Comments on Perens’ Comments on Software Patents

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/15/perens-on-patents.html

Bruce Perens and I often disagree
about lots of things. However, I urge everyone to read what Bruce
wrote
this weekend about software patents
. I’m very glad he’s looking
deep into recent events surrounding this issue; I haven’t had the time
to do so myself because I’ve been so busy with
the launch
of my full-time work
at
Conservancy this fall.

Despite my current focus on getting Conservancy ramped up with staff,
so it can do more of its work, I nevertheless still remain frightfully
concerned about the impact of software patents on the future of software
freedom, and I support any activities that seek to make sure that software
patent threats do not stand in the way of software freedom. Bruce and I
have always agreed about this issue: software patents should end, and
while individuals with limited means can’t easily make that happen
themselves, we must all work to raise awareness and public opinion against
all patenting of software.

Specifically, I’m really glad that Bruce has mentioned the issue of
lobbying against software
patents. Post-Bilski,
it’s become obvious that software patents can only be ended with
legislative change. In the USA, sadly, the only way to do this
effectively is through lobbying. Therefore, I’ve called on businesses
(such as Google and Red Hat), that have been targets of software patent
litigation, to fund lobbying efforts to end software patents; such funding
would simultaneously help themselves as well as software freedom.
Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, no companies have stepped forward to
fund such an effort, and they instead seem to spend their patent-related
resources on getting more software patents of their own. Meanwhile,
individual, not-for-profit Free Software developers simply don’t have the
resources to do this lobbying work ourselves.

Nevertheless, there are still a few things individual developers can do
in the meantime against software patents. I wrote a
complete
list of suggestions after Bilski
; I just reread it and confirmed all
of the suggestions listed there are still useful.

Comments on Perens’ Comments on Software Patents

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/15/perens-on-patents.html

Bruce Perens and I often disagree
about lots of things. However, I urge everyone to read what Bruce
wrote
this weekend about software patents
. I’m very glad he’s looking
deep into recent events surrounding this issue; I haven’t had the time
to do so myself because I’ve been so busy with
the launch
of my full-time work
at
Conservancy this fall.

Despite my current focus on getting Conservancy ramped up with staff,
so it can do more of its work, I nevertheless still remain frightfully
concerned about the impact of software patents on the future of software
freedom, and I support any activities that seek to make sure that software
patent threats do not stand in the way of software freedom. Bruce and I
have always agreed about this issue: software patents should end, and
while individuals with limited means can’t easily make that happen
themselves, we must all work to raise awareness and public opinion against
all patenting of software.

Specifically, I’m really glad that Bruce has mentioned the issue of
lobbying against software
patents. Post-Bilski,
it’s become obvious that software patents can only be ended with
legislative change. In the USA, sadly, the only way to do this
effectively is through lobbying. Therefore, I’ve called on businesses
(such as Google and Red Hat), that have been targets of software patent
litigation, to fund lobbying efforts to end software patents; such funding
would simultaneously help themselves as well as software freedom.
Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, no companies have stepped forward to
fund such an effort, and they instead seem to spend their patent-related
resources on getting more software patents of their own. Meanwhile,
individual, not-for-profit Free Software developers simply don’t have the
resources to do this lobbying work ourselves.

Nevertheless, there are still a few things individual developers can do
in the meantime against software patents. I wrote a
complete
list of suggestions after Bilski
; I just reread it and confirmed all
of the suggestions listed there are still useful.

Comments on Perens’ Comments on Software Patents

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/15/perens-on-patents.html

Bruce Perens and I often disagree
about lots of things. However, I urge everyone to read what Bruce
wrote
this weekend about software patents
. I’m very glad he’s looking
deep into recent events surrounding this issue; I haven’t had the time
to do so myself because I’ve been so busy with
the launch
of my full-time work
at
Conservancy this fall.

Despite my current focus on getting Conservancy ramped up with staff,
so it can do more of its work, I nevertheless still remain frightfully
concerned about the impact of software patents on the future of software
freedom, and I support any activities that seek to make sure that software
patent threats do not stand in the way of software freedom. Bruce and I
have always agreed about this issue: software patents should end, and
while individuals with limited means can’t easily make that happen
themselves, we must all work to raise awareness and public opinion against
all patenting of software.

Specifically, I’m really glad that Bruce has mentioned the issue of
lobbying against software
patents. Post-Bilski,
it’s become obvious that software patents can only be ended with
legislative change. In the USA, sadly, the only way to do this
effectively is through lobbying. Therefore, I’ve called on businesses
(such as Google and Red Hat), that have been targets of software patent
litigation, to fund lobbying efforts to end software patents; such funding
would simultaneously help themselves as well as software freedom.
Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, no companies have stepped forward to
fund such an effort, and they instead seem to spend their patent-related
resources on getting more software patents of their own. Meanwhile,
individual, not-for-profit Free Software developers simply don’t have the
resources to do this lobbying work ourselves.

Nevertheless, there are still a few things individual developers can do
in the meantime against software patents. I wrote a
complete
list of suggestions after Bilski
; I just reread it and confirmed all
of the suggestions listed there are still useful.

27C3 Fudfest

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/ccc-nervt.html

I really wonder why on earth the 27C3 accepted a nonsensical
paper like this
into their programme. So .. stupid. You read half the
proposal and it’s already kinda obvious that the presenter has no idea what he
is talking of. Fundamental errors, obvious misinterpretations, outdated issues:
this is just FUD.

And apparently this talk even is anonymous? Such a coward! FUDing around
anonymously is acceptable at the CCC?

Linux Plumbers Conference/Gnome Summit Recap

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/lpc2010-recap.html

Last week LPC and GS 2010 took place in Cambridge,
MA. Like the last years, LPC showed again that — at least for me — it is one of
the most relevant Linux conferences in existence, if not the single most
relevant one.

Here’s a terse, incomprehensive report of the different discussions I took
part in with various folks at the conference, in no particular order:

The Boot
and Init
track led by Kay Sievers (Suse) was a great success. We had
exciting talks which I think helped quite a bit in clearing a few things up,
and hopefully helps us in consolidating the full Linux boot process among all
the components involved. We had talks covering everything from the BIOS boot,
to initrds, graphical boot splashes and systemd. Kay
Sievers and I spoke about systemd, also covering the state of it in the Fedora
and openSUSE distributions. Gustavo Barbieri (ProFUSION, Gentoo) and Michael
Biebl (Debian) gave interesting talks about systemd adoption in their
respective distributions. I was particularly interested in the various
statistics Michael showed about SysV/LSB init script usage in Debian, because
this gives an idea how much work we have in front of us in the long run. A
longer discussion about the future of initrds and the logic necessary to find
the root file system on boot was quite enlightening. I think this track was
helpful to increase the unification and consolidation of the way Linux systems
boot up and are maintained during runtime.

Kay and I and some other folks sat down with Arjan van de Ven (Intel), to
talk about the prospects of systemd in Meego. The discussions were very
positive. In particular Arjan hat some great suggestions regarding use of the
Simple
Boot Flag
in systemd (expect this in one of the next versions) and
readahead. Before systemd can find adoption in Meego we’d have to add a short
number of features to systemd first, most of them should be easy to add.

Similarly, I sat down with Martin Pitt and James Hunt (both Canonical) and
discussed systemd in relation to Ubuntu. I think we managed to clear a lot of
things up, and have a good chance to improve cooperation between Ubuntu and
systemd in relation to APIs and maybe even more.

We talked to Thomas Gleixner regarding userspace notifications when the
wallclock time jumps relative to the monotonic clock. This is important to
systemd so that we can schedule calendar jobs similar to cron, but without
having to wake up periodically to check whether the wallclock time changed
relatively to the monotonic clock so that we can recalculate the next
point in time a calendar event is triggered. There has been previous work in
this area in the kernel world, but nothing got merged. Thomas’ suggestion how to
add this facility should be much easier than anything proposed so far.

I also tried to talk Andreas Grünbacher into supporting file system
user extended attributes in various virtual file systems such as procfs,
cgroupfs, sysfs and tmpfs. I hope I convinced him that this would be a good
idea, since this would allow setting externally accessible attributes to all
kinds of kernel objects, such as processes and devices. This would not only
have uses in systemd (where we could easily store all meta information systemd
needs to know about a service in the cgroupfs via xattrs, so that systemd could
even crash or go away at any time and we still can read all runtime information
necessary beyond mere cgrouping from the file system when systemd comes to live
again) but also in the desktop environments, so that we could for example
attach the human readable application name, an icon or a desktop file to the
processes currently running, in a simple way where the data we attach follows
the lifecycle of the process itself.

The Audio track
went really well, too. I was particularly excited about Pierre-Louis Bossart’s
(Intel) plans regarding AC3 (and other codecs) support in PulseAudio, and the simplicity of his
approach. Also great was hearing about Laurent Pinchart’s project to expose
audio and video device routing to userspace. Finally, I really enjoyed David
Henningsson’s and Luke Yelavich’s (both Canonical) talk regarding tracking down audio bugs on
Ubuntu. I was really impressed by the elaborate tools they created to test
audio drivers on users machines. Pretty cool stuff. Maybe this can be extended
into a test suite for driver writers, because the current approach for driver
writers (i.e. “If PulseAudio works correctly, your driver is correct”) doesn’t
really scale (although I like the idea and take it as a compliment…). I also
liked the timechart profiling results Pierre showed me that he generated for
PulseAudio. Seems PulseAudio is behaving quite nicely these days.

Together with Harald Hoyer I got a demo of David Zeuthen’s disk assembly
daemon (stc), which makes RAID/MD/LVM assembly more dynamic. Great stuff, and I
think we convinced him to leave actual mounting of file systems to systemd
instead of doing it himself.

Harald and I also hashed out a few things to make integration between dracut
and systemd nicer (i.e. passing along profiling information between the two,
and information regarding the root fsck).

I also hope I convinced Ray Strode to make Plymouth actively listen to udev
for notifications about DRM devices, so that further synchronization between
udev and plymouth won’t be necessary, which both makes things more robust and a
little bit faster.

Kay and I talked to Greg Kroah-Hartman regarding the brokeness of
VT_WAITEVENT in kernel TTY layer, and discussed what to do about this. After returning from the US Kay now
did the necessary hacking work to provide a minimal sysfs based solution that
allows userspace query to which TTYs /dev/console and
/dev/tty0 currently point, and get notifications when this changes.
This should allow us to greatly simplify ConsoleKit and make it possible to
add console-triggered activation to systemd (think: getty gets started the
moment you switch to its virtual terminal, not already at boot).

I also spent some time discussing the upcoming deadline scheduling kernel
logic with Dario, Dhaval and Tommaso regarding its possible use in PulseAudio.
I believe deadline schedule is a useful tool to hand out real-time scheduling
to applications securely. As an easy path to supporting deadline scheduling in
PulseAudio I suggested patching RealtimeKit to optionally use deadline
scheduling for its clients. This would magically teach PA (and other clients) to
use deadline scheduling without further patching in the clients.

At GNOME Summit I sat down with Ryan Lortie and Will Thompson to discuss the
the future of the D-Bus session bus and how we can move to a machine/user bus
instead in a nice way. We managed to come to a nice agreement here, and this
should enable us to introduce systemd for session management soonishly. Now we
only need to convince the other folks having stakes in D-Bus that what we
discussed is actually a good idea, expect more about this soon on dbus-devel.
Ryan and I also hashed out our remaining differences regarding the exact
semantics of XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, the result of which you can already
see on the XDG mailing list
. Ryan already did the GLib work to introduce
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and systemd already supports this inofficially since a few
versions.

I quite appreciate how Michael Meeks quoted me in his final
keynote. 😉

There was a lot of other stuff going on at the conference, and what I
wrote above is in no way complete. And of course, besides all the technical
stuff, it was great meeting all the good Linux folks again, especially my
colleagues from Red Hat.

I am still amazed how systemd is received so positively and with open arms
all across the board. It’s particularly amazing that systemd at this point in
time has already been adopted by various companies in the automotive and
aviation industry.

Off to LPC 2010, Boston

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/lpc2010.html

Later this week the Linux Plumbers Conference 2010 will take place at the
Hyatt Regency in Cambridge.

Together with Mark Brown I’ll be running the conference track about Audio,
and I believe we managed to put together quite a nice schedule with various
interesting talks covering many areas of what Audio on Linux is about.

I’ll also be around at the Boot
and Init Systems
track which Kay Sievers is running. Together with Kay I’ll
do a session about systemd,
everybody’s favourite system and session manager. We also managed to convince a
number of distribution maintainers of systemd to do short presentations about
the state of systemd adoption in their respective distributions: Michael Biebl
from Debian, Gustavo Barbieri from Gentoo, Kay for openSUSE and yours truly for
Fedora.

Because there never can be enough systemd coverage at a conference I’ll do
another talk about systemd, in Vincent Untz’ Desktop
track, this time focussing less on how to boot and maintain a system, but more
on doing the same for desktop sessions, in particular GNOME.

I’ll also stick around for the the first two days of the GNOME Boston Summit.

See you in Cambridge!

ИСУН

Post Syndicated from RealEnder original https://alex.stanev.org/blog/?p=262

Някак си незабелязано премина представянето на публичния интерфейс на Информационната система за управление и наблюдение на средствата от ЕС (ИСУН/UMIS).

Как се харчат парите, при кой отиват и за какви дейности винаги е било забулено от тежка бюрократична мъгла. Това е първия опит да се изнесат подобни данни, в такава дълбочина.

Съвсем свободно можете да разгледате информация, за това как са похарчени милиарди български и европейски средства тук: http://umispublic.minfin.bg

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Open Letter: Adopt RMS’ CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/20/open-letter-to-mark.html

I
was glad
to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t
want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse
proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way.
I wrote below a
brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS
(since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from
there). It’s fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark’s
words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There’s a
simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his
statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of
proprietary relicensing
that Canonical, Ltd’s.
CAAs/CLAs
give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard
Stallman
published a
few suggested texts
to use if you are attempting to only consider
benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you’ve
committed to that, I would expect you’d be ready, willing and able to
adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.’s, CLAs and CAAs. When will
you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward
to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.’s CAAs and/or CLAs.

The collective thoughts of the interwebz