Philippe Laurent gave an overview of cases involving “Open Licences before European Courts”. He did not list one recent “open content” case, Gerlach vs. DVU.

Ambjörn Elder on “The Methods of FOSS Activism” spoke about political activism; a worthy topic, but I hope for more discussion of activism for software freedom, rather than against ever worse policy.

In place of Armijn Hemel’s “Goes into an Executable? Identifying a Binary’s Sources by Tracing Build Processes” (missed flight) Kuhn and Sandler excerpted from a presentation on and took questions regarding nonprofit homes for free software projects. Writing this reminded me to make a donation to Software Freedom Conservancy, of which Kuhn and Sandler are respectively ED and Secretary of. Somewhat tangentially, I don’t find the topic boring, but I do find the lack of information, informed-ness (including mine), and tools regarding it boring. I don’t know of any libre documentation on running a nonprofit — I’d love to see a series of FLOSS Manuals on this. OneClickOrgs is a fairly new free software project to handle some aspects of governing a small organization, but I don’t know how useful it is at this point. Related to lack of documentation, some of the Q&A emphasized how little people know of these topics across jurisdictions — nevermind rule minutiae, even the existence of relevant “home” organizations.

Dave Neary on “Grey Areas of Software Licensing” questioned whether one could legally do various things, using examples largely drawn from GIMP development. The answer is always maybe. Fortunately developers sometimes take that as yes.

Allison Randal gave an overview of FLOSS history with a focus on legal arrangements in “FLOSSing for Good Legal Hygiene: Stories from the Trenches”.

Michael Meeks on “Risks vs. Benefits on Copyright Assignment” made the case that assignment (and some non-assingment contributor agreements) is harmful to participation, and proprietary re-licensing has not proven a good business, so a corporate sponsored software project ought to either be free (sans assignment and potential for propreitary relicensing) or proprietary, and fully enjoy the benefits of one or the other, rather than neither. He also indicated that permissive licensing can be better than copyleft for a free software project with copyrights held by a corporation, as the former gives all effectively equal rights, while the latter abets proprietary relicensing and ridiculous claims that the corporate sponsor will protect the community. Meeks repeatedly called on the FSF to abandon assingment, as for-profits disingenuously cite FSF’s practice in support of their own (FSF ED John Sullivan responded that they are getting corrections made where FSF practice is inappropriately cited and will work on explaining their practice better). Finally, Meeks requested an “ALGPL” which would require sharing of modified sources used to provide a network service, like the AGPL, but allow modifications that only link to or the equivalent ALGPL codebase to not be shared. I don’t know whether he wants GPL or LGPL behavior if such modificaitons are distributed. I was somewhat chagrined (but understanding; just not enough time, and maybe nobody submitted a decent proposal) that this was the only¹ discussion of network services!

Loïc Dachary on “Can for-profit companies enforce copyleft without becoming corrupt like MySQL AB?” said yes, if they aren’t the sole copyright holders; on projects he is hired to work on, he seeks out additional contributors who will hold copyright independently.

John Sullivan in “Is copyleft being framed?” presented some new data, apparently replicable (based on Debian package metadata), showing that GPL-family licenses are used in the vast majority (did I hear 87%?) of Debian packages.

Richard Fontana on “The (possible) decline of the GPL, and what to do about it” suggested the need to start thinking about GPLv4, but I’m not sure for what issues² — doesn’t matter; if the particulars of licenses can make a big difference, requirements for the next version of important ones should always be a relevant topic, even if there is no expectation of creating another version for many years. Fontana also indicated that perhaps the next (massively adopted, presumably) copyleft might not be created by an existing steward³ (meaning the FSF, or obviously CC in many non-software fields), which I take as an indication that license innovation is possibly more important than compatibility and non-proliferation.

I don’t remember much of panels with Hugo Roy, Giovanni Battista Gallus, Bradley Kuhn, Richard Fontana on application stores and Ciarán O’Riordan, Benjamin Henrion, Deb Nicholson, Karen Sandler on software patents, as I was probably preparing for my talk, but I trust that free software is still important if mode of delivery changes slightly and that software patents ought be abolished.

I spoke on “⊂ (FLOSS legal/policy ∩ CC [4.0])” (slides: odp, pdf, slideshare). Contrary to my apology I didn’t blog much of the talk beforehand. I will get to all of the topics eventually.

Most of the slides from the day should be available soon on the DevRoom’s page. Some audio might be available as well eventually.

Kuhn demonstrated his qualifications for another fallback career: crowd crontol. Fontana blogged a summary of the devroom. Sandler gave the most important talk on FLOSS policy (but not at FOSDEM). Marble apparently did almost all the organizing. Thanks to all! There will be another legal/policy devroom next year.

Addendum 20120210: Richard Fontana offered these corrections:

³“growing concern that anti-license-proliferationism concentrates power in privileged Establishment organizations”

How awesome is @niemanlab’s “faded” sidebar? And zen mode? That’s a site that cares about its readers.

You can view an archived version of the Nieman Lab site should their design change. The top of the sidebar isn’t faded, but overall I think the fading there is makes it a little easier to concentrate on a post without switching to “zen” mode (removing all navigation).

For my theme, I made the sidebar always faded except when hovered over, and float to the right as far away from the main content area as possible. All “header” content is in the sidebar so that there’s nothing preceding a post’s title.

I intended to remove anything hardcoded^* for my blog, anything I don’t understand or not used, and anything that doesn’t validate, but I didn’t get very far on any of those. I doubt this will be useful to anyone, but patches welcome.

^*Yes it is also a little ironic I’ve never bothered to published modified source used to run this blog until now.

My employer’s office moved from San Francisco to Mountain View in April, contributing to a number of people leaving or transitioning out, which has been a bummer. I’ve been working exclusively from home since May. Still, there have been a number of good developments, which I won’t attempt to catalog here. My favorites include agreement with the Free Software Foundation regarding use of CC0 for public domain software, small improvements in the CC legal user interface, the return and great work of a previous colleague, retirement of two substandard licenses, research, and a global summit/launch of a process toward version 4.0 of the CC licenses, which I hope over the next year prove at least a little bit visionary, long-standing, and have some consideration for how they can make the world a better place.

Speaking of which, I’ve spent more time thinking about social science-y stuff in 2011 than I have in at least several years. I’ll probably have plenty to say regarding this on a range of topics next year, but for now I’ll state one narrow “professionally-related” conclusion: free/libre/open software/culture/etc advocates (me included) have done a wholly inadequate job of characterizing why our preferences matter, both to the general public and to specialists in every social science.

Apart from silly peeves, two moderate ideas unrelated to free/libre/open stuff that I first wrote about in 2011 and I expect I’ll continue to push for years to come: increasing the minimum age and education requirement for soldiers and tearing down highway 980.

I haven’t done much programming in several years, and not full time in about a decade. This has been making me feel like my brain is rotting, and contributes to my lack of prototyping various services that I want to exist. Though I’d been fiddling (that may be generous) with Scala for a couple years, I was never really super excited about tying myself to the JVM. I know and deeply respect lots of people who doing great things with Python, and I’ve occasionally used it for scripts over the past several years because of that, but it leaves me totally non-enthused. I’ve done enough programming in languages that are uglier but more or less the same, time for something new. For a couple months I’ve been learning Haskell and doing some prototyping using the Yesod web framework (apparently I had heard of Haskell in 2005 but I didn’t look at it closely until last year). I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like, mostly due to unrelated distractions. The biggest substantive hurdle has not been Haskell (and the concepts it stands for), but a lack of Yesod examples and documentation. This seems to be a common complaint. Yesod is rapidly moving to a 1.0 release, documentation is prioritized, and I expect to be really productive with it over the coming year. Thanks to the people who make Yesod and those who have been making Haskell for two decades.

This year I appreciated three music projects that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, much to my detriment: DNA, Moondog, and especially Harry Partch. I also listened a lot again to one of my favorite bands I discovered in college, Violence and the Sacred, which amazingly has released some of its catalog under the CC BY-SA license. Check them out!

Finally, in 2011 I had the pleasure of getting to know just a little bit some people working to make my neighborhood a better place, attending a conference with my sister, seeing one of my brothers start a new job and the other a new gallery, and with my wife of continuing to grow up (in that respect, the “better half” cliche definitely applies). Now for this world to end!

Go Daddy’s^* pro-SOPA marketing failures made Namecheap’s action straightforward relative to companies not directly competing with Go Daddy. However, there are lots of other domain name registrars, none of which has done anything with Namecheap’s marketing savvy. Another registrar, Gandi (which I’ve used and recommended for some time, and has supported Creative Commons and other good causes), like Namecheap is donating a portion of domain transfers to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but doesn’t seem to be making a big deal of it, and their anti-SOPA blog post is rather tepid. Compare to Namecheap’s anti-SOPA blog post, which isn’t all that much stronger in terms of substance (contains genuflection to “intellectual property”), it is much more strongly worded and simply more effectively written.

One other company has a support-EFF-against-SOPA tie-in. That company, Zopim, provides website chat services, and doesn’t seem to compete with Go Daddy at all. I’m not interested, but never would have heard of them otherwise. Any company could do that.

(I see that sometime today two other small domain registrars have added support-EFF-against-SOPA deals. Good for Suspicious Networks and Centuric.)

What inspired to me write this post is that Namecheap isn’t only taking gratis publicity. They’re also running presumably paid ads as part of their anti-SOPA marketing campaign:

While trying to get the above ad to load again (noticed out of the corner of my eye but didn’t register until sometime after — I’m oddly trying to recover from ad blindness), I noticed another Namecheap ad, which if you’re already really tuned in, illustrates nicely the imperfect options available from a software freedom perspective for domain registration and other nearly commodity services.

Check out more anti-SOPA and pro-freedom actions.

^*Isn’t the name “Go Daddy” ridiculous? That, coupled with a super cheesy website and company logo led me to disregard them long before they started shooting sexy elephants at gladiator events, or whatever got people upset before they supported SOPA.

I have not seen obvious invitations for web sites used much recently, but that could be me not looking for web applications to try. I note three three overlapping purposes when they are used:

• Promotion. The entity that has set up the invitation system hopes for viral spam; some people have a strongly negative reaction to invitation systems as a result.
• Rationing. For example, to keep a system usable while resources added.
• Exclusivity. For purposes regarded as wrong for non-state actors (e.g. discrimination based on birth location) to the suspicious (supposed cabals) to the practical (privacy, working group size, keep out bad actors).

My impression is that at the web site/application level, invitations are used mostly for promotion, a little for rationing, rarely for exclusivity. But invitations are ubiquitous in human interactions, and it seems to me that exclusivity is their main purpose (though I’m ignoring many communications and social purposes independent of the three mentioned; e.g., in some situations a polite communication takes the form of an invitation). One doesn’t even need to step away from “social network” web applications to see this, just into the applications — consider “connection requests” and similar actions among users.

Invitations could be a useful part of the federated social web mix, as the challenges faced by federated sites are at least a little different than those faced by silos in all three of the aforementioned areas, but especially with regard to exclusivity. Consider that bad actors can set up their own federated sites, and that federated sites often represent single users or small communities — roughly requiring the same functionality of a community or individual user of a silo, including the functionalities of the entire silo.

Also, just remembered On The Invitation, a chapter from Collaborative Futures.

Congratulations to Mozilla on their $300m/year deal with Google, which will more than double current annual revenue. I’ve always thought people predicting doom for Mozilla if Google failed to renew were all wrong — others would be happy to pay for the default search position; probably less since Microsoft, Yahoo, and others make less than Google per ad view, but it’d still be a very substantial amount — and the link article hints that a Microsoft bid drove the price up.

There’s always a risk that Mozilla won’t spend the money well, but I’m pretty confident that they will. Firefox is excellent, and in 2011 has gotten more excellent, faster, and I think many of the other projects they’re doing are really important, and on the right track (insofar as I’m qualified to discern, which is not much), for example BrowserID. Even in small and hopelessly annoying things, like licensing, I think Mozilla is doing good. (Bias: Mozilla has donated to my employer.)

I’m no longer enthused about the possibility of huge resources for progress toward Wikimedia’s vision from advertising on Wikipedia. Since I was last on that bandwagon, it has become even less of a possibility in anything but the distant future: Wikimedia’s donation campaigns have gone very well, adequately funding its operating mission, and lack of advertising has become even more part of Wikimedia’s messaging; I’ve also become more concerned (not in particular to Wikimedia) about the institutional corruption risks previously blogged by Peter McCluskey and Timothy B. Lee. (Note these objections don’t apply to Mozilla: its significant revenue has always been advertising-based; very roughly its revenues are already 10x those of Wikimedia’s; and it is also building up an individual donor program, which I agree is often the healthiest revenue for a nonprofit.)

But I still very much think freedom needs massive, ongoing resource infusions, in the right institutional framework. I celebrate the tremendous benefits of the FLOSS community achieves without massive, concentrated, ongoing resource infusions, but I also admit that the web likely would be much worse, much less webby, and much less free without concentrated resources at Mozilla over the last several years.

Thank you Mozillians, and congratulations. I have very high expectations for your contributions over the next years to the web and society, in particular where more freedom and security are obviously needed such as mobile and software services. Such would be just a start. As computation permeates everything, and digital freedom becomes the most important political issue, the resources of many Mozillas are needed. More on that, soon.

Design. Many major free software projects have turned in some form to design[er]-driven UX/UI/look-and-feel/etc. Not all (any?) are acclaimed successes yet, but in a few years “open design” may go from paradoxical to hot.

Diversity. Lack thereof has become recognized as a major impediment to FLOSS potential. Existing cultures will change as participation expands and vice versa.

Distributed version control systems. Have changed the way many developers and projects work.

Governance. “Open by rule” governance that treat all participants equally and are run transparently has become recognized as a crucial part of making FLOSS FLOSSY, in addition to (and congruent with) FLOSS licensing. However, some advocate for corporate (usually) controlled projects in order to obtain corporate resources for FLOSS development. GPLv3 has seen strong uptake.

Mobile. Unlike the desktop a mostly free system (Android) is very popular, but also unlike the desktop, mobile devices with approaching 100% FLOSS[Y] software more or less don’t exist. The “appstore” phenomena is recognized as a threat to FLOSS, but it is totally unclear how that will play out.

Net services. Apart from Wikipedia, none of the dominant services people access through the web are free software. Most are largely powered by free software, and companies that run the services contribute much to back-end software, but the services users directly access are proprietary and centralized, with no interoperability among them. FLOSS and federated social web services have made strides but there is much significant technical work to do, and the network effects of the dominant proprietary services are daunting.

Open web. In 2008, Firefox 3 had just been released and Flash was ubiquitous. The “open web” is in much better shape now. It is the platform with the most innovation, is almost entirely based on open standards. As of fairly recently, the prognosis even for open web video looks good. One of the leading browsers, Firefox, is free software, and the free software WebKit renderer powers most others, while IE slowly declines.

I’ve surely missed things, some intentionally (patent threat), some out of partial ignorance (e.g., I don’t have any sense of how much has changed in the last 3 years for FLOSS as a grant, procurement, regulatory, or other “policy” requirement, but know it could be important).

Also thanks to Nathan Yergler, who held the job for four years. I really miss working with Nathan. His are big shoes to fill, but also his work across operations, applications, standards, and relationships set the foundation for the next CTO to be very successful.

In 2006 (maybe 2005) Victor Stone implemented a re-use notification (and a bit more) protocol he called the Sample Pool API. Several audio remix sites (including ccMixter, for which Victor developed the API; side note: read his ccMixter memoir!), but it didn’t go beyond that, probably in part because it was tailored to a particular genre of sites, and another part because it wasn’t clear how to do correctly, generally, get adoption, sort out dependencies (see hand-wringing above), and resource/prioritize.

I’ve had in mind to blog about re-use notification for years (maybe I already have, and forgot), but right now I’m spurred to by skimming Henry Story and Andrei Sambra’s Friending on the Social Web, which is largely about semantic notifications. Like them, I need to understand what the OStatus stack has to say about this. And I need to read their paper closely.

Ignorance thusly stated, I want to proclaim the value of refback. When one follows a link, one’s user agent (browser) often will send with the request for the linked page (or other resource) the referrer (the page with the link one just followed). In some cases, a list of pages linking to one’s resources that might be re-used can be rather valuable if one wants to bother manually looking at referrers for evidence of re-use. For example, Flickr provides a daily report on referrers to one’s photo pages. I look at this report for my account occasionally and have manually populated a set of my re-used photos largely by this method. This is why I recently noted that the (super exciting) MediaGoblin project needs excellent reporting.

Some re-use discovery via refback could be automated. My server (and not just my server, contrary to Friending on the Social Web; could be outsourced via javascript a la Google Analytics and Piwik) could crawl the referrer and look for structured data indicating re-use at the referrer (e.g., my page or a resource on it is subject or object of relevant assertions, e.g., dc:source) and automatically track re-uses discovered thusly.

A pingback would tell my server (or service I have delegated to) affirmatively about some re-use. This would be valuable, but requires more from the referring site than merely publishing some structured data. Hopefully re-use pingback could build upon the structured data that would be utilized by re-use refback and web agents generally.

After doing more reading, I think my plan to to file the appropriate feature requests for MediaGoblin, which seems the ideal software to finally progress these ideas. A solution also has obvious utility for oft-mooted [open] data/education/science scenarios.

See Internet Explorer 6 criticism for the baneful details.

Firefox broke the monoculture. Today is a good day to remember, and celebrate, as Firefox 4 is released. I’ve been using alphas and betas for many months; highly recommend.

Given the quote from Prodromou, founder of identi.ca/StatusNet and first among federated social web equals, it’s also a good idea to remember that many of the services that dominate their niches on the web are themselves monocultures. It was really great yesterday to see the EFF explain and get behind the federated social web.

Be a good citizen today — here’s another helpful and current link in that regard.