 Thank you all for coming. I realize I'm against Matthew Garrett, which I would be at his talk if I weren't required to be here to speak, so thank you all for choosing me over Matthew's talk. Matthew's talk will probably be much more technical than mine. I'm going to talk about things that my mother told me not to talk about. So I grew up in a strange part of the United States, which most of us who grew up there were called the Mid-Atlantic Region. It has this interesting aspect, hello, Mid-Atlantic Region. It has this strange aspect, a little bit about US history. We had the Civil War in the 1800s and that was sort of the battleground. I spent every young school trip going to the various battlegrounds of the Civil War because they were all within driving distance of where I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. But it had the weird aspect in the century that followed that you don't know whether you live in the south or the north. When I moved up to New York, people think I'm from the south because I'm from Maryland and no southerner in the US in the right mind would consider Maryland the south. So I have this, I think it's pretty much true. Deb, this agrees with me. You can talk. This is my point exactly, Deb. But there is a certain southern sensibility in Maryland where I grew up. And my mother gave me very southern motherly advice that in polite company, you're not supposed to discuss religion and you're not supposed to discuss politics. You might, since most of you in this room know me, that I was a somewhat rebellious child. So I never really thought this advice made much sense. In particular, I've discovered as I've gotten older that anything worth doing in life is just wrought with politics. There's always politics. And the reason I think this is true is because in anything that's important, reasonable people of sound mind and with good ideas can disagree on political strategy on policy matters. And any time you have legitimate disagreements on policy in a society, you're going to have politics. What I've discovered most in 25 years in free software is that our political system is very, very difficult to navigate. The main reason is, I think, and I'm not going to talk too much about this point, but I want to have at least made it, that most of the politics are played by proxy. My colleague Karen Sandler who works with me as executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is my employer, whom by the way I'm not speaking on behalf of, these are my own opinions, not necessarily the opinions of my employer. She asked me to say that 15 minutes ago, so I'm saying it. Sorry. I agree with that, but she didn't ask me to change the brand. She just told me to say that. I'm not used to it. So I hired Karen to have my old job. Yeah, indeed it is. Indeed it is. So I hired Karen to have my job, which made her my boss. And so now when she tells me these things I try, I have to do them because she's my boss. And I don't understand the why. I can still put the logo on, but I have to say that, but I'm saying that. So I've done my job. Please tell Karen that I disclaimed that these were not necessary with the views of my employer, although my employer probably shares a few of them, at least. And I'm on the board of directors of my employer, etc. So at least one board member. So at least one board member agrees with me. So but the interesting thing is that most people don't get into this depth of discussion of my affiliations. I also happen to be on the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation, which probably agrees more with these views than my current employer. But what you find in the Free Software community is people having these kinds of discussions without disclosing all these affiliations and all the political way that they're working. It is very common in a Free Software project for people to either consciously or subconsciously advocating their views of their employer from their project email address on the project mailing list. I think if you look at the whole upstart system thing that was a multi-year complex political system, there was a lot of that going on and that's just one of many examples. So I think that's why our politics are so stuffed, but I don't want to talk too much about that because I want to talk about the politics of copy left. I'm going to start by giving, this was the slide that made her make sure that I give you the disclaimer, by the way. I think there's a lot of things in Free Software that are beliefs. They aren't necessarily facts. They're things that I believe. These are the things that I believe are correct about Free Software. I can't prove them to you as a mathematical truth, but there is a logic to them and there's logical reasons I believe them, but I think it's important to distinguish what somebody believes versus what they can prove factually in kind of a mathematical sense. My experiences have taught me that the world is a bad place unless everyone has the right to copy, share, modify, and redistribute all their software. In other words, I believe that software freedom should be universal and that it is a fundamental analogy in the book Human Right. I can't prove that it has to be, but I believe it's true. I also believe that as a strategic matter, we should use the license of the software as a way to advance the idea of that software freedom, which basically means I believe strong copy left is an extremely important strategy for the future of software freedom. I still believe, however, that the developers have the right to choose the license for the works that they have copyrights on. Now, this doesn't mean I believe in the Tim O'Reilly Freedom Zero thing that the most important freedom is the freedom to choose a license, but I do believe that developers should have a say in how their code gets licensed. That's not to say that I somehow believe that you copy left shouldn't exist because sometimes people will say, well, copy left forces you to pick the copy left license. Well, it doesn't because you're never required to contribute to a copy lefted project. So you can always choose not to contribute, in which case you can go write your own stuff under whatever license you choose. In fact, you can even give a patch to a copy left project under a non copy lefted license. It won't matter that much because it'll get incorporated and the whole will be copy lefted. But you still have the right to choose what your specific copy rights are licensed, and I think each developer should be making that decision. Now, the fact is these are my moral beliefs. Someone mentioned in Karen's talk the issue of is free software like a religion. They're akin to religious beliefs to some extent in the sense that I can't prove them as factual. Oh, thank you here. But the thing I really want to point out is the people who believe fundamentally that proprietary software, the right to proprietary software is an inalienable right, that too is a moral belief for them. It's not the case that either state of software is endowed by nature. We've created systems that make both of these types of software exist in the world today, and the reason we have those systems is because somebody had a moral belief of one type, somebody else had a moral belief of another, and they built systems to create them. In fact, as a copy left advocate, I'm not objecting to the idea of having debate. Should copy left exist? Is it a good strategy? Do we need that strategy anymore? I have those debates all the time. I was having a very long one last night, but I admit to a certain amount of annoyance that I feel myself over the last five years or so having to continually defend copy left's mere existence. Oh, I got it from the audience. I'm old, folks. I mean, I'm not that old. I'm older than most of you, though. So I was around that already a free software activist when various events happened, and I was really appreciative of Bob Young's keynote because he gave us some history, because he was around, he's older than me even, which means he's really old, and was around during that time, during this time when various things were happening in the 90s, and this Oskan 2001 is kind of the culmination of what happened in the 90s with free software. Microsoft discovered us that we were a threat, that software freedom was a threat to Microsoft's business model, and it was a time when Microsoft was an easy enemy. It was similar to the Cold War, where there was a right and a wrong, and we had a political environment where there was one major enemy and we were working against it. We don't live in that political environment anymore, but we did at the time. So in the early 2000, Microsoft discovered they had to worry about us. So they started to attack us, and they were smart. I think this people love to talk about how bad Microsoft software was strictly back then, and they still do, but they were smart politically, and I think most people didn't realize how smart they were being. They studied free software. They looked for fault lines. They found a big one, which was the divide between copy left and non-copy left. And through the help of their buddy Tim O'Reilly, who said, well, I love to be the center of attention, the center of everything. I'm going to create this thing and make it big. And there's an article you should be called The Meme Hustler about Tim O'Reilly. I think it's the best description of Tim O'Reilly's role in free software that I've ever read. He designs this thing that's going to be the great debate, but he basically stacks the deck. He doesn't invite anybody to take the position about copy left. Knowing full well that Microsoft's goal is to say free software is great as long as you don't use copy left license. They put next to Craig Mundy up there on the stage, Brian Bellendorf, who is from the Apache Software Foundation. And I was at the SOSCon running around being my political self, trying to figure out what we were going to do about this debate. We were doing protests to try and say that there was a chair empty and all this kind of stuff. But in the meanwhile, in the back channel politics, I sit down with Brian and say, what are you going to do tomorrow? Because none of us are going to be on the stage. He said to me, I'm really upset about that. And here's why. Because if we let Microsoft say that copy left is bad and if I agree with that, I'm suddenly the most radical person on the stage. And the Apache Software Foundation, he said to me, should not be radical. I want to be the moderate. I can't be the moderate if copy left in FSF and that kind of politics is not there. It forces the political spectrum all the way to me to be the most radical. So I'm going to defend copy left up there. And I said, great. So he gets up there and he says, as Craig Mundy gets into a speech about how we love open source, of course already calling it that. Oh, we love open source of Microsoft. As long as you choose one of these Apache licenses or BSD, these are great licenses, you should be picking those. Brian says, well, copy left is a very important part of our community. We need some code to be copy lefted. That was wonderful that Brian did that. I thanked him every time I've seen him since then. But I don't think the ASF would do that today for us. When I was in high school, I started the environmental club. I was very concerned that there was no recycling. Again, I'm old. I was in high school in the mid 80s. High school is sort of the secondary education for the, I don't know what you call it in New Zealand, 14 to 17. High school. Okay. I don't assume that my terminology, I'm not, I try my best not to be a U.S. imperialist, right, to assume that the terms I use for things are the terms everybody else in the world uses. Like, I mean, a lot of U.S. Americans assume that. I try not to. I just got lucky on that one. Now I look dumb. But thanks. So in high school, I start the environmental club, which I got beat up for. I mean, I suppose it doesn't surprise anyone that I got beat up in high school. It says a lot about my sort of political way of operating. But what we used to do is we had to go around and put these cardboard boxes, like leftover cardboard boxes in each room and collect them every Friday. Eventually we had this giant pile of paper, recyclable paper, that we didn't know where to take because we couldn't find anywhere in Baltimore that would take mixed paper in the mid-1980s. So about three months later after we had this giant pile, we finally found somewhere and we got them to come and pick it up. But these days, I come to a conference like this, there's, there's rubbish bins. I say I'm using the right word. And there's recycling bins next to each other. And I don't think you would find, in most places, in the industrialized world, a school that doesn't recycle their mixed paper. It's generally just accepted that it has to be done these days, where in the 80s people who tried to do it got beat up. So that's progress, at least on the surface. The thing that happens in politics, though, is as a cause becomes integrated with the society, you face co-option. So Conservancy is 100% telecommute organization these days, but initially we had this co-working facility we rented from. It's called Green Desk. And their marketing was that they were going to do things good for the environment, their website said they're going to put solar panels on the roof and they recycled and used sustainable products and everything, and all this sort of thing. Now I discover, when I get there, that they don't actually even recycle the paper. They had separate bins, and I would get there early because I get up early in the morning these days because I'm old, and I go and I see the woman come through to collect the trash and she picks up all the bins and throws them into the same trash bin. And I asked her, and I said where does the recycling go? She goes, I don't know. So I asked the building manager, and he said, oh yeah, we sorted out later downstairs again. So the argument is they collected all into one big bag and then somebody has the job of pulling the paper back out later on. And the funniest part was this wasn't the first time I worked in an office where they told me that. I'd been told that in New York City before in an office that had separate bins that the person who collected the trash threw them all into one bin and didn't recycle them. And I've found multiple times now that I'm the only one who actually cares about this problem. And what I end up doing is taking my own paper home to my own curbside recycling at home, which probably in fact doesn't actually get recycled either, but I feel better about it because I feel like I've at least tried to avoid the system I know is broken for the system I suspect could also be broken. And when I raise it as an issue, people just say, oh what are you going to do? Oh this is how the world is, right? So, but the appearance of doing the right thing eventually becomes more important than doing the right thing. Once you reach that point where people start to think something's pretty good and ultimately just saying you're doing it or saying you're doing something good becomes enough. It's another way to just take the exploitable parts of whatever movement there is because any movement worth its all, any movement that has value, there's some kernel of really good idea underneath it eventually the co-opters find this out, figure this out and say well what parts can I exploit? What parts do I not like? I'll use the exploitable ones, leave the rest and we're left with open washing. That's the co-option term that we've coined in a free software community about or interesting the open source community about what it means to be co-opting. Now the funny part is, like my friend Richard Stallman, I believe that open source is the open washing altogether. Karen doesn't so agree with me but that's okay. So I think that that's something that relates a lot to this issue of whether copy left is popular, copy left is perceived. I also still think it's true that businesses prefer proprietary software generally. There are a few exceptions but most large companies do. People assume that you can make more money with proprietary software than you can with free software or at least you can make it easier. It's quicker and I don't even want to debate whether that's true or not. I'm not even sure and it's immaterial because people believe it and believing it makes it so and therefore most companies try to keep proprietary what they can keep proprietary. They only make something free software if it really is in their interest for some other strategic reason but all things being equal they'd rather make it proprietary. And from the point of view of what for-profit businesses are supposed to do which is especially public ones deliver value to shareholders keeping your options open is on the surface better for that goal. It's just a good business decision to have the option to keep something proprietary and then you also have the back end possibility of liberating it later and getting a bunch of great press for that. So as a for-profit matter I can see the logic of it even if I don't agree with it as a policy argument. Now Tim O'Reilly's arguments about why open source is better all bugs are shallow with all the eyes and collaboration breeds better software all those arguments still apply and as we see companies that are mostly proprietary software companies are partially proprietary software companies do upstream code when it behooves them they do contribute to free software projects when they can find a business reason to do so and when they don't find a business reason to do so they don't get involved. That's the world we live in today. Now this story is a few years old but it's still the zeitgeist I believe. Twelve years after that Brian Bohnberg saying I think copy left should exist and is important I go to another Oskan keynote I should really stop going to Oskan that's really the story but but you know but yeah I like being upset I like to have something to shake my fist at right I mean so that's you know Oskan um so I see in 2013 Tom Preston Warner from github get on the stage he's the guy who wrote this famous blog post you should open source almost everything keep the secret sauce private what's that okay no please don't give it more linkage I hope you were criticizing it yeah yeah yeah it's but the interesting right indeed but the interesting thing about Mr. Preston Warner's comments is that he's built his company around a gpl project in fact he's built his company around a gpl project to member of the software freedom conservancy in fact the software freedom conservancy was nice enough to give him a trademark license to call himself github because he was promoting git project generally and that's the rules that the git project decided they wanted to make for their trademark but he still stands up on the stage and says the gpl is a terrible license and restrict to the restrictives and you shouldn't use it go watch the video that's a direct quote now now what I'm wondering is is he saying git's license was so restrictive he wasn't able to build a business around it that seems strange so I'm still waiting for the announcement that git will abandon gpl version control systems and it can can't switch to mercurial because that's gpl too so I guess svn hub now because there's a non-copylefted version control system that they could build their business around so I assume that's what he's going to do but I haven't seen the announcement yet now this position is incredibly self-serving unbelievably so and I'm surprised that people don't see it it really gets my goats that people don't stand up and say this is you're just saying this because it's best for your business if you have all your options open and can prioritize code when you want to and you've even found a way to make a bunch of money off of a copylefted program so how is it exactly is the gpl so restrictive no one's asking him that except for me it seems meanwhile an organization that used to be willing to say that copyleft was pretty good doesn't really say that anymore this is directly from the apaches website these days this is what the apaches offer foundation today says about copyleft I have begun over time to wonder why am I still being nice to the apaches offer foundation I tend to say hey you have your choice in free software licenses I hope you choose a copylefted license but if you would prefer to choose a non-copylefted one please feel free it's still free software all of that I still believe but on the other hand I when I read things like this start to feel maybe I should be saying no you shouldn't use a permissive license it's a mistake choose a copylefted license instead you really really should and I'm starting to change my rhetoric to that because the other side is happy to attack and so I think there's a reason to not spot them oh your license is just fine we encourage people to use it now we were fortunate that Microsoft was just not powerful enough to kill copyleft copyleft was stronger than Microsoft's power in the late 1990s and early 2000s what I'm concerned about is that thousands of basically uncoordinated startups and other business interests can actually kill copyleft in a way that Microsoft couldn't now I'm not saying this is a conspiracy by any stretch I don't think they have a big meeting of startup companies and sit around a table and say how are we going to kill copyleft tomorrow I think it's purely a spontaneous alignment of completely independent unrelated self-interest that many many companies have discovered that copyleft is not in their business interest but non-copylefted free software is now we've seen a lot of historical examples of where copyleft has done us very well I still think it's a great example that GNU plus linux systems are much more popular than the bsd systems the bsd systems have great code and there are some key pieces of infrastructure that I myself and probably many of you rely on every day but I don't run free bsd on my laptop by any stretch what's happening of course is apple mostly although other companies as well send just enough upstream to bsd to keep it alive just enough resource and financial ways just enough developer resource to make sure that it stays alive and ultimately the choice between a copyleft and non-copyleft license is the adaption versus software freedom bsd developers will say it's wonderful that apple has adopted the bsd system as the center of their operating system notwithstanding the fact that it's been proprietorized because we want it to be adopted this is the argument we've had for years the problem is is that the strategic planning of companies that are opposed copyleft has gotten much better look very closely at what happens now with llvm quacom and apple are putting a tremendous amount of resource and developer time into llvm because both of them want gcc to die and we already see multiple companies that sell proprietary add-ons for llvm the compiler of the future that is the default is a mixed free software proprietary compiler where the core is free software but if you'll have this suite of optimizations on the open market that you can go and buy off the shelf for $50, $100, $1,000 a piece depending on how good they are and that's the compiler you'll have to build to get optimized code this is a dystopia that I think is sadly coming I think we played the stalemate we got most of the kernel all the way up to sort of that api layer you get when you launch a new vm an app to install a few interesting server programs everything else is pretty much still proprietary right now and we're being attacked from multiple sides to try to reproprietize the stuff we already got to stalemate on and all during that time all software got better and that's actually part of the problem hear me out hear me out it makes our political problem harder back in the old days it was very common to chase a bug all the way down the stack one of the experiences that made me into this crazy free software zealot that I am today was I once found a bug in xdm which I chased all the way through the nis plus library which was the proprietary authentication system that solaris system used back in the day and it turned out it was a bug in the solaris kernel all the way down I reported the bug I worked for Westinghouse which at the time was the largest not at the time the largest employer in Maryland but son told me that Westinghouse was just too small to get this bug closed and it was going to stay open and that's the kind of thing that made me feel like I'm helpless as a developer if there's proprietary software because I know how to fix this bug in fact I S traced it all the way down and they had swapped to arguments on a system call that if it were just changed that would fix it I even spent a week in a binary editor trying to change it and never figured it out I guess if I was more of a better reverse engineer I would have but that kind of silly thing made me a software freedom zealot but I don't think these kinds of horrible experiences where you chase from a free software program down into proprietary stuff and find a bug in the proprietary stuff happens to people so much anymore that's my point about software getting better it was easy to beat Microsoft because their software wasn't very good proprietary software is better there are plenty of people who sit there on a Mac all day and develop deploy on a Linux based VM and don't hit a bug in macOS during their work it was pretty impossible in the late 80s and early 90s to not find a bug in this in your own system while you were trying to develop something else it was pretty common so you just don't think about it if it's your operating system proprietary free if it works it's very easy not to wonder do I am I as my software freedom being taken away not only that the software is so much more complex from a developer perspective than it was those days and where the proprietorization layer shifts as you go down a software stack is much thinner I'll talk more about that in a minute it's created two fronts of problems for software freedom the first is the fact that most of most people on desktop type systems that are delivered the key applications they need in the browser the second problem is is that if you're not on a desktop system if you're in any type of embedded system things are done in the app store model I'm going to talk about both problems start with the first one how many of you have no script or LibreJS installed on your yeah this is a friendly answer you got about half most audiences as I tell this to I get about three people how many of you you're actually using Chroma Chromium instead of a different browser yeah yeah so the reason I asked those two questions is you actually Chroma Chromium you can't disable JavaScript very easily and the NoScript folks have said that they can't possibly port their plug-in to Chrome because there's no hook to turn off JavaScript processing but the reason I think this is so interesting and those of you who raised your hands the half of you that run NoScript or LibreJS you know that the web is kind of dead when you start browsing it with with JavaScript I have to admit these they used to be high and mighty and say I don't run proprietary software I fly Delta that's my preferred airline as we saw in Jim's talk but but I have to install proprietary software to change my seat because sadly unlike in Jim's talk where there's a nice little ASCII displayable map of the thing and I can change when I get my upgrade to the seat I want in first class if I'm lucky enough to be upgraded that doesn't exist I have to allow JavaScript to do that and installs a whole host of proprietary programs on my computer one of the scariest things that happened with JavaScript was that it turned installation of proprietary software into an HTTP request so just by your browser grabbing a file it can now install proprietary software in your computer most people sit all day browsing the web installing proprietary software program after proprietary software program and not even realizing it also blurred this line of object code and source code people like to say well JavaScript's all source code well most of it's not it's minified JavaScript which is effectively a form of object code it's a form of compilation now I love to point out that RMS knew this was going to happen and in GPLV2 itself says that the source code must be the preferred form for modification and GPLV3 does even better to make this abundantly clear the idea that you're all your code is minified and you can't edit it means it's not free software they grew up in this land and they grew up in developing an environment where they never actually had all the source in front of them but they often were given a JSON API a great example is all the Google services they all give you a pretty reasonable API through JSON or something else where you can grab them and you can integrate a cal learning application by pulling the JSON API out of calendaring and the Gmail one out of Gmail you know make some quick little app for people and you feel like you have a certain amount of freedom because the API is generally work i.e. software's gotten better and you can build your own little JavaScript program which you might even make free software but you're reliant on the Google Maps and the the Google Calendar and the whatever all these things I don't use so I don't know how to name them but you've created a mixed proprietary free application when it feels like you've created a basically free application because all these were free as in price on the web APIs that you could grab and so when you have been developing in that environment for long enough you really don't consider that it's reasonable to expect the entire source code from your system to be able to rebuild like the idea of Gen2 is completely foreign that I could rebuild everything I have from source and get binaries out for it JavaScript just isn't a world like that not only that the web didn't have a copy left license well I had one but we when I was at the FSF were too slow at getting it out into the world I'm proud to invent it invented the Afaro GPL I'm embarrassed I didn't invent it 10 years before because that's when we needed it in the late 90s when this was all starting by the time it was heavily available the non copy left license had become the standard for web type stuff and the fact of the matter is it wouldn't have mattered because if they had picked GPL if you're deploying in the web and you're not actually distributing something which the only thing that's distributed is that JavaScript the server side stuff so all not distributed to the user the GPL and the ISC license have the exact same ultimate effect you're not required to distribute the software to your users so they don't see the server side stuff all they get is the JavaScript which of course you can make proprietary object code minified JavaScript these people who grew up in this development environment are now founding all the startups that we have and they know the value of the Tim O'Reilly style of open source so they let their employees upstream when it behooves the company and it just doesn't become clear to the employees why they need copy left because they're used to the environment of not having all the source code and it's not that bad for them like it was for the older among us because it was horrible when you had a bug in the kernel and nothing worked but those kinds of situations don't come up now my hope is and I I gave Jeremy Allison my friend this talk up to that point the night before I gave it the first time it fuzz them I said so I end with complete dystopia he said well I have an idea I think there is some hope he believes that people will continue to have to reinvent the wheel wheel he compares it to the old days of unix where you had to redo things over and over again you'd switch employers it was a different type of unix you wouldn't have your code from your previous employer and you write everything from scratch over again and that if that happens to you often enough you discover why copy left matters and you want copy left you want the right to take your code from your previous employer under copy left and use it at your new employer and not have to reinvent the wheel again as I've just described won't work unless the co-option is fought against because I think it's very easy to tell people hey we're an open source company come work for us and the problems are subtle enough that people won't notice them until it goes away I think it's going to take an entire generation to fix that side of the problem the other side of the problem is still happening we're down to in my view the last copy left program that truly matters I used to say too I used to think it was GCCC and Linux the fact of the matter is that GCC is going to be replaced by LLVM sadly but surely so the real copy left battle is about Linux now and the fact is true that Linux is one of the only programs that companies truly cannot live without left they will do things where they'll create everything non copy lefted except for Linux Android is a great example the only copy lefted program in Android is Linux everything else is Apache licensed because Google said we'll just rewrite it all but there wouldn't even attempt to rewrite Linux that's why the battle is there now the problem is is that the GPL on Linux is not treated like the GPL we've had the proprietary kernel module problem for some time the GPL on Linux is treated as if it were the LGPL and until we start to fight that problem in a big way the co-option will come from that side too and slowly but surely we won't have the kernel as the great last GPL program it won't even be that and that kind of fight against copy left continues as well those of you who read my blog know that my favorite movie is a 1940s movie called it's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra and there's this wonderful scene in that film where the angel spoiler alert for this movie don't look at the slide if you haven't seen this movie from 1945 but this angel comes to visit George Bailey the main character and the angel goes to him goes with him to a bar pub where they he starts telling people he's an angel and George tells him don't don't tell people you're an angel they're gonna think a crazy kind of thing he says don't they believe in angels well yeah they believe in angels but don't say it anyway because if they believe in angels why are they surprised to see one this is how most companies even those that purport to support copy left feel about copy left they say oh we think the GPL is great but don't ever enforce it never never never enforce the GPL that's logically inconsistent and it's hypocrisy and that's the thing that is one of the worst aspects of the political environment around copy left now this is the last piece that's a kind of religion in this talk I was a Roman Catholic for many years I'm now an atheist this does not reflect the views of my employer necessarily but because I went to Roman Catholic school from first grade to my last year of university I read a lot of a lot of Catholic authors and I really liked Flania O'Connor and this book habit of being she writes about the Eucharist which those of you that are Christians know there's a great disagreement between Roman Catholics and the Protestant world about transubstantiation Roman Catholics believe that the Eucharist literally and molecularly turns into the body and blood of Christ and Protestants don't believe that Flania O'Connor writing about this says well it has to it has to transubstantiation has to be true because otherwise it's just a symbol and if it's just a symbol to hell with it that's exactly how I feel about the GPL if it's just a symbol of our software freedom and we're never going to enforce it we're never going to say if you fail to follow the copy left you've done our community wrong but to hell with it I'll just go join the Apache Software Foundation or something we have to fight for copy left and say that it matters and stand up for it if we're going to succeed with the strategy of copy left now I've often misquoted on this point particularly by one corporate lawyer who is trying to discredit me read this statement carefully an unenforced copy left is the functional equivalent of a non copy left license what I mean by that is that if you fail to enforce the copy left the way the world perceives the program from the point of view of the user is that it's not copy left because there is only the proprietorized version that's available with no source or offer as we say in the GPL enforcement world which means they don't have software freedom only enforcement can get them software freedom the problem is not solved with that either I'm working on copy left enforcement my organization software freedom Conservancy is supportive of that work and I'm very appreciative of that but I'm not so arrogant as to say that enforcement is what we need and that's all we need it's only one piece of the puzzle I think the bigger piece of the puzzle and embedded is not the fact that there's often proprietary drivers on your Linux or you don't get the source code of the Linux version you're running at all it's this application issue I'm reminded in the App Store model of what happened with Microsoft Windows in the 1980s there was this thing we used to talk about in the 1980s called the boutique software shop the little tiny software company 30 to 50 employees they did one application they deployed it on Windows and there was tons and tons of these that you could buy and what's happened is that model has returned to us it's profitable to write a single-purpose app with a few developers and make a lot of money and in fact you have an environment that is somewhat collaborative because you're an insular community right there with your 30 friends writing your application you all share your source code for that app with each other so it feels like a good thing to have and these are very common now that's how a lot of these apps are developed and this is the new ground war we need more free software apps on these phones and tablets because at this point even if the operating system is free is Android even if we get the Linux parts freed because we do enforcement all the applications are proprietary software buy and large there's some good GPL apps I have some on my phone but if you go to the F-Droid which is the App Store for Android for free software apps there's a lot a lot fewer apps than you'll find in the Google Play Store and I admit that I don't know what applications I should tell you to write it's hard to tell what applications are going to be popular I wouldn't have guessed that my wife would spend days playing Candy Crush and everybody in the world seems to play it if you've ever seen that episode of Star Trek Next Generation where everybody gets addicted to that game and Wesley Crusher's the only one who knows that they aren't that's what I feel when I see Candy Crush and couldn't have predicted that so I wish I had a formula to tell you which specific apps to write to be strategic this is the thing RMS knew how to do he knew that we needed a compiler and the compiler would be central and could write it that was an easier world to analyze because replacing Unix was pretty not I mean it wasn't totally obvious but it was it was there weren't many paths to choose and that was the one he chose right now there are a million different phone applications doing a million different things and I have no idea which one is going to become the most important one tomorrow I have a few recommendations I think there are things you can help us do I think this copy left enforcement thing is a necessary condition I've admitted it's not sufficient but we still have to do it I am going to do that work in conjunction with my organization the software freedom conservancy we have a project called the GPL compliance project for Linux developers which enforces the GPL for Linux and we'll be taking care of that if you hold Linux copyrights you can join us and help us enforce if you don't hold Linux copyrights Karen's in the room should be upset and say you can send us a check and support us so that we can do the work but the thing I want to ask for you most and this is where I'm glad I'm not executive director anymore say this one's more important than giving us money is that you need to get out there and code free software apps for phones find an app that you think auto exists write it and GPL it learn the Android API I've looked at it I know it's annoying I don't like Java either but this is the future of software freedom is those apps being free software on those phones if you're an old school hacker like me we've got to enter these communities that don't know about copy left and aren't thinking about it go learn Node go learn how to do JavaScript programming on the server side go learn all the things that the kids are into whatever the kids are into this week and join their communities and tell them what you've learned about copy left in a friendly way by writing cool copy lefted stuff using their technology go through all the .io domains and see what's there and try to build on those platforms copy lefted stuff some of it will be lost a lot of copy lefted code turned out to be useless that got written in the 80s and 90s not everybody can be Tridge and invent an amazing copy lefted program like Samba but you can try right because I don't think Tridge did you know Samba was going to be as huge as it was when you started it exactly exactly so just start stuff start writing stuff and copy lefting it the other thing I think is really important is coding on your own time and keeping the copyrights for the stuff you do not only on your own time certainly your employer should let you have the copyrights for the stuff you write in your own time that should be completely non-negotiable but also think about convincing your employer to let you keep your own copyrights for the work you're doing one of the problems we have in the Linux world is that while there are plenty of independent developers who have their own copyrights Matthew Garrett who's speaking on the other track right now is one of them and there are many others but there are a minority in some sense to the amount of for-profit corporate copyright that's found its way into Linux companies who actually oppose the enforcement of the GPL etc I don't think there's any reason and the Samba community to use that as an example again is a great place where many of the Samba developers have told their employers no I'm keeping my own copyright on Samba licensing it under GPL v3 or later to the project and they've been successful in that and I think more projects should say actually all the individual developers keep their own copyrights and they're the ones who are in control of this project through their copyrights start asking for that I used to say that if I wasn't doing this this free software advocacy I'd probably like be a union activist for developers I think there's a time to unionize you got developers are way highly too highly paid so you don't need more money but this is the kind of thing you can unionize about and say hey actually one of our demands is we keep our own copyrights actually more vacation is a good one but I would encourage you during that vacation to code some other stuff that's not related to your job but I'm the guy who like loses all my vacation and conservancy because I never take it so I don't necessarily purport that workaholicism is good for your health but it's worked out pretty well for me so far and the other thing is to really look at the AFARO GPL if you're doing web applications because as I was saying the GPL and the ISC licenses kind of merge into the same thing politically if the code server side AFARO GPL is the copy left of the web and it was designed for that it's not particularly widely used and that troubles me the places where it is used it's often abused I have a whole nother talk about that issue but writing your own code and put it under the AFARO GPL like the Gunnu Media Cobblin project that Deb works with is a good way to make a big difference for the future of copy left so with that I'll show you a few things the thing I want to point out in particular is a recent project I've been working on called the guide I call it it's this comprehensive guide of copy left I've put together all the great material I could find that I've written myself some of since the early 2000s and many other authors have written including Karen and Fontana and lots of other people to put together into a single book about copy left there's lots of contribution it is itself copy lefted under ccbysa even if you aren't an expert on copy left yet you can contribute because there's lots of typos in it and those are easy patches to do it's in git and inletech but I accept patches not even formatted correctly in letech I'll do the letech formatting I know nobody likes that anymore but I hope you'll contribute and help us out and again because my executive director is in the room please donate to Consurvency and with that I mean how much time do I have left for questions if I start questions now okay you have to just hold it about here sorry we have the mini microphone I saw a guy give a talk one's holding one of those the whole time it was really funny hi brady I just got a quick question for you I work on a very large agpl licensed web application oh what is it OpenERP now odu it's an open source business management application which is a different story which I'll talk to you about perhaps later because I don't want to have and who holds the copyright on it out of curiosity what's that who holds the copyright on it out of curiosity I will talk to you about that one fine off I've got to be with this co2im tomorrow so but my question is as fun enough is is one of his excuses now for wanting to make the changes that he's doing away from the agpl is that we've got gpl v2 lipholders coming to us and asking us to pay them licensing fees because the agpl is not compatible with gpl v2 that's that's pretty horrible behavior on behalf of the gpl v2 people to hit you up for money rather than trying to resolve the license difference through other means so I don't know what to tell you they are incompatible licenses so they have I am not your lawyer this is not legal advice but they probably have a copyright claim of some sort so it's something to worry about I hope you'll negotiate them if there's something I can do to help negotiate with them to explain why they're being unreasonable and their demands I'd be happy to help but I don't have any other advice beyond that thank you so can you just clarify that you are saying that because to your knowledge as not a lawyer gpl v2 and agpl are incompatible specifically he asked about gpl v2 only and agpl v3 gpl v2 or later and agpl v3 are compatible you have to do some extra things but I can tell you this later but generally speaking you will be able to bring that code into one single work actually the section agpl was written yet I have a couple of notes so I know there's a couple of references to it but yeah I want to talk about compatibility I'm actually trying to get Fontana to write the section of compatibility because he's the de facto expert on this so tell him you're welcome to fork my book I have no problem with that as long as you comply with the cc by sa license people should fork things all the time I have hostile forks friendly forks I'm completely friendly to all of them I have the interpretation of a cc by sa based on what the words say I mean if you were worried about it let's talk about it I mean the best thing to do before getting angry is to come talk to somebody if there is a problem with the licensing and I'd be happy to talk to you about it if you want to start to fork if you're not just kidding we'll talk about to make sure it's all in compliance ahead of time that's what any good forker does you want to take all your patches? I took I'm taking all your patches we'll do this offline let's stop trolling me let's have somebody else question so you know you mentioned that we should all start learning hipster languages like node.js or something like that but there's already there's already a copy-lefted thing called MongoDB that seems to be somewhat popular these days is that is that doing like that that seems to be the only thing that the hipsters use that that is like how is how's that is that doing it like what's that doing for us the problem with it is it's what I alluded to I have a whole I can give you I can give you a whole talk on this problem but the basics of it are that it's one of the many uses of the AferoGPL that really concerns me because it's the classic case of proprietary relicensing MongoDB is under the AferoGPL fully copyrighted by 10Gen and their primary business model is to get people to not use the AferoGPL version but to buy a proprietary license for that code that business model which I once thought was benign which RMS once called barely legitimate has been proven to be illegitimate in the sense that it always pressures people away from the free software to the proprietary version and turns the process of enforcement into a shakedown because what they come to you and say is well what you're doing doesn't look like it's a compliance with the license so you're just going to have to buy a proprietary license and it'd be a shame if you couldn't use it anymore so just pay us the money similar to what this fellow is describing about the GPL the two only copyright holders instead of trying to work out something to adapt software freedom they're just looking for a payday and that's the problem is that the AferoGPL being the strongest copy left in existence gives the most opportunity for those sorts of abusive business models so that's my concern and I've told the Ten Gen Guides that I believe this and they have no interest in accepting other copyright holders by the way it relates to that question if each individual developer contributing to MongoDB had their own copyrights the business model would evaporate this is why I actually now believe that multi copyright held copy left projects are the best option for software freedom and I'm still I'm on the board of the SF2 so it's not how interesting is that I say that yeah could you expand on that a little well so so the issue is that when you have a single copyright holder they can issue a license that is non-copy left so it puts them in a position of power over all the other contributors now the thing they cite is that the FSF asks for copyright and therefore how can it be so bad if the FSF for its projects asks for copyright assignment but the FSF as you would have heard about if you were at Terecaron stock which many of you were is a 501c3 charitable organization with a public mission to serve the public good 10GEN is not to use an example a 501c3 charity with a mission to the public good there are for profit business just like MySQL AB is now owned by Oracle which is in the for profit business of doing the same thing with MySQL and for that reason the copy left is not an equalizing force that it's supposed to be one specific force in the community has more power than the rest and that's what convinced me to prefer multi-copyright help projects because I want a situation where true equality exists the Linux situation bore this out one of the weird things that happen with Linux is while there are plenty of for profit corporate copyright holders there are enough individual copyright holders like Matthew Garrett in the community who can say no I'm going to stand up and enforce the GPL if Linux had gone a different way so it's that nobody had individual copyrights anymore which for example Linus doesn't Linux Foundation holds its copyrights now we'd be in a situation where the GPL would never get enforced because only the individual developer at this point is willing to enforce the GPL on Linux so this is why I think it's really important for individuals to hold their own copyrights and copy left it works that's not my actual question oh I'm sorry I just kept no I know I wanted you to keep going to what I'm trying to work out the the most nice way to ask this question you're not asking a nice question you can ask me no I'm not and not to you I mean to we have a pretty family audience I don't know if you're working I'll ask it badly and you can work out what I mean to what extent do you feel that GitHub has by not requiring people to nominate a license contributed to a confusion of licenses and b to young people these days not caring about licenses and copy left so I don't think I don't think GitHub is a completely bad actor on that anymore I mean I mean there was the problem of the of the so-called post open source debates which I referenced in the I suppose I should mention it since I referenced it in the in the abstract for this talk of this idea of the young developer saying we don't need the the we don't need those stinking licenses you know and and after all the last line of the free software free software song that would love to sing is we'll kick out those very licenses it's not time for that yet I would like that too but they're a little bit early on that but I understand their sentiment of like I don't want it to think about the license I just want software freedom like I don't actually like being an expert in copy left and all this gobbledygook right I am it because it's a necessary strategy but I would prefer a world where everybody just had software freedom and we did indeed kick out all those dirty licenses but I think the GitHub improved their behavior on this because they do encourage you when I did this recently just to test that you when you sign it for a project you get a list of popular free software licenses you're encouraged to pick one it automatically puts the license file in your directory as your first commit all that sort of stuff so they've made that situation much better my prompt my beef with GitHub right now is they're still an anti-GPL company there's actually somebody employed by GitHub who at least with part of his paid time goes and files bugs against the Faro GPL projects to tell them how evil the a Faro GPL is I think this is not good corporate behavior I think they should be basically neutral on free software licensing but but I think they're getting better I mean I'm gonna continue to talk to them and hopefully they'll get better over time sorry um oh sorry hey lecture yeah um so can you just get the last one or no we're going to we've got two more and then yours will have to be the last question yeah okay so you'll still get in there so we'll go you've been waiting and then we'll go you and then back over okay thank you for managing that queue I wasn't doing well myself obviously I made it a priority creature crew because Cruz raised his hand and he's my hero so I'm like I have to take a step so so um do you think of the fact that like Linux and a few other projects haven't upgraded to GPL v3 is a is a big problem in the grand scheme of things and do you think that maybe what we need is like a hipster license like copy left next to um solve some problems as copy left the next author put his head in his hands um I so I I have an answer for both of that I think I think GPL v3 is a substantially better license I think it's wonderful the the the the trilogy the other Samba developers participate in the GPL v3 process and jump to GPL v3 early and often however the GPL v2 is still a good license I I don't think the GPL v2 suddenly became a bad license the moment GPL v3 was published and the interesting thing and the reason I'm not focusing my copy left advocacy on switch to GPL v3 now is because the biggest problem we have with copy left are also GPL v2 problems the biggest problems we have are no source or offer and proprietary kernel modules and both of those are a violation of GPL v2 as much as they're a violation of GPL v3 anyway if we had solved those problems and then all the problems are user lockdown which we do have to uh I'm sorry uh uh crypto lockdown if if we get to the point where all that's left is crypto lockdown we do really need GPL v3 the thing is is Linux is not going to GPL v2 or later anytime soon although I wish it would I think it could if it had the political will with a lot of work and I'd help if they were willing to do it but uh it gives the Linux is truly the most important copy left program today and it's v2 only I think we do need to continue enforcing on v2 only with regard to copy left next um I will I think it was rather coy of of Mr. Fontana here to to quote a private email from Richard Stalman where he says and I think it wasn't even out of context that experimentation on new ideas of copy left is a good thing that's right um oh it was semi-private though I was on the thread but okay okay well then I take I take that back I apologize so so I I think that the RMS in his usual short-stated way is very correct I think it's good that we're experimenting with with new copy left licenses I have disagreements about with with Fontana about various different policy questions but having the licenses is a good idea and I don't think you should use it yet it's not ready for production I'm looking for an expert on top of the course with the use of the the use of the use of you reject so now I'll say you rejected all my patches Hi uh now we've all been around long enough that we've seen things come in and out of popularity and other things more one-shot they're popular and then they disappear and insignificant so is copy left star going to be on the rise or will it will it dwindle I mean you know clearly we've got a core of copy left believers here but in terms of the the wider in worldwide environment is it star going to be on their eyes or do you think it'll just dwindle into insignificance I mean I've said often that we're about to enter what I think will be the dark ages of software I think for that reason I think it's probably going to continue to decline because there are a lot of people who are aggressively trying to force that to happen who have a lot more power and money than those of us who don't want it to happen on the other hand I think the answers that we had from the free software movement are still correct which means that if you code on your own time and write copy left and stuff and invent something that's not big and professional like GNU but is useful will someday become big and professional and an important copy left to program it's happened at least once already so I think that it's in the hands of developers who have good ideas and are willing to write stuff on their own time and copy left that it's not under corporate control that's going to be the deciding factor that's why I give talks like this to and why I have code in bold four times because I want people to write copy left to programs I think the audience of people who are developers who care about copy left are the future in a lot of ways so I guess I think Trish now on your last one oh no it's fine that's all I want to hear what you have to say so there's a bit of a taboo around re-licensing where for example if something is permissively licensed re-licensing it under the GPL and then starting to distribute as GPL is commonly considered bad form but I often get people asking me to take my GPL code and can I please permissively license it because they want it to work for theirs should we revisit that taboo should there be a GPL fork of LLVM and try to encourage some of the Linux distros to actually be distributing a GPL fork of LLVM I almost want to jump to the version of the slides for the longer version of this talk and pull up the slide that says exactly that but it'll take too long indeed I actually have this idea about LLVM which is which is we might be able to beat it with just maybe maybe $800,000 a year in funding the just funded developers to read new research papers in compiler optimization and churn out a pharaoh GPL plugins for those optimizations for LLVM such that the great optimizations for LLVM or all a pharaoh GPL rather than under these various proprietary license from these proprietary companies I agree and I want to end that taboo and I call for it in the longer version of this talk that's a little more radical but it's I agree with you there's there's no reason that we have to keep conceding the space to non-copy left to licensing because we've been doing it for a long time and as you say they're always coming to us saying oh yeah re-license give more freedom by by making it a non-copy left license yeah we should we should do it and you should you should say no when they ask which I know some often does and I appreciate and if if you have a good idea for a non-copy left program don't be afraid to make a copy left to patch for it anymore I used to advise against that I don't anymore think about it strategically though because it might make sense strategically as a political matter to offer a couple of useful non-copy lefted practices and then make the big one copy lefted and say I really don't feel comfortable making this non-copy left to at least cause the debate in the community now they will not be friendly debates but maybe we have to get there maybe we have to start talking about it yeah indeed all right so I'm out of time and but I'm around so all day tomorrow too so I'm happy to talk to you and Bradley just to thank you for your presentation today we have a small gift thank you so much