May 13, 2014

0x44: Oracle v. Google Federal Appeals Court Decision

Summary

Bradley and Karen explain why they've been gone for so long, and then discuss the recent Oracle v. Google Federal Appeals Court Decision.

This show was released on Tuesday 13 May 2014; its running time is 00:55:43.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:00:31)

• Karen is now Executive Director of Conservancy and Bradley is President and Distinguished Technologist. (03:01)
• Bradley will be working extensively on the NPO Accounting Project. (03:40)

Segment 1 (00:09:37)

• Karen says the Oracle v. Google Federal Appeals Court Decision is not an engaging read, but the lower court decision was. (09:50)
• Karen said: You're out of your element, Donny! (12:38)
• Karen mentioned a tweet from the EFF (15:23)
• Bradley mentioned his older blog post about the previous decision (16:48)
• Karen incorrectly said we never recorded a show on the previous decision, but we did indeed discuss the previous Oracle v. Google decision in , which Bradley and Karen discussed in Episode 0x35 (18:53)
• Karen and Bradley explained what an affirmative defense, arguments in the alternative, and merger doctrine. (21:03)
• Bradley mentioned the Apache Software Foundation is now publicly more against copyleft software than proprietary software, and that such position is unreasonable, unlike the OpenBSD position that copyleft and proprietary software are equally bad: a position Bradley disagrees with but agrees is consistent, reasonable moral stance. (38:40)
• Bradley mentioned his discussions with Mark J. Wielaard of the Classpath project (52:20)
• Bradley and Karen ask people to doante to Conservancy.

Tags: faif, copyright, Oracle

December 5, 2012

Episode 0x35: Oracle vs. Google Copyright Decision

Summary

Karen and Bradley discuss the copyright decision in the Oracle vs. Google case.

This show was released on Wednesday 5 December 2012; its running time is 00:32:38.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:33)

• Bradley mentioned the BPM for the human heart is to the Bee Gee's song, STayin' Alive. (01:55)
• FaiF's bandwidth is provided by OSU-OSL. Please donate to OSU-OSL. (09:50)
• Bradley and Karen discuss the copyright decision in the Oracle vs. Google case. (12:26)
• Bradley couldn't find quickly a full telling of the windings/SCO font thing, but this blog mentions it (29:34)

Tags: faif, copyright, Oracle

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.

Tags: faif, GPL, licensing, copyright, Richard Fontana, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Oracle, conferences

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