Please donate now to send Producer Dan Lynch to a Free Software conference of his choice, where he can help us record interviews and otherwise participate in the Free Software conference community:
We seek to raise $2,500 to fund Dan's trip. Amounts raised beyond that benefit Software Freedom Conservancy (which is the non-profit where the show's hosts, Karen and Bradley, work).
$2,383.26 of the $2,500 goal has been met.(Progress updated monthly.)
Free as in Freedom
Episode 0x11: Corporate Licensing Decisions That Impact the Project's Community
7 June 2011
Download
oggmp3Summary
Dan Lynch (filling in for Karen) and Bradley discuss a few examples where licensing decisions by companies impacts the health of the software development community.
This show was released on Tuesday 7 June 2011; its running time is 01:24:34.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:36)
- Dan interviewed the CentOS developers on FLOSS Weekly. (00:05:52)
- Bradley has a blog post that describes RHEL licensing model. His previous blog post to that one, while mostly off-topic here, has a few points of interest. (00:10:36)
- Dan Lynch mentioned The Smoking Man from the The X Files television series. (00:17:22)
- Bradley mentioned that Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee working on systemd, which is now in Fedora, but not in RHEL yet (as far as we know). (00:18:53)
- Bradley suggested that developers starting projects read Karsten Wade's The Open Source Way, and Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project, and Bradley's blog post about developing in public. (00:22:16)
- Dan and Bradley briefly discussed copyright abolition. Dan mentioned Stallman's writing on the Pirate Party's copyright positions.
Segment 1 (00:32:30)
- Bradley briefly discussed the history of StarOffice, and the creation of OpenOffice.org. (00:33:40)
- Bradley explained issues related to the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice.org. (00:37:30)
- Bradley has talked about how proprietary relicensing is very dangerous (00:39:50)
- Fedora, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE all switched to LibreOffice as a default. Bradley didn't know at recording time that the OpenOffice package in wheezy is a transition package to switch to LibreOffice. (00:41:24)
- Bradley and Dan mentioned a blog post by IBM's Rob Weir that misquotes the FSF to support IBM's positions on the OO.o relicensing issue. (00:58:26)
- Bradley mentioned the idea that Apache-2.0 work can be relicensed under LGPLv3-or-later, as he discussed in his blog post about the OO.o relicensing (01:00:45)
- Dan mentioned Jeremy Allison's comment on the aforementioned post on Rob Weir's blog. (01:02:08)
Segment 2 (01:16:09)
Bradley thanked Dan, on behalf of Karen, for all his work to make Free as in Freedom possible.
Send feedback and comments on the oggcast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following @faif on identi.ca.