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BSD license question

Brendan Scott of Open Source Law has written and posted an interesting article on Groklaw. The article posits that this is a broad misconception about the freedoms granted by the BSD license. In particular that code licensed under the BSD is not re-licensable (after modifications to the code) under “closed source” licenses as commonly believed (article in pdf).

From the arguments presented four consequences may be drawn

(a) the BSD appears to require that modifications be distributed only under the terms of the BSD, and that this requirement therefore cascades down to subsequent generations of code;

(b) the license does not appear to permit the relicensing of BSD code under the terms of any other license, at least in so far as any restrictions in other licenses would seem not to be binding;

(c) there may be some scope for arguing that the term â??modificationâ?? to the code is restricted or limited in some fashion. However, as the license only permits redistribution of â??modificationsâ?? the BSD does not permit the redistribution of any derivative work which is not a modification;

(d) the BSD does not have a requirement for the distribution of source code. It is not clear whether this means there is a deficiency in the Open Source Definition.

Posted on by mklang

Chomsky in Uppsala

Battleangel reports that Noam Chomsky is to be awarded an honorary degree by the faculty of languages, Uppsala University. Since Chomsky is one of the greats then maybe it would be interesting to go to Uppsala in May. I wonder if there will be a public lecture?
For the purpose of enlightenment Battleangel also provides a bio:

Professor Noam Chomsky took his doctorate in 1955, with a dissertation on formal grammar that laid the foundation for his groundbreaking work in linguistics. Since then he has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as Professor since 1961, and has fundamentally transformed the methods and theory of the subject of linguistics. By opposing explanations of language based on behaviorist psychology and emphasizing instead the innateness of the basic components of grammar as unique to the human species, his rejuvenation of linguistics constituted a paradigm shift. Chomskyâ??s work with formal grammar also established the research field of mathematical linguistics, which became the foundation of a major component in modern computational science. Few scholars have dominated their research fields the way Chomsky has, and as a leftist-oriented critic of U.S. foreign policy he has also attained a considerable reputation outside academic circles, standing out as one of the most outreaching and truly creative humanists in history.

Read the university press release.

Posted on by mklang

Iron Harvest

If we ignore the nationalistic/romantic ramblings of some deranged people there is a consensus that war is not a good thing. Certain wars (unfortunately not all) get a great deal of media attention – which may lead to popular cries for peace. â??Secretâ?? or unpublicized wars are harder to end.

The end of war is naturally worth working for. But it also brings with it a loss of interest in the region and the people involved. This is natural since most people (me included) tend to see the end of fighting as the solution. Naturally there is a need for reconciliation and rebuilding but thatâ??s about it.

But, this complacent attitude of mine was too be rudely disturbed when I came across the term â??iron harvestâ??.

The term is used by farmers in Belgium and France to describe the yearly amount of WWI ordinance found while plowing their fields. It’s more than 80 years since the war ended and still enough war garbage appears to motivate a term of its own.  â??The French Département du Déminage recover about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year. Since 1945, approximately 630 French démineurs have died handling unexploded munitions.â?? (Wikipedia)

But naturally the problems do not stop with an old war. As recently as 2006 the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah in Lebanon resulted in up to one million unexploded cluster bombs (BBC News). Estimates made by U.N. officials indicate that 90 of all cluster bombs used were launched during the last 72 hours of the conflict (Washington Post)

These small lethal bombs are left lying about in fields and in ruins. This slows the pace of economic and social recovery since the fields are too dangerous to use and rebuilding takes much longer. Not to mention all the accidental casualties and fatalities which occur when people come into contact with these lethal bombs.

Theoretically such ordinance should be easily prohibited by the present rules of war but unfortunately they are not. Therefore special legislation is required. Belgium has gone the furthest among countries and banned cluster bombs completely. Other countries are also working towards this goal.

Replying to questions in Parliament, the Swedish Minister of Defence (December 2006) has stated the governments is going to play an active role in international work against cluster bombs including working for an international ban and actively participated in the coming Norwegian conference on banning cluster bombs. The minister also stated that he was going to do away with Swedenâ??s supply of a (all?) cluster bombs (bombkapsel 90), create a Swedish ban on cluster bombs, and stop the production of bombkapsel 90 for the Swedish JAS 39 Gripen fighter.
Lets hope he keeps his promise.

Unsurprisingly, the UK and US are for cluster bombs â?? or rather against the banning of the bombs (great article by Monbiot)

Somewhere behind all the politics there is a designer. Once again we need to ask â?? what kind of mind designs technology like this? After a hard day at the drawing board does he or she go home to his family and smile? What will he/she till his/her children when they ask what he does? â??Daddy designs bombs which kill childrenâ??

I donâ??t think soâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Torrent BBC

The BBC must be seen as being among the avant garde of television today. Not too long ago they opened up their archives under licenses similar to Creative Commons licenses (Look at the Creative Archive License Group). In doing this they were ahead of their time.

Now they have decided to make â??hundredsâ?? of episodes of BBC programmes via bittorrent.

By doing this the BBC once again show that they â??getâ?? technology. While in Sweden the term file-sharing is becoming synonymous with illegal action the BBCâ??s deal with Azareus shows that they can recognize a superior distribution system when they see one.

The new deal means that users of the software will be able to download high-quality versions of BBC programmes, including Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and the League of Gentleman. Classic series such as Fawlty Towers will also be available through a BBC “channel”. BBC News

Naturally the BBC is not into giving away these top titles (you didnâ??t think it would be that good â?? did you?) No, the titles will be protected by digital rights management software to prevent the programmes being traded illegally on the internet.

The BBC might carry the nickname Auntie Beeb but all I can say is that I wish my Swedish public service relatives were as creative.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

The Sting, or why suckers happily pay

Much of the visible focus of the Free Software vs Proprietary Software discussion revolves around products such as the browser, or the operating system. But what really gets me depressed is the fact that my own faculty has chosen to use proprietary software (the Norwegian Fronter) as their course management system. The best thing is that none of the teachers are particularly happy with this choice. But I doubt that anyone is ever happy about software.

But the fact that we have chosen proprietary software which we cannot develop (even if we wanted to) increases the sense of: â??No, no please let us pay for the privilege of being unhappy with software we cannot improve.â??

UPDATE: The system our faculty uses is the Open Source system called Fronter. The fact is that we have the legal technical ability to make changes to the system. The faculty have contributed in the past (Thank you, Aleksander!). The lack of understanding about this among the teachers (me included) can only be seen as a lack of internal communication.

Just to make sure that I maintain that unhappy feeling â?? UCLA have decided to rub salt into my wound. The UCLA have decided to adopt the Moodle as their sole course management system. Moodle is licensed under the GNU General Public License and is under active development in collaboration by universities all over the world.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.

If my own department is too dumb to see the merits of this argument then what hope is there for Free Software? People seem to want to be part of the P. T. Barnum worldview “There’s a sucker born every minute…and two to take ’em.” But why do I have to work with the ones who want to be conned and pay happily for the privilege?

The misleading title of this post may suggest that I have an answer to this question beyond human stupidity. But I don’t – or maybe I am just tired and cranky?

Posted on by mklang

Snow!

Another trip to Stockholm. This time to meet with people from UR (utbildningsradion) public service. It was a good meeting and an interesting discussion on how public service television in Sweden can use Creative Commons licensing. After the meeting I had some time to kill so I walked around Stockholm and it started to snow. Finally! So far December has been dismally warm and wet so a little snow makes it feel more like Christmas, even if we will not get a white Christmas in Göteborg.

So now that I have seen snow I feel more disposed to the season – which is good considering I shall be buying the tree tomorrow… Everything else is already all in place (almost). Christmas in Sweden is pretty traditional: tree, presents and too much food. I am looking forward to it.

Posted on by mklang

Resistance Studies Network

For some time now I have been dropping (subtle?) hints about another project in my life. It’s now time to come clean admit what I am doing. Some university colleagues at the Dept. of Peace and Development Studies and at the History of Ideas and Theory of Science and I have formed the Resistance Studies Network at Göteborg University.

While the whole thing is in its infancy the idea is to develop the topic of resistance studies and eventually establish it as a legitimate field of research and as a subject in its own right. Resistance has been studied before but usually it is about technical resistance (ohm and stuff) or the Belgian resistance of WWII but the subject has not been studied as a topic of its own.

The idea is to find and define the concept of resistance. To attempt to understand the nature of resistance. When is resistance resistance? When is resistance legitimate? Resistance to what? The questions seem endless…

Anyway right now we have a web page, blog, wiki pages and a mailing list. Next term we start seminars and text discussions. This will be followed by publications and conferences. Ah, academia… So far there is a natural inclination for hands on “action research” so there may even be some prison time (not sure if this will help you get tenure…)

Posted on by mklang

Code v2 out now

When Professor Lessig published his book “The Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” in 1999 the book quickly became both a bestseller and a highly influential component in the discussion on the regulation of technology.

After the publication Professor Lessig set up a wiki about the book. The idea was to allow anyone who was interested to help to develop version 2 of The Code. That version is still accessible here. Lessig took the Wiki text December last year, and then added his own edits. Code v2 is the result. Now the work of compiling the new version of The Code has been completed and it is available for download here. The new text is also available in a Wiki.

Posted on by mklang

License Validity – again

TechnoLlama wrote about a Spanish Creative Commons case:

A Spanish court in Pontevedra has ruled in favour of the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) against a café named Direccion000. SGAE initiated action against the cafe to claim royalties for de public performance of music in the locale, while the owners claimed that they did not have to pay because they were only using â??free musicâ?? under Creative Commons licences.

The SGAE could show that the cafe was not entirely truthful in their claims. The music they were playing included that of members of the SGAE.

What is more interesting is that the court apparently commented on the CC licenses in the decision â??â?¦it is worth to point out that the document presented by the defendants-appellants as a licence for free use of music does not constitute anything other than a mere informative leaflet about its own content, lacking any form of signature, and therefore bereft of legal value whatsoeverâ??.

OK – let me come clean from the beginning: I am not a Spanish lawyer. But I find it incredibly hard to believe that the Spanish legal position on licenses & contracts is such that they need to be completed with the formality of the signature to be valid.

Additionally I would also like the court to explain what the value of a “informative leaflet” is under contract law.

OH NOT AGAIN… Where did these people go to law school?
The Creative Commons licensing system does not really require the status of a license to be able to survive. Under legal principles the fact that the creator has stated in an “informative leaflet” that she will not enforce her rights under copyright law is enough for me to follow the permissions and conditions stated in the Creative Commons documentation.

If I follow the documentation and the creator attempts to sue me for copyright violation (therefore  claiming that the Creative Commons is not a license) the courts would naturally understand my actions as being carried out with permission.

An analogy. Supposing a theme park which charges admission puts up a sign that admission on 1 January 2007 is free. If they (despite their previous idea) attempted to sue all visitors who did not pay admission on this date for trespassing the courts would hardly support the claims of the theme park.

Go and read:

Charles Fried Contract as Promise (We enforce contracts because they are promises â?? and we have a moral obligation to keep our promises).

Posted on by mklang

Cyberbalkanization

Sometimes the world seems more bizarre than usual. Nothing really big, just a bit like looking at a mirror from an angle… It’s the same, vaguely familiar space… and yet slightly different. Too much work has made me ignore the fun part of blogging. What is left is zipping rapidly through the news not really registering what is going on. This becomes a disjointed reality. It’s close, vaguely familiar and yet slightly unreal. Even explaining it all makes it seem stranger than it is.

Here are three examples of “news”

Swedish media is full of the news that we will soon (tonight) have our first Swedish astronaut. Christer Fuglesang is to be the first Swede in space (sounds like an episode of the Muppet Show). Actually it gets a bit strange since the Norwegians seem to be claiming him as well. Well wikipedia says he is one of ours so it must be right.

The Swedish tennis star Björn Borg has sold the rights to his name for 124 million kronor (18 MUSD) to Worldwide Brand Management. WBM has previously had the license to the brand and paid royalties to the Dutch company Fabulous Licensing, which has connections to the Borg family.

NASA announced plans Monday to begin building a permanent base on the moon by 2024, four years after the space agency starts sending crews of four astronauts there for weeklong exploratory missions. The base would probably be located near the lunar south pole and be staffed by rotating teams of international astronauts for up to six months at a time, according to NASA officials.

When I have less time I tend not to follow much “traditional” media (newspapers, radio & television). Then when I see these kinds of news items zipping past the horizon I get the feeling that I am not missing much.
In 2001 Cass Sunstein wrote about the dangers of Internet media in his book Republic.com (sample chapter). He argued that the Internet could weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon known as the theory of cyberbalkanization.

Posted on by mklang