We raised $2,515.72 toward Dan Lynch's trip to a conference to represent the show and record content! We'll be coordinated with Dan about what conference he wants to attend.
If you'd like to further support Free as in Freedom, please become a supporter of Software Freedom Conservancy, the charity where Bradley and Karen work.
![[Ogg/Vorbis Audio RSS]](/static/img/cast/rss-audioogg.png)
![[MP3 Audio RSS]](/static/img/cast/rss-audiomp3.png)
Free as in Freedom
April 2, 2019
![[Get cast in Ogg/Vorbis
format]](/static/img/cast/audio_ogg_button.png)
![[Get cast in MP3 format]](/static/img/cast/audio_mp3_button.png)
0x65: Linux Foundation's Community Bridge
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss and critique the new initiative by the Linux Foundation called CommunityBridge. The podcast includes various analysis that expands upon their blog post about Linux Foundation's CommunityBridge.This show was released on Tuesday 2 April 2019; its running time is 00:47:17.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
- Conservancy helped Free Software Foundation and GNOME Foundation begin fiscal sponsorship work. (07:50)
- Conservancy has always been very coordinated with Software in the Public Interest, which is a FOSS fiscal sponsor that predates Conservancy. (08:26)
- Conservancy helped NumFocus get started as a fiscal sponsor by providing advice. (08:53)
- The above are all 501(c)(3) charities, but there are also 501(c)(6) fiscal sponsors, such as Linux Foundation and Eclipse Foundation. (10:00)
- Bradley mentioned that projects that are forks can end up in different fiscal sponsors, such as Hudson being in Eclipse Foundation, and Jenkins being associated with a Linux Foundation sub-org. (10:30)
- Bradley mentioned that any project — be it SourceForge, GitHub, or Community Bridge — that attempts to convince FOSS developers to use proprietary software for their projects is immediately suspect (12:00)
- Open Collective, a for-profit company seeking to do fiscal sponsorship (but attempting to release their code for it) is likely under the worst “competitive” threat from this initiative. (19:50)
Segment 1 (21:23)
- Projects that use CommunityBridge are required to act in the common business interest of the Linux Foundation members. (27:30)
- Board of Directors seats at the Linux Foundation are for sale, according to their by-laws. (28:50)
- Bradley advises that you should not put anything copylefted into CommunityBridge — given Linux Foundation's position on copyleft and citing the ArduPilot/DroneCode example. (29:50)
- CommunityBridge appears to only allow governance based on the “benevolent dictator for life model” (31:40), at least with regard to who controls the money (34:30)
- Bradley mentioned the LWN article about Community Bridge. (33:22)
Segment 2 (36:54)
- Karen mentioned that CommunityBridge also purports to address diversity and security issues for FOSS projects. (37:00)
- Bradley mentioned the code hosted on k.sfconservancy.org and also the Reimbursenator project that PSU students wrote. (42:00)
Segment 3 (42:44)
Bradley and Karen discuss (or, possibly don't) discuss what's coming up on the next episode. Fact of the matter is that this announcement wasn't written yet when we recorded this episode and we weren't sure if 0x65 would be released before or after that announcement was released. We'll be discussing that topic on 0x66.
December 31, 2018
0x5F: Was 2018 the Year of Non-FOSS Licensing?
Summary
Bradley and Karen return, as promised, in 2018 (just barely)! They discuss the many non-FOSS and otherwise software-freedom-unfriendly licenses that have been promulgated in 2018.
This show was released on Monday 31 December 2018; its running time is 00:36:49.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
Bradley and Karen discuss ideas for what to do with the oggcast going forward.
Segment 2 (07:49)
- Bradley mentioned the field of endeavor restriction in Open Source Defintion. (09:20)
- Bradley mentioned how badly Amazon treats its workers who pack boxes, which was widely reported this month (10:22).
- Bradley referenced that someone changed attempted to change a license on a project to prohibit use by USA border protection agents. This was the Lerna project, and Bradley wrote a blog post about it earlier this year. (12:14)
- Bradley mentioned the controversy about the new MongoDB license, the SS Public License, which Bradley also wrote a blog post about earlier this year (14:09)
- karen reports that many people at the Sustain OSS Conference were surprised that sustaining the idelogy of software freedom was something that people value. (27:10)
November 24, 2015
0x57: Support Conservancy Now!
Summary
Free as in Freedom host Christopher Allan Webber interviews Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn about their work on copyleft and at Software Freedom Conservancy. You can become a Supporter of this work!
This show was released on Tuesday 24 November 2015; its running time is 00:26:10.
Show Notes
- Bradley mentioned Cygnus Solutions, ultimately acquired by Red Hat, which was an early for-profit supporter of copylefted projects.
- Bradley and Karen discussed the VMware lawsuit.
- Chris Webber wrote this blog post in response to a Shane Curcuru, who is VP of Brand Management at the Apache Software Foundation, anti-copyleft talk at OSCON 2015. Shane's talk is consistent with Apache Software Foundation's historical and recent anti-copyleft positions (12:23)
December 30, 2014
0x53: Can Plagiarism Happen Under Copyleft?
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss what plagiarism is (or isn't) and how it interacts with copyleft licenses.
This show was released on Tuesday 30 December 2014; its running time is 01:16:43.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:37)
- Please donate to to send Dan to a conference. There's a progress bar on faif.us now.
- You can also donate to support Software Freedom Conservancy, where Bradley and Karen work, by becoming a supporter.
- Karen mentioned her blog post about the supporter program. (00:08:30)
- Bradley mentioned his blog post about the supporter program as well. (00:09:30)
Segment 1 (00:16:16)
- Bradley and Karen pick up on a topic original discussed in Segment 1 of FaiF 0x02. (00:16:50)
- Bradley discussed the Laurie Stearns' article from the California Law Review, entitled Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property, and the Law (00:23:50)
- Bradley mentioned The GNOME Foundation Copyright Assignment Guidelines that he co-authored. (00:28:05)
- Bradley mentioned the Doris Kearns Goodwin Plagiarism controversy, and how it would have been simply redressed if the material she reused had been copylefted. (00:29:26)
- Karen mentioned that Flickr made different policies for CC-BY-SA'd works when selling printed versions. (32:30)
- Bradley mentioned that even software freedom advocates just comply with the copyleft licenses and don't work collaboratively, particularly during hostile forks, using Conservancy's Kallithea project as an example. (00:35:25)
- Bradley reiterated a point he made in FaiF 0x08, where he discussed that Linus Torvalds switched to GPL for Linux because he realized non-commercial restrictions weren't appropriate. (00:37:50)
- Bradley mentioned the hostile fork of GCC called egcs. The H-Online years later wrote a long article that discussed the egcs fork egcs fork. (00:39:46)
- Bradley mentioned that plagiarism is ultimately about attribution, and modern DVCS systems makes attribution easy and renders plagiarism impossible (if DVCS logs are accurate). (00:44:15)
- Bradley mentioned that he continually has learned the lesson that if you let your employer keep copyright, you lose everything you had when you switch employers (if the work isn't copylefted). (00:47:00)
- Bradley discussed the methods of attribution required in GPLv3. (00:50:05)
- Bradley mentioned that copyright notices are the primary method of attribution in copyleft licenses, and even non-copyleft ones too. (00:53:19)
- Karen discussed the attribution requirements in text of CC-BY-SA 4.0. (00:53:49)
- Bradley wants to do a whole FaiF show about how CC-BY-SA may not be a true copyleft since it has no source code requirement (00:54:40)
- Bradley mentioned the “fake name” that film directors use when they wish to disavow a work they aren't happy with. The name is, in fact, Alan Smithee, and indeed the 1984 film Dune lists Smithee as a director even though David Lynch is known publicly to be the director. (00:58:40)
- Bradley mentioned the unfair accusations against Red Hat when they stopped publishing their internal Linux Git repository and instead released a more standard ChangeLog. (01:05:30)
December 24, 2014
0x52: Legal Issues from a Radical Community Angle
Summary
Bradley and Karen play and discuss
Stefano Zacchiroli's talk entitled Legal issues from a radical community angle that he gave 12:00 European/Central time on Sunday 2 February 2014 at FOSDEM 2014.
This show was released on Wednesday 24 December 2014; its running time is 01:04:50.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:35)
Karen and Bradley introduce the talk.
Segment 1 (00:02:38)
Stefano Zacchiroli's talk entitled Legal issues from a radical community angle . You can watch the video instead of listening to our audio and/or follow along with Zach's slides.
Segment 2 (00:53:17)
- Please note: Bradley and Karen recorded these comments before the init system coupling referendum completed, which is why Karen and Bradley don't discuss it. However, their comments about the Debian democratic process are highly relevant to the recent vote. Also, Bradley discussed his views on that specific issue as a guest co-host on Linux Outlaws, Episode 368.
- Bradley and Karen discussed SPI as Debian's fiscal sponsor and used a few terms like grantor/grantee (01:01:20)
December 11, 2014
0x51: Why Licenses Requiring Use of Trademarks are Non-Free
Summary
Bradley and Karen play and discuss Pam Chestek's talk entitled Why Licenses Requiring Use of Trademarks are Non-Free that she gave on Sunday 2 February 2014 at FOSDEM 2014.
This show was released on Thursday 11 December 2014; its running time is 01:10:00.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:34)
- You can donate now to send Producer Dan Lynch to a Free Software conference. Donations will be made to Conservancy and any proceeds raised beyond the amount needed to send Dan to a conference will support Conservancy generally. (05:30)
- Dan will of course need to follow Conservancy's travel policy since Conservancy will fund his travel. (06:50)
- Bradley discussed the backstory on the Groupon attempt to steal GNOME's name. GNOME Foundation had to go public to raise funds to fight Groupon (10:05)
Segment 1 (00:13:26)
Pam Chestek gives a talk entitled Why Licenses Requiring Use of Trademarks are Non-Free. You can watch the video instead of listening to our audio and follow along with Pam's slides.
Segment 2 (01:00:37)
- Bradley mentioned Pam's talk from the previous year, which was played on 0x3C. (01:01:32)
- Bradley mentioned that GPLv3§7 allows for removal of additional restrictions that abuse that clause of GPLv3. (01:04:24)
November 11, 2014
0x50: Big Announcements & Evans' FOSDEM 2014 Talk
Summary
Karen and Bradley announce Conservancy's DMCA filing and Conservancy and FSF's joint launch of the copyleft.org project, and then discuss Eileen Evans' FOSDEM 2014 talk, entitled Licensing Models and Building an Open Source Community.
This show was released on Tuesday 11 November 2014; its running time is 01:13:10.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
- Conservancy file a DMCA petition regarding so-called “Smart TVs”. (02:00)
- Bradley mentioned the magic marker that was as circumvention technique under DMCA. Here's an amusing joke press release about the issue. (03:10)
- There isn't much documentation online of Bruce Perens live DMCA violation, but this article appears to be the main one on the subject, and there is also this interview (06:46).
- Bradley and Karen talked about the joint FSF/Conservancy copyleft.org announcement. (09:10)
- Bradley first pulled together the materials for copyleft.org for FSF's CLE seminars, particularly the one in March 2014. (10:00)
- Karen noted that Conservancy donated the time to write up a pristine example of good complete, corresponding source code for a GPL'd product. (11:30)
- Bradley discussed the incorrect GPLv2§2(a) violation accusations that some made against Red Hat regarding its changes to its publication of RHEL's Linux fork. (12:00)
- Karen and Bradley encouraged listeners to submit talk proposals for the FOSDEM 2015 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom (15:03)
Segment 1 (19:38)
This is a recording of Eileen Evans' FOSDEM 2014 talk, entitled Licensing Models and Building an Open Source Community. If you'd rather watch the video, which includes the slides from her talk, it's available on FOSDEM's site.
Segment 2 (46:40)
- Bradley and Karen discuss Eileen's talk.
- Bradley mentioned the OpenStack CLA fight, which was covered in a panel discussion on FaiF 0x4B. (56:16)
- Karen mentioned the 501(c)(6) issues that OpenStack Foundation has faced, which were discussed already on FaiF 0x4E. (56:34)
October 9, 2014
0x4F: Linus Torvalds' Comments at DebConf 2014
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss and criticize comments made by Linus Torvalds at his Q&A during DebConf 2014 in Portland, OR on 29 August 2014.
This show was released on Thursday 9 October 2014; its running time is 00:38:51.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:37)
Bradley and Karen discuss the Q&A with Linus Torvalds at DebConf 2014 in Portland, OR on 29 August 2014. (01:09)
Segment 1 (04:30)
- Ryan Lortie asked about an offensive public statement Linus Torvalds made on 6 July 2012. (05:04)
- Bradley mentioned that Linus Torvalds argued Red Hat was kowtowing to Microsoft using offensive language. (07:57)
- Karen mentioned that Linus
called GNOME an
unholy mess
. (19:05)
August 26, 2014
0x4C: Copyleft vs permissive vs CLAs
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss the talk, Copyleft vs. Permissive vs. Contributor License Agreements: A Veteran’s Perspective by Simo Sorce given at FOSDEM 2013 on Sunday 3 February 2013.
This show was released on Tuesday 26 August 2014; its running time is 01:14:47.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:38)
Bradley and Karen introduce Simo's talk.
Segment 1 (00:03:02)
The slides from Simo's talk are available, if you want to follow along
Segment 2 (00:59:50)
- Bradley menitoned his blog post about CLA's on Conservancy's website. (01:00:10)
Segment 3 (01:10:22)
Bradley and Karen are still trying to decide what to do about the FOSDEM 2014 talks.
August 5, 2014
0x4B: CLA Panel Discussion
Summary
Bradley and Karen host a panel discussion on CLAs with Van Lindberg and Richard Fontana.
This show was released on Tuesday 5 August 2014; its running time is 00:54:05.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:38)
Bradley and Karen introduce the panel discussion.
Segment 1 (01:28)
- The panel guests are Van Lindberg and Richard Fontana.
- Van quoted from the Apache Corporate CLA. (40:55)
Segment 2 (48:17)
- Bradley and Karen wrap up the discussion.
- Bradley mentioned the AKG C1000S which we use to record the oggcast. (50:40)
July 30, 2014
0x4A: See LA?
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss Contributor Licensing Agreements, which pulls material from Bradley's blog posts on the subject.
This show was released on Wednesday 30 July 2014; its running time is 00:44:34.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
- Bradley mentioned FSF's copyright assignment process. (05:50)
- Bradley mentioned RMS' essay regarding what you should do if a company asks you to assign copyright on Free Software. (14:00)
- Open Stack is reconsidering their CLA.
- Bradley mentioned again that goofy Eclipse contributor poster. (27:22)
June 3, 2014
0x46: O'Sullivan's Legally Cementing Licences in Legislation
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss the talk, Legally Cementing Licences in Legislation: Two Law Merchant Models for Free Software Licences by Maureen O’Sullivan given at FOSDEM 2013 on Sunday 3 February 2013.
This show was released on Tuesday 3 June 2014; its running time is 01:06:41.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:37)
- Bradley mentioned the Planet money t-shirt story (03:04)
- Bradley mentioned he buys Union made sweat pants (04:42)
Segment 1 (00:06:48)
Bradley and Karen introduce the talk.
Segment 2 (00:07:20)
This segment is the talk, Legally Cementing Licences in Legislation: Two Law Merchant Models for Free Software Licences by Maureen O’Sullivan given at FOSDEM 2013 on Sunday 3 February 2013. You can follow along with the slides.
Segment 3 (00:50:55)
- Bradley mentioned a talk he gave on 2005-03-12 at UC Irvine to a workshop of academics meeting about the research area of Computing Communities. Bradley still has some email archives regarding this, but can't find any online link to the workshop (URLs in the emails are all dead) or a recording of his talk. (58:52).
- As Bradley mentioned, ESR self-identifies as a gun nut. (01:00:19)
- Bradley mentioned FaiF 0x3A, which had Gabriel Holloway's talk (01:03:27)
September 4, 2013
0x42: libVLC LGPL Relicensing
Summary
Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Jean-Baptiste Kempf's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled Relicensing libVLC and VLC modules from GPL to LGPL.
This show was released on Wednesday 4 September 2013; its running time is 01:25:43.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:28)
- The plural of hiatus appears to be hiatukset, but hiatuses is the proper English. (01:50)
- Bradley adopted two dogs from a shelter. They like kongs (02:30)
- Bradley's wife has a blog with pictures of their dogs. (04:30)
Segment 1 (00:05:52)
Jean-Baptiste Kempf slides are available for this talk.
Segment 2 (01:03:20)
- Bradley had written a a blog post about the VLC relicensing. (01:03:48)
- Bradley mentioned a an article in The Onion about pugs known health problems (01:15:47)
- Karen mentioned The Last GUADEC blog post.
Segment 3 (01:21:00)
Bradley and Karen discussed the release of the ExFAT Samsung source code.
August 2, 2013
Episode 0x40: Alison Chaiken on Free Software in Cars
Summary
Note: initially, from 2013-08-01 18:30 through 2013-08-02 08:40 (US/Eastern), the audio file links in the feed did not work. That has been corrected.
Bradley and Karen interview Alison Chaiken about Free Software in cars.
This show was released on Friday 2 August 2013; its running time is 00:51:30.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:38)
Bradley and Karen introduce the interview.
Segment 1 (00:01:43)
- Bradley and Karen interview Alison Chaiken about Free Software in the automotive industry.
- Alison mentioned the Genivi Alliance, which is an industry trade association with some interest in “Open Source”.
- Alison presented a session at LibrePlanet about the Right to Repair act in Massachusetts. (00:14:30)
- Alison encouraged listens to get involved with Right to Repair and the Massachusetts Right to Repair.
Segment 2 (00:36:09)
- Karen moderated a panel at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2013 on Automotive issues (37:12)
June 13, 2013
0x3E: Mozilla - Licensing in the Trenches
Summary
Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Gervase Markham's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled Mozilla: Licensing In The Trenches.
This show was released on Thursday 13 June 2013; its running time is 01:11:55.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:34)
- Bradley encouraged listeners to Conservancy's campaign for non-profit accounting software. (02:10)
- Bradley mentioned his 2009 blog post encouraging people to donate to Free Software charities (02:50)
- Karen asked people to donate to the GNOME Foundation privacy campaign (04:11)
Segment 1 (00:04:57)
Gerv's slides from his FOSDEM 2013 talk can be downloaded from FOSDEM's website.
Segment 2 (00:51:48)
Bradley and Karen discuss Gerv's talk.
May 7, 2013
0x3C: FOSDEM 2013: How to Share a Trademark
Summary
Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Pamela Chestek's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled How to Share a Trademark.
This show was released on Tuesday 7 May 2013; its running time is 01:23:47.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:33)
Karen and Bradley introduce the talk.
Segment 0 (00:02:05)
Pam gave us slides, but it's all in one big SVG.
Segment 2 (00:55:10)
- The talk that Bradley mentioned was this talk that Karen gave at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2012; he was unable to find a recording. (57:04)
- Note that most of the time the word
source
was used in the talk and Karen's comments, it meansorigin
, notsource code
. (01:05:55) - Bradley mentioned this Planet Money story about the 5¢ coke. (01:21:37)
April 11, 2013
Episode 0x3B: FOSDEM 2013: Should We Embrace App Stores?
Summary
Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Simon Phipps' and Amanda Brock's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled Should We Embrace App Stores?.
This show was released on Thursday 11 April 2013; its running time is 01:11:25.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:33)
Karen and Bradley introduce the talk.
Segment 1 (00:03:03)
- Simon and Amanda used no slides during their talk.
- Amanda misquotes Bradley at 07:30. Bradley said:
An unenforced copyleft is the moral equivalent of a permissive license
, not that you give a license automatically not by enforcing. You can listen to FaiF Episode 0x38 to verify.
Segment 1 (00:49:35)
Bradley and Karen discuss the talk.
April 3, 2013
Episode 0x3A: FOSDEM 2013: FOSS Code Goes In And Never Comes Out
Summary
Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Gabriel Holloway's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled FOSS code goes in and never comes out: The Challenge of Sandboxed Proprietary Cloud Services.
This show was released on Wednesday 3 April 2013; its running time is 01:24:33.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:33)
Karen and Bradley introduce the talk.
Segment 1 (00:05:48)
The speaker's that you hear are:
- Gabriel Holloway, who gives the talk
- Till Jaeger asks the first question.
- A few other questions are asked, but we're unsure who the speakers are.
- Tom Marble, asks a question later.
Unfortunately, Gabe didn't provide us with slides.
Segment 2 (00:52:25)
- Bradley mentioned the Berne Convention on Copyright. (01:07:19)
- Karen mentioned Cooper Union and how they are in danger of running out of money for their full tuition scholarships. (01:10:00)
- Bradley looked but couldn't find the NPR story about terms of use. (01:19:37)
February 13, 2013
Episode 0x37: Copyright Assignment Again
Summary
Karen and Bradley discuss the LWN article, GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance and other issues related to copyright assignment.
This show was released on Wednesday 13 February 2013; its running time is 01:01:15.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:46)
- Bradley didn't want his words compared to the Ayn Rand's quote from an
interview with Phil Donahue where she said
I'm not going to die, it's just that world will end
. (02:54) - Bradley discussed the reaction to on 0x36 that occurred in this identi.ca thread. (04:20)
- Bradley and Karen discussed the LWN article, GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance. (11:15)
- Bradley pointed out that every other copyleft license allows for
relicensing under newer versions automatically (i.e., they have an
automatic -or-later ), and Karen asked whether Sun's
CDDL does. Bradley checked later, Karen was correct that CDDL's
later version clause (Section 4) is similar to the GPL
policy. (23:00) However, Fontana wrote to us on IRC to say
CDDL's license upgradeability clause is not entirely like GPL's. The GPL states that if no version number is specified, any version can be used. CDDL does not say this; it seems to assume that it will always be clear what version CDDL code will be distributed under, whereas GPL seems to assume otherwise.
- Bradley mentioned the interview he did with The H Online on GPL enforcement. (41:57)
May 29, 2012
0x2A: Conservancy's Compliance Project
Summary
Karen and Bradley discuss Software Freedom Conservancy's announcement regarding its coordinated license compliance program.
This show was released on Tuesday 29 May 2012; its running time is 00:32:53.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
Karen and Bradley discuss Software Freedom Conservancy's announcement regarding its coordinated license compliance program.
May 22, 2012
0x29: Richard Fontana at Linux Collaboration Summit 2012
Summary
Karen and Bradley play and discuss Richard Fontana's Linux Collaboration Summit 2012 talk, The Decline of the GPL, and What To Do About It.
This show was released on Tuesday 22 May 2012; its running time is 01:19:27.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
Karen mentioned a legal summit where Richard and Karen spoke; the same event where the organizers said having Bradley speak would be the same as having the caterers speak.
Segment 1 (04:46)
Fontana's slides for this talk are available on Fontana's website.
Note that this talk is a longer version of Ricahrd Fontana's FOSDEM 2012 talk, The (possible) decline of the GPL, and what to do about it from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom.
Segment 2 (57:24)
Bradley and Karen discuss Fontana's talk.
May 8, 2012
0x28: FOSDEM 2012: Loic Dachary
Summary
Karen and Bradley play and discuss Loïc Dachary's FOSDEM 2012 talk, Can for-profit companies enforce copyleft without becoming corrupt like MySQL AB? from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom.
This show was released on Tuesday 8 May 2012; its running time is 00:56:01.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:35)
Bradley and Karen discuss FOSDEM again.
Segment 1 (10:10)
Unfortunately, we don't have Loïc's slides.
Segment 2 (32:03)
Bradley and Karen comment on Loïc's talk.
April 25, 2012
0x27: FOSDEM 2012: Randal's Legal Hygiene
Summary
Karen and Bradley play and discuss Allison Randal's FOSDEM 2012 talk, FLOSSing for Good Legal Hygiene: Stories from the Trenches from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom.
This show was released on Wednesday 25 April 2012; its running time is 01:04:56.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:35)
Bradley talked about the #faif IRC conversation regarding hot milk recipe and its copyright. (01:54)
Segment 1 (07:10)
Allison's slides are available from faif.us.
Segment 2 (35:00)
- Karen and Bradley discussed the insanely complicated poster that Eclipse developers have to put on their walls to know how to accept patches (37:40)
- RMS's GNU Project essay talks about the Qt problem. (39:16)
- Bradley mentioned Chris Hertel's appearance on Linux Outlaws.(44:25)
- Karen mentioned The Scientific American article entitled Secret Computer Code Threatens Science. (54:00)
- Bradley mentioned Roland McGrath (56:44)
April 13, 2012
0x26: FOSDEM 2012: Meeks on Copyright Assignment
Summary
Karen and Bradley play and discuss Michael Meeks's FOSDEM 2012 talk, Risks and Benefits of Copyright Assignment from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom.
This show was released on Friday 13 April 2012; its running time is 00:47:19.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:35)
Bradley and Karen introduce Michael's talk.
Segment 1 (01:56)
Michael's slides are available from faif.us and from his blog post on the talk.
Segment 2 (26:47)
- Bradley mentioned GNU Mediagoblin as an example of a true upstream multi-copyright-holder AGPLv3'd project. (28:10)
- Bradley mentioned that LibreOffice is “wealthy” as well by Michael Meeks standards, given their successful fundraisers. (29:38)
- Bradley mentioned the Desktop Summit panel that he and Michael were on and Karen moderated. (34:06)
- Bradley and Michael co-authored (with Vincent Untz) the GNOME Copyright Assignment Guidelines. (35:30)
- FSF was previously supportive of MySQL AB back in 2002, but Michael also used to support the Sun JCA. (38:20)
March 29, 2012
0x25: FOSDEM 2012 Patents Panel
Summary
Karen and Bradley play and discuss Panel on Patents, moderated by Karen Sandler, with Ciarán O'Riordan, Benjamin Henrion, and Deb Nicholson from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom.
This show was released on Thursday 29 March 2012; its running time is 00:48:59.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:35)
- This American Life issued a retraction of the story we mentioned on 0x24. This American Life released a transcript or mp3 of the audio of the retraction. (02:21)
- Karen and Bradley introduce the panel.
Segment 1 (03:58)
This is the recording of the panel. Some of the questions aren't completely audible, but Dan did a pretty good job boosting it in places.
Segment 2 (32:21)
- IBM's amicus brief in Bilski clearly shows that IBM is pro-software patent. (33:48)
- The Linux System Definition which defines the only patents available for licensing by OIN licensees, was unilaterally updated recently without consulting the Free Software community.
- Keith Bergelt of OIN will speak at Linux Collaboration 2012 on the Legal track, which Bradley is chairing (35:29)
- OIN is a for-profit company. (37:54)
- IBM has attacked Free Software projects with patents, such as TurboHercules (39:22)
- IBM is the largest software patent holder in the world. (44:27)
- Red Hat refuses to grant a patent license for patent use in Free software, they have only a weak promise that allows them to sell of patents to others who may enforce against Free Software projects, or which could be revoked. (46:26)
September 13, 2011
Episode 0x18: 12 Years of Compliance: A Historical Perspective
Summary
Bradley and Karen play a speech recording of Bradley's presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled 12 Years of FLOSS License Compliance: A Historical Perspective.
This show was released on Tuesday 13 September 2011; its running time is 00:57:19.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
- Bradley mentioned that time travel requires special verb tenses according to the Douglas Adams' book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. (01:48)
- Bradley gave a keynote at Ohio Linux Fest 2011 (01:58)
Segment 1 (05:02)
- This segment is a recording of Bradley's OSCON 2011 talk, entitled 12 Years of Copyleft License Compliance: A Historical Perspective. The slides are available on Bradley's website so you can follow along during the talk if you like.
- There is a live denting identi.ca thread from Bradley's talk. (03:50)
- Bradley wrote a blog post about a minor GPL violation in the Emacs codebase. It has since been fixed.
- RMS mentioned the NeXT/Objective C GPL violation in his essay, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism.
Segment 2 (52:35)
- Bradley will be speaking at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2011 and at LinuxCon Europe 2011. (55:05)
July 19, 2011
Episode 0x14: Free as in FOAM
Summary
Karen and Bradley briefly discuss and play Bradley's keynote at the Sixth Annual OpenFOAM Conference.
This show was released on Tuesday 19 July 2011; its running time is 01:04:03.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:38)
- Bradley spoke at the Sixth Annual OpenFOAM workshop. (01:42)
Segment 1 (03:20)
- Follow along with Bradley's slides from his talk at the Sixth Annual OpenFOAM Workshop (03:22)
- The sources for the slides is available.
Segment 2 (53:12)
- Karen and Bradley discussed the talk.
- Bill Gates' arrest in New Mexico (Bradley incorrectly said Nevada) is discussed in Gates' Wikipedia entry. (55:20)
- Bradley mentioned the made-for-TV movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley. (56:26)
June 21, 2011
Episode 0x12: Karen's New Job; Supreme Court on Patents
Summary
Karen announces her new job, and Bradley and Karen discuss the recent USA Supreme Court decisions on patents.
Be sure to make sure you're subscribed to feeds available on faif.us if you haven't already!
This show was released on Tuesday 21 June 2011; its running time is 00:54:31.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:37)
- If you have not moved your RSS feed already away from softwarefreedom.org, and to faif.us, you should do that now! Here's links to the ogg RSS feed and mp3 RSS feed. New FaiF shows won't appear on softwarefreedom.org.
- Karen is now the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. (04:30)
- Bradley served on the GNOME Foundation Executive Director Hiring Committee, but resigned when Karen became a serious candidate. (05:13)
- Karen will continue as General Counsel of Question Copyright, and pro-bono counsel to Software Freedom Conservancy, and will also continue pro bono on some matters for SFLC. (06:30)
- Bradley has been working on GNU Bash. (07:34)
- Berlin's Tegel airport is closing soon. (14:40)
- Bradley mentioned that he incorrectly said in 0x11 that Red Hat doesn't provide sources publicly for RHEL. The RHEL SRPMS are actually on Red Hat's FTP site. (18:20)
- There are various identica threads on the RHEL issue from 0x11.(18:47)
- Bradley has previously explained the history of the term “punditocracy” in episode 0x0A. (27:46)
Segment 1 (28:58)
- Bradley and Karen discuss the USA Supreme Court decision in the Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S. A. case, on which SFLC submitted an amicus brief, which was previously discussed in FaiF Episode 0x05. (29:55)
- Bradley and Karen discuss the USA Supreme Court decision in the Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Ltd. Partnership case, on which the EFF submitted an amicus brief. (40:11)
June 7, 2011
Episode 0x11: Corporate Licensing Decisions That Impact the Project's Community
Summary
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.
May 24, 2011
Episode 0x10: Linux License Violations
Summary
Dan Lynch (filling in for Karen) and Bradley play and discuss Matthew Garrett's talk GPL Violations: What Are We Doing? (aka Linux License Violations) from the Linux Collaboration Summit 2011.
If you want to listen to only the off-topic parts of this oggcast, please download the FaiF 0x10 Off-Topic Remix.
This show was released on Tuesday 24 May 2011; its running time is 01:24:10.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:34)
- FaiF Producer Dan Lynch is filling in for Karen as co-host this week. (00:43)
- Karen got married on the day Dan and Bradley recorded the oggcast. (01:03)
- Dan is also known as the co-host of Linux Outlaws, host of Rat Hole Radio, and occasional co-host of FLOSS Weekly. (02:05)
- Bradley mentioned Dick Van Dyke's admission (06:56)
Segment 1 (08:05)
- This segment is Matthew Garrett's talk GPL Violations: What Are We Doing? (aka Linux License Violations) from the Linux Collaboration Summit 2011.
- Matthew Garrett released the slides from his talk which you can follow along with during the talk.
Segment 2 (51:29)
- Bradley mentioned that Matthew is particularly interested in the GPL violations on Android/Linux devices that he's found. (52:57)
- Bradley mentioned Greg Kroah-Hartman's GPL enforcement against Microsoft, which Bradley also blogged about a few years ago. (55:51)
- Dan asked Bradley about DMCA usage in GPL enforcement. Bradley explained that there is a process called DMCA takedown that Matthew was discussing. (57:30)
- Dan and Bradley discussed the Linux Foundation Open Compliance Program. (1:05:05)
- Bradley mentions that he is completely opposed to criminal penalties for copyright infringement, and mentioned his ACTA commenting blog post. (1:12:13)
- Bradley and Dan discussed the Sony DVD rootkit. (1:15:17)
- Karen's wedding invitation got some press since it was a working record player. (1:16:58)
- Karen and Mike's wedding song is at the end of the oggcast, but you can also download the song from the wedding website. (1:21:08)
May 10, 2011
Episode 0x0F: Why Samba Switched to GPLv3
Summary
This episode is a recording of Jeremy Allison's talk, Why Samba Switched to GPLv3 from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.
This show was released on Tuesday 10 May 2011; its running time is 01:00:51.
Show Notes
Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), Bradley was at Samba XP with Jeremy the day this show was released. So, there he wasn't able to get show notes together in detail for this show.
However, Jeremy's slides from the talk are available (in PDF), and also ODP format. So, you can follow along with it in the talk.
Also, you may be interested to read Bradley live-dent'd Jeremy's talk, so the discussion there might be useful to read as well.
April 26, 2011
Episode 0x0E: Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement
Summary
This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.
This show was released on Tuesday 26 April 2011; its running time is 01:02:48.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:34)
- Bradley is still recovering from a rhinovirus which he didn't take care of and also made him sicker, which explains the problems with his voice. In fact, the coughing in the background during Fontana's talk is all Bradley. He apologizes. (00:50)
- This show is Richard Fontana's Linux Collaboration Summit 2011 talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement. (03:24)
Segment 1 (03:48)
- Richard Fontana's slides for his talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement are available on his website. (04:29)
- Bradley was live-denting Fontana's LCS talk. (04:31)
- Richard Fontana is the purveyor of the disturbing group on identi.ca. (04:30)
- Fontana makes reference to a Bradley's blog post on switching back to Debian from Ubuntu. (05:55)
- Fontana pointed out that the GNU Manifesto deals a lot with how Free Software is completely compatible with many business models. (12:30)
- Fontana pointed out that many of the relationships between companies in Free software have great variability in level of transparency. (16:00)
- In the background, you hear Bradley saying something. He's giving
Josh Berkus credit for the phrase
throw code over the wall
, a phrase which both Fontana and Bradley now use regularly. (32:28)
Segment 2 (48:25)
- Fontana made an interesting analogy to commissioned art and its similarity to FLOSS. (50:33)
- Fontana noted later on identica that he does support non-profit as solution to entanglement problem. (54:48)
- Bradley mentioned the 60 Minutes story about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (CAI). (55:30)
- Fontana now talking about GE/NBC relationship, but Bradley was surprised that Fontana didn't mention Ben Bagdikian's book, The Media Monopoly. (18:26, 56:30)
- Bradley was glad that Fontana called proprietary relicensing illegitimate. Bradley points out that sometimes community members, including himself, have too easily forgiven business models on the edges of software freedom. (25:13, 30:50 58:30)
March 29, 2011
Episode 0x0C: Disturbing Debates
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss two debates going on in the free and open source software community. One recent and seemingly inflated, and one long and confusing.
This show was released on Tuesday 29 March 2011; its running time is 00:43:18.
Show Notes
Segment 1 (03:12)
- Bradley wrote a blog post about the Bionic issues that were raised. (03:44)
- On the old oggcast, Karen and Bradley discussed the Android/Linux system and Bionic specifically. (04:09)
- Karen mentioned an old oggcast where permissive vs. copyleft licensing was discussed. (06:19)
- Jake Edge wrote an LWN article that discussed Bionic (07:58)
- Bradley mentioned Raymond Nimmer's blog that started the debate (10:52)
- Bradley also mentioned Edward Naughton's blog post and paper on Bionic. (11:38)
- Raymond Nimmer is not David Nimmer, who is known for writings on copyright (18:10)
- There is now an disturbing group on identica, which is more disturbing than a tag about disturbing. (19:15)
- Joe Brockmeier did some research on Edward Naughton's ties to Microsoft. (20:05)
- Karen mentioned a paper on deep legal analysis of header files and on originality requirements in copyright (24:40)
Segment 2 (26:07)
- Karen wanted to clear up some confusion about the discussion last episode about the “Open Source” and “Free Software” terminology.
March 1, 2011
Episode: 0x0A: Windows Mobile Windows Phone 7 Series Application Store
Summary
Bradley and Karen discussed the Windows Phone 7 Application Store terms and conditions which prohibit GPL'd and other copylefted software in the application store.
This show was released on Tuesday 1 March 2011; its running time is 00:38:13.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:35)
- Karen and Bradley discussed the Microsoft Phone Marketplace agreement, which was heavily covered in news and blogs. (02:50)
- Karen quoted directly from the § 1(l) from the Windows Phone Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (03:20)
- Bradley credited Jello Biafra with coining the term “punditocracy”, but it seems to have been first used by Charles Reynell in The Economist in 1989 and popularized by Eric Alterman in his 1992 book, Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy.
- Bradley mentioned the brouhaha about the order of succession after Regan was shot in 1981. (Bradley incorrectly said 1980 on the show.) (09:47)
- Karen and Bradley previously discussed the Apple Online Store agreement on FaiF Episode 0x03.
- Bradley mentioned that the arm port of Windows 7 isn't even done (21:30)
- According to a Canalys study quoted on Wikipedia's Smartphone entry, RIM is only 14% of the market now, when it was previously much larger. Symbian is still the largest, surprisingly. (25:21)
- K-9 Mail is a fork of the last Free Software version of Google's Android Mail application. (30:21)
- Bradley compared what's happening with Android to the history of X Windows (31:40)
- Bradley joked about the naming length controversy for the Windows Phone 7. (33:00)
- Steve
Ballmer strangely kept saying:
The operating system is called Windows
while talking to market analysis back in July 2010. (36:04)
After the show was recorded, there was an announcement that Microsoft would allow employees to build their own companies writing Windows 7 Series Windows Mobile applications.
February 15, 2011
Episode 0x09: Copyleft, -or-later, and Basics of Compatibility
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss types of copyleft generally and introduce the basics of license compatibility and -or-later clauses.
This show was released on Tuesday 15 February 2011; its running time is 00:41:57.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:38)
- This show discusses copyleft and basic issues of license compatibility (04:09)
- Karen mentioned an episode of the old Software Freedom Law Show, Episode 0x08, where Bradley and Karen discussed selecting a FLOSS license and what the various options are. (04:45)
- license compatibility 06:28
- Bradley incorrectly said that the original Emacs license didn't
have the word
General
in it. However, the other explanations appear to be correct. There's a useful history page that someone wrote about the history of GPL. It appears the non-general GNU copylefts existed from 1984-1988. (06:57) - Karen noted that the Library GPL was renamed to the Lesser GPL which happened in 1999. (09:30)
- Bradley mentioned that when he and RMS worked on the GNU Classpath Exception, Bradley suggested it be called the Least GPL. (10:38)
- GPL doesn't have a choice of law clause. If another copyleft does, it surely is incompatible with the GPL. (14:17)
- AGPLv3
§ 13 and GPLv3 §
13 explicitly make themselves compatibility with each other, which
Bradley calls
compatibility by fiat
. (15:40) - Karen mentioned that the Mozilla Public License § 13 has a section about multiple licensed code (16:50).
- Bradley mentioned that Mozilla Firefox uses a combinatorial license: (GPL|LGPL|MPL), which is a disjunctive tri-license. (19:00).
- Bradley mentioned that the old Software Freedom Law Show Episode 0x17 discussed compatibility of permissively licensed software and copylefted software. (20:22)
- Apache Software License 2.0 was likely the first FLOSS license to have an explicit patent licensing provision (23:40)
- Bradley and Karen discussed the fact that -only vs. -or-later are options with the GPL, while they are not with other copylefts, such as CC-By-SA. (30:11)
February 1, 2011
Episode 0x08: Strictly Commercial
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss non-commercial-only commons licenses, particularly the CC-By-NC license, and how they compare to Free Culture and Free Software licenses, and why some authors pick NC licenses instead of Free Culture/Software ones.
This show was released on Tuesday 1 February 2011; its running time is 00:49:32.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
- Listeners seeking a show on how to select a Free Software license, differences between copyleft and non-copyleft, and how they interact with copyright are encouraged to listen to episode 0x08 of the old Software Freedom Law Show which covered these topics. Please write in again if that show doesn't cover your questions on the issue. (02:10)
- Bradley reminisced about the crass “Brian and O'Brien” show on Baltimore's B-104 Gary Huddles who was notorious locally in Baltimore because he was implicated in Maryland's version of the 1980s Savings and Loan scandals. (03:30)
- Karen mentioned that freedomdefined.org is the source for the Free Culture definition that defines what licenses are Free Culture licenses. (12:54)
- Bradley suggested listening to some of the old versions of RMS' Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks. In fact, there is an audio recording of the one at MIT on 19 April 2001 that Bradley attended, and an audio recording of the one that Bradley heard at Cardozo Law School. There is audio of the Q&A session, wherein RMS engages in that discussion Bradley mentioned with Free Culture activists. (10:10, 14:04)
- Bradley mentioned that Linus Torvalds switched to GPL for Linux because he realized non-commercial restrictions weren't appropriate. (Search the string GPL on that link to find Linus' answer on that.) (19:00)
- Karen mentioned that Creative Commons did a study considering what people understand commercial vs. non-commercial to mean. (20:43)
- Karen and Bradley discussed the text of CC-By-NC. (23:00)
- Karen mentioned various CC-By-SA licensed derivatives that had been made from Sita Sings the Blues. (38:24)
- Bradley discussed the Harry Potter Lexicon case and Karen mentioned the so-called IP Colloquium discussion on it. (44:30)
- Bradley mentioned Memory Alpha, which is a CC-By-NC wiki regarding Star Trek, which is tolerated by Paramount. (45:20)