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)

Tags: faif, commercial, licensing, copyright, IBM, patents, CLAs

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.

Tags: Creative Commons, licensing, non-profit, copyright, IBM, conferences, FOSDEM

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)

Tags: faif, licensing, Richard Fontana, IBM, patents

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.

Tags: faif, novell, commercial, licensing, copyright, LGPL, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Oracle, IBM