Free as in Freedom

By Free as in Freedom

A bi-weekly discussion of legal, policy, and other issues in the open source and software freedom community (including occasional interviews) from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Presented by Karen Sandler ... more

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FAQs about Free as in Freedom:

How many episodes does Free as in Freedom have?

The podcast currently has 111 episodes available.

Free as in Freedom episodes:

July 19, 2011Episode 0x14: Free as in FOAM
Karen and Bradley briefly discuss and play Bradley's keynote at the
Sixth
Annual OpenFOAM Conference.
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:38)
Bradley spoke at the Sixth
Annual OpenFOAM workshop. (01:42)

Segment 1 (03:20)
Follow along with Bradley's
slides from his talk at the Sixth Annual OpenFOAM Workshop
(03:22)

The sources
for the slides is available.

Segment 2 (53:12)
Karen and Bradley discussed the talk.

Bill
Gates' arrest in New Mexico (Bradley incorrectly said Nevada) is
discussed in Gates' Wikipedia entry. (55:20)

Bradley mentioned the made-for-TV movie The
Pirates of Silicon Valley. (56:26)

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
1h 5min
July 05, 2011Episode 0x13: Torts and 1023s
Karen and Bradley discuss the USAmerican legal system in regard to
torts, and the current delays from the USA IRS on 501(c)(3) non-profit
applications (i.e., Form 1023s).
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:48)
Billy Crook wrote in to make a good joke about 0x12 being the last
episode available in other RSS feeds. (Don't forget the right RSS feed
is at faif.us.)

Karen calls tortes
delicious pastries.

Bradley saw a documentary
called Hot Coffee, which discussed the idea of tort deform. (03:35, 05:45)

Bradley mentioned that Karl
Rove, George W. Bush's political operative, was involved in early tort
“reform”. (06:54)

Brendan Scott is a lawyer in Australia, who has published about GPL
enforcement and writes
a blog about legal issues related to Open Source and Free Software
(11:58)

Segment 1 (12:50)
Bradley talked about 501(c)(3) status and Form 1023s in his interview on FLOSS
weekly. (13:50)

Around 2010, applications for Free Software non-profits' 501(c)(3)
status started to be delayed, according to independent evidence that
Karen and Bradley have collected from the IRS and the community of
non-profits. (16:20)

Form
1023s are the applications you file with the IRS (17:15)

As far as we know, no applications have been refused yet for a
Free Software non-profit, but there seem to be extremely long
delays. (18:40)

Bradley mentioned a blog post from the
Executive Director of CASH Music, where he talked about their Form
1023 being delayed. (19:10)

Karen has confirmed with IRS agents that this process of
applications does not impact existing non-profits
currently. (21:00)

Bradley pointed out that COBOL jobs are still very
prevalent. Bradley even found a website dedicated only to COBOL
jobs. (36:18)

After we recorded, Simon
Phipps posted a blog post quoting Bradley about the issue.

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
40min
June 21, 2011Episode 0x12: Karen's New Job; Supreme Court on Patents
Karen announces her new job, and Bradley and Karen discuss the
recent USA Supreme Court decisions on patents.

Be sure to make sure you're subscribed to feeds available
on faif.us if you haven't already!
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:37)
If you have not moved your RSS feed already away from
softwarefreedom.org, and to faif.us, you
should do that now! Here's links to the ogg RSS feed and mp3 RSS feed. New FaiF shows
won't appear on softwarefreedom.org.

Karen
is now the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. (04:30)

Bradley served on the GNOME
Foundation Executive Director Hiring Committee, but resigned when Karen became a serious
candidate. (05:13)

Karen will continue as General Counsel of Question
Copyright, and pro-bono counsel to Software Freedom Conservancy, and
will also continue pro bono on some matters for SFLC. (06:30)

Bradley has been working
on GNU
Bash. (07:34)

Berlin's Tegel
airport is closing soon. (14:40)

Bradley mentioned that he incorrectly said in 0x11 that Red Hat
doesn't provide sources publicly for RHEL. The RHEL SRPMS
are actually on Red Hat's FTP site. (18:20)

There are various identica
threads on the RHEL issue from 0x11.(18:47)

Bradley has previously explained the history of the term
“punditocracy” in episode 0x0A. (27:46)

Segment 1 (28:58)
Bradley and Karen discuss the USA Supreme
Court decision in the Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB
S. A. case, on which SFLC
submitted an amicus brief, which was previously discussed in FaiF Episode
0x05. (29:55)

Bradley and Karen discuss the USA
Supreme Court decision in the Microsoft Corp. v. i4i
Ltd. Partnership case, on which the EFF submitted an
amicus brief. (40:11)

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
55min
June 07, 2011Episode 0x11: Corporate Licensing Decisions That Impact the Project's Community
Dan Lynch (filling in for Karen)
and Bradley discuss a few examples
where licensing decisions by companies impacts the health of the
software development community.
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:00:36)
Dan interviewed the CentOS developers on FLOSS Weekly. (00:05:52)

Bradley has a blog
post that describes RHEL licensing model. His
previous blog post to that one, while mostly off-topic here, has a
few points of interest. (00:10:36)

Dan Lynch mentioned The Smoking Man
from the The X
Files television series. (00:17:22)

Bradley mentioned that Lennart Poettering is a
Red Hat employee working on systemd,
which is now in
Fedora, but not in RHEL yet (as far as we know). (00:18:53)

Bradley suggested that developers starting projects read Karsten
Wade's The Open
Source Way, and Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software:
How to Run a Successful Free Software Project, and Bradley's
blog post about
developing in public. (00:22:16)

Dan and Bradley briefly discussed copyright abolition. Dan
mentioned Stallman's
writing on the Pirate Party's copyright positions.

Segment 1 (00:32:30)
Bradley briefly discussed the history of
StarOffice, and the creation of
OpenOffice.org. (00:33:40)

Bradley explained issues related to the LibreOffice
fork of OpenOffice.org. (00:37:30)

Bradley has talked about how proprietary
relicensing is very dangerous (00:39:50)

Fedora,
Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE
all switched to LibreOffice as a default. Bradley didn't know at
recording time that the OpenOffice
package in wheezy is a transition package to switch to LibreOffice. (00:41:24)

Bradley and Dan mentioned a
blog post by IBM's Rob Weir that misquotes the FSF to support IBM's
positions on the OO.o relicensing issue. (00:58:26)

Bradley mentioned the idea that Apache-2.0 work can be relicensed
under LGPLv3-or-later, as he
discussed in his blog post about the OO.o relicensing
(01:00:45)

Dan mentioned Jeremy Allison's comment
on the aforementioned post on Rob Weir's blog. (01:02:08)

Segment 2 (01:16:09)

Bradley thanked Dan, on behalf of Karen, for all his work to make
Free as in Freedom possible.
Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
1h 25min
May 24, 2011Episode 0x10: Linux License Violations
Dan Lynch (filling in for Karen) and Bradley play and discuss
Matthew Garrett's talk GPL
Violations: What Are We Doing? (aka Linux License
Violations) from the Linux Collaboration Summit 2011.
If you want to listen to only the off-topic parts of this oggcast, please download the FaiF 0x10 Off-Topic Remix.
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:34)
FaiF Producer Dan Lynch is filling in for Karen
as co-host this week. (00:43)

Karen got married on the day
Dan and Bradley recorded the oggcast. (01:03)

Dan is also known as the co-host of Linux Outlaws, host of Rat Hole Radio, and occasional co-host of FLOSS Weekly. (02:05)

Bradley mentioned Dick
Van Dyke's admission (06:56)

Segment 1 (08:05)
This segment is Matthew Garrett's talk GPL
Violations: What Are We Doing? (aka Linux License
Violations) from the Linux Collaboration Summit 2011.

Matthew Garrett released the slides
from his talk which you can follow along with during the talk.

Segment 2 (51:29)
Bradley mentioned that Matthew is particularly interested in the GPL violations
on Android/Linux devices that he's found. (52:57)

Bradley mentioned Greg
Kroah-Hartman's GPL enforcement against Microsoft, which Bradley
also blogged
about a few years ago. (55:51)

Dan asked Bradley about DMCA usage in GPL enforcement. Bradley
explained that there is a process called DMCA
takedown that Matthew was discussing. (57:30)

Dan and Bradley discussed the Linux
Foundation Open Compliance Program. (1:05:05)

Bradley mentions that he is completely opposed to criminal
penalties for copyright infringement, and mentioned his ACTA commenting
blog post. (1:12:13)

Bradley and Dan discussed the Sony
DVD rootkit. (1:15:17)

Karen's
wedding
invitation
got
some
press
since
it
was a
working
record
player.
(1:16:58)

Karen and Mike's wedding song is at the end of the oggcast, but you
can also download the
song from the wedding
website. (1:21:08)

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
1h 25min
May 10, 2011 Episode 0x0F: Why Samba Switched to GPLv3

This episode is a recording of Jeremy Allison's talk, Why
Samba Switched to GPLv3 from the 2011
Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and
Karen on the talk.
Show Notes:

Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), Bradley was at Samba XP with
Jeremy the day this show was released. So, there he wasn't able to get
show notes together in detail for this show.

However, Jeremy's slides
from the talk are available (in PDF), and also ODP
format. So, you can follow along with it in the talk.

Also, you may be interested to read Bradley live-dent'd
Jeremy's talk, so the discussion there might be useful to read as
well.
Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
1h 1min
April 26, 2011Episode 0x0E: Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement
This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk, Open Source Projects and
Corporate Entanglement from the 2011
Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and
Karen on the talk.
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:34)
Bradley is still recovering from a rhinovirus which he
didn't take care of and also made him sicker, which explains the
problems with his voice. In fact, the coughing in the background during
Fontana's talk is all Bradley. He apologizes. (00:50)

This show is Richard Fontana's Linux
Collaboration Summit 2011 talk, Open Source Projects and
Corporate Entanglement. (03:24)
Segment 1 (03:48)
Richard Fontana's
slides for his talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate
Entanglement are available on his website. (04:29)

Bradley was live-denting
Fontana's LCS talk. (04:31)

Richard Fontana is the purveyor of the disturbing group on
identi.ca. (04:30)

Fontana makes reference to a Bradley's
blog post on switching back to Debian from Ubuntu. (05:55)

Fontana pointed out
that the GNU Manifesto deals a lot with how
Free Software is completely compatible with many business models.
(12:30)

Fontana pointed out
that many of the relationships between companies in Free software
have great variability in level of transparency. (16:00)

In the background, you hear Bradley saying something. He's giving
Josh Berkus credit for the phrase throw code over the wall, a
phrase which both Fontana and Bradley now use regularly. (32:28)

Segment 2 (48:25)
Fontana
made an interesting analogy to commissioned art and its similarity
to FLOSS. (50:33)

Fontana noted later on
identica that he does support non-profit as solution to entanglement
problem. (54:48)

Bradley mentioned the 60
Minutes story about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (CAI). (55:30)

Fontana now talking
about GE/NBC relationship, but Bradley was surprised that Fontana
didn't mention Ben
Bagdikian's book, The Media
Monopoly. (18:26, 56:30)

Bradley was glad that
Fontana called proprietary relicensing illegitimate. Bradley points
out that sometimes community members, including himself, have too
easily forgiven business models on the edges of software
freedom. (25:13, 30:50 58:30)

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
1h 3min
April 12, 2011 Episode 0x0D: NDAs

This episode is a recording of Karen's talk, Sign on the
Dotted Line: NDAs and Free and Open Source Software from the 2011
Linux Collaboration Summit.
Show Notes:
Segment 1 (01:33)

You can download a copy of
Karen's slides from the talk if you'd like to follow along.
Here's a listener donated transcription of one of the questions:
[23:14]
[indistinct]
Signed up
[indistinct]
At Google you can opt out.
Some of the people are
You cannot actually [indistinct]
[29:53]
On some NDAs you can have sections that say you are not allowed to
use open source software and not allowed to write open source
software, but the company is hiring you to do exactly this.
[30:12]
In NDAs. I'm a consultant, and so I get a lot of NDAs on my desk. I
know at least 5 large semiconductor companies who have this paragraph
inside that forbid you to look at open source software and its clear
that open source software is a clause for the death penalty when
they're hiring you as a consultant to write drivers in the Linux
kernel.
Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
43min
March 29, 2011Episode 0x0C: Disturbing Debates
Bradley and Karen
discuss two debates going on in the free and open source software
community. One recent and seemingly inflated, and one long and
confusing.
Show Notes:
Segment 1 (03:12)
Bradley wrote a blog
post about the Bionic issues that were raised. (03:44)

On the old oggcast, Karen
and Bradley discussed the Android/Linux system and Bionic
specifically. (04:09)

Karen mentioned an old oggcast
where permissive vs. copyleft licensing was discussed. (06:19)

Jake Edge wrote an LWN
article that discussed Bionic (07:58)

Bradley mentioned Raymond
Nimmer's blog that started the debate (10:52)

Bradley also mentioned Edward
Naughton's blog post and
paper
on Bionic. (11:38)

Raymond Nimmer is not David Nimmer, who
is known for writings on copyright (18:10)

There is now an disturbing group on
identica, which is more disturbing than a tag about
disturbing. (19:15)

Joe
Brockmeier did some research on Edward Naughton's ties to
Microsoft. (20:05)

Karen mentioned a
paper on deep legal analysis of header files and on
originality requirements in copyright (24:40)
Segment 2 (26:07)
Karen wanted to clear up some confusion about the discussion
last episode about the “Open Source” and “Free
Software” terminology.

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
44min
March 15, 2011Episode 0x0B: Free Software Project Non-Profit Existence
Bradley and Karen
have an introductory discussion on how non-profit governance interacts
with Free Software projects and what issues are important for
developers who want their project to have a non-profit existence.
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:37)
Bradley and Karen began the discussion by commenting
on this blog post by Andy Updegrove about non-profit
governance. (01:50)

Bradley and Karen tend to agree that non-profit settings are better
places to foster and help Free Software development. (03:40)

Bradley mentioned that Roland McGrath wrote GNU C
Library (and other GNU programs) while working as an employee at the FSF, and many of those programs are now
often maintained by Red Hat (or other company's) developers, under the
auspices of the GNU project, as overseen by the FSF. (04:50)

Corporate form and organization questions should be secondary to
project leadership ones. (09:50)

One of the most important things is to have an organization in a
place where people are willing to do the work to keep the organization
going. (20:10)

Enthusiasm to keep the organization running is the most important
resource for running the organization. (22:26)

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to .
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.
Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.
The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
...more
35min

FAQs about Free as in Freedom:

How many episodes does Free as in Freedom have?

The podcast currently has 111 episodes available.