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New Legal Journal
July 14th, 2009
There’s a new legal journal out, and it is all about (and by) us. “Us” in the wide sense of the word, those people that are concerned with legal issues around Free Software communities, projects, organizations. You can find it on boing boing as well, where Andrew Katz, one of the editorial team, is quoted as “even lawyers can adopt a collaborative model and create something both free as in freedom, and as in beer.” This collaboration is in part thanks to the Freedom Task Force of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which has created a neutral ground for exactly this kind of collaboration and sparring around Free Software law questions. You’ll see that positive, constructive dialogue is our main weapon.
If you were to look in the journal, you’d find a piece by me commenting on some topics that were active in march and april, basically a blog on paper. I like it that way, and I feel my role both as a columnist for that journal and within the FTF as a whole is to push the technical and community aspects. In other words, make sure that the topics that are relevant in Free Software communities are taken up by the legal experts that write for the journal. In the meantime, I’m learning about the practice and interpretation of law. It’s fun to get lost in the twisty passages of esoteric interpretations of licenses, but far more useful in the medium term to provide services aimed at projects and businesses involved with Free Software. The journal, I think, provides a means to communicate interpretations of the law to all involved — also people in the projects, not on the bench.
One might get one’s knickers in a knot over the title of the journal, which contains either a redundancy (Open Source software is Free Software, and there’s no need to expand upon Free Software) or is missing several additional terms like Libre and Liberal. I like the latter, but that’s because the opening keynote of GCDS was by Robert Lefkowitz; it was a wonderful display of showmanship and rhetorical skill. The upshot of the talk was that we use Free Software because we are lawyers (or pretend to talk to them) and gentlemen.
So be it. I will go find my monocle and take the first train to London, there to consult with Sherlock Holmes on the case of the licentious liberal.
Onward
July 14th, 2009
Back from GCDS; patches for qtcreator handed off; packing for trip to London; putting kids to bed. I realize now that I didn’t tell a single dinosaur story at this conference; that I still owe some people an explanation; that I had far too little time to talk to Till about anything. I intend to spend this week on work-work (which is why I’m going to London) and restoring family ties that 14 days of Free Software travel have raveled.
The closing summary article on GCDS is up on the dot now, and it gives a pretty clear picture of what happened and what the most tangible results are. I’d like to thank the membership of KDE e.V. for giving me another mandate for three years as KDE’s “legal dude”. This will no longer be my primary Free Software affiliation because of my work for the Free Software Foundation Europe, but I expect it to receive as much attention as it needs. It will be evening (GMT+2) work, though. I look forward to working with Frank and Celeste and the “old” board members to maintain our legal and organizational stability.
We have the technology ..
July 11th, 2009
We have the technology, we can fix it. The nice thing about showing people things that are broken and then sitting down to figure out what’s wrong is that the things get fixed. Holger helped out with understanding some of the rendering issues on the Sun Ray server, we tracked down some more suitable default themes (but there’s so many cool themes out there it’s hard to find a boring flat one), pushed graphicssystem RASTER into startkde, and ended up with a KDE4 that looks like this. Thin client heaven? I think not, but it’s a little better than when it started. Just a wee bit, though, even something totally flat like Heron (wish list: semantic tagging of plasma themes so I can search for “flat and boring”) totally borks the plasma panel.
Aaron was, probably rightly so, kind of annoyed with my cheap shot about ugliness on feature-limited X servers.
Still, it’s important to flag the problems, show them to people. The cheapness was more related to me complaining to the wrong people, but now at GCDS I could show them to the Sun Ray folks — and I’m very happy to have met Bob, Brian, Ken (?) and others from Sun — and collect information. It looks mostly like Qt has two problems: the fallback for non-porter-duff compositing is not very nice, and BGR colormaps are not supported. That’s the guesses from the Sun folk and they sound plausible enough — I’ll be trying them out when I get back home and can spend an evening re-compiling Qt all the time (instead of like here at GCDS where the evenings are for discussion and food).
.. and then we can fix it.
Results, great and small
July 11th, 2009
Smallest possible result: the punchline “she got the clap from a gnome” just made me giggle uncontrollably. Curse those webcomics! if there’s anything I’ve caught from GNOMEs this week, it was enthusiasm for cross desktop technologies, and I buried a Mexican. You just can’t get that kind of community building without a big conference, although I do miss a certain sense of “one moment that the entire project is together in a single room” because of the schedule.
Seeing how we (as the Free Software Desktop) are growing a new Pillar of the Free Desktop by moving Strigi analyzers and Tracker and Nepomuk Ontologies and Zeitgeist (really just a visualization of one suitable Nepomuk query) together — this is the Semantic Pillar — is really exciting. Finding this synergy takes a conference. Crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s is part of the work week around Akademy. That’s a good concrete result.
I got some patches for Qt Creator ready, but I’m so totally useless with git that I haven’t managed to push out any merge requests yet. Similarly, I see that the (Open|Nevada) Solaris packages are coming along well too, but haven’t taken the time to sync up these last few days. There are some other bugs I would like to look at in the coming weeks, but there is nothing critical right now.
Finally, I got to send off Akademy and GUADEC with a bang. No additional tools allowed (John Layt, that other photo is also genius). I spent some time going over the major results I could identify, and with Vincent Untz providing the “it was fun” part, we thanked the University, the organizers, and then we moved on to the best part: the Pope on patents.
Found Objects
July 10th, 2009
Something to keep in mind for future conferences is perhaps a wiki page (world-writable) for lost-and-found. I ended up with a Medion brand USB stick, 64MB, with .tex source files on it and a bunch of PDFs and some family pictures. The TeX sources look have this attribution:
\author{Departamento de Matematicas \\ I.E.S. Santa Maria de Guia}
\title{PO. Numeros enteros}
It’s primary school quizzes on whole numbers! Was found in the music hall, but I haven’t had time to notify about it yet. I will take it to the conference at the ULPGC and leave it at the desk there. (Wasn’t there a news item recently about the dangers of plugging in random USB sticks? And if you’re looking for objects, consider this method.)
BugSquad-ish
July 10th, 2009
[[ Some notes from behaving like a BugSquad member. Picture of the real deal on the dot. ]]
There was a BoF session on a timezone bug, where Pau Garcia y Quiles brought together folks running all kinds of Linux distros and other Free Software operating systems to examine system timezone setting. That has yielded lots of new information, but not yet a resolution. Changing system timezone on Solaris seems to require a reboot – that doesn’t seem right. I’ll have to play with the GNOME code to see what it does.
Re-tagged a bunch of old bugs that were not FreeBSD-specific to the “All” operating system after checking the bug still exists in current 4.3-rc1 on Solaris.
On monday evening, I wrote a BugSquad song. I guess those are the only 12 lines of original content I’ve written so far?
Canary tweets
July 3rd, 2009
Claudia tells me I should use microblogging. I don’t know. Maybe I can write 140-character paragraphs instead. Is that ok?
The Canary islands are beautiful and rugged. I will leave it to Jos to wax lyrical about them. I have been hiding out in the ops room, compiling.
There will be Solaris Nevada b.115 packages for KDE4 out in a few hours. Then I can demonstrate the same on Sun Ray — and how ugly it is.
No one has exploded from stress *yet*. But then, the first real event of the day is about 25 minutes away.
Stoke my ego some more
June 30th, 2009
Last week I gave a talk at an NOiV event (NOiV is the Dutch government agency created to oversee the motion to prefer Free Software in government procurement) and today the speakers got back the evaluation results. I’m happy to have gotten good marks (7.5 out of 10) and to have had “Adriaan’s enthusiasm for Open Source” named explicitly by two different respondents as a cool thing about the event.
Now I need to change my style for any speaking I may be doing at GCDS. I’ve promised to bring the traditional (?) speaker-motivation instruments for Akademy, and I’ll need to lay off the buzzwords a little.
C#, see submarine
June 30th, 2009
There have been two posts about C# and mono on PlanetKDE this week (e.g. Richard and Andreas). The comments on Andreas’ entry are quite cogent, as are those replying to Richard, but it deserves a wider audience. As far as asking RMS at Gran Canaria this weekend, it’s worth a shot if you abstract the question away from specifically-C# and specifically-mono.
At issue is the notion of a Free Platform. Or perhaps an unencumbered platform. The latter is a weaker term because it does not stress the Freedom aspect of the software we write, but it might better express the uncertainty around what constitutes such a platform. There are many things that might encumber a software program or software platform. Dictionary check:
encumber 1. weight down, burden 2. to impede or hamper the function or activity of 3. to burden with a legal claim (as a mortgage)
Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
- Technical inadequacies (functional)
- Technical inadequacies (maintainence)
- Poor documentation
- Lousy management structure
- Licensing troubles
- Copyright management trouble
- Patents
To phrase the first four even more informally, that’s “it doesn’t work well”, “the code inside it sucks”, “i can’t figure out how to use it”, “the people working on it are jerks”. They are technical or organizational and well outside the scope of what the FSF (and sister organizations FSFE, FSFI and FSFLA) are normally involved in. Comparisons between C# and other languages on the first three points (Objective-C has a defrobnicator and C# doesn’t, nyah nyah nyah) miss the point. Project management is, I think, largely a personal choice and unless there are other indicators, I don’t think you can say “community management is better than having a single entity”. So contrasting Java’s Sun^WOracle^WJCP management process with whatever C# / mono uses misses the point again, except where it touches on those other indicators.
But then we get to licensing, copyright consolidation and patents, and these are the relevant indicators for determining whether a platform or software program is encumbered (vs. Free). For licensing, the question to ask is “is this a Free Software license?”. If you’re cheeky, you could check the Open Source definition as well. Mono is under a mix of GPLv2, LGPLv2.0 (not 2.1!) and MIT/X11, so the code of Mono itself and its derived works is Free Software (by this measure) and works linked to the libraries are not encumbered.
Copyright management is one of those topics close to project management style, but I believe that a project with a clearly stated management style — almost regardless of what that style is — is better-off than one with a confused, ambiguous or stupid copyright management style (an example of the latter being: publish all the source with no attribution and no copyright headers). In any case, the Mono project with its mandatory copyright assignment (to Novell) is clear.
Which is when we come to the last item on the list, patents. Software patents per se do not exist in the EU, but they do in the US. Other parts of the world I am insufficiently aware of. There is the notion of the “submarine patent” (a term whose use has mutated over time, see this article for instance about long-pending patents). In current use, it seems to be a patent that is not-well-known, but applies to some piece of technology that is incorporated into a standard (either official through a standards organization or as a de facto standard). That’s odd from a patent perspective, because the whole point of patent (dict: shown, open to public inspection, well-known) is to make sure that knowledge is pushed into the public domain at some point (that’s the social contract around patents). In any case, Aaron phrases it quite well:
there is a rather higher than zero chance of Microsoft taking advantage of its patents and coming down on C# implementations when and if it feels like it. they have an agreement with Novell, and Novell thinks it covers everyone but Microsoft seems to disagree. and that’s their public position.
however, we don’t know for sure. so it’s “only” a risk, not an absolute.
You will find similar statements about the risk entailed in using the possibly-patent-encumbered Mono .net framework in the comments to Andreas’ blog entry (the first comment, by STiAX, in particular).
So the whole issue isn’t about licensing, management or technical features, but purely about the risk involved with using a platform that is encumbered by patents. This is an issue on which the Free Software developer community has been either split or ambivalent for years. GIFs? MP3s? .NET apps? All encumbered at some point or in some way.
A similar kind of encumbrance would be if MIT (or Xorg) could retroactively re-license the X11 libraries to something proprietary (note: they cannot), thereby removing the platform upon which all Free Software X11 applications are built; it would be a risk, and given the importance of Free Software, a risk where the expected value of a manifestation is huge.
This isn’t to say there’s not other submarines in the water. We don’t know. Maybe we should. The known submarine should be treated with caution. And the side of caution is to treat C# as a non-Free platform to be avoided.
Postscriptum and prescription of the FLA
June 29th, 2009
The Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) between KDE contributors and KDE e.V. is one that assigns those assignable rights derived from authorship from the original author to the fiduciary (i.e. KDE e.V.) and then assigns, non-exclusively, the rights on that work to (0) use, (1) study, (2) modify, (3) distribute and (4) authorize third-parties for the same, back to the original author.
Ugh, that’s a lot of legalese, but that is also why my slogan for the KDE project is “I talk to lawyers so you don’t have to.” It’s a wonderful thing that Sebas has been talking to KDE contributors at LinuxTag and has obtained a number of signed FLA documents. That means that a good chunk of important KDE code is now actually owned — in the sense of copyright — by KDE e.V. Sebas quotes our friend Carlo Piana (he received the pineapple fortune cookie award for Coolest Lawyer, once) describing an FLA as follows:
The fiduciary licence aims at simplifying this process, by assigning the copyright to an entity as KDE e.V. which is not “scalable” and therefore provides sufficient safeguards as to the possible hijacking of the project for nefarious reasons.
Now, I’m not entirely sure about that “scalable” there. KDE e.V. is scalable, in the sense that with individual donations and supporting members we have the resources to support the growing developer and contributor communities as well as serve users in general though efforts like UserBase. I think what Carlo meant is “saleable”, in the sense of “you can’t buy a community.” I’ll have to ask him, next time we meet.
So you can’t buy a community and you can’t buy a non-profit association with strong checks and balances in its constitution. This is good, and having a strong copyleft Free Software license applied to the software as well ensures its long-term availability (don’t let that link fool you, though: the KDE platform libraries are LGPL licensed, so you can, if you really feel it is necessary, write proprietary applications on top of it — but consult your local counsel for license advice). The main issue that the FLA tries to solve is really one of license and responsibility fragmentation.
When multiple authors work on something, then each author has a share of the copyright on the creative work — at least, each author who contributes something original and creative enough to be considered a creative work. This leads to multiple authors and the requirement to agree on copyright matters between all the authors in a particular work. This fragmentation can consume considerable resources if ever there is a particular need to deal with all the rightsholders for one particular work.
Note that KDE contributors — all of them — have traditionally been rather lax in maintaining the copyright headers in our sources. We do not maintain a comprehensive list of authors in each file, nor do we follow GPLv3 article 5.a very well, in general. Figuring out exactly when 5.a applies is something I’ll leave for the real lawyers and another blog post. In any case, a consequence of the signing of the FLA’s by a number of authors is that for their work the copyright header should be changed to
Copyright [years] KDE e.V. <kde-licensing@kde.org>
Ideally we would include a postal address (of KDE e.V.) as well; the whole point of this exercise is to make it really darn clear who to contact for licensing information and to make sure that we clearly claim the copyright on these files.
Note also that the KDE licensing policy is lacking in some details and allows poor licensing hygiene by potentially mixing incompatible licenses: we have had license checks (Tom Albers has now and in the past been instrumental in moving that forward). Just because we’re not doing things optimally now doesn’t mean we can’t move forward and improve things (this applies in many fields of endeavour).
The FLA used by KDE e.V. has a big blank where you can fill in which works are covered by the FLA. There is also a pre-filled form (PDF, 50kB) which identifies the works using standard language referring to your SVN account name. That should make filling things in easier. If you didn’t sign up at LinuxTag, you could print that, fill it in, and mail the form to the KDE e.V. office. We maintain a list of signed FLA’s as well, to keep track of who has done so — let me emphasize that the signing of an FLA is optional and the choice to do so rests entirely with the individual whose creative work is covered (or would be covered) by such an FLA.
So, by concentrating the copyrights held we reduce fragmentation; given that we have a strong basis to build on with careful checks and balances in the consitution of KDE e.V., this is an improvement for the currently-hypothetical case that we would want to (or have to) relicense large parts of KDE to some other Free Software licence.
There are additional checks placed on any relicensing attempt on the part of KDE e.V. They were added as a sort of backup guarantee that KDE e.V. cannot do evil in relicensing code. However, at the same time these relicensing restrictions (written down in the Fiduciary Relicensing Policy) reduce the effectiveness of the FLA itself, because the FRP says that we at least have to try to get permission from the original author before relicensing. However, it does mean that we get to judge “reasonable effort” ourselves instead of letting someone else do it. So in the end we (as in KDE e.V., representing the KDE community as a whole) do have a stronger grasp of the code in order to be able to defend it if needed.
And, since the rights are transferred back in a non-exclusive license to the original author, the original author may fork or relicense if that’s really absolutely necessary. I should point out that that should be a real last resort and that working with the rightsholder (i.e. KDE e.V.) should be preferred. Remember, KDE e.V. exists to support (“we exist only to serve”) the development of KDE software, including the KDE workspace, KDE platform, and KDE applications. If there is some perceived need to fork, then somewhere there’s a misunderstanding of what the constitutional aims of the association are.
But I digress. There is an FLA, and it is signed by many people. Perhaps many more will do so at Akademy this year.
So where do we go from here? Maybe next weekend, we can take over the world.
The answer to this question actually depends on which hat I’m wearing. The KDE hat says: continue to consolidate licensing, pursue license checking and accuracy across the entire codebase and behave as an exemplary community software project with regards to legal matters.
My FSFE hat says that we need to take the concrete experience with KDE and with Bacula and introduce other projects in Europe and the rest of the world to this kind of lightweight legal housekeeping. The FLA has been translated into many languages, but I feel that having used it in KDE it could use a little extra precision. Also, any legal document intended for use by non-lawyers probably needs an implementation guide and HOWTO. And most importantly, those need to be well-known to projects who might need such documentation.