Post Open Source

Mozilla Public License 2.0 and increasing public copyright license compatibility

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Incompatibility among public copyright licenses dampens their potential for reducing underlying friction caused by copyright. Increasing compatibility among public copyright licenses is one of the successes of the free/libre/open source community, or so I think. Without long-term, distributed collaboration among license stewards and projects released under public licenses, it would have been easy to obtain a world in which it usually isn’t legally possible to use code from one project in another. (A shared understanding of what constitutes “free” and “open” really helps — the scope for incompatible-in-spirit licenses is greatly reduced, and distributed collaboration facilitated by everyone sharing broad premises.)

I’ve been watching from afar development of the Mozilla Public License version 2 (going for nearly 2 years, I believe about the right amount of time to version a widely used public license) almost exclusively because I was eager to see it become GPL compatible, and how it would achieve this.

Luis Villa explained most of the “how” three months ago. To make sure I understand, here’s my summary:

  • MPL 1.1 is not GPL-compatible. MPL 2.0 will be, but with a few caveats to ensure that projects released under the MPL won’t become GPL-compatible unintentionally, and that there’s a way for new projects under MPL 2.0 that really, really don’t want to be GPL compatible, don’t have to be.
  • Code from a project is released under MPL 2.0 (and not multi-licensed), it can only be made available under the GPL* when incorporated into a larger project that is already GPL licensed, i.e., there has to be a good reason.
  • The entity doing such incorporation in the point above has to offer the MPL code under the MPL and additionally the GPL. A downstream entity can choose to only use the GPL. In other words, people who want to use the original project’s code line under the MPL have ample opportunity to do so, until it is truly forked into a GPL-only version.
  • MPL 1.1 projects (1.1 has a “future versions” clause) modified and released under MPL 2.0 are not GPL-compatible in the manner above unless the project was already multi-licensed under the MPL and GPL (the most important MPL 1.1 licensed projects are multi-licensed), i.e., the intent to allow for use under the GPL is already established.
  • Projects that want to use MPL 2.0 and really don’t want to be GPL compatible can include an “Incompatible With Secondary Licenses” notice.

I think the last point is an unfortunate complication (such projects could stick with MPL 1.1, for instance), but I trust that there are good stakeholder use cases for it. But that’s a minor nit. Villa and other people who worked on MPL 2.0 did a great job and get congratulations and thanks from me.

One of my dreams for Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 is that it be one-way GPL compatible, as MPL 2.0 will be. MPL 2.0 demonstrates mechanisms for achieving GPL compatibility without upsetting current licensor expectations, which ought be a useful perspective from which to evaluate options for CC BY-SA 4.0. Though CC licenses should not be used for code, it’s easy to see a future in which most “culture” includes “code” and it is an unnecessary pain to keep their licenses separate in all cases. Also, there is some demand for a source-requiring copyleft license for non-software works (BY-SA does not require adaptations to provide source, which is often OK for cultural works, but not always) and it doesn’t make sense to create another source-requiring copyleft license in addition to the GPL.

*Actually LGPL 2.1 or greater, GPL 2.0 or greater, or AGPL 3.0 or greater. MPL has a weaker copyleft than any of the GPL-family licenses — MPL’s copyleft is scoped by file, LGPL’s by library, GPL’s by any linked code, AGPL adds requirement for source distribution to network services.

Addendum 20120103: MPL 2.0 is released today. FSF has added MPL 2.0 to their free licenses page with a GPL compatibility explanation.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source | 12 Comments »

Rolling bugfree‽

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

Since September 26 I’ve been exclusively using Firefox Nightly builds. I noticed an annoying bug a few days ago. It was gone the next day. It occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed any other bugs. For months prior, I had used Firefox Aurora (roughly alpha) and don’t recall any bugs.

Since October 15 I’ve been using Debian Testing on my main computer. No problems.

For years prior, I had been using Ubuntu, and upgrading shortly after they released an alpha of their next six-month release. Years ago, such upgrades would always break something. I upgraded an older computer to the just released Ubuntu 12.04 alpha. Nothing broke.

In recent memory, final releases desktop software would often crash. Now, there are as many “issues” as ever, but they seem to be desired enhancements, not bugs. The only buggy application I can recall running on my own computer in the last year is PiTiVi, but that is just immature.

Firefox and Debian (and the many applications packaged with Debian) probably aren’t unique. I hope most people have the relatively bug-free existence that I do.

Has desktop software actually gotten more stable over the last 5-10 years? Has anyone quantified this? If there’s anything to it, what are the causes? Implementation of continuous integration testing? Application stagnation (nothing left to do but fix bugs — doubt it!)? A mysterious Flynn Effect for software? Or perhaps I’m unadventurous or delusional?

Posted in Computers, Open Source | 2 Comments »

Almost Wikipedias and innovation in free collaboration projects

Friday, October 21st, 2011

I recently watched a presentation by Benjamin Mako Hill on Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About Mechanisms of Collective Action (audio and video at the link) — or some conjectures about why Wikipedia took off, while 7 older English language internet encyclopedia projects did not.

The presentation had some interesting bits of net history, at least to someone as poorly read as myself — I had only heard about Interpedia (1993) and The Distributed Encyclopedia Project (1997) recently via a timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals.

Through study of materials concerning the older projects and interviews with project founders, Hill arrived at 4 propositions…

  1. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it was built around a familiar product.
  2. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it was focused on substantive content development instead of technology.
  3. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it offered low transaction costs to participation.
  4. Wikipedia attracted contributors because it deemphasized attribution and “social ownership” of content.

…mapped on a grid reminiscent of many diagrams of “innovation quadrants” (example):

Or, as Dan O’Sullivan said with a broader stroke, ‘Everything is radical about Wikipedia except for the actual articles’.

At first blush this indicates that I should temper my enthusiasm for claiming that Wikipedia exploded the category of encyclopedias and that more free collaboration projects should aim to explode additional product categories.

Though early Wikipedians set out to create an , and I’m persuaded that presenting contributors with a familiar product to build helped it succeed, I think it is clear that Wikipedia, or more properly 845 language Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects, have created a “product” that is much more useful and different from previous encyclopedias in ways that justify saying it has “exploded” the category. Yes, individual articles read more or less like previous encyclopedia articles, but then emails read more or less like letters. One approach to thinking about how big of an impact Wikipedia may have made so far would be to compare Wikipedia to surviving proprietary online encyclopedias (or perhaps hypothetical ones, had Wikipedia or similar never happened). I suspect the comparison would be akin to AOL and near peers vs. the internet.

One remain hopeful about free collaboration exploding further categories is that Wikipedia, and of course free and open source software projects, have innovated on process. There’s a huge amount of knowledge diffusion to be done, and further development of free collaboration processes, but a now new free collaboration project doesn’t automatically start out in a dead zone of innovating in too many dimensions if it attempts to include product innovation, as might have been the case in the past, as free collaboration equaled process innovation.

One small thing that we’ve mostly figured out that we mostly hadn’t figured out 10+ years ago (or 20+ years ago for software) is appropriate copyright licensing. I dimly recall from the past reading about copyright issues with keeping h2g2 going, and limitations for everything2 (no license is required, so entries are mostly solo-contributor), but I quickly looked at a few of the other projects Hill mentioned and found some curiosities. Interpedia’s FAQ on copyright doesn’t say what the project’s copyright policy is, but does express fear of an infamous patent. The Distributed Encyclopedia Project used what would now be recognized as an onerous and impractical license that at a glance I’m not sure agrees with the brief statement found at the bottom of an example article. The very first archive.org capture of theinfo.org states “All of the content is released under the Anti-Copyright License”, which sounds hopeful, though subsequent captures don’t have that statement, and the text of said license is not captured.

I’m really looking forward to Hill’s publication, as well as the further development of his research program concerning mass collaboration and social movements. Also, check out his reading list on AcaWiki.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Source, Patents, Wikipedia | 11 Comments »

Open World Forum: Knowledge Commons Fail/Fix

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at Open World Forum. Slides (odp, pdf, slideshare), video (archive.org, YouTube):

I rushed through my final slides and promised to expand on them virtually, which I’ve done here with more slides (odp, pdf, slideshare), or watch a video narration of same (archive.org, YouTube):

Thanks to Open World Forum co-president Louis Montagne and Knowledge Commons track leader Florence Devouard for inviting me to participate!

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Public Goods | 6 Comments »

7 FLOSS trends of the past 37.5 months

Monday, September 12th, 2011

A prospective, from memory, high level summary of trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software, in the last 37.5* months:

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).

*37.5 months ago Creative Commons held its previous global meeting. Another will be held next week. I’m organizing 2.33** sessions, one of which will touch on movements near Creative Commons (“Where are We?”) and another of which concerns these in depth (or as much as is possible in 80 minutes; “CC’s Role in the Global Commons Movement”).

The CC-specific parts of these sessions will be fairly detailed and for the first one, possibly more interesting to insiders (many of the participants have been involved in CC affiliate projects for most of CC’s history).

I’d also like to convey, perhaps in as little as one slide, the big trends of the last 3 years in a few related areas, without any details. These areas and their trends lead, inform, reinforce, and depend on CC’s work in varying measures, so I think the CC community should understand them at a high level at least, such that the most relevant can be more closely learned from or cooperated with.

**I’m also organizing 1/3 of a session on issues to consider for version 4.0 of the CC license suite; the part I’m organizing concerns the non-commercial clause used by some of those licenses. I promise it will be much more fun than a report on that topic.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source, Open Standards | 4 Comments »

Novakick

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

I backed Novacut’s first, unsuccessful, Kickstarter campaign last year because I think that new tools for distributed collaborative creation and curation are important to the success of free culture (which I just said is a lame name for intellectual freedom, but I digress) and Novacut’s description seemed to fit the bill:

We’re developing a free open-source video editor with a unique distributed design:

  • Distributed workflow – collaboratively edit video with other artists over the Internet
  • Distributed storage – seamlessly store and synchronize video files across multiple computers and the cloud
  • Distributed rendering – seamlessly spread rendering and encoding across multiple computers and the cloud

I didn’t investigate whether Novacut had a feasible plan. My pledge was an expressive vote for the concept of new tools for distributed collaboration.

Novacut is making another go of it at Kickstarter, and it looks like they’ll succeed. I just pledged again.

However, I’m saddened by how much of philanthropy is not also carefully instrumental. The only low barrier way to move in this direction (I’d prefer futarchist charity) that I know of is criticism, so hats off to Danny Piccirillo for his criticism of Novacut fundraising. I’m further saddened that such criticism is not welcomed. I would be honored that someone found a project I am involved in or a fan of worth the time to criticize and thankful for the free publicity.

Now, I’m looking forward to see what Novacut delivers, and/or what Novacut ideas other video editor projects implement.

Speaking of delivery, I noticed today a new crowdfunding site targeting free software and Brazil, makeITopen. According to a writeup, it appears to have a couple interesting twists. Projects that do not reach their thresholds have donations not fully returned to donors, but only as credits within the system (unlike Kickstarter and others, where pledges are not collected until a project has reached its threshold). More interestingly, there is a process for donors to approve (or not) the software delivered by the project. This sort of thing is probably hard to get right, and I fully expect makeITopen to fail, but I hope it is hugely successful, and think that getting approval right could be very useful. At least for donors who wish to be instrumental.

Addendum 20110730: The best two comments on the Novacut criticism kerfuffle: Jono Bacon saying be calm, but onus is on Novacut to explain, and Jason Gerard DeRose (Novacut lead), explaining how Novacut’s intended high-end userbase demands a different program than do casual video editors, and that there’s plenty of scope for cooperation on underlying components. Congratulations to Novacut for meeting its Kickstarter threshold, and good luck to Novacut, (the working editor many critics advocated directing resources toward), and and Gnonlin (two underlying components in common). Onward to killing King Kong with FLOSS.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Open Source, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Public Goods | 2 Comments »

Creative Commons hiring CTO

Monday, July 11th, 2011

See my blog post on the CC site for more context.

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.

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source, Programming, Semantic Web | 1 Comment »

DRM as a competitive threat to free software?

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

A Day Against DRM post. I posted another at Creative Commons.

Critiques of Digital Restrictions Management fall into about 10 categories:

  1. DRM causes various product defects
  2. DRM usurps people’s control of devices they own
  3. DRM discourages tinkering and understanding technology
  4. DRM discourages sharing
  5. DRM curtails various freedoms people would otherwise enjoy
  6. DRM encourages hostile behavior toward consumers
  7. DRM encourages monopoly
  8. DRM is technical voodoo
  9. DRM is business voodoo
  10. DRM presages more forms of attempted control, each with additional properties similar to those above, increasing the probability of a dystopian future.

Eventually I may link the above bullets to the relevant posts on DRM I’ve made over the years.

Defective By Design, a project of the Free Software Foundation, coordinates the Day Against DRM and various other anti-DRM actions. It is pretty clear that several of the problems with DRM listed above, particularly 2-5, are inimical to the FSF’s values. I sometimes think the linkage to core values of software freedom could be made stronger in anti-DRM campaigns, but these are not easily packaged messages. I also think there’s usually a missed opportunity in anti-DRM campaigns to present free software (and maybe free culture) as the only systemic alternative to creeping anti-freedom technologies such as DRM.

I began writing a post for Day Against DRM because I wanted to pose a question concerning DRM’s competitive threat to free software: how significant is it in today’s circumstances, and how significant in theory?

In today’s circumstances, the use of DRM that does not support free software platforms by popular media services (currently Netflix is probably most significant; DVDs with DRM have always been a problem) seems like a major barrier to more people using free software.

In theory, it isn’t clear to me that DRM must be a competitive threat to free software adoption (though it would remain a threat to software freedom and nearby). If a mostly free software platform were popular enough, DRM implementations will follow — most obviously Android.

However, I would also hope the dominance of free software would create conditions in which DRM is less pertinent. I would love to see enumerated and explored the current and in-theory competitive threats to free software posed by DRM, and vice versa.

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source | 2 Comments »

IE6 is a stark reminder to developers of what a Web monoculture looks like. We need to remember it.

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

The title of this post quotes Evan Prodromou.

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.

Posted in Open Services, Open Source, Open Standards | 1 Comment »

Dear Jean Quan,

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

Congratulations on your election and tomorrow’s inauguration as Oakland mayor.

I ranked ahead of you, but in truth my expressive rationale for doing so could just as well have favored you: a progressive Asian American woman represents a defining characteristic of what makes Oakland special and its future just as much as does a green lesbian (who is also an American and a woman, but such is identity politics).

Expressiveness aside, expectations for positive outcomes from your term as mayor are pretty low (note emphasis on outcomes; everyone knows you’ll put in more hours than recent Oakland mayors). Oakland still has a terrible crime problem, and city finances are beyond terrible. I suspect if there were betting markets on outcomes related to these problems, current prices would predict that under your leadership crime will get worse (relative to comparable cities; of course national trends may determine absolute direction of change), chief police will quit, the city will teeter on bankruptcy, your response will be to ‘social program us to death’, and you will be a one term mayor, succeeded by Kaplan, Joe Tuman, or .

Low expectations can be a blessing, if you’re willing to take steps to smash them and secure your re-election and legacy as Oakland’s most successful mayor in decades.

First, crime. Blaming the problem on poverty, racism, poor schools, unemployment, etc., isn’t going to cut it, neither as discourse nor as the stereotypical actions resulting, loosely characterized as “building youth centers”. Most voters aren’t that stupid (well, they are, but in other directions when it comes to crime). Fortunately, one can be a good progressive, acknowledge that crime is a major problem, especially for the disadvantaged, and take smart, progressive-compatible steps to smash crime. Check out Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Aaron Swartz’s essay on crime:

Such things are a frustration for white suburbanites, but for poor people stuck in the ghetto, they’re a nightmare. Crime is yet another disadvantage and a particularly noxious one at that. Even aside from all the other indignities suffered by the poor, just imagining life in a crime-ridden neighborhood is enough to make your skin crawl.
…
So there’s the question: How can we have less crime with less punishment?

Here are the no-brainer steps you can take on crime:

  • Do not get caught saying anything that could be construed as “blaming society” for the problem or that the solution consists of “building youth centers”.
  • Work with Batts to actually fight crime; defer to his expertise at every opportunity.
  • Provide high-minded leadership on protecting civil liberties; on this defer to nobody. However, limit riot-bait to national and global issues. For example, city proclamations calling for bringing George W. Bush to justice and the like will only cause rioting on right-wing talk radio, leaving Oakland neighborhoods and businesses unscathed.

Next, finances. Similarly no-brainer suggestions:

  • Repeat early, loudly, and clearly that Oakland has an unsustainable spending problem, and everyone, especially your loyal allies in and funded by city government, are going to feel immediate pain.
  • Immediately push through cuts, primarily to areas you favor politically, sparing police and maintenance as much as possible.
  • Immediately push through revenue increases, e.g., tackle mis- and under-priced parking.

Beyond the above mandatory issues, a few less pressing but visionary actions for you to consider adding to your mayoral legacy:

  • Do everything you can to signal (and perhaps do a little of substance too) that you believe Oakland is the eco-city of the future, urban permaculture doers are heroes, and Oakland should be the world leader in marijuana business and education. Each of these increases Oakland’s specialness, and eliminates any future challenge from Kaplan. (If you’re moderately successful on the two major issues above, you also eliminate any traction Tauman or Russo might otherwise gain during your first term.)
  • Make Oakland the leader in “open” policy. There are obvious opportunities around city data, software procurement, and open licensing of city publications. The last would even help improve the article about you on Wikipedia. ☺ I and many other technology professionals and advocates of openness who live in Oakland would love to help. Some of us work for Creative Commons and other organizations with deep expertise in this area.
  • In another decade, autonomous vehicles will reshape cities. Establish some kind of an unpaid citizens committee to investigate how Oakland can prepare.

Here’s to great outcomes for Oakland, and your incredible success as mayor!

Mike Linksvayer
Golden Gate District, Oakland

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Oakland, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

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