For example, Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, one a philosopher, the other a computer scientist, presented a paper on the so-called “Freedom-Zero Problem” with the Free Software Definition: How can one claim that it is morally responsible to mandate the unrestricted access to and use of code even in cases where this will certainly lead to harm? For example, why doesn’t the GPL forbid Free Software from being used in nuclear weaponry, or for torturing other humans? This ethically charged issue reappeared in numerous conversations throughout the conference.

Chopra & Dexter have a blog and they have just published the book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. Read the introduction. This is how Steven Weber thinks about the book:

In Decoding Liberation, Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter recapture and extend a part of the conversation that will ultimately be much more important than business models, patent and copyright law, or total cost of ownership for a piece of software. What does the open source model offer to political, artistic, and scientific freedom, and thus to the human enterprise of creativity beyond the guts of a computing machine? Their book is an eloquent, thoughtful, adventurous, and exciting dive into what really matters about changing the rules of code.

I hope to have time to read the book one day.

Some picks from the program:

• The Freedom Zero Problem: Free Software and the Ethical Use of Software
  Samir Chopra & Scott Dexter
• Acting for the Best and Acting Legitimately: Challenges Facing the Stronger Claims of the Free Software Movement
  Jamie Dow
• The Free, Open Source Option as Ethic
  John Bork
• Open Source Philosophy and “Democratic Rationalization” in Africa
  Evaristus O Ekwueme
• The Missing Link: Computer Ethics and Formal Methods
  Darren Abramson & Lee Pike
• Panel: A Skeptical Look at Wikipedia
  Panelists: Tony Doyle, James Caufield, Don Fallis & Marc Meola
• Web 3.0 – Tools for Co-operation? Social Philosophical Remarks on the Desirable Possible Future Development of the Internet
  Wolfgang Hofkirchner

• “We have a copyright law that makes majority of our children criminals – this is not wise.
• The law must be changed to meet the people’s morals instead of following the needs of monopolies to make big profits.”

Perhaps we can see some influence of his son here – although Linus is very non-political.

However, I’m still working for the OSSI project (part-time). We study company participation in free/open source software companies. You can find our research reports on the site. Also worth mentioning is a chapter on Richard Stallman’s philosophy in the Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives that I wrote with Tere. I’m also a co-author in The Protestant ethic strikes back: Open source developers and the ethic of capitalism that appered in First Monday. We are also participating in the OSS2007 in Limerick, Ireland in June.

From now on, I might be writing less on free software and more and other topics, probably in Finnish. Those only interested in FS can follow that topic or subscribe to the corresponding feed.

Go read his interview with Richard Stallman. Some issues are always repeated in all Stallman interviews, so some of you may want to skip the usual talk about MIT, Symbolics, GNU and Open Source Initiative, but what I found interesting and novel here are his views on non-functional works.

Stallman is known to demand freedom for all software use, commercial or non-commercial. With works of art, he seems to have a slightly different opinion:

However, for some works of authorship and art, the issues are different. Music, for instance, is generally not a functional work, it is in the category of artistic and entertainment works. As far as this category is concerned I believe people should always have the freedom to non-commercially redistribute exact copies of the entire work. That is the minimum freedom that everyone must have for those kinds of works. (Emphasis added.)

This seems like he’s adjusted some of his views. Does Stallman now think that authors and publishers do have a moral right to their music, and therefore commercial distribution can be restricted to rights’ holders?

Stallman as although seen programs and literary works as different, requiring different definition of freedom. This is reflected in the GNU Free Documentation License that allows non-modifiable parts in documentation. Stallman believes in a kind of authorship that doesn’t exist in computer programs but exists in works of art, essays and scientific texts:

However, when it comes to scientific papers I don’t think people should have the freedom to publish modified versions; modified versions of someone else’s scientific article are not a contribution to society.

There is a controversy in the Debian project over the definition of freedom in literary works. The GNU Free Documentation License is seen as non-free by many developers (see draft position statement). The issue was cleared a bit in the General Resolution of February 2006 that decided that “GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free”. But there is still a disagreement about what freedom means for different kinds of works. Debian still does not accept any work that prohibits commercial distribution or modification.

I look forward to reading more interviews from Richard Poynder. Please note he is asking for donations. I haven’t made a Paypal donation before, but this time I felt like giving a few euros for such quality work.

For a software company, making a product free/open source software (FOSS) or participating in such a project is sometimes a wise business decision. However, for the effort to be succesful, the company must know how FOSS communities work and how they interact with companies. The OSSI project is an attempt to increase our understanding on the topic.

Karl Fogel has written a good practical guidebook from such a point of view. The book is
Producing Open Source Software. How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (O’Reilly 2005). The book is also available online under a Creative Commons license.

Fogel starts by describing how to start a new project effectively. Like Jamie Zawinski said, a FOSS license is not a magic pixie dust that will bring lots of developers to your project. For this to happen, the project must be attractive, it must be easy to start with and it must be promising. The developers don’t want project documentation, they want code. They don’t want management structure, they want screenshots. They want a free and open license. Unless the basic technical infrastructure is there, it is hard to have the project going.

After the infrastructure, he moves on to discuss project structures. The project can be a (benevolent) dictatorship, a skills-based meritocracy or some issues are decided by a vote. Because the structure is often informal, whether a company may affect the outcome of the project depends on the actual company developers working on the software. If the developers are skilled and receive respect from other community members, they will have a say on the future direction of the software.

Chapter five on money is particularily interesting. Fogel describes different ways of company participation and discusses the benefits and problems of paid developers in a volunteer community.

Other chapters give advice on communications, release management and how to attract and treat volunteers. Volunteers, after all, are essential. If the volunteers go, the project will, if not die, at least change dramatically. Chapter nine is on licenses and copyright ownership and assignment.

I think is the best practical guidebook to FOSS I’ve seen so far. I recommend you to take a look.

The process document gives us some idea of the changes that will be proposed. The Four Freedoms will be the cornerstones of the license and any suggestions will be evaluated against these basic values.

The GPL is a global license although based on the US copyright law. Copyright laws are globally quite similar because of treaties like the Berne convention, but there are local differences: moral rights, DRM, issues from contract law, etc. Because of all these differences, it is important that there is a careful review process.

The document describes the process for participation. Our research project will contribute to the discussion.

Frederick Noronha has now written a booklet with short articles and interviews covering many of the people and projects present at Asia Source. It is a useful resource for those interested in real-life projects utilising FLOSS in those areas.

A new book by author Phillipe Aigrain - “Cause commune : l’information entre bien commun et propriété” (or, in English, “Common Cause: Information Between Commons and Property”) has been released online in French under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Selected extracts in English are also available online. Editions Fayard may be one of the first major mainstream French-speaking publishers to facilitate Creative Commons licenses. Let’s hope it serves as an example to open up more French-speaking (and other) content by mainstream publishers for freedom of use.

The book looks like an interesting foray into the politics of the “information age”. I wish somebody will translate it. Unfortunately, translations are forbidden by the license.

P.S. Just noticed that the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit has a
blog covering many interesting topics, including open source.

The report

is targeted at governments that are investigating whether and how they can integrate FOSS into their strategies for social and economic development. It provides a broad overview of how FOSS fits into national ICT policy-making, outlines the areas where governments can take policy decision related to FOSS as well as some of the possible approaches, and lists activities related to FOSS policy from across Africa. It recommends an approach to FOSS policy-making linked to national development goals and discusses some example development goals and how FOSS policies could address them.

The report has an overview of country policies and a good overview of effects of FOSS on development.

P.S. Restaurant Lehtoranta threatens to sue for a critique published on the net. The demand is just silly. Luckily the person being sued is a lawyer and an activist of Electronic Frontier Finland.

The WIPO Online Forum is designed to enable and encourage an open debate on issues related to intellectual property in the information society, and in light of the goals of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

I hope the input will be taken into account. Next part of the WSIS process will take place in
Tunis, from 16 to 18 November 2005.

Anonymoys reader makes a good remark in his comment about the Nokias gesture.

“That is, since they are publishing the kernel source (and applications) covered under the GPL, they can’t impose additional conditions — such as keeping current on patent royalties — on the use of that code. In fact, their obligations extend beyond their announcement. If I extract code from the kernel and put it in my program, they can’t enforce patents on that either.”

GPL does that. Nokia had to make the announcement. They distribute Linux hence any of their patents must be available to use with Linux under GPL.

Digital systems are fundamental architectural components of the information society. Therefore it is silly that we need such a strong legalistic approach. Folks on the debian-legal mailing list have spent hours and hours making interpretations on different software licenses. The interpretations are very precise and good but I hope there wasn’t such need. But we’re forced to have such conversations.

Assistant professor Lucie Guibault said that programmers should more carefully mark their copyrights in GPL programs. Otherwise the court might be confused on who is the copyright holder: the FSF, who wrote the license, or somebody else?

The article received strong criticism such as

This “lawyer” is a blithering idiot. The GPL FAQ (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-howto.html) explicitly tells you to put your own copyright notice on any GPL’d source.

Maybe the commentor is right, but how many programmers really add their copyright notices? And how many of us who modify a GPL’d program follow this requirement (2 a):

a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

If Linux kernel contributors actually followed this rule, each of the 15 000 files in the kernel source would have a long changelog at the beginning of the file.

With other infrastructure, we don’t need to negotiate on whether I’m allowed to walk on a public road or what I may use may the electricity for. Free software is a wonderful thing but the forced legalism is a curse.

P.S. A nice paper on trivial software patents.

I think this means about 300 people, but it seems the Finnish government is slowly moving to free solutions.

The announcement in Finnish

The aforesaid non-assertion shall extend to any future Linux Kernel to the extent that Nokia does not declare any new functionality embodied in such Linux Kernel to be outside the scope of this Patent Statement. Nokia shall issue such declaration through its website no later than one hundred and twenty (120) days after the official release of such Linux Kernel. (Emphasis added.)

You’re allowed to use my patents - unless I tell you not to. A trap is also included: because you’re only allowed to use those patents in the official kernel, if such code is copied to any other software (say *BSD), the patent license doesn’t apply anymore.

In other news, Nokia announced a Linux-based device.

This is important because it is only by escaping necessity (i.e. the constant requirement to produce things we need) that we can begin to communicate and become human as political animals. For Arendt, Work is a prerequisite for the possibility of Action – the realm of great deeds and great words.

Berry argues (like Marxists and the critical theory before him) that in today’s society, we’re all caught in a spiral of laboring and consuming and always alienated from the product of our work. Free software is promising in this respect because the products of free software activities are work - something that lasts - and also commons, i.e. something everybody has access to.

Free software certainly has liberating potential but what makes hacking possible, economically? Free software might turn labor into work, but at whose expence? While we build an information society here in the North, we’re at the same time “outsourcing” the labor into the South in the form of production of food, clothing and electronics. And often on not so fair terms.

Interestingly enough the Creative Commons people try to have licenses translated and valid in each of the countries. I really don’t know how this can (and if it will) cause problems some time in the future… Maybe the reason for this different strategies is because of the different origin of the main members of these communities (Stallman as a programmer and Lessig et al. as lawyers).

Taking a look at some of the international CC licenses, it seems careful work has been done in adapting the license to the local jurisdiction but I believe that just translating/localizing the license risks creating loop holes that didn’t exist in the original. Moral rights could be one. I see moral rights more as a potential loophole could could be used by the copyright holder to prevent some use of the software than a problem of protection.

Take Zynaddsubfx for instance. The author has licensed his program under the GPL but has an extra wish: “Please don’t use this program to make music that is against God and Jesus Christ. Realize that the only way to the Salvation is Jesus Christ. Please don’t lose this chance and don’t make others to lose it!”

What if somebody took Zynaddsubfx and turned it into a (GPL-licensed) program called Satanic Synthesizer that was designed to create death metal type of music? Would this be a breach of the original author’s moral rights? Could the author sue based on his moral rights, although there was no GPL infringement?

Lessig has admitted that “In many jurisdictions that protect moral rights, you can’t just automatically give away the moral right, without knowing something about how, or in what context, the work is to be used. For those jurisdictions then, a Creative Commons-like mechanism just wouldn’t work.” He goes on saying that CC wasn’t created for these jurisdictions.

With regard to Stallman vs. Lessig I think it is more about their ideological background. Lessig seems to be constitutionalist whose argument is based on the idea of individuals’ rights, freedom of speech etc. while Stallman is more a communitarianian/anarchist type for whom voluntary co-operation and non-hierarchical society are primary goals.