Coffee|Code : Dan Scott - FSOSS

Why I donated to the Software Freedom Conservancy

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:15:23 -0500

A few days ago I made a small donation to the Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered in the United States. There are many organizations to which I could have donated, and indeed Lynn and I have donated to a number of charities again this year, but I felt it was important to direct some funds to the Conservancy for a number of reasons - which I will attempt to describe and hopefully convince you as well.

First, for those who know that the Evergreen open source integrated library system is a member project of the Conservancy and the the project on which I invest much of my professional and person time, an obvious question might be: "Why didn't you just donate to Evergreen?". Donating to Evergreen does result in a small percentage of those funds being directed to the Conservancy. Currently, Evergreen directs 5% of its income to the Conservancy, but I feel that even with $20,000 passing through the project's hands for the purposes of the 2012 Evergreen conference, that $1,000 that goes to the Conservancy is far below the value our project has received in return in the form of Conservancy services.

One of those services is the provision of a trusted third-party home for project assets such as the aforementioned finances, but also including domain names, trademarks, logos, and (if desired) copyright. While distributed ownership of these assets is not a problem for projects when everything is going fine, personal disputes, a change of business strategy, or new ownership of a contributing company can lead to severe difficulties for a project. Evergreen's sister project, Koha, found itself forced to change its domain name and fight trademark battles over its very name when one company adopted an aggressive business strategy.

Another service from which Evergreen has thus far derived great benefit is access to legal counsel familiar with software freedom issues. In September the Conservancy added Tony Sebro as General Counsel to offer basic legal assistance to its member projects. The Conservancy was most recently involved in a discussion about Evergreen documentation licensing that evolved from an unfortunately adversarial position to, shortly after the Conservancy became involved, a mutually satisfactory agreement. I believe this result was due not only to Conservancy's legal expertise and familiarity with the specific licenses in question and the general mechanism of granting licenses, but also with their ability to understand the goals of the project and its participants in helping to guide all parties to their desired goals.

The Conservancy also has a wealth of experience to draw upon to offer guidance expertise on many matters that free software projects have in common, but which each project tends to rediscover on its own. For example, the Evergreen project has been able to run conferences on an annual basis for the past three years, but has historically relied on Equinox's willingess to assume the financial risks when signing venue contracts. This year, due to the positive results of the previous conferences, the Conservancy was able to provide the deposit for the Evergreen 2012 conference in Indiana. While personally I deeply appreciate the role that Equinox has played in helping to build such a core part of our community experience, it is an important step for our project that the Conservancy be able to assume this role.

In addition, the Conservancy's experience with various conference management packages and the payment fees associated with online financial services such as Google Checkout and PayPal provided some important guidance early on in the Evergreen conference 2012 planning process. That advice probably paid for itself!

I expect that the Evergreen project will continue to benefit from our membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy as we work towards a mechanism for electing members of the Evergreen Oversight Board and continue growing and evolving the project. The $1,000 or so that the Conservancy has earned as a result of the 5% of revenue that Evergreen directs its way is far below the value that we have derived from our relationship thus far, and that is why I have chosen to donate to the Conservancy again this year.

P.S. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, donations to the Conservancy are tax-deductible for American citizens. As a Canadian, this particular benefit does not apply to me - however, the rest of the benefits that the Conservancy provides to free software projects are international in scope and deserve to be supported.

Thoughts on making Android more free-as-in-freedom

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:15:44 -0400

This conversation on identi.ca has prompted me to publish the rough notes I had prepared for a proposed discussion on making the Android operating system experience more free-as-in-freedom at the Google I/O 2010 Conference Bootcamp "unconference". Unfortunately, my proposal was not one of the top vote-getters (it missed the cut by two votes), so we didn't get to have the discussion there, even though I'm sure we would have had an interesting discussion. But perhaps there's something worthwhile in the roughly formed thoughts that follow...

Making Android more "Free as in Freedom"

What do I mean?

Not "zero cost", but:
- Free to run for any purpose
- Free to study the source (a critical means of learning how to build better applications)
- Free to redistribute verbatim copies
- Free to modify the source and redistribute the modified version
Android the operating system may be FaiF, but Android the distribution is not

We have opportunities to win interesting development investments on Android over proprietary platforms; see the Wockets - open source effort to create very low cost motion measurement devices for hobbyists, researchers, and developers interesting in creating software and devices that measure or respond to movement that is developing with Windows Mobile first, and Android second. It's a shame to see an "open" research project being built on a closed base, but there might be some clues in these researchers' rationale that suggest ways that the freedom of Android could be improved.

Drivers (camera, GPS, etc) bundled as binary blobs are a problem for auditing, bug fixing, innovating
Current phones get applications delivered out of the box:
- that sometimes suck (GTalk - no way of changing the Google account it uses)
- that you won't use and don't want (Facebook!)
- that you might not trust (this is your phone, +++)
- that you can't legally redistribute (Market?)
- that you can't remove (my precious space!) without installing a new firmware image
Can be hard to determine what apps are even free software; we might need to combine these multiple, partially overlapping, sometimes contradictory sources:
and the Android Market and SlideMe Market don't enable filtering by license
Opportunities abound for new Free-as-in-Freedom applications to gain a significant foothold:
- No Skype = space for LinPhone / SipDroid to move in (given a quality contact mechanism)
- No good multi-protocol IM client (libpurple via NDK?)
- Boost the Replicant project
It's in our best interests as Android users and developers to have a free platform - we developers can build on each others work to create a better user experience, rather than starting from scratch every time in our own jealously protected niches.

Changing the default run level in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:06:21 -0500

Dear Dan:

You felt pretty pleased with yourself for jumping on the latest Ubuntu release back in the alpha stages on your virtual machine, then having it running on your laptop and Lynn's Asus EEE 701 the day after the final release came out.

But did you ever have to change the default runlevel? NO, you didn't. You didn't anticipate that you would want to convert that alpha-6 server into a workstation. Nice thinking, hero. And now that you've figured it out, you're going to remind yourself that the place to change it is in /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf. You might want to look at the env DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL setting. Oh sure, you could manually create an old-school /etc/inittab file, and it would get picked up from there. But, you know, throwing away a grand old tradition like that really feels liberating, doesn't it?

So now you know. Don't forget, okay? But if you do, you might just find yourself coming back here.

Evergreen: deOSSification of library software

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:45:16 -0400

In a few minutes I'll be giving a talk with John Fink at the Free Software Open Source Symposium at Seneca College on Evergreen: an enterprise-strength OSS solution for library ossification. I'm jazzed!

Here are the slides: (ODP format) (PDF format).