Yesterday’s Links (for July 13th 2007)

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Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday (July 13th 2007).

See also: the archive of Yesterday’s Links.

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

FSFE’s 2007 General Assembly meeting

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From Friday June 29th to Sunday July 1st, FSFE held its annual meeting of the General Assembly in Brussels. Starting at 10am each morning, we were in the meeting room until 8pm, 10:30pm, and 5pm. Being an employee, I was there as a guest.

In preparation for the meeting, a two year executive summary of FSFE’s projects was published.

On the Monday afterward, Sean Daly interviewed Georg Greve. The audio and a transcript of the interview is on Groklaw. We had been trying to arrange that interview all weekend, and Sean was always ready, but the annual meeting was so draining that it kept being put off til the next day.

While in Brussels, we had a social event where we met with some of the Fellows from Belgium and the Netherlands. Before the weekend, some of us were saying it was a pity not to organise a more formal event since so many people of FSFE were present. After the weekend, I realised that it’s just not possible to add more work to the schedule. The social event was just right.

It was funny that the meeting coincided with the release of GPLv3. This was one of the biggest announcements of the year, but we were all too busy and tired to be able to participate much.

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

Misleading InformationWeek GPLv3 article

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LINUS CALLS GPLv3 "A FINE CHOICE" – is a title that InformationWeek could have used for their article. It would have been very selective quoting, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for InformationWeek. Nor does pretending that old emails are new emails, or misrepresenting people.

In reality, there is no news. Their article contains nothing at all that is new since GPLv3’s June 29th release. I thought this clarification was worthwhile because Slashdot has now featured that article, and from looking at the comments, it seems that most readers have been fooled into thinking this is some new statement from Linus.

News? Olds?

The article starts with "Free Software Foundation last month published a revised version of the General Public License" – framing the article as post-GPLv3 news. It then proceeds to present quotes from Linus, without mentioning that they’re from a June 20th email – that’s not just old, it’s from before GPLv3 was even published.

At the very end of the article, the June 20th date is mentioned in relation to one quote – but only that one quote. It’s not mentioned that the whole story has just been a creative rehash of that one old email.

Misrepresentation

Of course, InformationWeek don’t give readers a link to Linus’s actual email. Besides being able to see that date that the quotes were taken from, readers could have seen that Linus’s "fanatics and totalitarian states" comment was part of a general comment in a meandering discussion. It was not, contrary to the introduction of InformationWeek’s article, part of a description of the "executives of Free Software Foundation … mind-set".

Selective

I wonder how long it took them to decide not to quote this bit of the email: "I don’t think it’s hypocritical to prefer the GPLv3. That’s a fine choice, it’s just not *mine*." If they have some objection to publishing balanced statements, they could have just left out the last four words.

Conclusion

We’ve see some real low quality journalism during the GPLv3 drafting process. Dan Lyons’s stories in Forbes (which Slashdot also featured) defined the low point. The author of this InformationWeek article, Paul McDougall, hasn’t managed to stoop down to Lyons’s level, but he gets my nomination for 2nd place.

Linus’s position is clear. He’s repeatedly said that he’d use GPLv3 in certain situations if there was a practical advantage, but he prefers v2 over v3. That’s fine. I prefer v3, but v2 is still a great licence.

In related news, I just checked Groklaw and saw that PJ’s latest story is about a different InformationWeek story which she finds misleading, on the topic of SCO, patents, and yet another claim about the end of free software.

UPDATE: InformationWeek have posted a response to the criticisms of their article. I have a response to that second article here: InformationWeek opens it’s mouth to change feet.

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

Yesterday’s Links (for July 12th 2007)

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Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday (July 12th 2007).

See also: archive of Yesterday’s Links.

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

Yesterday’s Links (for July 11th 2007)

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I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep this up, but for a long time I’ve thought about doing daily blog entries about the interesting links I see each day. So here’s a first attempt, and we’ll see how it goes: the first "Yesterday’s Links".

Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday (July 11th 2007).

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

Videos on free Java, Alan Cox, and GPLv3

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Below are four recordings of talks. I’ve been hoping to do a write up about these, but haven’t found the time, so I’ll just post the links anyway – before they get old. The first two are quite interesting:

And the other two are about GPLv3. These aren’t quite as interesting. I’m hesitant to link to them since they contain mistakes and they mostly take the open source perspective which I think is counterproductive, but they are still part of the GPLv3 debate.

As I mentioned in my last post, I think one of the important aspects of the GPLv3 process is that it has generated enough informed debate such that any similar activities in the future will have a better starting point. But that only happens for the bits we’ve all remembered to record (in text or audio), and it only happens if we don’t let those recordings disappear or go unread/unheard. So here are the other two videos I came across recently:

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

GPLv3 due on Friday 29th

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After a year and a half, GPLv3 is finally due this Friday, June 29th. Starting with the January 2006, our focus in FSFE has on raising awareness and informing the free software community. Making transcripts of the January 16th launch and RMS’s first GPLv3 presentations and getting them on Slashdot was a good start.

We will have a situation where GPLv3 has been read by many people and a lot of the community have been involved in debating the words used.

Licensing is a very important consideration for the free software community. It requires experts, and it has to be done by people who have the free software community’s interests in mind. So it’s something we can’t let our corporate associates do on our behalf.

Some lawyers were required, but the type of expert we needed most were those who care about the long term future of free software and who would give their time to research and discuss the implications of various policy decisions.

Because the free software community had never done anything like this before, there were almost no people with this type of experience. That’s why raising maximum awareness was essential.

For FSFE’s part, having secured funding from NLnet, we organised an international conference in Barcelona. And thanks to funding raised by others, and sometimes personal expense, we were able to have speakers at 20 or 30 other events. That, and all the transcripts – with translations in Dutch, Thai, German, French, Spanish, and maybe others. I was surprised at how popular the transcripts were.

And after all that work, I think GPLv3 is in a strong position. Many free software users and distributors have probably not read GPL version 2. That is because it is easy enough to use that people can to use it by following the example of others and doing what seems intuitive. With GPLv3, as well as having a new licence, I think we now have a new level of licence knowledge in the community.

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

History of glibc and Linux libc

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The "Linux libc" fork of the GNU C Library is now a mostly forgotten event. The fork lived from 1994 to 1997/8 – just before my time – but I’ve found interesting accounts of it by others.

The main sources of information are:

Reasons

According to Wheeler’s appendix, the fork occurred just after February 1994, and the motivations were procedural/organisational: "the Linux kernel developers thought that the FSF’s development process for the C library was too slow and not responding to their needs". This ties in with Bruce Perens’ comment in 2000 that the Linux libc fork "went on for years while Linux stabilized" (from article Forking: it could even happen to you).

Moen’s article says the reason was technical: "they decided that FSF’s library (then at version 1-point-something) could/should best be adapted for the Linux kernel as a separately-maintained project". Both reasons could have contributed.

During the fork

H. J. Lu is mentioned by a few people as being the maintainer or main contributor to Linux libc.

Elliot Lee’s article says that while the Linux kernel developers were using their fork, glibc development stalled for a time. This coincides with the time that FSF spent working on version 2.0, during which there were no official releases for two years. The development progress during this time is noted in the twice-annual GNU’s bulletins that FSF published throughout the 90s.

From the NEWS files, it seems Cygnus Solutions hired Ulrich Drepper to work on it from late 1995 onwards since the January 1996 GNU’s bulletin mentions that Drepper has contributed a lot "in the last few months".

Glibc 2.0

It looks like glibc 2.0 was released in January or February 1997 (from the dates in the GNU ftp site, from the January 1997 GNU’s bulletin, and from some mailing list discussion archives).

By all accounts, glibc-2.0 surpassed Linux libc on features, standards, and code cleanliness. Elliot Lee’s article goes into most detail on this, citing features such as POSIX compliance, internationalisation support, multithreaded support, IPv6, and 64-bit data access, and library version migration support.

There is an 1998 interview with H.J. Lu about libc5 and glibc. The interview mostly focuses on technical differences and the transition. H.J. is quite positive about glibc 2.0.

Ending

Bruce Perens’ one line comment about the aftermath is that the projects "re-merged", however, while the communities and contributors may have merged, according to Stallman, little or no code did. According to Stallman, the Linux libc had insufficient records of authorship or copyright ownership for the code they distributed (something the GNU project has always been very strict about), and the Linux libc maintainers were unwilling to sort this out.

In 1997 through 1998 nearly all GNU/Linux systems switched from libc back to glibc. Red Hat migrated in December 1997, and Debian was planning their migration at that time too, according to Lee. And so ended a story that is now rarely mentioned.

Revisions: #1 Added a 1998 interview with H.J. Lu to the Glibc 2.0 section.

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

Free software in public administration, beta

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Here is a list of links about free software being used in public administration. If anyone has more links, or better links, please send them to me at ciaran atsign fsfe.org.

I won’t be able to do a good job of maintaining this list, but I hope it will give someone else a good starting point. A lot of these links came from people who replied to my request on the FSFE discussion@ mailing list – thanks.

If you’re sending me links, I’m much more interested in stories about things that have happened than about things that are planned, predicted, or being talked about. I will do at least one follow-up blog entry after I’ve added any links that get sent to me. I’ll use the same name but without the "beta" tag.

IcedTea Java, unrelated patent deals, and FSDaily

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The IcedTea project has been launched by GNU Classpath. It’s goal is to make Sun’s recently freed Java implementation, called OpenJDK, work in free software environments. This involves replacing some binary blobs with code from GNU Classpath, and making or adapting a free software build system for OpenJDK.

As the announcement says, it’s just in the experimental stages, but it’s great to see progress being made through the collaboration of Sun and the free software community.

In other news, Xandros and LG Electronics have signed patent deals with Microsoft for the privilege of distributing free software. That MS are rushing these deals out the door before GPLv3 comes into usage could be a sign that they don’t have much confidence in getting more of these deals post-GPLv3. The direction the money is flowing in (not toward MS) also seems to be a sign that MS does not have much confidence in it’s patent claims.

When GPLv3 is released at the end of June, these companies will have to disclaim those deals if they want to distribute future versions of software that moves to GPLv3 (such as all GNU projects). So these deals will be exposed as useless and MS’s patent claims will be undermined by their refusal to go to court or even detail which patents are infringed.

Meanwhile, this week, Slashdot ran yet another "Stallman is splitting the community" article (it seems the next round of the anti-GPLv3 campaign has started). When Slashdot is publishing this crap, is there a place for people to get free software news and participate in informed debate? Bruce Perens’s answer was to set up Technocrat, although it has a science/technolgy focus rather than a free software focus. A new website with a free software focus is FSDaily, so I wish them luck.

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