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Free as in Freedom
October 9, 2014
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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)
July 1, 2014
0x48: copyleft-next
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss the talk, copyleft-next: an Introduction by Richard Fontana given at FOSDEM 2013 on Sunday 3 February 2013.
This show was released on Tuesday 1 July 2014; its running time is 01:35:07.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:37)
Bradley and Karen introduce the talk.
Segment 1 (05:37)
The slides Fontana's talk on copyleft-next are available.
Segment 2 (01:06:51)
- Bradley mentioned the issue of Noam Chomsky's points on concision (01:13:23).
- Bradley mentioned the anti-GPL keynote by Tom Preseton-Werner of Github at OSCON 2013. (01:14:53)
- Bradley and Karen discussed the Harvey Birdman Rule. (1:27:45)
- Bradey mentioned a comment he posted about CHR-governed policy meetings. (01:29:00)
October 17, 2013
0x43: State of the GNUnion
Summary
Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss John Sullivan's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled State of the GNUnion.
This show was released on Thursday 17 October 2013; its running time is 01:19:37.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:33)
Karen and Bradley introduce the talk.
Segment 1 (00:01:58)
The slides for John's talk are available, and the source of those slides is available too.
Segment 1 (00:54:31)
- Bradley mentioned RMS' essay, Who Does That Server Really Serve? (01:08:55)
Segment 2 (01:14:53)
Private Internet Access became a new GNOME Advisory Board Member.
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.
July 17, 2013
Episode 0x3F: FOSDEM 2013 - AGPLv3 Panel Discussion
Summary
Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss The panel discussion on the GNU Affero General Public License from FOSDEM 2013.
This show was released on Wednesday 17 July 2013; its running time is 01:28:47.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:00:38)
- Bradley asked for donations again to Conservancy's NPO accounting software campaign and Karen asked for donations to GNOME's Privacy Campaign.
Segment 1 (00:04:50)
This is the Panel Discussion: GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 from FOSDEM 2013. The speakers, in the order their voices are heard, are Tom Marble (introduction), Richard Fontana (moderator), Bradley M. Kuhn, Eileen Evans, and Christopher Allan Webber.
Segment 2 (01:06:47)
- Bradley mentioned the phrase
Give me convenience or give me death
, which is from a title of the Dead Kennedys album he suggested applied to the selection of proprietary software (01:10:10) - Bradley mentioned RMS' recent update to his Who does that server really serve? essay. (01:11:30)
- Bradley mentioned his blog post on doing VoIP encryption with Free Software. (01:14:04)
- Bradley mentioned his talk entitled The Affero GPLv3: Why It Exists & Who It's For? at the Southern California Linux Expo 11x. The slides are available and the sources for the slides are available. (01:17:30)
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)
December 18, 2012
Episode 0x36: RMS' Ubuntu Essay and Canonical, Ltd.'s Response
Summary
Karen and Bradley discuss RMS' essay on FSF's website, Ubuntu SpyWare: What To Do, and Shuttleworth's Slashdot interview that responds somewhat to RMS' comments.
This show was released on Tuesday 18 December 2012; its running time is 00:39:57.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:36)
- Karen and Bradley discuss RMS' essay on FSF's website, Ubuntu SpyWare: What To Do (08:50)
- Bradley mentioned how Fab discovered (and discussed on Linux Outlaws 280) how a search for “ter” in efforts to find a terminal window in Ubuntu yields [slightly NSFW] gives results for Rachel Ter Horst DVDs. (09:44)
- Bradley mentioned his blog post about Nokia's problems interfacing with Free Software communities. (14:50)
- Bradley and Karen discuss Shuttleworth's Slashdot interview (18:25).
- Bradley and Karen also briefly mentioned Jono Bacon's comments about RMS's essay and Jono's apology. (19:30)
- Bradley mentioned Shuttleworth's comments during his LinuxCon 2011 keynote. (20:14)
- Bradley mentioned Douglas Rushkoff's article, Teach U.S. kids to write computer code (29:30)
July 5, 2012
0x2D: FSF's Restricted Boot Paper
Summary
Karen and Bradley discuss FSF's announcement of FSF's white paper on Restricted Boot, which critiques Red Hat's approach to restricted boot for its Fedora distribution and Canonical, Ltd.'s approach to restricted boot for its Ubuntu distribution.
This show was released on Thursday 5 July 2012; its running time is 00:42:22.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:38)
- Karen mentioned it's useful that FSF avoids preloaded names. Bradley used FSF's criticism of the term “intellectual property” as an example of why it's important to avoid biased terminology. (02:22)
- Karen suggested that listeners may want to read FSF's white paper on Restricted Boot. (04:00)
- Bradley suggested also reading the Fedora statement and both Canonical, Ltd. statements. (04:37)
- Bradley and Karen mentioned the many blog posts Matthew Garrett made about UEFI are worth reading in sequence to learn more about this issue. (13:21)
- Bradley mentioned that FSF collaborated with the EFF on the broadcast flag issue. (25:40)
- Alan Cox made some critical posts toward Matthew and the Red Hat policy. (20:50)
- Bradley mentioned this Ancient Aliens from the History channel. (39:15)
December 16, 2011
Episode 0x1E: Our Non-Profits Considered
Summary
Karen and Bradley discuss recent debates about the value of non-profit organizations for Free Software.
This show was released on Friday 16 December 2011; its running time is 00:44:33.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:34)
- Fontana (and other Red Hat employees) pointed out some imprecision in what Bradley said in Episode 0x1D about Debian non-free. (01:07)
- A call for participation has been announced for the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2012. Please submit a proposal by 30 December 2011 (04:30)
- A recent debate about non-profits started, initiated by a blog post called Apache Considered Harmful. (12:55)
- Karen and Bradley briefly mentioned that some now believe that Considered Harmful Considered Harmful (13:16)
- A long thread on this issue occurred on the FLOSS Foundations mailing list (13:45)
- Bradley made an official Conservancy Blog post about the value of non-profits for Free Software (14:17)
- Sourceforge became proprietary software in 2001, as is well-described in this by The Sourceforge proprietarization debacle is well described in an article by Loïc Dachary. (19:19)
- Bradley mentioned FaiFCast Episode 0x11, which discussed the OpenOffice.org/Apache/LibreOffice situation. (44:35)
- Bradley pointed out that this debate conflates a lot of different
issues, and tried to list all the conflated questions here:
- Should a non-profit home decide what technical infrastructure is used for a software freedom project? And if so, what should it be?
- If the projects doesn't provide technological services, should non-profits allow their projects to rely on for-profits for technological or other services?
- Should a non-profit home set political and social positions that must be followed by the projects? If so, how strictly should they be enforced?
- Should copyrights be held by the non-profit home of the project, or with the developers, or a mix of the two?
- Should the non-profit dictate licensing requirements on the project? If so, how many licenses are ok?
- Should a non-profit dictate strict copyright provenance requirements on their projects? If not, should the non-profit at least provide guidelines and recommendations?
January 4, 2011
Episode 0x06: GRUB, Zulu Foxtrot Sierra
Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss the inclusion of ZFS GPLv2-or-later code inclusion into GNU GRUB.
This show was released on Tuesday 4 January 2011; its running time is 00:47:58.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:35)
- Bradley and Karen discussed the inclusion of ZFS code now included in GRUB, as the GRUB Project announced and was covered at LWN by Jonathan Corbet.
- It's not mandatory that GNU projects have assignment to the FSF. The GNU Maintainer's guide discuss the requirements when items are assigned to FSF. (14:40)
- FSF requires that the entire codebase be assigned once GNU project maintainers choose to assign copyrights. Conservancy's policy on copyright assignment differs here; Conservancy will accept partial copyright assignment. (16:07)
- Bradley mentioned the COBOL front end to GCC that is not in the main GCC codebase because it is not copyright assigned to FSF. (17:40)
- Bradley and Karen discussed the Squeak relicensing last call. (25:49)
- Bradley posted a comment to Corbet's article. (32:30)
Final (45:45)
- The calendar Bradley was thinking of was the International Fixed Calendar, which Wikipedia confirms, with a sourced link, was used by the Eastman Kodak Company from 1928 to 1989.