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Understanding Licenses, bit by bit (4)
December 29th, 2009
It took a little while, but I wrapped up the licenses-as-icons with a summary in tabular form. It’s not on this blog, because I don’t know how to pull in fancy CSS and tables into wordpress. Instead, it lives on one of my personal sites for now. It will move to the FSFE pages in due course, once I’ve had some of the other people in the Freedom Task Force look over it. The page is largely auto-generated now by a little python program that understands the labels given to the different licenses. There is plenty of room for improvement: links to the license texts, better explanations of what the badges mean, etc.
One thing I’m quite happy with is the family overview: it shows which licenses are the same when compared using only the qualities reflected in the badges. So it shows MIT and BSD 2-clause as the same — which I’m willing to accept. Unfortunately, due to the granularity of the badges, it also shows some things together (or at least indistinguishable based on the badges) that do not belong together.
There’s one badge missing: “allows relicensing”, which would for instance distinguish between OSL and AFL (as I pointed out when reading them previously). And it might make sense for every license that gets a warning marker to be excluded from the family groupings entirely, so as to avoid the possibility of confusion there.
Thanks: I’d like to thank Mignon Engel and Egon Elbre for providing icons that can be used to symbolize the different badges. You can switch between the different style sheets in your browser’s View menu (unless you’ve got Safari, which doesn’t support that feature as far as I can tell).
Copyright: Some folks have asked about the license on the icons, the text, these blog entries. Since this is work I do as part of my job for the FSFE, it is copyrighted by my employer — the Free Software Foundation Europe (an independent sister organization representing Free Software in Europe). Most of the materials produced by the FSFE are released under a liberal license, for instance allowing unlimited verbatim copies as long as the copyright notice is preserved (otherwise it wouldn’t be verbatim, right?). However, this material hasn’t been licensed that way yet, so I’d have to answer that right now, it’s “All Rights Reserved.”
Next Steps: Refine the meaning of the badges. Add a relicensing badge. Add another dozen licenses (for instance there’s no Affero versions here yet). Clean up the text. Turn it into a nice booklet. Publish. …? Profit!
KDE SC 4.4 beta2 on OpenSolaris
December 27th, 2009
The -440 repository — that is KDE4-OpenSolaris-speak for “the Mercurial repository which holds the specfiles that are being developed for building KDE SC 4.4.0 once it is released” — has been bumped to beta2 now (version 4.3.85). We’re still in the process of rebuilding everything, as there are some new dependencies and the usual fixes and patches to be updated. I count 66 patches still applied; we have started pushing more of them upstream — especially the trivial ones like adding newlines to the last line of a file. Thanks to SadEagle for picking up some of the patches to KHTML again as well — they’re a little odd in that they apply to code that isn’t ever called but that needs to compile anyway.
xz: this is a new dependency, a general purpose compression library. Very straightforward build, no other dependencies — something that we should be trying to foist off on SourceJuicer as quickly as possible so as to make it available to more people.
libattica: Frederik Gladhorn (and whoever else worked on that), I salute you. No patches required, builds without even a single warning. If I’m going to be really picky, I’d point out that the files are licensed GNU LGPL 2.1 (the Lesser GPL) while the included COPYING file is the GNU LGPL 2 (the Library one). And there’s no tests for it, so while I can see it compiles, I have no idea if it works. Good job, anyway.
The status continues to be: it works. It’s kind of slow, and backtraces involving the Flash plugin are non-ASCII text, but for straightforward web browsing and KMail and konsole — my desktop — it’s in OK shape. As usual additional compile and runtime testers are encouraged to step forward.
All I want for Christmas is an Office Suite?
December 25th, 2009
My friend Armijn pointed me to a thing called Orange Office (no link). I get a Dutch site, which is full of d/t errors (a fundament of Dutch grammar) which tries to sell me .. OpenOffice.org. It comes down to a long spiel about Microsoft Office compatibility and how OOo works exactly the same as Microsoft Office and yet it’s so cheap! Buy now! Word! Powerpoint! Operators are standing by! Yes, they’re charging 15 EUR for an OpenOffice.org download. Going through the terms and conditions is hilarious (well, ok, I should take my medicines now) for disclaiming responsibility, disallowing resale (hello, LGPL!), disclaiming the applicability of refund law which applies to tele-sales. You know the drill. It gets better as the “buy now” page has a “limited quantity offer!” for Calc and Draw as well. The payment processing, somewhat to my surprise, seems to be legitimate — it’s still a heck of a way to rake in 15 bucks for an otherwise gratis download of OpenOffice.org 3.1.
John is a #$%!
December 24th, 2009
Ah, libel. Publishing defamatory or damaging text. There’s various interpretations, and generally calling John a complete moron on a web forum or in a blog post might be libelous (which John? I dunno .. you decide). This has been troublesome regarding publications which are also available (like on the Internet) in Britain, because British libel law treats publication, certainly online, a little differently from how one might expect. It’s not the date of production that counts, but the day of reading. This has led to a notion of “libel tourism” in the UK.
In any case, that’s my background for being interested in the topic, so a Canadian result on the topic caught my eye. It has no impact on the UK, of course, but it shows how the interpretation of libel is changing elsewhere. The CBC reports and Michael Geist comments on the introduction of a new defense “responsible communication” against libel suits. Interestingly, the CBC claims that the Canadian Supreme Court looked (among others) at the UK and found the available defenses in Canada “too strict.”
In any case, it means that in Canada, as long as (1) I did some research (2) the communication is in the public interest (3) the judge in the case confirms that it is in the public interest, then I can publish “John is a moron”.
And on a totally unrelated note, does it not strike you as odd that John Turner (17th prime minister of Canada) is not listed on the category page for Johns? Neither is John (Maddog) Hall. Nor John Oates. It’s a travesty.
KDE SC 4.4 beta1 for OpenSolaris
December 24th, 2009
Thanks to the efforts of the KDE4-OpenSolaris group — among whom I number myself, hnhn, Hajma, and Ben as well as various testers and supporters — the KDE SC 4.4 beta1 (version number 4.3.80) is available as OpenSolaris IPS packages. Note that beta2 has been released already so there is more updating to do. In the course of the beta cycles, the amount of patching that needs dealing with tends to drop — at least as long as there are no large code drops.
Speaking of large code drops, Dario tries to explain polkit — a good thing, but I’m still not sure if this thing actually exists for me or not.
Packages: there is an IPS server hosting packages for 4.3.80. This is still my FreeBSD port of the pkg.depotd, so I do hope it remains compatible with the pkg command — pkg is still under interesting development, and it does suffer from API changes every now and then. In theory, you can just add this IPS server (say, as kdedev-ips .. oh, hang on, that is one of the things that has changed: I don’t think you can free-form name your IPS servers anymore). This should be a straightforward upgrade of your existing KDE packages.
Korona 4.3.80: there is a new release of the OpenSolaris live CD Korona (by Pavel Heimlich). It is available from genunix.org. Genunix is where you can find all of the different OSOL distributions and specializations. You can also get Belenix there, which is the KDE4-with-gcc distribution of OSOL. Note that the most recent distro’s are based on an OSOL with ZFS data deduplication, which may help in reducing disk space requirements if you have virtual machines or multiple source trees checked out.
Next steps in KDE4 on OpenSolaris are bumping everything to beta2 and plenty of runtime testing. I’m pretty happy with the stability of the desktop and KDE PIM right now, even Akonadi works; I think my main annoyance is with hangups in name resolution. Konqueror, for instance, regularly hangs (up to 10 seconds) in a dbus call (yay pstack). I think that’s either name resolution or favicon handling.
Collection Agencies
December 23rd, 2009
A while back I wrote about the Dutch national collection agency for music rights (performance and otherwise). That was related to a plan which was to charge webpage owners (i.e. individuals) a flat rate for embedding up to six videos in the page. This met with — rather confused, I said at the time — political opposition, and the plan was subsequently shelved. Today the collection agency Buma announced that it had reached an agreement with YouTube for an undisclosed sum; for this, YouTube obtains blanket permission to host (and redisplay) videos containing music that are otherwise subject to licensing in the Netherlands. Recall that Dutch copyright law is a little peculiar and downloading is — for the time being — allowed, it’s the making available that violates the copyrights.
The Dutch privacy organization Bits of Freedom (site is in Dutch) is, on the one hand, happy to have clarity, but at the same time there’s now a very strange situation: music videos hosted on YouTube are “vogelvrij” while all other video platforms are still encumbered. In addition, the artists are once again screwed over, as Buma has just sold (for an undisclosed sum) all these rights — for 15000 domestic artists and 2 million foreign ones. So if I were an artist (those of you who have heard me sing at conferences .. well, lucky you) I’d be kind of annoyed at this point, either for being sold out for too little under a blanket or for being sold out at all.
Trouble on the Line
December 23rd, 2009
I want them to stop explaining my browser options to me. I don’t want to know my browser options. The more I know about my browser options, the more I feel like a fool.
…
So I feel like a real consumer fool about my money, and now I have to feel like a fool about my browser, too. I liked it better back when we all had to belong to the same Browser Company, and browsers were browsers — black heavy monolithic boxes, that were routinely used in the movies as murder weapons (try that with todays browsers!). Also, they were permanently attached to your computer and only highly trained Browser Company personnel could “install” them. … It was as close as most people came to experiencing what heroin addicts go through, the difference being that heroin addicts have the option of going to another supplier.
All that is taken directly from a column by Dave Barry (he still writes for the Miami Herald) which I stumbled across recently. It’s in “Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits”, published in 1988. I’ll admit to minor editing: I replaced “phone” with “browser”. There were no web browsers in 1988.
Not much changed, eh, in twenty-one years?
It’s just a matter of serendipity that I was flipping through this tatty old humor book in the weeks following the European Union’s anti-trust decision around browsers. You can see the EU decision (PDF, 1.1MB) and the FSFE’s reaction — the latter can be summed up as “yes, this is one problem sort-of out of the way, but there’s more issues to be dealt with.”
I like choice. But I suspect Dave’s missive on the phone still largely applies and that people don’t want a browser. They want a tool with which to order pet food from the comfort of sitting in a cardboard submarine in their basement. There’s another angle on the topic as well: encouraging installation click-through. I hadn’t considered that — although recommendations that all the balloted browsers be available in some (fairly) recent version on-disk were made. That would change the issue from downloading and installing software to activating software. However, if you follow Adrian’s train of thought (that zdnet link), you end up disabling all change to the device, returning to the era of fixed-function machines that nobody can change.
Except by the Browser Company, of course.
Who is the FSFE?
December 21st, 2009
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is lots of people. I have tried to illustrate this previously, with lots of photos and drawings, but one of the best ways of showing just who is involved is through the Fellowship Interviews. This month, Simon Joseffson, who .. well, I guess you should just read the interview. Stian, who does the interviews, asks all the right questions.
Upcoming Conferences
December 21st, 2009
All I want for Christmas is to stay home, play in the snow with the kids, rearrange the living room and plan how to attend the following interesting events (in calendar order), all of which are in the Netherlands or functionally equivalent (that is, take a train ride no longer than from here to Delfzijl):
- FOSDEM — it’s the 10th edition of FOSDEM already! Wow, how time flies. I think I’ve attended four or five, only. While in past years I was running back and forth between the KDE and Sun (or OpenSolaris) stand, this year I will be rock-steady at the FSFE stand, where you’re welcome to talk about licensing, freedom, patents, and all else that ails you. Of course, I can still demonstrate KDE4 running on OpenSolaris, but only in its role as the platform I sometimes use to get my work done.
- The 6th Amsterdam Girl Geeks Dinner with Karin Spaink as keynote speaker is scheduled for the 18th of February. Topic is privacy.
- Linux Audio Conference is in Utrecht, from May 1-4. All you ever wanted to contribute to audio in the Free Software world, in 4 days. Kernel, applications, collaboration.
- NLUUG Spring Conference of Systems Administration.
And did you know? You can support the FSFE in its support for Free Software throughout Europe — in legal, licensing, policy, governance, promotion, procurement and publicity — by donating to help it achieve its goals. Which include being at conferences (like FOSDEM, the NLUUG conferences, and many others) to spread the word about Free Software, for individuals, businesses, and organizations.
Understanding Licenses, bit by bit (3)
December 19th, 2009
In the past two installments, I suggested a basic icon theme to describe the important points of a variety of Free Software licenses, applied those icons to the top ten most popular Free Software licenses and found that several of them are “the same” in terms of icons — which suggests that either what the two licenses does is roughly the same (so we can consider them equivalent) or that there is a distinguishing characteristic that hasn’t been taken into account yet. The second installment took a close look at two licenses that were “the same” and illustrated a third option: that I’d applied the icons wrongly.
One question left over from the first installment is whether the Artistic and LGPLv2.1 licenses are different in a meaningful fashion. I won’t try to answer that here, but instead I’ll carry on with the next top 10 most popular licenses, as enumerated by Black Duck Software again (bear in mind that these licenses apply to less than 1 percent of all Free Software projects):
- Common Public License
This license has been superseded by the Eclipse Public License, but remains more popular than its successor. It looks a lot like the Apache license, although there’s a subtlety in the patent grant (“at the time”) and a designation of jurisdiction (New York). It is weak copyleft, because it requires source to be made available in a reasonable fashion, but certain additions to the program are excluded. - Eclipse Public License
It is very difficult to see what the difference is between the CPL and EPL. I don’t feel like running diff right now. - zlib
The zlib license adds to the basic 1-clause or 2-clause MIT / BSD licenses a requirement to mark changed files and to represent the origin (and modification) of the software accurately. I consider that a common courtesey and basic honesty, but it might be good idea to add it to the list of icons; a kind of “label the provenance” image (but I can’t think of one right now). - LGPLv3
The LGPLv3 is interesting because it is relatively short: it is explicitly a “GPLv3 with these additional permissions and modifications to the conditions”. - Academic Free License
Interpreting Larry’s licenses leaves me a little scared: it is, after all, his specialty to write licenses. I don’t see how this is copyleft, since there is no obligation to provide source downstream — unless I’m totally misunderstanding the meaning of “contradicts” in clause 1.d. The license itself allows non-contradictory re-licensing; that probably deserves an icon of its own, although I suspect that relicensing is going to be possible only within the group of licenses with the same set of icons (I’d hope so). There is some specific patent and retaliation language here, but the troll in the “patent grant included” icon should make everyone read twice. - Open Software License
Another Larry Rosen product, and the only difference I can quickly spot is that this one requires licensing derived works and copies under the same license (where AFL allows a different but non-contradictory license). More evidence for the need for a “allows relicensing” badge. - CDDL
Largely the same as the Mozilla license. - Mozilla Public License 1.0
Largely the same as the Mozilla license. Oh, wait, this is the Mozilla license, just an earlier version. I don’t feel like breaking out diff just now. - PHP
The PHP license looks at first glance like a BSD-style license; and then you realize it has six clauses instead of 2 or 3 (four thou shalt not count; five is right out). These have to do with the use of the name PHP and as far as I’m concerned would justify a kind of warning badge saying “surprise conditions here”. I’m not going to draw one just right now. - Ruby
This is an unusually permissive license because it allows relicensing or public domain distribution and allows binary distribution while pointing only to the original.
That wraps up the tour of the top 20 most popular Free Software licenses, good for pver 90 percent of all software licenses in the Free Software world (though apparently there’s about 1800 variants out there). Today’s list suggests that we need an additional badge for relicensing, one for “watch out!” and perhaps a “represents” badge as well.
So, to return to the original reasons for doing this exercise: provide a quick overview of what the licenses mean that we use regularly in the form of an iconic representation, and to illustrate where the essential points of licenses agree. Tomorrow: wrap-up, table presentation, and a general request for better artwork.