About Hugo Roy

Hugo Roy is the French Coordinator of the Free Software Foundation Europe. He lives in Paris and studies Law at Sciences Po. (About Hugo, on www.fsfe.org)

FOSDEM 2012, panel on Application stores

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Hugo Roy

For the 3rd year in a row, I’m going to FOSDEM, the most awaited European Free Software event that takes place every year at the Université Libre of Brussels (how appropriate: the free university in the land of (not free) beer!)

This year though, I will not only attend and chat at the booth, I will also discuss the topic of application stores in the Legal DevRoom, Saturday afternoon, with Giovanni Battista Gallus, Bradley M. Kuhn, and Richard Fontana. Here’s the abstract:

So-called “app stores” are becoming a popular means of distributing software, particularly for mobile devices. However, the rise of app stores has been accompanied by tensions with free software/open source legal norms. Companies controlling official app distribution channels for their platforms typically place restrictive terms on both users and developers in ways that may be difficult or impossible to harmonize with requirements and expectations around FLOSS licensing. Moreover, there is a perception that noncompliance with FLOSS licenses is prevalent in app store distribution. This panel will explore some of the problems arising out of the intersection between app stores and FLOSS, under EU as well as US law, and will discuss possible solutions.

So if you’re interested, come and join us at 17.30 in room AW1.125!

Quelques notes sur la seconde licence publique Mozilla (MPL 2.0)

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Hugo Roy

(A short post in French on the Mozilla Public License 2.0. If you want to know about it, you can read in English Luis Villa, who led the update process. Richard Fontana wrote an article (RedHat); and the FSF has lauded the compatibility with GNU licenses.)

Cette année, une petite nouvelle est arrivée dans le monde des licences de logiciel libre : la seconde version de la licence publique Mozilla (MPL 2.0). Elle n’est pas totalement nouvelle, car elle garde l’esprit général de la première version puisqu’il s’agit d’une licence de faible copyleft. C’est-à-dire que cette licence permet dans une certaine mesure — assez large — de combiner du code régi par la MPL avec du code sous une autre licence (y compris propriétaire). Pour autant, des modifications apportées aux fichiers du code MPL doivent être régies par les mêmes obligations : mise à disposition du code source, notifications des droits des utilisateurs (droits d’utiliser, de partager, d’étudier le fonctionnement et de publier des modifications — la définition d’un logiciel libre).

Ainsi, la MPL est un bon compromis, entre d’un côté les licences “académiques” (BSD, MIT) et de l’autre, les licences copyleft¹ fortes comme la licence publique générale GNU. Mais comme tout compromis, la MPL souffre des inconvénients incombant à chacun des deux modèles de licence.

Il y a cependant des qualités indéniables à la MPL 2.0, que j’ai voulues résumer ici […]

Lire Les qualités de la MPL 2.0.

Android 4.0 at the Chaos Communication Congress

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Hugo Roy

Coming at the CCC, I thought I should take some extra caution. One of the things I did was to add a lock-screen password on Android 4.0 (that I updated from manually about a week ago). Yesterday morning, I figured this was mostly annoying. So I decided to remove it and I kept the simple “slide” lock icon.

Then this night, around 3 or 4 a.m. I wanted to check my emails at the #28C3 party, there was a sheet of paper with the name of a wifi network and a password. I thought, well, that’s great. How stupid I was.

I connected to this network and did some emails for about 20 minutes. As the night goes on, the phone went out of battery. When I got home and plugged the phone to restart it something unexpected happened. The phone was displaying the lock screen, asking for a password; not the SIM code.

I don’t have the password. The former password I use doesn’t work. And there aren’t any options available to me to fix it (apparently, former versions used to suggest to reset the password with an email to the Google account). I am not root on this phone, it’s not in debug mode, etc.

Basically, I got locked out of my own phone. It looks like I just got owned.
Bug report: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=23697

Edit: Fixed with fastboot

root@synclavier:/home/hugo/Tech/android/android-sdk-linux/tools# ./fastboot-linux-i386 devices
31320E7E6C1F00EC	fastboot
root@synclavier:/home/hugo/Tech/android/android-sdk-linux/tools# ./fastboot-linux-i386 oem unlock
... OKAY

It has erased everything on the phone, but at least I can use it back.

Add Duck Duck Go as a search engine in Gnome Shell

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Hugo Roy

Take one of the xml for DuckDuckGo in the OpenSearch standard, here’s mine:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>DuckDuckGo</ShortName>
<Description>Encrypted Duck Duck Go with encrypted Google Suggest</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="https://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" template="https://encrypted.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url rel="suggestions" type="application/x-suggestions+xml" template="https://encrypted.google.com/complete/search?q={searchTerms}&client=ie8&mw={ie:maxWidth}&sh={ie:sectionHeight}&rh={ie:rowHeight}&inputencoding={inputEncoding}&outputencoding={outputEncoding}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

and save as /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml for instance on Debian Wheezy. Now, refresh Gnome Shell (by doing alt+f2, ‘r’) and whenever you search for someting in the Shell’s Activity overview, you have the possibility to search the Web with DuckDuckGo.