Recording of Stallman on copyright
For anyone interested in Richard Stallman’s talk about copyright (in general, not just for software), here’s a recording from yesterday:
Yesterday’s links, August 6th 2007
Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday.
- David A. Wheeler’s home page – he’s written lots of interesting essays about free software
- History of free software – a Wikipedia article with an interesting External links section and some interesting content but needing more input.
- Blue GNU news site launches as a free software forum. To get things started, they published an interview with Rob Savoye of Gnash.
- FSFE.org now has a blog aggregator http://fsfe.org/planet
See also: the archive of Yesterday’s links.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
Yesterday’s links, August 3rd 2007
Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday.
- Microsoft HD Photo considered for standardisation by JPEG committee – this will need some looking into, particularly to see how useful the patent promise really is. No details available yet.
- Signal and Noise in GPLv3 – an article about the media representation of the GPLv3 discussions, explaining that they exagerated the controversy, etc. Not a bad article, but it prints a few too many Linus quotes without critical thinking. For example, Linus says that the GPLv3’s fight against tivoisation is like scientists refusing to share information with people they don’t like. A more accurate analogy would be scientists who refuse to share information with people who are trying to make shared information unusable.
- BoycottNovell.com – a news site which started out as a forum to protest Novell’s patent deal with Microsoft, but which is turning into a general free software news site.
- The Trophées du Libre competition have announced their 2007 call for submissions of free software projects.
See also: the archive of Yesterday’s Links.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
Yesterday’s Links (for August 1st 2007)
Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday.
- Open Source Initiative have approved the "CPAL" Adware licence – we can only hope that people ignore this recommendation. SugarCRM did so immediately; they moved to GPLv3 instead.
- Groklaw article on Microsoft and Open Source Initiative (not related to the adware issue).
- Article on Eben Moglen at OSCON, a well written article by Ashlee Vance about attempts to control what is said at and reported about a conference.
- no-word.el how to set Emacs up to filter MS Word documents through antiword so that you get a text version of the file (found on John Sullivan’s blog post about this).
See also: the archive of Yesterday’s Links.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
One Month On, GPLv3 Adoption Going Very Smoothly
I recently read the discussion on the GCC development mailing list related to GCC’s transition to GPLv3. Despite generating 172 emails, the transition was quite smooth actually.
I decided to read about GCC’s transition because I wanted to investigate a (false) claim which Slashdot featured on their front page. Slashdot’s story, which I now know to be complete rubbish, claimed that key GCC developers were talking about forking GCC.
Actually, they mostly discussed version numbers, as well as the copyright status of code written by scripts, and of World War II photographs, etc.
About the version number, DJ Delorie argued against bumping the version number up to 4.3.0 for the new licence because Slashdot might print a negative story about GCC 4.3.0 not having the features previously scheduled for that version number. Which is pretty funny in hindsight because the developers finally agreed not to bump the number up to 4.3.0, and Slashdot still printed a negative story. It seems there’s no getting around the fact that Slashdot just loves controversy, even when it means creating anti-free-software FUD.
So, in review, Samba’s GPLv3 transition went well. Then SugarCRM ditched their custom licence and moved to GPLv3, which, as I said, is one way in which GPLv3 tackles licence proliferation. And now GCC and 286 other projects have made the transition, according to Palamida’s GPLv3 counter. It seems that GPLv3 transitions are going quite smoothly.
In fact, it seems that many commentators have been surprised (and some have surely been disappointed) by the lack of major problems. There is a vacuum of bad press, which is why Slashdot has resorted to printing hallucinations, and InformationWeek can only publish bad news by inventing it. All in all, I’d chalk that down as a success for the eighteen months of hard work that was the GPLv3 consultation process.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
Learning efficiency/productivity
I have three efficiency tips. One is to tell people what your goals are, another is to maintian a todo list, and the third is to remember to eat breakfast. Obviously, I still have a lot of room for improvement, so I’m going to read Getting Things Done and see what other good tips I can find there.
It was hard to resist using the title "Getting Getting Things Done read" for this entry, but I wouldn’t want to give too much prominence to a book that can’t be freely copied. At the same time, I do what to say what my goal is – that way I have to do it. That tip got me started in the campaign against software patents. I knew nothing about the subject, so I told people I would give a talk about it at an event – then I couldn’t avoid getting that work done.
When I’ve read the book, I’ll blog about what I’ve learned. Hopefully I’ll have found some useful free software for implementing the methods in the book. Many free software packages for the book can be found on Wikipedia’s Comparison of GTD software article.
The tip about lists works for three reasons. One is they stop you from forgetting things, a second is that they remind you of more options so there will usually be something you feel like doing, and the third is that they free up your brain from trying to remember these things. Human brains stopped being for that as soon as writing became easy. So I start each day by reading yesterday’s list and making a new list with whatever I haven’t finished.
Oh, and breakfast. Without a proper breakfast, after an hour or two my concentration has deteriorated noticeably.
In the mean time, by coicidence, I got this link passed to me recently:
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
Yesterday’s Links (for July 30th 2007)
Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday.
- Dinosaur Comics – about punch
- A GIMP 2.4 release candidate is coming soon, and the developers are of course looking for testers and some website help.
- The Open Library has launched to put freely licensed and public domain books online. This looks very similar to what Project Gutenberg has been doing for years, but discussions of the former never mention the latter. From a bit of reading, it seems that The Open Library will include books that are under more restrictive terms, but I haven’t found the details yet.
- EU Court Backs ISPs on User Privacy – a high court adviser has said that ISPs aren’t required to hand over data in civil cases, but the same isn’t true for criminal cases. Another reason to support FSFE’s work against the "IPRED2" criminalisation directive.
See also: the archive of Yesterday’s Links.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
Yesterday’s Links (for July 29th 2007)
It’s proven harder than I thought to find 4 or 5 good links per day. I’m going to keep trying, but I’ll probably expand this to include some musings too – and then find a new name for the series.
- UK rejects music copyright extension – it’s great news, but the article is a bit disappointing; it mostly focuses on the sob stories of the companies who are exploiting musicians and the writer fails to point out that the argument of musicians needing more financial support was put forward by four millionaires.
- SugarCRM goes GPLv3 – with forum comments from Rick Moen and Bruce Perens
- An interview about the ingimp project – a project to log how users use the GIMP so that it’s interface can be improved
- Talks given at this year’s GCC summit, and a booklet of the proceedings (which seems to be bascially a copy of each paper that was presented)
See also: the archive of Yesterday’s Links.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
Yesterday’s Links (for July 16th 2007)
Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday (July 16th 2007).
- XKCD cartoon: NP-Complete ordering in restaurants
- Mark Radcliffe on 10 benefits of GPLv3
- The Converter Hoax – an FSFE article about OOXML-ODF converters
- Wikipedia chart of most viewed articles
- Google’s timeline searches, for example: GNU or "free software"
See also: the archive of Yesterday’s Links.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship
InformationWeek opens its mouth to change feet (GPLv3)
InformationWeek have posted a follow-up article. In trying to respond to recent criticism about misrepresenting facts regarding Linus Torvalds and GPLv3, InformationWeek has managed to show exactly how incorrect their first article was.
Their misleading GPLv3 article from last week drew criticism for using false evidence to suggest that Linus is on a new anti-GPLv3 and that Linus’s insults are "the latest sign of a growing schism".
Now they’ve done something very strange. In their new article "The Linus Files, Part Two", they’ve dug up further, slightly older, insults which Linus has levelled at FSF, and they’re presenting these as some kind of proof that their first article was accurate. An attempt at a classic straw man tactic, albeit executed so poorly that it’s backfired.
By digging up older criticism, and being unable to find or provoke anything new, they’ve just shown that there is no news to report. No new phenomenon, no widening of an old rift. You could even conclude that things are calming down.
UPDATE: I added the first sentence just now because previously there was no way to find the InformationWeek article I’m debunking.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE’s Fellowship