Digital Citizen

Things to consider:

• Eben Moglen’s appeal for the FSF touches on the recent Microsoft-Novell deal wherein Microsoft says they’ll license their patents to users of Novell’s SUSE GNU/Linux distribution and devices that resist our attempt to make them work for their owners.
• The easiest time to give up Microsoft Windows Vista is before you can adopt it in the first place. Let the FSF explain why Vista will do you no favors.
• Defective by Design would like to show you how DRM hurts your interests.

If you’re interested in writing GUI applications with Python, check out this beginner’s video guide to using Glade with Python and GTK+ (large video, small video, PDF slides, OpenDocument slides, code samples). Also interesting, a talk for beginners about doing work on websites.

The videos are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license.

Code v2.0 is Stanford Law Professor’s revised version of “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace“. This revision was started (in part) on a wiki (a website anyone is allowed to edit) and Prof. Lessig took a copy of the wiki text up through December 31, 2005 then added his own edits.

The Wiki text was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License as is this book.

Share and enjoy.

This isn’t a terribly important question, but it could be interesting to ask because Firefox’s recent gains across Europe are getting so much press. If you’ve seen any mainstream press recently, you’ve probably seen some reference to the Xiti Monitor survey which concluded that Firefox usage is on the rise in Europe—up to 23.2% from 19.4% in April. The Inquirer has a colorful map of Firefox usage in Europe.

Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) is still the most popular web browser worldwide and the new MSIE version 7 has been released. Historically, people use the browser that comes with their computer and they don’t update their system software.

Where does this leave Firefox, a free software web browser (if one uninstalls the “Talkback” software that comes with it by default)?

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Philip Langdale recently wrote about SD card readers and the Linux kernel. One of the conclusions he reaches seemed familiar to me (emphasis mine):

When it comes to hardware support, we often find ourselves confronted with statements that such-and-such a piece of hardware can’t be used to its full capability under linux or feature ‘X’ isn’t supported yet. For a long time, the SD card reader in many recent laptops fell into that category but thanks to the efforts of Pierre Ossman, who managed to reverse engineer the SDHCI standard from trial-and-error and partial documentation, many of us are now able to use that reader. Although I can’t prove it, I feel that the subsequent publishing of the ’simplified’ spec (without the DRM bits that we don’t care about) by the SD Association was provoked by his efforts (Why bother hiding it now?) Thanks to those specs, Pierre was able to polish the driver up even more and support a wider range of implementations (of course, there are some that are so out there that even having the SDHCI spec isn’t enough to get them working).

The claim reminded me of another similar example of free software pressuring non-free information to be published in such a way that it becomes useful for the free software community. Consider the pressure of all the hackers working on free software Java implementations. I’m convinced that Sun will free their Java software to stay relevant in a world where free software Java work (Apache Harmony, Kaffe, Classpath, and others) is becoming increasingly functional and available on more amenable terms than Sun’s implementation.

So of course Sun’s Simon Phipps is a big fan of GPLv3 so far—GPLv3 is the upcoming version of the GNU General Public License—from how things look so far, GPLv3 will help keep Java free in such a way that improvements to Sun’s Java software will pose no threat to Sun. Sure, the license change will simultaneously make the free software community happy (which will turn the community into advocating for the use of Java instead of seeing Java as a trap), but it wasn’t long ago that James Gosling at Sun defended the status quo by claiming any opposition to Sun’s extant licensing was unclear (”It’s often difficult to get a good picture from the open source community of what they actually object to in what we’re doing”). Gosling is also quoted there saying that Sun’s Java customers would object to an “open source” Java:

We’ve got several thousand man-years of engineering in [Java], and we hear very strongly that if this thing turned into an open source project—where just any old person could check in stuff—they’d all freak. They’d all go screaming into the hills.

and Gosling was described as being ambivalent about Apache Harmony.

While having sex with Monica Lewinsky (and lying about it) didn’t directly cause anyone to die, former US President William Jefferson Clinton’s policies certainly condemned a lot of people to death as William Blum points out.

In the past couple of weeks, two new defenses against copyright infringement have emerged:

1. Get a stern talking to by Edgar Bronfman, parent of 7 and Warner Music Group CEO who just admitted that he’s fairly certain that at least one of his kids have engaged in illicit downloading. As of yet, somehow these children have avoided being sued by the RIAA. Their punishment?

   I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music. Frankly, right is right and wrong is wrong, particularly when a parent is talking to a child. A bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that.

   Stealing isn’t the issue here, copyright infringement is.

   Maybe these kids learned about infringement from the Warner Brothers movie studio which got started when the Warner brothers fled west to illicitly make and commercially show movies out of the reach of Edison’s patent police. Or maybe the kids picked up the idea of selectively obeying copyright law in their history class by recalling that the US didn’t initially honor foreign copyright, thus allowing American publishers to reprint works under copyright in other countries (much to the chagrin of Charles Dickens, whose work was being distributed commercially without remuneration).

   Warning: Bronfman lectures are limited to first 7 applicants.

2. Keep the infringing copy “safe in your vault” and you’ll be okay. Boing Boing has the scoop about a screening which took place on 2006-11-30:

   During the Q&A at last night’s screening of Kirby Dick’s “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” Dick recounted the story of how his film was unlawfully duplicated by the MPAA’s ratings board. He submitted one copy of his movie to the MPAA, extracting a promise that no more copies would be made — the MPAA’s own anti-piracy materials describe making a single unauthorized duplication as an act of piracy.

   Once it got out that the MPAA had made its “pirated” copy of Dick’s movie, one of the MPAA’s lawyers called Dick up to admit that the cartel had indeed made an infringing copy, but not to worry, “The copy is safe in my vault.”

   At this point, I raised my hand and asked if Dick thought anyone caught downloading movies from the Internet could get off the hook by saying, “Don’t worry, I keep my copies safe in my vault?”

   I still don’t think it’s wise, fair, or appropriate to use the term “piracy” in this context no matter how popular its use may be. Also, we have to consider the difficulty of avoiding infringement if the MPAA can’t manage to keep themselves inside their view of the law. But of course the larger issue remains how much deference we ought to give to any business model built on disallowing treating friends like friends.