having to say the words. (For those of you that
were still children in the 1990s, trademark aggression by Sun at the time
on the their word mark for “Java” was fierce, it was worse than
the whole problem the Unix trademark, which led in turn to the GNU
name.)

But today, as I saw people all of the Internet quoting judges, lawyers and
witnesses saying the word “Classpath” over and over again, it
felt a bit weird to think that, almost 20 years ago sitting in that
restaurant, I could have said something other than Classpath and the key
word in Court today might well have been whatever I’d said. Court cases
are, as I said, dramatic, and as such, it felt a little like having my own
name mentioned over and over again on the TV news or something. Indeed, I
felt today like I had some really pointless, one-time-use superpower that I
didn’t know I had at the time. I now further have this feeling of:
“darn, if I knew that was the one thing I did that
would catch on this much, I’d have tried to do or say something more
interesting”.

Naming new things, particularly those that have to replace other things
that are non-Free, is really difficult, and, at least speaking for myself,
I definitely can’t tell when I suggest a name whether it is any good or
not. I actually named another project, years later, that could
theoretically get mentioned in this
case, Replicant. At that time, I thought
Replicant was a much more creative name than Classpath. When I named
Classpath, I felt it was somewhat obvious corollary to the “GNU’S Not
Unix” line of thinking. I also recall distinctly that I really
thought the name lost all its cleverness when the $ and the all-caps was
dropped, but RMS and others insisted on that :).

Anyway, my final message today is to the court transcribers. I know from
chatting with the court transcribers during my depositions in Conservancy’s
GPL enforcement cases that technical terminology is really a pain. I hope
that the term I coined that got bandied about so much in today’s testimony
was not annoying to you all. Really, no one thinks about the transcribers
in all this. If we’re going to have lawsuits about this stuff, we should
name stuff with the forethought of making their lives easier when the
litigation begins. 🙂

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/02/29/VMware.html

[ This blog was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

On last Thursday, Christoph Hellwig and his legal counsel attended a
hearing in
Hellwig’s VMware
case that Conservancy currently funds. Harald Welte, world famous for
his GPL enforcement work in the early 2000s, also attended as an
observer and wrote
an excellent
summary. I’d like to highlight a few parts of his summary, in the
context of Conservancy’s past litigation experience regarding the GPL.

First of all, in great contrast to the cases here in the USA, the Court
acknowledged fully the level of public interest and importance of the case.
Judges who have presided over Conservancy’s GPL enforcement cases USA
federal court take all matters before them quite seriously. However, in
our hearings, the federal judges preferred to ignore entirely the public
policy implications regarding copyleft; they focused only on the copyright
infringement and claims related to it. Usually, appeals courts in the USA
are the first to broadly consider larger policy questions. There are
definitely some advantages to the first Court showing interest in the
public policy concerns.

However, beyond this initial point, I was struck that Harald’s summary
sounded so much like the many hearings I attended in the late 2000’s and
early 2010’s regarding Conservancy’s BusyBox cases. From his description,
it sounds to me like judges around the world aren’t all that different:
they like to ask leading questions and speculate from the bench. It’s
their job to dig deep into an issue, separate away irrelevancies, and
assure that the stark truth of the matter presents itself before the Court
for consideration. In an adversarial process like this one, that means
impartially asking both sides plenty of tough questions.

That process can be a rollercoaster for anyone who feels, as we do, that
the Court will rule on the specific legal issues around which we have built
our community. We should of course not fear the hard questions of judges;
it’s their job to ask us the hard questions, and it’s our job to answer
them as best we can. So often, here in the USA, we’ve listened to Supreme
Court arguments (for which the audio is released publicly), and every
pundit has speculated incorrectly about how the justices would rule based
on their questions. Sometimes, a judge asks a clarification question
regarding a matter they already understand to support a specific opinion
and help their colleagues on the bench see the same issue. Other times,
judges asks a questions for the usual reasons: because the judges
themselves are truly confused and unsure. Sometimes, particularly in our
past BusyBox cases, I’ve seen the judge ask the opposing counsel a question
to expose some bit of bluster that counsel sought to pass off as settled
law. You never know really why a judge asked a specific question until you
see the ruling. At this point in the VMware case, nothing has been
decided; this is just the next step forward in a long process. We enforced
here in the USA for almost five years, we’ve been in litigation in Germany
for about one year, and the earliest the Germany case can possibly resolve
is this May.

Kierkegaard wrote that it is perfectly true, as the philosophers say,
that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other
proposition, that it must be lived forwards. Court cases are a prime
example of this phenomenon. We know it is gut-wrenching for our
Supporters to watch every twist and turn in the case. It has taken so
long for us to reach the point where the question of a combined work of
software under the GPL is before a Court; now that it is we all want this
part to finish quickly. We remain very grateful to all our Supporters
who stick with us, and the new ones who will join
today. That
funding makes it possible for Conservancy to pursue this and other
matters to ensure strong copyleft for our future, and handle every other
detail that our member projects need. The one certainty is that our best
chance of success is working hard for plenty of hours, and we appreciate
that all of you continue to donate so that the hard work can continue.
We also thank the Linux developers in Germany, like Harald, who are
supporting us locally and able to attend in person and report back.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/02/19/kuhns-paradox.html

I’ve been making the following social observation frequently in my talks
and presentations for the last two years. While I suppose it’s rather
forward of me to do so, I’ve decide to name this principle:

Kuhn’s Paradox

For some time now, this paradoxical principle appears to hold: each
day, more lines of freely licensed code exist than ever before in human
history; yet, it also becomes increasingly more difficult each day
for users to successfully avoid proprietary software while completing their
necessary work on a computer.

Kuhn’s View On Motivations & Causes of Kuhn’s Paradox

I believe this paradox is primarily driven by the cooption of software
freedom by companies that ostensibly support Open Source, but have the (now
extremely
popular) open
source almost everything philosophy.

For certain areas of software endeavor, companies dedicate enormous
resources toward the authorship of new Free Software for particular narrow
tasks. Often, these core systems provide underpinnings and fuel the growth
of proprietary systems built on top of them. An obvious example here is
OpenStack: a fully Free Software platform, but most deployments of
OpenStack add proprietary features not available from a pure upstream
OpenStack installation.

Meanwhile, in other areas, projects struggle for meager resources to
compete with the largest proprietary behemoths. Large user-facing,
server-based applications of
the Service
as a Software Substitute variety, along with massive social media sites
like Twitter and Facebook that actively work against federated social
network systems, are the two classes of most difficult culprits on this
point. Even worse, most traditional web sites have now become a mix of
mundane content (i.e., HTML) and proprietary Javascript programs, which are
installed on-demand into the users’ browser all day long, even while most
of those servers run a primarily Free Software operating system.

Finally, much (possibly a majority of) computer use in industrialized
society is via hand-held mobile devices
(usually inaccurately
described as “mobile phones”). While some of these devices
have Free Software operating systems (i.e., Android/Linux), nearly all the
applications for all of these devices are proprietary software.

The explosion of for-profit interest in “Open Source” over the
last decade has led us to this paradoxical problem, which increases daily
— because the gap between “software under a license respects my
rights to copy, share, and modify” and “software that’s
essential for my daily activities” grows linearly wider with each
sunset.

I propose herein no panacea; I wish I had one to offer. However, I
believe the problem is exacerbated by our community’s tendency to ignore
this paradox, and its pace even accelerates due to many developers’ belief
that having a job writing any old Free Software replaces the need for
volunteer labor to author more strategic code that advances software
freedom.

Linksvayer’s View On Motivations & Causes of Kuhn’s Paradox

Linksvayer agrees the paradox is observable, but disagrees with me
regarding the primary motivations and causes. Linksvayer claims the
following are the primary motivations and causes of Kuhn’s paradox:

1. Software is becoming harder to avoid.
2. Proprietary vendors outcompete relatively decentralized free
   software efforts to put software in hands of people.

The latter may be increasing or decreasing. But even if the latter is
decreasing, the former trumps it.

Note the competition includes competition to control policy,
particularly public policy. Unfortunately most Free Software activists
appear to be focused on individual (thus dwarfish) heroism and insider
politics rather than collective action.

I rewrote Linksvayer’s text slightly from a comment made to this blog post
to include it in the main text, as I find his arguments regarding causes as
equally plausible as mine.

As an Apologia for
the possibility that Linksvayer means me spending too much time
on insider politics, I believe that the cooption I discussed above means
that the seemingly broad base of support we could use for the collective
action Linksvayer recommends is actually tiny. In other words, most
people involved with Free Software development now are not Free Software
activists. (Compare it to 20 years ago, when rarely did you find a Free
Software developer who wasn’t also a Free Software activist.) Therefore,
one central part of my insider politics work is to recruit moderate Open
Source enthusiasts to become radical Free Software activists.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/01/25/fsf-conservancy.html

[ This blog was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege, for the last 20 years, to be
either a volunteer or employee of the two most important organizations
for the advance of software freedom and users’ rights to copy, share,
modify and redistribute software. In 1996, I began volunteering for the
Free Software Foundation (FSF) and worked as its Executive Director from
2001–2005. I continued as a volunteer for the FSF since then, and
now serve as a volunteer on FSF’s Board of Directors. I was also one
of the first volunteers for Software Freedom Conservancy when we founded it
in 2006, and I was the primary person doing the work of the organization as
a volunteer from 2006–2010. I’ve enjoyed having a day job as a
Conservancy employee since 2011.

These two organizations have been the center of my life’s work. Between
them, I typically spend 50–80 hours every single week doing a mix of
paid and volunteer work. Both my hobby and my career
are advancing software freedom.

I choose to give my time and work to these organizations because they
provide the infrastructure that make my work possible. The Free Software
community has shown that the work of many individuals, who care deeply
about a cause but cooperate together toward a common goal, has an impact
greater than any individuals can ever have
working separately. The same is often true for cooperating organizations:
charities, like Conservancy and the FSF, that work together with each other
amplify their impact beyond the expected.

Both Conservancy and the FSF pursue specific and differing approaches and
methods to the advancement of software freedom. The FSF is an advocacy
organization that raises awareness about key issues that impact the future
of users’ freedoms and rights, and finds volunteers and pays staff to
advocate about these issues. Conservancy is a fiscal sponsor, which means
one of our key activities is operational work, meeting the logistical and
organizational needs of volunteers so they can focus on the production of
great Free Software and Free Documentation. Meanwhile, both Conservancy
and FSF dedicated themselves to sponsoring software projects: the FSF
through the GNU project, and Conservancy
through its member
projects. And, most importantly, both charities stand up for the
rights of users by enforcing and defending copyleft licenses such as the
GNU GPL.

Conservancy and the FSF show in concrete terms that two charities can work
together to increase their impact. Last year, our organizations
collaborated on many projects, such as
the proposed
FCC rule changes for wireless devices, jointly handled
a GPL
enforcement action against Canonical, Ltd.,
published the
principles of community-oriented GPL enforcement, and continued our
collaboration on copyleft.org. We’re
already discussing lots of ways that the two organizations can work
together in 2016!

I’m proud to give so much of my time and energy to both these excellent
organizations. But, I also give my money as well: I was the first person
in history to become an Associate Member
of the FSF (back in November 2002), and have gladly paid my monthly
dues since then. Today, I also signed up as an
annual Supporter of
Conservancy, because I’m want to ensure that Conservancy’s meets its
current pledge match — the next 215 Supporters who sign up before
January 31st will double their donation via the match.

For just US$20 each month, you make sure the excellent work of both these
organizations can continue. This is quite a deal: if you are employed,
University-educated professional living in the industrialized world,
US$20 is probably the same amount you’d easily spend on a meals at
restaurants or other luxuries. Isn’t it even a better luxury to know that
these two organizations can have employ a years’ worth of effort of
standing up for your software freedom in 2016? You can make the real
difference by making your charitable contribution to these two
organizations today:

• Conservancy’s Supporter program
• FSF’s Associate Membership program

Please don’t wait: both fundraising deadlines are just
six days away!

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/01/05/jdk-in-android.html

I have probably spent more time dealing with the implications and
real-world scenarios of copyleft in the embedded device space than anyone.
I’m one of a very few people charged with the task of enforcing the GPL for
Linux, and it’s been well-known for a decade that GPL violations on Linux
occur most often in embedded devices such as mobile hand-held computers (aka
“phones”) and other such devices.

This experience has left me wondering if I should laugh or cry at
the news
coverage
and pundit
FUD that has quickly come forth from Google’s decision to move from the
Apache-licensed Java implementation to the JDK available from Oracle.

As
some smart commenters like Bob Lee have said, there is already
at least one essential part of Android, namely Linux itself, licensed as
pure GPL. I find it both amusing and maddening that respondents use
widespread GPL violation by chip manufacturers as some sort of
justification for why Linux is acceptable, but Oracle’s JDK is not.
Eventually, (slowly but surely) GPL enforcement will adjudicate
the widespread problem of poor Linux license compliance — one way
or the other. But, that issue is beside the point when we talk of the
licenses of code running in userspace. The real issue with that is
two-fold.

First, If you think the ecosystem shall collapse because “pure GPL
has moved up the Android stack”, and “it will soon virally
infect everyone” with copyleft (as you anti-copyleft folks love to
say) your fears are just unfounded. Those of us who worked in the early
days of reimplementing Java in copyleft communities thought carefully about
just this situation. At the time, remember, Sun’s Java was completely
proprietary, and our goal was to wean developers off Sun’s implementation
to use a Free Software one. We knew, just as the early GNU developers knew
with libc, that a fully copylefted implementation would gain few adopters.
So, the earliest copyleft versions of Java were under an extremely weak
copyleft called the
“GPL
plus the Classpath exception”. Personally, I was involved as a
volunteer in the early days of the Classpath community;
I helped name
the project and design the Classpath exception. (At the time, I
proposed we call it the “Least GPL” since the Classpath
exception carves so many holes in strong copyleft that it’s less of a
copyleft than even the Lesser GPL and probably the Mozilla Public License,
too!)

But, what does the Classpath exception from GNU’s implementation have to
with Oracle’s JDK? Well, Sun, before Oracle’s acquisition, sought to
collaborate with the Classpath community. Those of us who helped start
Classpath were excited to see the original proprietary vendor seek to
release their own formerly proprietary code and want to merge some
of it with the community that had originally formed to replace their code
with a liberated alternative.

Sun thus released much of the JDK under “GPL with Classpath
exception”.
The reasons
were clearly explained (URL linked is an archived version of what once
appeared on Sun’s website) on their collaboration website for all to see.
You see the outcome of that
in
many files in the now-infamous commit from last week. I strongly
suspect Google’s lawyers vetted what was merged to made sure that the
Android Java SDK fully gets the appropriate advantages of the Classpath
exception.

So, how is incorporating Oracle’s GPL-plus-Classpath-exception’d JDK different from having an Apache-licensed Java userspace? It’s not
that much different! Android redistributors already have strong copyleft
obligations in kernel space, and, remember that Webkit is LGPL’d; there’s
also already weak copyleft compliance obligations floating around Android,
too. So, if a redistributor is already meeting those, it’s not much more
work to meet the even weaker requirements now added to the
incorporated JDK code. I urge you to ask anyone who says that this change
will have any serious impact on licensing obligations and analysis for
Android redistributors to please prove their claim with an actual example
of a piece of code added in that commit under pure GPL that
will combine in some way with Android userspace applications. I admit I
haven’t dug through the commit to prove the negative, but I’d be surprised
if some Google engineers didn’t do that work before the
commit happened.

You may now ask yourself if there is anything of note here at
all. There’s certainly less here than most are saying about it. In
fact, a Java industry analyst (with more than a decade of experience in the
area) told me that he believed the decision was primarily technical.
Authors of userspace applications on Android (apparently) seek a newer Java
language implementation and given that there was a reasonably licensed Free
Software one available, Google made a technical switch to the superior
codebase, as it gives API users technically what they want while also
reducing maintenance burden. This seems very reasonable. While it’s less
shocking than what the pundits say, technical reasons probably were the
primary impetus.

So, for Android redistributors, are there any actual licensing risks to
this change? The answer there is undoubtedly yes, but the situation is
quite nuanced, and again, the problem is not as bad as the anti-copyleft
crowd says. The Classpath exception grants very wide permissions.
Nevertheless, some basic copyleft obligations can remain, albeit in a
very weak-copyleft manner. It is possible to violate that weak
copyleft, particularly if you don’t understand the licensing of all
third-party materials combined with the JDK. Still, since you must comply
with Linux’s license to redistribute Android, complying with the Classpath
exception’d stuff will require only a simple afterthought.

Meanwhile, Sun’s (now Oracle’s) JDK, is likely nearly 100% copyright-held by Oracle.
I’ve written
before
about the dangers of the consolidation of a copylefted codebase with a
single for-profit, commercial entity. I’ve even pointed out
that Oracle
specifically is very dangerous in its methods of using copyleft as an
aggression.

Copyleft is a tool, not a moral principle. Tools can be used incorrectly
with deleterious effect. As an analogy, I’m constantly bending paper clips
to press those little buttons on electronic devices, and afterwards, the
tool doesn’t do what it’s intended for (hold papers together); it’s bent
out of shape and only good for the new, dubious purpose, better served by a
different tool. (But, the paper clip was already right there on my desk, you
see…)

Similarly, while organizations like Conservancy use copyleft in a
principled way to fight for software freedom, others use it in a
manipulative, drafter-unintended, way to extract revenue with no intention
standing up for users’ rights. We already know Oracle likes to use GPL
this way, and I really doubt that Oracle will sign a pledge to follow
Conservancy’s and
FSF’s principles
of GPL enforcement. Thus, we should expect Oracle to aggressively
enforce against downstream Android manufacturers who fail to comply with
“GPL plus Classpath exception”. Of course, Conservancy’s GPL
Compliance Project for Linux developers may also enforce, if the violation
extends to Linux as well. But, Conservancy will follow those principles
and prioritize compliance and community goodwill. Oracle won’t. But,
saying that means that Oracle has “its hooks” in Android makes
no sense. They have as many hooks as any of the other thousands of
copyright holders of copylefted material in Android. If anything, this is
just another indication that we need more of those copyright holders to
agree with
the principles,
and we should shun codebases where only one for-profit company holds
copyright.

Thus, my conclusion about this situation is quite different than the
pundits and link-bait news articles. I speculate that Google weighed a
technical decision against its own copyleft compliance processes, and
determined that Google would succeed in its compliance efforts on Android,
and thus won’t face compliance problems, and can therefore easily benefit
technically from the better code. However, for those many downstream
redistributors of Android who fail at license compliance already, the
ironic outcome is that you may finally find out how friendly and reasonable
Conservancy’s Linux GPL enforcement truly is, once you compare it with GPL
enforcement from a company like Oracle, who holds avarice, not software
freedom, as its primary moral principle.

Finally, the bigger problem in Android with respect to software freedom is
that the GPL is widely violated on Linux in Android devices. If this
change causes Android redistributors to reevalute their willful ignorance
of GPL’s requirements, then some good may come of it all, despite Oracle’s
expected nastiness.

Update on 2016-01-06: I specifically didn’t mention the
lawsuit above because I don’t actually think this whole situation has much
to do with the lawsuit, but if folks do want to read my analysis of the
Oracle v. Google lawsuit, these are my posts on it in reverse chronological
order: [0], [1],
[2],
[3].
I figured I should add these links given that all the discussion on at
least one forum discussing this blog post is about the lawsuit.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/12/30/ian-murdock.html

[ This post
was crossposted
on Conservancy’s website. ]

I first met Ian Murdock gathered around a table at some bar, somewhere,
after some conference in the late 1990s. Progeny Linux Systems’ founding
was soon to be announced, and Ian had invited a group from the Debian BoF
along to hear about “something interesting”; the post-BoF
meetup was actually a briefing on his plans for Progeny.

Many of the details (such as which conference and where on the planet it
was), I’ve forgotten, but I’ve never forgotten Ian gathering us around,
bending my ear to hear in the loud bar, and getting one of my first
insider scoops on something big that was about to happen in Free Software.
Ian was truly famous in my world; I felt like I’d won the jackpot of
meeting a rock star.

More recently, I gave a keynote at
DebConf this year and talked about how long I’ve used Debian and how
much it has meant to me. I’ve since then talked with many people about how
the Debian community is rapidly becoming a unicorn among Free Software
projects — one of the last true community-driven, non-commercial
projects.

A culture like that needs a huge group to rise to fruition, and there are
no specific actions that can ensure creation of a multi-generational
project like Debian. But, there are lots of ways to make the wrong
decisions early. As near as I can tell, Ian artfully avoided the
project-ending mistakes; he made the early decisions right.

Ian cared about Free Software and wanted to make something useful for the
community.
He teamed
up with (for a time in Debian’s earliest history) the FSF to help
Debian in its non-profit connections and roots. And, when the time came,
he did what all great leaders
do: he
stepped aside and let a democratic structure form. He paved the way
for the creation of Debian’s strong Constitutional and democratic
governance. Debian has had many great leaders in its long history, but Ian
was (effectively) the first
DPL, and he chose
not to be a BDFL.

The Free Software community remains relatively young. Thus, loss of our
community members jar us in the manner that uniquely unsettles the young.
In other words, anyone we lose now, as we’ve lost Ian this week, has died
too young. It’s a cliché to say, but I say anyway that we should
remind ourselves to engage with those around us every day, and to welcome
new people gladly. When Ian invited me around that table, I was truly
nobody: he’d never met me before — indeed no one in the Free Software
community knew who I was then. Yet, the mere fact that I stayed late at a
conference to attend the Debian BoF was enough for him — enough for
him to even invite me to hear the secret plans of his new company. Ian’s
trust — his welcoming nature — remains for me unforgettable.
I hope to watch that nature flourish in our community for the
remainder of all our lives.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/12/18/conservancy-yir.html

If you’ve noticed my blog a little silent the past few weeks, I’ve been
spending my blogging time in December writing blogs on Conservancy’s site
for Conservancy’s 2015:
Year in Review series.

So far, these are the ones that were posted:

• Karen Sandler Speaks about IRS Charity Issues
• Bradley M. Kuhn Speaks About Future of Copyleft
• Bradley and Karen Speak at FOSDEM 2015
• Conservancy Wins DMCA Exception for Smart TVs

Generally speaking, if you want to keep up with my work, you probably
should subscribe not only to my blog but also to Conservancy’s. I tend to
crosspost the more personal pieces, but if something is purely a
Conservancy matter and doesn’t relate to usual things I write about here, I
don’t crosspost.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/12/02/sjw.html

I have something to say that I’m sure everyone is going to consider
controversial. I’ve been meaning to say it for some time, and I realize
that it’s going to get some annoyance from all sides of this debate.
Conservancy may lose
Supporters over this,
even though this is my personal blog and my personal opinion, and views
expressed here aren’t necessarily Conservancy’s views. I’ve actually been
meaning to write this publicly for a year. I just have to say it now,
because there’s yet another event on this issue caused yet another a war of
words in our community.

If you follow the types of Free Software politics and issues that I do
(which you probably do if you read my blog) you have heard the phrase
— which has become globally common in general politics —
“Social Justice Warrior”, often abbreviated SJW. As anyone who
reads my blog probably already knows, SJW is used as a derogatory catch-all
phrase referring to anyone who speaks up to on any cause, but particularly
on racial or gender inequality. While the derogatory part seems
superficially to refer to tactics rather than strategic positions,
nevertheless many critics who use the phrase conflate (either purposely or
not) some specific, poorly-chosen tactic (perhaps from long ago) of the few
with the strategic goals of an entire movement.

Anyway, my argument in this post, which is why I expect it to annoy
everyone equally, is not about some specific issue in any cause, but on a
meta-issue. The meta-issue is the term “SJW” itself. The
first time I heard the phrase (which, given my age, feels recent, even
though it was probably four years ago), I actually thought it was something
good; I first thought that SJW was a compliment. In fact, I’ve
more-or-less spent my entire adult life wanting to be a
social justice warrior, although I typically called it being a
“social justice activist”.

First of all, I believe deeply in social justice causes. I care about
equality, fairness, and justice for everyone. I believe software freedom is a
social justice cause, and I personally have proudly called software freedom
a social justice cause for more than a decade.

Second, I also believe in the zealous pursuit of causes that matter. I’ve
believed fully and completely in non-violence since the mid-1980s, but I
nevertheless believe there is a constant war of words in the politics
surrounding any cause or issue, including software freedom. I am,
therefore — for lack of a better word — a warrior, in those
politics.

So, when I look at the three words on their face: Social. Justice.
Warrior. Well, denotively, it describes my lifelong work exactly.

Connotatively, a warped and twisted manipulation of words has occurred.
Those, who want to discredit the validity of various social justice causes,
have bestowed a negative connotation on the phrase to create a social
environment that makes anyone who wants to speak out about a cause
automatically wrong and easily branded.

I’ve suggested to various colleagues privately over the last two years
that we should coopt the phrase back to mean something good. Most
have said that’s a waste of time and beside the point. I still wonder
whether they’re right.

By communicating an idea that these social justice people are fighting
against me and oppressing me, the messenger accusing a so-called SJW
has a politically powerful, well-coopted message, carefully constructed for
concision and confirmation bias. While I don’t believe all that cooptive
and manipulative power is wielded solely in the one three-word phrase, I do
believe that the rhetorical trick that allows “SJW” to have a
negative connotation is the same rhetorical power that has for centuries
allowed the incumbent power structures to keep their control of those many
social institutions that are governed chiefly by rhetoric.

And this is precisely why I just had to finally post something about this.
I won a cultural power jackpot, merely by being born a middle-class
Caucasian boy in the USA. Having faced some adversity in my life despite
that luck, and then seeing how easy I had it compared to the adversity that
others have faced, I become furious at how the existing power structures
can brand people with — let’s call it what is — a sophisticated
form of name-calling that coopts a phrase like “social
justice”, which until that time had a history of describing some of
the greatest, most selfless, and most important acts of human history.

Yes, I know there are bigger issues at stake than just the words people
use. But words matter. No matter how many people use the phrase
negatively, I continue to strive to be a social justice warrior. I believe
that’s a good thing, in the tradition of all those who have fought for a
cause they believed was right, even when it wasn’t popular.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/11/26/conservancy-fundraiser.html

[ A version of this blog post
was crossposted
on Conservancy’s blog. ]

I’m quite delighted with my career choice. As an undergraduate and even
in graduate school, I still expected my career extend my earlier careers in
the software industry: a mixture of software developer and sysadmin. I’d
probably be a DevOps person now, had I stuck with that career path.

Instead, I picked the charity route: which (not financially, but
work-satisfaction-wise) is like winning a lottery. There are very few
charities related to software freedom, and frankly, if (like me) you
believe in universal software freedom and reject proprietary software
entirely, there are two charities for you:
the Free Software Foundation, where I used to
work, and Software Freedom
Conservancy, where I work now.

But software freedom is not merely an ideology for me. I believe the
ideology matters because I see the lives of developers and users are better
when they have software freedom. I first got a taste of this
IRL when I attended the earliest Perl
conferences in the late 1990s. My friend James and I stayed in dive motels
and even slept in a rental car one night to be able to attend. There was
excitement in the Perl community (my first Free Software community). I was
exhilarated to meet in person the people I’d seen only as god-like hackers
posting on perl5-porters. James was so excited he asked me to take a
picture of him jumping as high as he could with his fist in the air in
front of the main conference banner. At the time, I complained; I was
mortified and felt like a tourist taking that picture. But looking back, I
remember that James and I felt that same excitement and we just
expressed it differently.

I channeled that thrill into finding a way that my day job would focus on
software freedom. As an activist since my teenage years, I concentrated
specifically on how I could preserve, protect and promote this valuable
culture and ideology in a manner that would assure the rights of developers
and users to improve and share the software they write and use.

I’ve enjoyed the work; I attend more great conferences than I ever
imagined I would, where now people occasionally walk up to me with the same
kind of fanboy reverence that I reserved for Larry Wall,
RMS and the heroes of my
Free Software generation. I like my work. I’ve been careful, however, to
avoid a sense of entitlement. Since I read it in 1991, I have never
forgotten RMS’ point
in the GNU
Manifesto: Most of us cannot manage to get any money for
standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result,
condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and
starving. We do something else., a point he continues
in his regular speeches,
by adding: I [could] just … give up those principles and start
… writing proprietary software. I looked for another alternative,
and there was an obvious one. I could leave the software field and do
something else. Now I had no other special noteworthy skills, but I’m sure
I could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy restaurant; they wouldn’t
hire me; but I could be a waiter somewhere. And many programmers, they say
to me, “the people who hire programmers demand [that I write
proprietary software] and if I don’t do [it], I’ll starve”. It’s
literally the word they use. Well, as a waiter, you’re not going to
starve.

RMS’ point is not merely to expose the
false dilemma
inherent in: I have to
program, even if my software is proprietary, because that’s what companies pay me to
do, but also to expose the sense of entitlement in assuming a
fundamental right to do the work you want. This applies not just to
software authorship (the work I originally trained for) but also the
political activism and non-profit organizational work that I do now.

I’ve spent most of my career at charities because I believe deeply that I
should take actions that advance the public good, and because I have a
strategic vision for the best methods to advance software freedom. My
strategic goals to advance software freedom include two basic tenets: (a)
provide structure for Free Software projects in a charitable home (so that
developers can focus on writing software, not administration, and so that
the projects aren’t unduly influenced by for-profit corporations) and (b)
uphold and defend Free Software licensing, such
as copyleft, to ensure software
freedom.

I don’t, however, arrogantly believe that these two priorities are
inherently right. Strategic plans work toward a larger goal, and pursing
success of a larger ideological mission requires open-mindedness regarding
strategies. Nevertheless, any strategy, once decided, requires zealous
pursuit. It’s with this mindset that I teamed up with my
colleague, Karen Sandler, to
form Software Freedom
Conservancy.

Conservancy, like most tiny charities, survives on the determination of
its small management staff. Karen Sandler, Conservancy’s Executive
Director, and I have a unique professional collaboration. She and I share
a commitment to promoting and defending
moral
principles in the context of software freedom, along with an
unrelenting work ethic to match. I believe fundamentally that she and I
have the skills, ability, and commitment to meet these two key strategic
goals for software freedom.

Yet, I don’t think we’re entitled to do this work. And, herein there’s
another great feature of a charity. A charity not only serves the
public good; the USA IRS also requires that a charity
be funded primarily by donations from the public.

I like this feature for various reasons. Particularly, in the context of
the fundraiser that
Conservancy announced this week, I think about it terms of seeking a
mandate from the public. As Conservancy poises to begin its tenth year,
Karen and I as its leaders stand at a crossroads. For financial reasons of
the organization’s budget, we’ve been thrust to test this question: Does
the public of Free Software users and developers actually want the
work that we do?.

While I’m nervous that perhaps the answer is no, I’m nevertheless
not afraid to ask the question. So, we’ve asked. We asked all of you to
show us that you want our work to continue. We set two levels, matching
the two strategic goals I mentioned. (The second is harder and more
expensive to do than the first, so we’ve asked many more of you to support
us if you want it.)

It’s become difficult in recent years to launch a non-profit fundraiser
(which have existed for generations) and not think of the relatively recent
advent of gofundme, Kickstarter, and the like. These new systems provide a
(sadly, usually proprietary software) platform for people to ask the
public: Is my business idea and/or personal goal worth your money?.
While I’m dubious about those sites, I do believe in democracy
enough to build my career on a structure that requires an election (of
sorts). Karen and I don’t need you to go to the polls and cast your
ballot, but we do ask you consider if what we do for a living at
Conservancy is worth US$10 per month to you. If it is, I hope you’ll
“cast a vote” for Conservancy
and become a Conservancy
supporter now.