David A. Harding
Wednesday, 28 Mar 2007
Speakers (names linked to my report on their speech)
Keysigning Party
A keysigning party during the registration preceded the meeting. I
volunteered to help newbies figure out what to do, and I think I
succeeded. I only collected 8 keys to be signed, but some of them are
well connected and belong to important community members.
Keysigning Picture
Peter Brown: Libre Planet
Peter Brown,
the executive director of the foundation, started the
meeting at 10:10. He highlighted some events on the day's agenda and
talked about what the foundation did in the last year.
The day after last year's meeting, he said, the board members decided to create the BadVista campaign. He then briefly reviewed the Daniel Wallace versus GPL case the FSF won this past year. He spent a lot of time talking about the Defective by Design campaign: 20,000 people have signed up to help advocate against DRM. Continuing, he talked about the FSF's offer of money to buy and free a 3D MMORPG, and how shortly after the FSF and partners lost the bid, Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, decided to free (license under the GPL) the client for their game.
The FSF's open letter to Steve Jobs received 6,000 signatures in 16 days. The letter, Brown said, says, ``you can't pass the buck; you can't pass the blame.'' He is trying to persuade his former employer, the New Internationalist to do an issue on free software. The UK green party added a free software policy and the Friends of the Earth International switched their office to GNU+Linux to support their policy for free software. And it ``looks like Solaris is going GPL.''
The FSF is starting a new project called Libre Planet to get local free software groups working together.
Selected pictures from Browns's presentation
John Sullivan: BadVista and the Campaign
for Free Software Adoption
John Sullivan, the program director, said
gNewSense
makes it easier to determine what hardware works with free software and
can be added to the
FSF's hardware
compatibility list
because gNewSense includes no proprietary drivers or
binary blobs
in the kernel. He said the
free software jobs
page isn't doing very well (no jobs currently listed), but that he's
working on it for next year. The
GNU audio and video repository
received an overhaul and a renewed commitment to recording Stallman's
speeches. BadVista, which Sullivan works on a lot, is a success at redirecting
some of Microsoft's $500,000,000 advertising budget for Vista into free
software media coverage: journalists want the other side and
badvista.org is the
#4 hit on a
Google query for vista
(after Microsoft and Wikipedia).
Sullivan is looking for writers for badvista.org. You can ask for topic ideas by joining #fsf on irc.freenode.net or emailing info@badvista.org.
In response to a question from the audience about the status of last year's open letter to Bono (lead singer of U2) about DRM, somebody (Pete Brown?) said Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia and a good friend of Bono's, agreed to deliver the letter for the FSF and Defective by Design.
Selected pictures from Sullivan's Presentation
Justin Baugh: Hardware Free from
Restrictions
Justin Baugh, Senior SysAdmin, talked about hardware support for free software.
He covered the
Dell Ideastorm website,
of which 8 of the top 10 requests were for free software.
HP
shipped 30 million personal systems last year; they want evidence of a
large enough demand (at least 300,000 units worth) before they dedicate
engineering resources to pre-installing GNU+Linux.
Beryl,
AIGLX
and
other 3D window managers are encouraging hackers to make free software
accelerated video drivers (like
Nouveau).
Wireless drivers under GNU+Linux still suck (my words, his point).
He suggests we continue to support hardware manufacturers that make good faith efforts to support free software.
Joshua Ginsberg: FSF Systems
Administration
Joshua 'jag' Ginsberg, Senior SysAdmin, gave a talk titled, Duct
Tape, Bailing Wire, and Dual-Core Opterons. The talked focused on
a lot of details about what the FSF is doing with its hardware.
Selected pictures from Ginsberg's presentation
Brett Smith: Compliance and
GPLv3
Brett Smith,
Licensing
Compliance Lab,
handles the FSF's copyright assignments and answers licensing questions.
``We get a lot of questions about Wikipedia,'' he said. ``At Wikipedia
we get a lot of questions about the FSF,'' replied Greg Maxwell, Chief
Research Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. Smith says he's read
every comment added to the GPLv3 license drafts.
Smith, who deals with more than 100 GPL violations a year, explained how the FSF deals with license compliance:
Report: Smith receives all reports sent to
licensing@fsf.org
and attempts to
verify them. He uses tools like strings to look for FSF copyrighted
material. If he finds a violation, he tries to determine who the
violator is and opens a case.
Contact: Smith starts by sending an email to the violator. If they don't respond (which seems to happen often), he sends another email after two weeks followed by phone calls, faxes, mail, and letters from the FSF's lawyers (the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC)).
Negotiation: The FSF does not negotiate how the GPL will apply to the software but rather works with the violator on repairing the harm they've done. Since many violations are in firmware, the FSF suggests the companies publish the GPL licensed code on their websites.
Compliance: Under the GPL, violators lose the right to redistribute GPL licensed software. During the compliance phase, violator's rights are restored and they are billed for taking up the FSF's time.
Gerald Sussman: Robust
Design
Gerald Sussman,
Board Member and Professor at MIT, gave the same speech
as last year.
Selected pictures of Sussman's presentation
Richard Stallman: Free Software and
Software Patents
Richard Stallman,
President of the FSF and founder of the Free Software
Movement, started by saying he's wearing a button that says,
``EMACS
loves every user.'' He then began his speech about software patents.
Stallman debunked the starving genius idea promoted by those that support patents. The idea is that a geniuses create brilliant ideas in their basement, and if we don't let them patent it, their ideas will be taken by the big corporations and the inventors will get little or no money—they'll starve. Stallman went through the ideas step-by-step:
``IBM doesn't say, `Not again. You've got a patent. [We can't compete with you.]''' Instead IBM will sign a cross licensing deal and the inventor and IBM will compete as if the patent never existed.
Stallman pointed out a irony of the patent system: ``There are no patents on how to write a threatening letter.'' Patent lawyers make sure their field isn't patentable. Stallman said the FSF's lawyers say, ``what you have to pay if you knew about a patent [before violating it] is 3 times what you have to pay if you didn't know about it.''
In an great analogy about why software is more complex than any other
patentable field, Stallman listed things you don't need to worry about
in while loop with an if statement:
if statement will oscillate
at a certain frequency and rub against the while
statement until they fracture.if statement will draw and whether
it can dissipate the heat there inside that while
statement.while statement that will make the if
statement not function.while and if statements and cause them not
to function.if statement inside the
while statement.if statement breaks, to remove it and replace it
with a new one.Stallman said, ``designing the factory can be the hardest part of building a product.'' Physical manufacture is limited; intellectual manufacture is much less limited: ``we can probably infringe more patents in a week then they can infringe in a year.''
According to a study by the co-founder of the Public Patent Foundation, Linux (the kernel) has 287 patents. Since Linux represents about 0.25% of the GNU+Linux system, Stallman estimates GNU+Linux might infringe on 100,000 patents.
Stallman then talked about the Microsoft-Novell patent deal and said the GPLv3 draft to be released on Wednesday, 28 March 2007 will contain two new clauses: one dealing with companies that take Microsoft's position and one dealing with companies that take Novell's position.
Picture from Stallman's speech
Eben Moglen: After GPLv3
Eben Moglen,
Board Member, started his speech by saying he was happy
the GPLv3 process is wrapping up. But that doesn't mean the free
software movement can take a nice vacation; there's more work to do. He
thinks we're about to move from one phase to another in the history of
our movement.
He summarized a major change happening right now: ``The survival of the Red Hat-Novell distribution model is at stake.'' I think everyone in the audience blinked at that statement; Moglen continued with a history lesson: IBM and HP were the major initial investors in Red Hat and Novell's free software business because they wanted to see the technology commercialized, but they didn't want to be sued. But now IBM and HP want to enter the market directly, and they're beginning to compete against Red Hat and Novell.
``A tipping point looms,'' said Moglen, ``the breaking point of DRM is upon us.'' Microsoft and Apple have taken the technology as far as it can go; Microsoft has ``an OS built on tilt points,'' and ``there are problems: ... A consolidated U.S. Government policy against Vista,'' and other large customer rejections. The GPLv3 will be supported by hardware manufactures, Moglen said.
About software patents: for 10 years ``Big Pharma'' wanted IT patents so they could say the patent system is beneficial to groups besides themselves, for Moglen said, ``Big Pharma owns [the] global patent system.'' But this year there is a software patent case before the Supreme Court (Microsoft v. AT&T) and the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat) sent in an amicus curiae in support of Microsoft that said, ``Justices, you should hold that patents don't apply to software.'' This isn't unusual or unexpected; what is unexpected is another brief was submitted that was almost word-for-word the same as PubPat's filed by the Eli Lilly company (a Big Pharma firm).
Moglen said, ``It's just a matter of time ... I don't want to say how long'' until software patents aren't a problem anymore.
Moglen continued by talking about what will happen this year: ``By the middle of this year, [Steve] Jobs will be trying to build an iPhone that does not included any GPL software.'' Questions: ``Is Nokia going to be as open as Apple is closed? Will Mr. Dell give in to his customers? Can Mr. Gates keep the laptop [as] a platform that doesn't embed OSes?''
Moglen said it wasn't his idea to use TiVo as the example of companies abusing the GPL (I think he felt TiVo has made some contributions to the community), but ever since the FSF ousted TiVo as a GPL abuser, Moglen expected a call from the TiVo people. ``It took a long time for the TiVo lawyers to call. But I got the call.'' They said, ``If you really feel bad [for using us as an example], you can change the license not to cover us.'' In exchange, the TiVo lawyers offered to make sure the movies on TiVo were stored in an open format and people could copy them off the device.
They seemed to think, Moglen said, ``my client is the free movie foundation.'' ``Just give us the freedom to change the software.'' Moglen said. But the TiVo lawyers replied, ``we lose money on every one of our boxes—we can't afford to not let anyone subscribe. If we do that, we'll get our lunch eaten by MythTV.'' By giving up freedom, you create subsidies, Moglen said.
``If I'm standing here next year and the tide on DRM hasn't changed, you'll know what to throw at me,'' Moglen said, and Stallman replied, ``DVDs?''
``IBM has made it impossible for Microsoft to create another SCO,'' Moglen said. The same has to be true about the Microsoft-Novell deal. We need to hack the deal so that every thing they try has the opposite reaction. Nobody has ever planned a strategic attack on patent portfolios, but consider the possibility that we do what has never been done before; that we might attempt to reorganize Microsoft's patent portfolio, Moglen said.
Moglen concluded with a few notes: in the future, the free software movement may target services companies (I think he meant Google and other web services companies); there are places in the world that don't respect the GPL—that's why the SFLC is opening an office in New Delhi; and he said, ``you have to bigger than 100 billion dollars a year before your CEO doesn't return our phone calls.'' Moglen's concerned that the free software movement isn't reliable enough: business knows what Stallman wants, but ``the less principled part of our community confuses business.''
Picture during and after Moglen's speech
Board Members Panel (Q&A)
The Board Members Panel was in question and answer format. Some
interesting information was discussed:
Mako Hill: Defining Free Culture
Mako Hill,
Debian
and
Ubuntu
developer, spoke about defining free culture. I think you
should just read his
free
culture definition
if your interested.
Awards
The meeting concluded with a presentation of the Award for the
Advancement of Free Software to Linux kernel hacker
Ted Ts'o
and
the Social Benefit Award to the
Sahana project