license

GPLv3 to launch on Friday

The Free Software Foundation have announced that version 3 of the GPL will be officially launched on Friday. Here is the announcement.

On Friday, June 29, at 12 noon (EDT), the Free Software Foundation will officially release the GNU GPL version 3. Please join us in celebration as we bring to a close eighteen months of public outreach and comment, in revision of the world’s most popular free software license.

Beyond the creation of an improved license, the process of drafting version 3 has helped highlight vital issues for the community of free software users. This is a moment to thank the thousands who participated by commenting on the license, and those that represented stakeholders through the GPLv3 committee process.

Now with the release of GPLv3, we will see new defenses extended to free software. These defenses will continue the long history of fighting all efforts to make free software proprietary.

Please join us as we stream live footage of Richard Stallman announcing GPLv3 from Noon (EDT) at www.fsf.org.

If you are in the Boston area you can also join us at the FSF offices from 11:30am. Please let us know at <info@fsf.org> if you would like to attend.

Posted on by mklang

Make Internet TV

Sure going to the big events and meeting the big speakers is really cool. But in most cases we have read the opinions and ideas of the big speakers. The best thing about conferences, workshops and meetings is the serendipitous meetings. Today at breakfast I was introduced to someone from makeinternettv.org (Make Internet TV).

This is a great outreach site which provides information about how to use technology to shoot videos and to publish them online. The site is organised in an informative and attractive six point layout:

  1. Equip
  2. Shoot
  3. Edit
  4. License
  5. Publish
  6. Promote

In addition to this the site also has a great wiki.

This site strives to help people to create their own videos and find their audiences through the Internet. Naturally this is a valuable store of information for individuals but I see this as an important tool for activists attempting to spread their message to a wider audience.

Most activists are focused on their issues and sometimes even consider marketing (beyond leaflets) to be a suspicious activity. With sites such as these activist groups will be enabled to create attractive information and supply it to the world.

Posted on by mklang

Theories, Movement & Collected Stories

James Boyle has just given an excellent presentation on what the environmental movement did right. He points to the right mix of theory, movements and the collection of stories in the creation of the concept of the environment. The environment as a concept did not exist prior to its creation, establishment and acceptance in the wider public.

What he means is that the movement to protect public domain and develop creative commons requires more than the creation of licenses and preaching to the choir. The theory is required as a base but the broader public does not want to read theory. Therefore what is required is a movement of people to enable the transfer of dry theory in the communication to the public.

How should this be done? Well the environmental movement added a collection of stories. Individual examples of environmental damage. Burning streams, smog cities, nuclear waste and silent springs. The collection of stories have become established and iconic. They are established in the mental image of the public to such a degree that protection of the environment becomes an obvious step.

So, in order to establish the protection of the public domain, open access and creative commons the organisations working with these issues should look at the strategies of the environmental movement.

Posted on by mklang

iSummit begins

Today is the first day of the iSummit and we begin with the legal day with presentations by Catharina Maracke, Heather Ford, Paul Keller, Lucie Guibault and Mike Linksvayer.

The agenda is the version 3.o, international law and statistics on license use so it should be very exiting and I am looking forward to the presentations and discussions.

Naturally there are lots of other people here blogging – amongst them is TechnoLlama

Posted on by mklang

Technology doesn't lie

Via Bruce Schneier I read an article from the BBC about the growth of car cloning in the UK. This is basically when someone mimics the number plate of another car to avoid being fined for speeding or avoiding the congestion charges.

What struck me was the interesting part of the story

Tony Bullock’s car was cloned even though his plates were not physically stolen, and he was threatened with prosecution after “his” car was repeatedly caught speeding in Leicester.

He said: “It was horrendous. You are guilty until you can prove you’re not. It’s the first time that I’ve thought that English law is on its head.”

Here is the problem. Technology does not lie and unfortunately, we tend to believe, that technology is infallible.

The problem is that the technology in question does not take into account that the license plate may be cloned and therefore the socio-technical system (i.e. the stakeholders involved in the system) need to be aware that the technology may create false positives.

Unfortunately in this case an unfair burden of proof is placed on the clone victim to prove that neither she/he nor her/his car were involved in the illegal activities.

Naturally the most powerful actors in this scenario is the legal system which for some reason prefers to believe in the convenient fiction that the technology is correct.

Posted on by mklang

Affero General Public License

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released the first discussion draft of the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL). This new license is based on version 3 of the GNU GPL. It has a new term to ensure that users who interact with the software over a network can receive the source for that program.

The original Affero GPL was intended to guarantee that everyone could receive the source for web applications that they used, so the software could always be shared and improved. The corresponding provision in the GNU AGPL applies this same principle to all software that interacts with users through a network, but doesn’t impose additional requirements when the same code is used for other purposes. Since the GNU AGPL is based on version 3 of the GNU GPL, it will also provide improved internationalization, compatibility with the Apache License, and other
benefits.

As with its other licenses, the FSF will hear feedback on the draft from the public before releasing the final version of the license. The additional provision is in the first paragraph of section 13. We ask that comments not specific to the GNU AGPL be submitted to the latest draft of GPLv3. You can learn more about this draft on the GPLv3 portal at <http://gplv3.fsf.org/agplv3-dd1-guide.html>.

Posted on by mklang

Harvard Thesis Repository

With so many discussions on Free Culture, Open Access and the problems connected with making academic publishing available outside academia it is surprising how few good places there are to find thesis’ online.

This is why I was happy when Peter Murray-Rust pointed me towards the Harvard College Thesis Repository (a project of Harvard College Free Culture).

Here Harvard students make their senior theses accessible to the world, for the advancement of scholarship and the widening of open access to academic research.

Too many academics still permit publishers to restrict access to their work, needlessly limitingâ??cutting in half, or worseâ??readership, research impact, and research productivity. For more background, check out our op-ed article in The Harvard Crimson.

If you’ve written a thesis in Harvard College, you’re invited to take a step toward open access right here, by uploading your thesis for the world to read. (If you’re heading for an academic career, this can even be a purely selfish moveâ??a first taste of the greater readership and greater impact that comes with open access.)
If you’re interested in what the students at (ahem) the finest university in the world have to say at the culmination of their undergraduate careers, look around.

The FAQ explains much of the process. It is also good to see that they are applying Creative Commons Attribution License

Q. What permissions do I have to grant to free my thesis?

A. To make sure your thesis is always available for scholars to build on, we ask that you give everyone permission to do the things you’d want to be able to do with a scholarly work you liked: download the work, read it, keep copies, share it with other people, and adapt it into fresh works. The specific legal permission we ask for is the Creative Commons Attribution License, the same one required by the world’s leading biology journal PLoS Biology and the other journals of the Public Library of Science.

My only (small) complaint is that I wish the repository was clearer in showing the license terms for their content. I only found it in the faq. Normally I would not bother reading the faq. To increase the usability of the site the terms should be on the download page and preferably on the essay file.
Despite this I think this is an excellent initiative and I would hope that the fact that Harvard has taken a step such as this would work as an incentive for other universities to follow suite.

Posted on by mklang

Academy Award Film under CC

A Story of Healing a film from 1997 has just been re-released under a Creative Commons license. This makes it the first academy award winning film to be released under the Creative Commons license.

About the film from IMDB:

In January, 1997, a team of five nurses, four anesthesiologists, and three plastic surgeons arrive in Vietnam from the United States for two weeks’ of volunteer work. They operate on 110 children who have various birth defects and injuries. They also talk to the film crew about why they’ve made this trip and what it means to them. We watch them work, and we see the children, their families, and their surroundings in the Mekong Delta. Over the closing credits, Dionne Warwick sings Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

To view A Story of Healing visit the Interplast website. The film is also downloadable from blip.tv, and wherever you share it!

(via Creative Commons blog)

Posted on by mklang

Capitalism 3.0

Are you drowning in books to be read? Sometimes I think that I am. Then while I am in the middle of the deep end of the pool, instead of a life buoy, another book comes skimming across the water. This time it was Peter Barnes’ book Capitalism 3.0 which is available both as in a Pdf file (licensed under Creative Commons naturally) and in the more comfortable paper variety.

After scanning through the pdf I ordered the book. Barnes’ argument is based on the idea that capitalism is flawed and needs to take the Commons into consideration. He takes a broad view of the commons which includes headings such as nature, community and culture. Based upon this view he attempts to draw together the diversity of our commons and connect it to the capitalist approach to business.

 

 The book is critical of the accesses of old capitalism (which Barnes calls Capitalism 2.0). But he is also a bit too positive to what capitalism has done well – but a good book must be one that you disagree with in parts. Barnes attempts to show that Capitalism 3.0 has a chance of alleviating some of the access of capitalism 2.0 and he ends his book on a positive note:

Capitalism 2.0 had its moments. It defeated communism, leveled national boundaries to trade, and brought material abundance never seen before. But its triumph was accompanied by huge unpaid bills, debts that are now coming due. Perhaps we ought to think of ourselves as a company in bankruptcy. We canâ??t pay all of our bills, but we can pay some, especially if we stretch the payments out. In some cases, we can compensate debt holders with equity. In any event, we need to reorganize our economy so, in the future, we donâ??t run up the same debts again. Thatâ??s what
Capitalism 3.0 would do.

But Capitalism 3.0 also has a higher purpose: to help both capitalism and the human species achieve their full potential. To do that, our economic machine must stop destroying the commons and start protecting it. At the same time, it must lift the bottom 95 percent of humans at a faster rate than it raises the top 5 percent. This requires more than compassionate rhetoric, or a few bandages around the edges. It requires an upgrade of our operating system.

You can either buy a copy of the book or, if you prefer it, download it from the Capitalism 3.0 website.

Posted on by mklang

Bad Attitude

The blog Bad Vista puts a nice perspective on the difference in attitude between free and proprietary software:

As the GPL preamble says:

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users.

In contrast, a typical Microsoft Vista EULA says:

The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways.

See the difference in attitude?

Posted on by mklang