GPLv3 launch, transcript and report, from January 16th

It’s been a month now since the conference that launched the GPLv3 discussion process. A busy month, so I’m only blogging it now. There’s now available:

At the start of the year, I wasn’t planning on getting heavily involved with GPLv3. It looked like it was a project for experts and I thought that software patents would keep me too busy anyway, but actually GPLv3 is quite accessible and I’ve ended up working on it without specifically trying.

One reason for working on the above transcript is that it can be used by others as a base to make their own presentations. Other reasons include grep-ability, web search engines, translatabilitiy (human and machine). In general, just to make the information propagate more conveniently.

Most people who’ve read the draft GPLv3 seem pretty happy with it, so I first made a

to make it easier for people to read about the license and participate in the process. I hope to do something similar for FSFE when I, and others, get time. I’ve also found myself participating in mailing list discussions about GPLv3 and incorporating GPLv3 information into talks that I give.

The conference itself, on January 16th and 17th, was pretty interesting, although I think the social networking was more important than the license discussions.

The majority of my work is done with people I know by their email address – so it was good to put some faces and accents to those addresses.

The other big thing on my plate is the March 16th event in Belfast with Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens, and yup, it’s turning (in part) into a GPLv3 event.

GPLv3 and Belfast GNU/Linux User Group

There’s a lot of energy in Northern Ireland right now about free software, particularly in medium-sized businesses and the public sector. One sign of the energy is that a big event is being organised for March 16th, with Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens – but that will soon be announced properly. Another is that the Belfast GNU/Linux User Group is becoming active again and is having monthly meetings.

There was a meeting scheduled for just after the launch of the GPLv3 drafting consultation, so I went to Belfast and gave a presentation about that. The pieces of paper which I used for my presenation were pretty low-tech compared to David Newman’s MythTV presentation which was before mine, but I’ve now put online:

Are privacy and service a trade off?

There is a story going around the newswires that iTunes contains spyware that sends information about your music listening to Apple. (iTunes is the software interface to iPods.) Many articles are commenting that there is a trade-off: your personal information is not personal, but you get better music suggestions from Apple.

This does not have to be the case. First, the sending of your data could be optional. Second, you could have control over who the data is sent to and what data is sent.

There are two reasons why these things that could happen are not happening. They are about consumer helplessness. One reason is that Apple uses technical means to prevent iTunes users from being able to look at or modify the behaviour of the software (they distribute machine-readable binaries and withhold the human-readable source code). Another reason is that Apple uses legal means (copyright) to prohibit anyone that manages to fix the software from helping other computer users (which someone could otherwise do by distributing that fixed version).

The ubiquity of digital technologies and networks today poses questions about how to protect society’s privacy. Over and over, free software is the best solution I see to many of these problems. People should have a right to study, modify, and redistribute the software that they use.

What do I actually do?

Sometimes, when I meet other activists, they ask me what I do, and I never have a good answer. I usually say something vague about building support for things among policital groups, and assisting other campaigns that need help and that are doing things that benefit free software, but then the person asks "Yeh, but what’s your day like?" …but I don’t have an average day to describe.

A friend suggested using my blog to send a few notes about each day, so I’ve taken it as my new year’s resolution and here I am. There’s a load of mundane stuff as well, like any job, and internal discussions, but here are some of the other things I did in the last three days.

Wednesday

  • Talking to different people about organising events in Belfast, Dublin, and London. One large event is certainly happening in Belfast in March, in IFSO we are considering trying to organise a follow-up event for May in Dublin, and I’ve been invited to give a talk in London at the start of April so I’m looking into organising another event in London to coicide with that. One idea was an international event for Fellows.
  • Some coordination work for a new part of the Fellowship site which is not announced yet.
  • Sent info to the discussion list about the new GNU project for making a Flash player: Gnash.

On Thursday

  • Got the fsfe-ni mailing list set up for Northern Ireland, put an entry in the FSFE newsletter about it, and informed the Belfast GNU/Linux users group.
  • Gave some help to a group of people who are considering taking over the GNU package that I maintain: GNU acct. I am looking to hand over to someone else because I am no longer an active programmer.
  • …and I made the hard decision that I will attend the GPLv3 launch conference. This means that, like anyone wanting to enter the the USA, I will have to submit to being fingerprinted. A second issue is that my government will be required to hand over a lot of data about me to the government of the USA. The government of the USA has promised to keep that data private, and to only use it for fighting terrorism, but the ink was barely dry when they were caught breaking that agreement. It seems to me that the USA was a terrible choice of venue, but I have decided to go, so I will now focus my thinking on making the most of this trip and the conference. My expenses are being paid by the hosts.

Today (Friday)

  • Interfacing and coordination between the European Commission, FSF, and FSFE regarding the GPLv3 conference.
  • Enquiring as to whether I have the papers etc. for travelling to the USA. (I do.)
  • Blogged about what I do 🙂

Best text-based presentation software?

Until now I’ve been using either HTML or MagicPoint for my presentations, but neither is perfect. I like the simplicity of MagicPoint, but making the fonts nice is difficult and its word splitting and line wrapping can be unpredictable.

After asking a few people, and after discussing it on LWN.net, it seems Latex-beamer is many people’s favourite. I don’t know Latex, so I was hoping to find a replacement which was as simple as MagicPoint, but maybe I should just accept that learning Latex is necessary and probably useful anyway.

Surely many Fellows have faced this decision before, so any comments would be appreciated.

Using a non-text tool such as OpenOffice.org is not an option. No eye-candy feature is more important than being able to do my work in Emacs 🙂

Free software portal on Wikipedia

There’s now a free software portal on English Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software

Wikipedia has a lot of great articles about free software, but it also has gaps, and confusions about free software (and open source, GNU, Linux, copyleft, etc.) that are common in society are present in some corners of Wikipedia too.

The goals of the free software portal are to provide a starting point for people reading about free software, and to highlight areas where people who would like to contribute are needed. …and the portal itself needs contributors and suggestions.

Free software portals on the French and German Wikipedia’s have existed for a while:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portail:Logiciels_libres
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Freie_Software

(The other languages are still waiting for someone to start one.)

Happy New Year’s Parties!

looking back at the software patents directive

An academic writing a paper has asked me questions about the software patents directive. So I’ve replied to him, and have turned my answers into a webpage: software patents, looking back.

As far as I know he was not involved in this issue until after the directive was rejected, so it provided me with the opportunity to look back and consider what happened – starting from scratch.

I’m hoping to turn it into a complete post-directive essay, but I don’t know when I’ll get the time, so I’ve put it online in it’s raw form. I just turned his questions into headings.

One interesting thing is how much time people spent talking about things that don’t matter. "Harmonisation" is one example, it’s a word that everyone said, but nobody actually cared about. History and interpretation of world trade agreements such as TRIPS are another thing. History has to be looked it because we have to know what we’ve previously agreed to do, but in the case of software patenting, it was clear that history and TRIPS contained nothing clear, and nothing binding, about whether software functionality can be patented.

It will be improved in the future, but for now I hope that page contains some useful information for some people. At the very least, the references section contains links to some key documents.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship

FSF’s “Social Benefit” award contenders

This year, FSF announced a new award, the “Free Software Award for Social Benefit“. Nominations will be accepted until November 30th, but what sort of projects are elegible?

The award was inspired by the Sahana project, which is a free software package which was written to help distribute aid in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The developers are hoping to develop it further so that it can be used after other disasters.

So that’s the only project that we can assume is elegible. But I reckon Wikipedia is elegible. Maybe the telecentres in Brazil would be elegible, although I don’t know too much about them (and I can’t find a good webpage about them, here’s one page that mentions them at least). BarnRaiser is another suggestion I’ve heard.

I hope that gives some people ideas – leave a comment if you think of a good candidate.

Slides on FSFE and bad legislation

http://ciaran.compsoc.com/2005-10-22-dublin.html

These are my slides from a talk I gave at this year’s ILUG AGM.

With some changes, they could be used by anyone that wants to give a talk on current legislative threats to free software. Or if anyone would like me to give this talk at an event, if I’m available, I would be happy to do so provided that basic (low-cost) travel expense (from Brussels) can be covered.

ciaran at fsfe dot org

20 minutes against software patents

20 minutes against software patents.

Whenever the tech media reports bad news about the software patents directive, discussions break out on web and email forums about how something should be done. So here’s my suggestion for how to do something very useful if you can only give maybe 20 minutes:

Pick a clueful document, pick two of your political representatives, and with a two-line email, ask them to read the document, and listen to person(s) and/or organisation(s).

Why?

It scales. There is a limited number of clueful documents, so out of 10 emails, only 50% of the document suggestions will be unique. In 100 emails, the percentage probably drops to 15%. And if the timespan is short, the percentage drops further. So your representative will not be swamped by volume.

The division of labour. We need to (a) convince our representatives that something must be done, and (b) tell them what they must do. Both tasks need help, but (b) cannot be done well in only 20 minutes. So the above suggestion is about how to help with (a), but by mentioning the people and organisations that you want your representative to listen to, you make the people doing (b) much more productive.

When people phone up MEPs’ offices, they have a much better chance of being given an appointment if the name of the organisation they represent is known to the MEP or their assistant. If you want your representatives to listen to FSFE, FFII, and IFSO: tell them.

The quality stays high. There are plenty of good articles, press releases, and open letters released regularly, but we can’t expect our representatives to go looking for them. We should be handing it to them on a plate. Lets!

Take an educated guess for who to write to. The legislative process is complex, if you’re waiting for certainty before sending an email, it will probably never get sent. Pick two representatives based on whatever knowledge you have, and send your email.

Could you spare 20 minutes right now?

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship