Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 448, featuring the Hiawatha web server and associated projects.
Category Archives: Postings
Copyright Needs Radical Reform
Use of copyright today far exceeds the ways its framers imagined. We need reform, not just adjustments.
Copyright is back in the news in Europe. In the UK, the Digital Economy Bill proposes to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years. Meanwhile, an extensive modernisation of copyright for the EU is also in progress, with a goal of making the treatment of copyright the same across Europe, especially in relation to digital media. Continue reading
5 Reasons Facebook’s React License Was A Mistake
Facebook’s BSD+Patent license combo fails not because of the license itself but because it ignores the deeper nature of open source.
In July 2017, the Apache Software Foundation effectively banned the license combination Facebook has been applying to all the projects it has been releasing as open source. They are using the 3-clause BSD license (BSD-3), a widely-used OSI-approved non-reciprocal license, combined with a broad, non-reciprocal patent grant but with equally broad termination rules to frustrate aggressors.
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FLOSS Weekly 442: Hyperledger
Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 442, where Brian Behlendorf explained the Hyperledger Project of which he is Executive Director. An excellent show, with many interesting branching-off points.
Hyperledger is a project to maintain a platform for distributed ledger projects and the toolkits and apps that support and use them. It’s intended for building private systems where everyone participating can be identified, so does not have an associated proof-of-work token or the “cryptocurrency” aura that goes with it.
It may be the tool that finally re-decentralises the Internet. By taking away the shiny gold, people can finally see the power of a distributed ledger whose authority is established by consensus rather than heirarchy. The book Simon mentions, “The Mystery of Capital” by Hernando de Soto, is available from Amazon UK and Amazon US.
Apache Bans Facebook’s License Combo
The Apache Software Foundation has moved the “Facebook BSD+Patent grant” license combination (FB+PL) to its “Category X” licensing list, effectively banning inclusion of any software under FB+PL from Apache projects. That included RocksDB, which has consequently just dropped FB+PL and added the Apache License v2 on Github, and React.JS which does not look like it will resolve the issue so fast.
Update, 22 September: Facebook has announced it will switch React to the MIT license.
Here’s what we know so far (subject to updates, last day’s in green, latest marked 🆕): Continue reading
Why OSI License Approval Matters
Individual judgement about the presence of software freedom in a license is not the same as community consensus expressed through OSI approval.
Does it really matter if a copyright license is OSI Approved or not? Surely if it looks like it meets the benchmark that’s all that matters? I think that’s the wrong answer, and that OSI license approval is the crucial innovation that’s driven the open source revolution. Continue reading
DRM Is Toxic To Culture
In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons.
Ancient dry stone enclosure wall in Cornwall, England
It’s possible that you think that unauthorised use of copyrighted music, films and books is such a serious problem that it’s worth giving away a little of your convenience and freedom in exchange for stopping it. If you do, I’d like to suggest you think again – and time is running out. Continue reading
Copyright: A Modest Proposal
Maybe if we stopped saying “copy” everywhere we’d find a way to fix copyright?
- Why is a song that I play digitally or a book I read electronically subject to extensive controls that are not considered appropriate to physical records or books? It’s because they are subject to licenses that can’t be applied by the seller to the physical works.
- Why can those licences be imposed on digital works? Because the use of digital works is considered subject to copyright, whereas the use of physical works is not because of a legal doctrine called “copyright exhaustion”.
- Why is that? Because the act of instantiating the work for use has been described as “copying”, allowing the rules surrounding copyright to be used as a threat to back up arbitrary license terms controlling use.
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Rehost and Carry On, Redux
A key value of open source is the ability to switch to a different supplier if your first becomes unavailable or unattractive. Forgerock is apparently withdrawing that value, on which it relied itself for its inception.
After leaving Sun I was pleased that a group of former employees and partners chose to start a new company. Their idea was to pick up the Sun identity management software Oracle was abandoning and continue to sustain and evolve it. Open source made this possible. Continue reading
Free vs Open
It’s been almost 20 years, but people are still arguing over “open source” and “free software”. Here’s why it’s the wrong argument.
The term “Open Source” in the context of software was coined in 1998 by a group of experienced software freedom advocates frustrated by the challenges of helping corporations adopt Free Software. As the movement has energetically grown over the ensuing decades, it has been repeatedly necessary to remind people that framing it as a methodology is a construct chosen nearly 20 years ago to help cultivate executive acceptance and business promotion of software freedom. The frame is necessarily not the entire story, no matter how often newly-woke geeks may assert it should be and how evil it is not to say “Free Software”. Open Source is inescapably a part of the culture, philosophy and ethical construct that is software freedom, not an alternative to it. Continue reading
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