Of the two hosts, I know Bradley Kuhn from around the way and more recently as part of the larger group of voices discussing software freedom all over identi.ca.  As a latecomer to this new oggcast and not having heard their previous show, this was my first time listening to Karen Sandler (@kaz on identi.ca).  The two hosts have a good repartee, it’s clear why they enjoy doing this together, and they bring excellent information and insight to their topics, which mainly cover policy, legal, and related issues in the FLOSS (free/libre and open source software) world.  Sandler is the general counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, and Kuhn is the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy.  So, it is literally listening to two experts in the field on FLOSS and its legal aspects discuss interesting and relevant topics.

Another reason I was inspired to write this post is in reaction to the latest show, where they discuss the issues and reasons around copyright assignment to appropriate non-profit organizations.  In their discussion around copyright assignment, Sandler had some strong points to make about how useful it can be in cases where code needs to be relicensed.  (To be clear, I understand their preference is, if copyright is assigned it should be to a non-profit organization, such as the Software Freedom Conservancy, that in turn makes contractual promises not to license the software non-free in the future.)

This topic sparked interest in me because of my own experiences relicensing the Fedora Project’s documentation from the deprecated OPL to the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported license in 2009.  In the post I wrote on the subject, “Why relicense Fedora documentation and wiki content“, I discuss clause 2(a) in the Fedora Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which I started referring to as “the nuclear option“, that allowed the project to sub-license contributions to the project under an equivalent or freer license.  Since the content we wanted to relicense (sub-license) was all new contributions (as opposed to content from an upstream), it was clearly something that could be sub-licensed under the CLA.

Without repeating all of the reasoning involved, it boiled down to this:

1. We achieved a wide consensus from the community that they wanted the relicensing;
2. We obtained permission to relicense from all substantive copyright owners (i.e., people who wrote the long guides not just short wiki pages) – even though they all had signed the CLA we considered it crucial that we have actual consensus to even proceed;
3. We didn’t bother to contact wiki authors/editors individually, but we did multiple loud announcements to give people a chance to know, understand, and make reasonable objections – it’s important not to surprise folks;
4. We used the nuclear option with great reluctance and only after effectively gaining the approval of the community.

This situation was necessary because the OPL we were using effectively put the Fedora Project on a content island, unable to interact with the growing body of freed content under the Creative Commons licenses.  The work coincided with the start of a review by Fedora Legal of the CLA overall, which has resulted in work to replace it with a simpler agreement that relies upon the acceptable FLOSS licenses and doesn’t assign these sort of additional legal rights to the Fedora Project.

So, the FaiFcast put me in mind of this situation where copyright assignment wasn’t involved, a different provision in the CLA was able to save us countless hours of work, and yet we were reluctant to use that provision and subsequently removed it from the next generation agreement.

Yet there is still a clause that seems to provide some protection against having to track down thousands of contributors in a future relicensing scenario:

The Fedora Project Board may, by public announcement, subsequently designate an additional or alternative default license for a given category of Contribution (a “Later Default License”). A Later Default License shall be chosen from the appropriate categorical sublist of Acceptable Licenses For Fedora.

Once a Later Default License has been designated, Your Unlicensed Contribution shall also be licensed to the Fedora Community under that Later Default License. Such designation shall not affect the continuing applicability of the Current Default License to Your Contribution.

Read the entire proposed agreement to understand all of the special terms, especially the very narrow definition of “Contribution”.  The goal, as I understand it, is to ensure continued freedom for contributed code or content by relying upon a simple agreement between the project and the contributor to use a permissive license now and forever.

I read all of PJ’s story (great stuff) of the Groklaw community and the eventual arise of trolls and astroturfers, glanced at the comments (wow, lots), wrote up an appeal to PJ to relicense, and along the way … I read something that reminded me to read the other comments first and not start my own thread if it belongs under another.  So I skimmed all the comments, leaving out all the side discussions about “Google {should,shouldn’t}” and such, and did find one where PJ explained why she would NOT be using a different license than the NC/ND for Groklaw works.  OK, fair enough.

So I wrote this comment, “Thanks, inclusion in The Open Source Way”.

This is my first time commenting on anything on Groklaw, and the reputation has me a bit intimidated. Yet, it was a fun distraction, and now I’ll keep my eye on the discussion for a while to see what else comes from it.  Meanwhile, I used this same content to stub out a page on the TOSW wiki, “Legal the open source way“.  This placeholder gives me a way to find myself again when I sit down to write the chapter, with help from PJ’s article-in-a-glass-box.

Words such as “freedom” might work, but are a bit much to say each team, and to me have the effect of hyperbole — big words chosen to prove how important the topic is.  Overblown.

Not that I consider matters of freedom to be trivial, but I don’t want to be using alarming language in every discussion unless it’s necessary.

Recently I found myself beginning to use a slightly new term that I think resolves the English ambiguities:  freed software.

What I like is the not unsubtle reference to any situation where a person, place, or thing was once owned as chattal and is now freed of ownership.  Being freed means having the freedoms of one who is free.  My writer/culture ear thinks that “freed” is the word that takes us out of the tautology of “free-as-in-freedom”.

It seems an odd choice to restrict academic openness and freedom for the sake of bad actions by bad actors or the support of old business models that need to evolve.  It also seems odd to use such strong words about sharing, which is usually a good thing in any context.  Sharing is not the same thing as stealing, which you wouldn’t know from Chris:

File sharing is bad.

One can almost hear Mr. Mackey, “File sharing is bad, mmkay?”  When he exhorts educators and parents to, “… stop this nonsense in its tracks,” Chris Dawson is parroting the FUD of the music industry.  Panic!  Gloom!  Doom!  Bankruptcy!

Where the rest of us come from, sharing is good.  Stealing may be bad, but so is a system that turns artists against fans.  A system that makes criminals out of the ignorant and well-meaning. A system that takes a simple idea to spur innovation and protect rights (copyright law) and turns it into a 150 year monopoly.

What apparently spurred Chris’ post is a new DOJ statement that millions of dollars in damages are justified for infringing on copyright via downloading stolen works and his concern that would end up with his school system in legal action:

However, the significance of this latest ruling can’t be emphasized enough to students and needs to be enforced vigorously on our networks. Want to download the latest Ubuntu ISO via torrents? Tough. Do it via http.

Some reminders of why freedom is more important than supporting dinosaur business models:

• Sharing music is not illegal, nor are the technologies to share it.  Many artists are now distributing freely licensed works, such as under the CC licenses.  That plus the inexpensive methods of sharing via torrent network allows the artists to build a community of fans based on sharing.
• Some legal downloads may only be available as a torrent.  For example, smaller projects or organizations with openly available and licensed content may not be able to pay the bandwidth costs to distribute themselves via HTTP.  Torrent lets the transit bandwidth costs be shared so none suffer, and also serves to reduce bottlenecks across the Internet by distributing load.
• Restricting new technologies to protect existing businesses puts a damper on innovating and developing new business models.

If he were merely acting in a pragmatic protection of his school system, that is at least a fair and defensible position.  But blocking a technology because it can be used for illegal purposes is attacking a symptom and not anywhere near the problem.  Adopting the language and stance of the monopolistic doesn’t show pragmatism.

Chris, you had a teachable moment here.  You could have told concerned parents who read your blog something other than to fear file sharing and not trust their kids (as you apparently don’t trust your own.)  You could have taught people about this situation, how it fits in to this moment in history, and also how to protect themselves.

Kids understand nuanced arguments.  If they don’t know by now, they’ll soon learn the fallacy of whitewashing “Just Say No” campaigns.    We tell them, “Illegal drugs are bad, mmkay?” while smoking and drinking are legal and a leading cause of death, illness, and ripping families apart.  When you act like they won’t understand a nuanced argument, when you treat teenagers like five-year-olds, they lose respect for you.  They stop listening, which may be why you have to resort to restricting their legal freedoms in order to catch them at illegal activities.

Finally, if you are going to be a voice representing IT and education, it is rather unbalanced to dismiss academic freedom for fear of problematic copyright laws.  Chris seems to understand this in his last line, making it more sad that he couldn’t take a balanced position in his important role:

Perhaps the entertainment industry and copyright law will catch up with the Digital Revolution, but for now people are just being bankrupted.

From Wednesday 08 April to Friday 10 April, I was in fabulous and mildly-rainy San Francisco to attend the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. I hadn’t spent that much time in Japan Town, it was cool to walk through the streets and catch bits of a Japanese-in-San Francisco history walking tour signs. The hotels and conference site were all within a few blocks of each other.

The summit was a meshing of multiple mini-conferences, including an embedded Linux summit.  This brought a wide range of Linux-related developers to one location and gave them reasons to intermingle.  The first day I was there (Wednesday) was a middle-of-the-summit day for some, and a chance for all to pause and take part in general interest topics in the main hall.  These included a final three-way discussion with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, Ian Murdock of Sun, and Sam Ramji of Microsoft, titled, “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

As usual, I ran in to old friends (e.g. Elena Zannoni, still Queen of GCC tools, and Pete Graner, still one of the best engineering managers you’ll ever know) and made new ones (e.g. Jeff Osier-Mixon, who was there pimping Montavista’s new embedded linux community, Meld.)   Jeff and I talked for a long while about community affairs, and ‘best community practices’  was a theme for my time spent there.  I got the down-low invite to the Community Leadership Summit, since announced.

One role the Linux Foundation has been filling better in the last few years is being a catalyst between Linux developers, especially kernel, embedded, etc. and the companies that employ the contributors or deeply rely upon the contributions. I overheard a few embedded Linux developers saying that the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) was down their list this year and got cut with travel budget considerations. That doesn’t mean OLS is not relevant, but that it has some competition in meaningful Linux developer conferences.  This is more a recognition that there is a gap to be filled here, one that a foundation traditionally fills as a neutral entity between otherwise competing interests, and the Linux Foundation is filling that gap.  This creates a gravity that can draw in or away from independent efforts.

Since simply networking with other free software folken isn’t enough, I was also  there to talk on a panel about measuring community contributions, which I covered in another article.  I also signed up to do what I could to help Tim Waugh prevent tragedies at the OpenPrinting Summit, a task which I and Tim largely failed at.

The OpenPrinting group met to work on improving printing in Linux with the typically laudable goal of “just work.”  They have come to a solution they feel is a good interim step toward an undefined future.  They are going ahead with plans to provide an automagic way of downloading and using proprietary printer drivers from within the printing dialogs.  This situation is analaguous to providing a way to access proprietary multimedia codecs, which Fedora tried to solve with CodecBuddy, one of the greyer parts of the project’s history.  I felt that mistake was made and lesson well (l)earned.

This automagic tool gives the printer manufacturers a way out instead of doing the right thing, that is, working on opening printer drivers or at least opening their standards so equivalent free drivers can be implemented.  I was just lurking in person while Tim was on the conference call, but I had to interrupt the meeting to make sure all there understood.  Their plan to write an application with the sole purpose to download and use/install proprietary code was not going to have an easy time passing Fedora package review.  In the end, the only thing it can deliver in Fedora are free drivers, and those are or should be packaged and already in the distro.

Even if the tool does make its way to Fedora, it still may not make it in to the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and even if there, the printing companies are still likely to negotiate individually with Red Hat to get proprietary drivers available in RHEL.  Nobody there seemed to have a problem with this.

I did not walk away feeling the state of printing in Linux was improved with this situation, although I’m sure millions of users will disagree with me.  Don’t those users realize this is a bandage over the situation that is made this way because of the printing manufacturers?  A bandage does not heal a wound or remove an infection.  Instead of a holistic solution that treats the whole body, we have a festering wound that is going to require surgery one day.

Based on our rapt expressions, I reckon James Bottomly was saying something smart and insightful.

The OSWALD (Oregon State Wireless Access Learning Device) is built from the ground-up from idea in the Summer of 2008 to the first units in first-year CS student hands on 23 April 2009.  It runs OSU’s version of an OpenEmbedded Linux; check out the full software stack to see there is a lot of capability in one hand.  It has ports for external devices (via USB) such as keyboard, mouse, monitor, and GPS.  The unit itself has a joystick with click for the left thumb, ABXY keys and a thumb-size touchpad plus buttons for the right hand.  It holds in your hands like a handheld game device.

It is also fairly raw, especially in terms of additional software ports, because it is a platform for students to learn on.  In his first-year CS class yesterday, Carlos Jensen handed out the devices for the first time.  The students’ first assignment is to write an MP3 player so they can listen to music on it.  Next week they work on the user interface for the player.

Ironically, the students who are doing the work to bring this to first-years are amongst the last class to work on dead-code autopsies. They were in the same first-year class long ago and no handheld like the OSWALD was in sight.

OK, so now the students have a handheld that encourages them to hack it for their own needs.  To provide the other half of the circle, OSU has a new social project hosting website.  They did a lot of work to blend Elgg and Trac into a seamless project tracker that makes friends want to flock.  Although they are running this as an OSU-specific project hosting with an open/public view, it can accomodate their industrial partnernships and class privacy needs.  They sound ready to roll this solution for other educational institutions to use, and I think they have a good chance for strong adoption.  I’ll be writing more about this, since I’m going to do what I can to help get it packaged for Fedora.  The concept is strong and the field seems pretty wide-open to get filled with a stellar open source solution.

1. Your goal is to prepare your child for a rich and abundant life in the real world.
2. Your goal is to let your individual child blossom in her way, in her time, knowing a firm grounding in her family and roots prepares her to find her best path at each step of life.

If you follow the first guideline, then you make preschool decisions that affect college choices, are working hard to make money that supports a rich and abundant life, and want your children to attend the best schools with the best programs.  You may not have spent as much of a quantity of time with your children, you focus on quality, and figure that their rich and abundant life that they’ll lead forever is the best thing you can do for them.

Or something like that.

If you follow the second guideline, you treat your children like a slow cooked meal.  Each ingredient of their lives is cultivated from the ground, locally and appropriately.  You follow the schooling they want, letting them set their own pace and break away slowly from the family constellation at a pace that suits each child.  You may work less or for less money or make some other compromise that puts the most amount of time in the hands of your family, aware that the future years are going to be unknown but most likely, they’ll be little stars moving in their orbits by then.

The first guideline is most like the guideline that our society follows.  That is, “The norm and the expectation.”  Some people follow it by clear choice, others because they haven’t thought of any other way.  Following the second guideline is more rare in the US culture, although perhaps a little less so than even a decade ago.

I was contemplating this as I looked at the International Baccalaureate site. I’m clearly in the second guideline camp, but I felt mixed emotions looking at the little baccalaureates from around the world.  How happy they look!  I be they feel really a part of something! What bright, shiny futures they’ll have!

This emotion has to do a bit of battle with the part of me that knows these children are forming a new constellation with new people precisely because they were forced from their first constellation, their family circle, at an early age.  Forced from the breast, from the family bed to the crib, from the crib to their own bedroom, from their bedroom to the nanny, nanny takes them to preschool, preschool starts a bond with same age people that is shattered in college, and after that … well, the real world starts.  A real world that is in fact nothing like those first 18 years, except where they repeat family choices with their own future families.

It’s honestly hard not to feel I’m failing in part with my children by not teaching them everything now that they’ll eventually need.  Even as I watch their peers in other lifestyles learn so much more at such an earlier age than I ever did.  If it weren’t for the pioneering experience of other homeschoolers to bolster me when the cold chill goes down my spine in the night, I don’t know how I’d make it through to the morning.

“There’s probably a Perl script running that company now …”

(No, I won’t say what company.)

Thanks Spot for always being way out front on legal and licensing issues. Fedora is freer because of your efforts. You’ve helped all of us be better leaders in bringing free software everywhere.

A Spot avatar

One concern expressed in comments to my post were two interrelated ideas: that contributors were going to be forced to use a CMS instead of whatever solution they prefer (i.e., a wiki), and that this would end-up splitting content into different areas, which is confusing for everyone.

The scope of the CMS solution that I am looking for is to cover two specific websites: www.fedoraproject.org and docs.fedoraproject.org. The ‘www..’ site hosts content that is relatively static, usually only changes between releases, and is part of a management and translation process. The ‘docs…’ site hosts full-length documentation that has been drafted, edited, translated, and organized into topics and by version/release. The wiki continues to be a community documentation site, focusing on content of the smaller and easier to digest size and scope that works best in a wiki format, with two audiences: contributors and end-users, in that order.

In addition, there are some specific content topics that have lived on the wiki as their canonical home, which has required them to have an access control list (ACL) defining who can edit. My goal is to get that content’s canonical home moved to the CMS within the www container.

People who work on that more controlled content as writers and editors do not need to switch from the wiki as their preferred authoring tool. It is the formal publishing location that we need to change to be within the CMS. Then we can use the CMS’s native access control tools. This process matches what we do for the release notes, where the community writes and edits content in the release notes beats, but the final publication locations (docs.fedoraproject.org and the fedora-release-notes package) are not wide-open for at-will changes by anyone in the community.

This follows a policy that Fedora Documentation has long used, which Fedora Websites began to follow a few releases ago. For multiple reasons, certain types of content cannot have the wiki as their canonical reference point. One case is where the content integrity is highly important to the very existence of the project, such as legal matters and packaging directions. Content is so powerful in this area that the changing of even one word can put the entire project in jeopardy.

Anther case is when the translations and the original must be in tight synchronization, which is not trivial in a free moving wiki environment. The case that started it all off for the Websites and Infrastructure team was the fundamental slowness of any dynamic content system when the pages are being hammered for information after a release.

(Note to self: the CMS solution must be able to make specific pages or content areas static, serving them from built web components and not out of the database.)

After the Fedora Websites meeting we just had, there is now a specific task I am working against, and a rough timeline. Please continue to leave comments here, on fedora-websites-list, or directly to me via email.

This is my first jetBlue flight, going fine so far. Oakland International (OAK) was the usual big airport experience. Big parts “under construction” with new services “coming soon”, please “pardon our dust.” I guess it’s all being funded with profits from the wireless network. Boingo service is the vendor of choice at OAK, and it would have been a pricey $4 per hour for me. I might consider $1 per hour, although free makes more sense. Heck, I’d arrive earlier for flights and buy more from their various stores if I could get some work done. While they are at it, how about a few more AC power outlets? Instead I took a nap so I would be alert for the flight.

All lands that flies well, and we hit BOS right on time, with a tailwind making up for the late departure. Although it took another hour to get to the hotel, I enjoyed taking the T instead of a taxi, as I had always previously done. Apparently I picked a great night to not wear my “I {heart} LA” shirt (fact: I do not really have one.) The Boston Celtics were about to hit the boards against the LA Lakers in game 6 of the NBA championship. The T was awash with green t-shirts and other Celtics wear. Myself? I couldn’t care less, I’m from Northern California (Golden State Warriors is the team there, if one cares), and I just didn’t want to get caught under the feet of a town of sad mad Bostonians.

Once here, I settled in to the room with a great southern view — the full moon was out and in the center of my room’s picture window. Then I took a long walk around the city, found a Pizzeria Uno to satisfy dinner, and settled in for the night. Big day on Wednesday, need what sleep I can eek. (This was finished the next morning, polished, and posted.)