September 28, 2011

Episode 0x19: GNOME 3.2 and Other Topics

Summary

Karen and Bradley discuss the GNOME 3.2 release, Karen interviews Jos Poortvliet, Bradley complains about identi.ca web interface and they discuss together UEFI “secure” boot, and the PyPy Python 3 campaign.

This show was released on Wednesday 28 September 2011; its running time is 00:48:46.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:40)

• Bradley wrote a blog post about how GNOME 3 is not for him.

Segment 1 (07:14)

• Karen interviewed Jos Poortvliet

Segment 2 (21:04)

• Bradley mentioned Shaun McCance's post to desktop-devel about response bias, which he posted on user survey thread. (25:04)
• Karen mentioned that GNOME 3.2 has been released with new features, such as better window resizing. (28:57)
• Bradley pointed out that gnats was one of the earliest Free Software bug tracking systems. (30:37)

Segment 3 (31:53)

• Bradley mentioned that he feels like the unfrozen caveman lawyer when trying to use identi.ca now. (32:54)
• Bradley mentioned Matthew Garrett's blog post about UEFI so-called “secure” booting. (37:36)
• PyPy is trying to raise funds to support Python 3 on PyPy. (41:20)

Tags: faif, novell, gnome

August 30, 2011

Episode 0x17: Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful

Summary

Bradley and Karen play a speech recording of Richard Fontana's presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful.

Note: this show and the slides from Richard Fontana are licensed under CC-By-SA-3.0 USA. This will be the new license of the show for this and future episodes.

This show was released on Tuesday 30 August 2011; its running time is 01:03:49.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:34)

• This show is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful. (03:13)

Segment 1 (03:34)

• Richard Fontana has made his slides from his talk available on his website.
• Bradley live-dented Fontana's talk from OSCON.
• Richard Fontana references Michael Meeks' essay, Some thoughts on Copyright Assignment (29:55)

Segment 2 (45:17)

• Bradley and Karen were on a panel discussion on copyright assignment at Desktop Summit. (45:33)
• Bradley mentioned that Mark Shuttleworth's obsession with cadence had a similar weird effect on a different debate. (58:30)
• Karen has done some pro bono work for PubPat, and also Question Copyright (01:01:30)

Tags: novell, copyright, Richard Fontana

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

December 7, 2010

Episode 0x04: Conference Behavior and Novell Sale

Summary

In this episode of Free as in Freedom, Karen and Bradley discuss in the first segment recent press coverage of sexist attitudes at Free Software conferences, and in the second segment, discuss the public filings related to the Novell sale.

This show was released on Tuesday 7 December 2010; its running time is 00:58:16.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:40)

• Karen and Bradley discuss an article called The Dark Side of Open Source Conference, which was covered some in the tech press, in press outside of technology. Deb Nicholson wrote a blog post about it, as did Valerie (the original article's author. (01:06)
• Bradley mentioned his blog post where he discussed issues of gender equality across all Computer Science, not just the Free Software community. (05:29)
• Karen mentioned Kirrily “Skud” Robert. (10:27)

Segment 1 (32:18)

• There was an announcement that Novell will be sold (32:15)
• Karen mentioned that Andy Updegrove blogged twice on the subject (32:30)
• Karen talked about the 8K filing that Novell made regarding the purchase. (34:30)
• Karen mentioned a post on groklaw. (42:43)
• Bradley mentioned that the OIN patent license is incredibly narrow and not particularly useful, because the definition of the “Linux system“ is so narrow, and because OIN is a pro-patent, for-profit company that doesn't have the interest of Free Software at its heart. (45:30)
• Karen disagrees with Bradley's comments on OIN and thinks his characterization of the patent pool is a serious exaggeration. (46:00)

These show notes are Copyright © 2010, Karen Sandler and Bradley M. Kuhn of Free as in Freedom, and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC-By-SA-3.0 Unported).

Tags: faif, novell