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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/07/03/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/2017/04/25/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/2017/04/25/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/2017/04/25/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/2017/04/25/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!