 Let's welcome our next speaker, John Sullivan. Hello, everybody. Sneak preview. I'm John Sullivan. I'm the executive director at the Free Software Foundation since 2011. I've been with the organization going back to 2003 in various kinds of capacities. It's a real pleasure to be back here again. I want to thank Bradley and Tom and Karen and Richard for putting this dev room together. It's always an excellent set of talks. It's really honored to be a part of it. I do want to plug another awesome conference while I'm up here, which is Libre Planet. It's happening in Cambridge in the US, March 24 through 25. Deb Nicholson, who just spoke, will be one of our key notes there, along with Gabriel Coleman, Richard Salmon, and Seth Schoen from EFF. So at the FSF, we want all software to be free software. So basically, proprietary software shouldn't exist because it infringes everyone's freedom and leads to horrible consequences along the way. And in order to achieve that, we need to have a really huge movement. And one way to get to that movement is to make sure that everybody, not just technical people, but not just developers, but that everybody understands what free software is, why it's important, what the ideals behind it are. So we talk about that goal by saying that we want to make free software a kitchen table issue, and something that families talk about around the dinner table, along with other political issues, like TPP or anything else. Or it's like my family on the couch in front of the television sort of issue. But the point is to get regular people talking about it. And this talk is related to that goal and also related to the ongoing work that we're always doing to help people understand and use free software licenses properly. And I think it'll be a pretty short talk, maybe famous last words. But the point here is pretty simple. I'm going to share the results the next 18 minutes of your life are blank. But I'm going to share the results and the rest of this talk of a very short survey of sites or places where people get software, and especially places that distribute a mix of proprietary and free software, and look at to what extent those places are telling users what the license of that software is and whether that license and that software is free or non-free. So I think this is important because free software right now is everywhere, but basically invisible. And I think that what we'll see in this survey will help explain why that's the case. I think it's something that we as a community, including the corporate partners and members of that community that we work with, need to work on. And also, RMS wanted me to talk about it. So a couple of years ago here, too, I gave a talk on chooselicense.com run by GitHub and highlighted a few of the ways that I thought that that site kind of biased users or developers towards particular licenses and didn't describe some of the licenses entirely accurately or fairly. And a great dialogue came out of that presentation and GitHub actually made some changes to improve the information on chooselicense.com. So I guess I'm also hoping that if we talk about a few sites in this presentation, that some of those sites will maybe also be interested in making some changes. These examples will be pieces of software, entries for software that you can download. I'm not recommending or recommending any of these programs. I picked them basically because they're either free or proprietary, not because they're programs that I actually use. So I said free software is invisible. One of the main examples that I mean by that is Android. It's by far the largest, the operating system with the largest install base in the world today. No commercially available Android device is actually all free software. Every device has some amount of proprietary software on it. And we know of a lot of the apps for Android are proprietary. But we also know that what makes Android go, the fundamental building blocks of it are free software. So we have, what, a billion, two billion monthly active users around the world using free software. But how many of them actually know that they're using it? And I was inspired by James's talk this morning. I don't know if anybody saw it, but I had to throw up some two-fock lyrics that I thought of as I was thinking through this presentation. So to start with, we need to look at the ways that people get software. They order tapes from 675 Mass Ave in Cambridge. They go to Babbage's and buy it in a box. Anybody remember Babbage's, even? They download it from the web. They use that package manager in their Gnu Linux distribution. They get it from app stores, targeting their mobile devices. From the application interface itself, programs that I'm gonna talk about, like LibreOffice and Firefox, have an actual menu bar option where you pick tools and add-ons or tools and extensions. And that ends up taking you to your website, which you can go to separately as well, but it's integrated within the application. So I kind of consider that a separate category. And then also more developer-oriented code hosting sites like GitHub that people do use for distributing software. That's already compiled sometimes, but even if it's not, it is a place where people get software that they then go on to use Libs. Of course, software also comes on things that people buy. They might not go to Babbage's, but they still go to Best Buy or they still order things online. And devices that come with software in the box or are loaded onto the devices. And that's a separate problem that we're tackling through our Respects for Freedom hardware certification program to help let users know, or potential customers know, that a device that they're buying actually contains only free software. But we're gonna talk here today about the downloading individual programs. And I'm gonna look at the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, the Chrome Store, Firefox, LibreOffice, Apache, OpenOffice, Savannah, and GitHub all in the next 13 and a half minutes. And as we look at these things, I'm gonna focus on the last, sorry, I'm gonna focus on a list of questions here for each of these sites. So when you're looking at an entry for a program on that site, is there a license field at all? Does it say what license the program is under? If it does, is the information there clear? Does it seem to be accurate? Does the field indicate whether the license is a free license or an open source license? And can users search for programs that fall under any particular licenses? So we can start with the App Store from Apple, except we won't because the App Store is so hostile to free software that there's really no point in looking at it. It's so inextricably connected to DRM and the devices are so locked down. Technically, you can install a free application on your own device if you get a developer signing key and do it yourself. There's restrictions on them being able to redistribute anything signed with your key, et cetera. So when we're talking about, we have a lot of work to do here that doesn't have anything to do with putting the license information on the software that's in the App Store. So let's move on to something that's a little closer, the Google Play Store. These slides are gonna be a little hard to read. We have just enough lovely Brussels sunshine to wash them out. But the Google Play Store interface, the entry format here, I think it takes three slides to cover. Yeah. And you'll have to trust me. If you can't read the text there, but none of these metadata fields for this program next cloud indicates the license. For the lawyers in the room, we'll clarify that there is something up here that says permissions. That is not legal permissions. That is technical permissions. So it describes what kind of Android permissions the program has to request in order to run. But there is no field up here for what the license actually is. I haven't checked, I admit the Google Play app view. I don't have the Google Play app, it's proprietary. But my understanding is that it also does not list the license information for any of the applications there. The next slide example I picked because it does include in the description that the developer put there a link to the GitHub issue tracker. And so if you're familiar with GitHub, you can actually track down where, what the license is. You can find that information or it's GitHub repository, but it's not presented for people that are not that savvy. And it's also not in any kind of structured data field that could be searchable or discoverable outside some pretty close reading. And you'll see a lot of this in the Google Play store where developers will put the information about the program being free software open source in the description. But there's no field for it. And just FYI, the license for next cloud, according to the GitHub repository appears to be GPLv2 without specifying only or any later version. But I spot checked some of the files in the repository and they seem to be under GPLv3 or any later version. So situation there might not be quite that clear, but we know that it's intended to be free software and there's no indication of that in the official entry format. The Chrome Web Store, this is the Ublock Origin extension. And according to its source repository, it is licensed under the GPLv3. But it appears from spot checking its source files to also be or any later version. But again, there's nothing here that conveys that. Much more compact interface, fewer fields with information, but no statement about the license. The Windows Store. Look, we have a winner, top free apps. So, I don't know. No, not that kind of free. The Netflix logo is kind of a giveaway. However, we do actually have a leader so far. This is the entry for VLC in the Windows Store. And there is actually a link to, I think I have a laser on this. Yeah, I've never used it. There is a link to additional terms, okay? And that link takes you to a page on the VLC site, which describes the license. Actually, it's not as clear as it could be because it talks about the general licensing policy of video land that produces VLC. But it does tell you that most of their software is available under GPLv2. And it does point you to information about how to figure out the license of a particular program that they distribute like this one. So, this is the best thing we have so far. It's making an effort to say what the terms are and points you to a reasonable place to read more about them. Also, if you needed any proof, where is it? It says here that this is not compatible with my device. So, I did not take the screenshot from a Windows phone. It was from my computer Linux system. Firefox. So, this is again UBlock Origin. And, I think we have a new leader, maybe unsurprisingly, over the Windows Store. This does have a indication of the license. Sorry, this looks so terrible. It looked fine on my own projector. So, we have license terms here. New general public license version three. But this is a splash screen to talk about user freedom and why it's important. So, that's another good way besides just indicating the license of the software that users are looking at. It's another good way to communicate the importance of those ideals. And I think it's really great that they did that. Firefox does allow non-free add-ons. And so, it was interesting to look at the contrast between those, the free add-ons and the non-free ones. This is the Evernote extension for Firefox. And it says, where the other one said GPLv3, it says custom license. So, this seems to be some kind of euphemism, custom license, but it's actually kind of true. So, finally one you can kind of read. When you click that link, it goes to a custom license, which says you are free to use Evernote's web clipper with any of the application services offered by Mozilla. So, it's not free software. You can't use it for any other purpose. Doesn't give you the right to share it. Everything not granted to you here is covered by default copyright permissions. So, not free software. That's not especially clear for users who won't know the difference between a custom license and other kinds of licenses. LibreOffice has a view like this for their extensions. And this actually is, I like what they do because they show the version, different versions of software can have a different license. It's possible what happens. And so, they actually maintain a recent version history and have a column for the license for each version. And this is for the chord diagrams extension. It indicates the license as continued GPLv3. Once again, doesn't specify or any later version or GPLv3 only. So, what does a proprietary LibreOffice extension look like? There aren't any. So, I think that's pretty awesome. LibreOffice has a policy that all of their extensions distributed from the official site are free software. So, there's no issue here with being able to differentiate free software from proprietary software. And the statement is pretty clearly on the front page of the extensions repository. Before we have LibreOffice, we had OpenOffice, which became an Apache project. This is the same extension I showed in the LibreOffice repository. That's the chord diagram extension. You can kind of see a similar release listing format down at the bottom there, but it happens to be missing the license column. So, they aren't conveying that same kind of information. And my understanding is that proprietary extensions are permitted in the Apache OpenOffice extension repository, but I had a really hard time finding what might be an example of that because I'm not familiar enough with Apache with OpenOffice or LibreOffice extensions to know what to look for. I did look to see if there was an ever-node extension for OpenOffice, apparently there's not. But I would doubt that in a proprietary extension case, since there's no license field for the free extension, there's probably no license field for a proprietary extension either. And we have just a couple of examples of code hosting sites. Savannah, one operated by the FSF for GNU and also some non-GNU projects. Maybe unsurprisingly, does specify the license information of projects and even says whether it's or any later version or only when it comes to the GNU licenses. But I don't see a way even on Savannah to search by license. There's something that I couldn't find on any site or app store type thing that I looked at. GitHub has been doing quite a bit, has made some changes I think over the last year, a little bit longer to communicate license information for projects. And this is a clip from the UBlock Origin page on GitHub. You can see they have a row at the top there of these little tags. And one of the tags says what the license is, GNU GPLv3. If you click that tag, it goes to the actual license file that's in the repository. And in addition to the copy of the license there that the developer uploaded, you also see kind of a summary at the top of what the license means, what the permissions are, what the obligations are. So I think we can talk about the accuracy or if there's better ways to phrase the communication about what the permissions and obligations are. But I think that this model is pretty cool and something maybe we can work on getting adopted in other places that it's not just showing the user a copy of the license, which we try to make the GPL understandable for anybody. But obviously with limited time, the summary of what users' rights and any obligations are is very useful for people deciding whether to download a piece of software or not. I also though on GitHub couldn't find a way to search by license. I don't think that's there yet. So what did we learn from this quick survey? So for one thing there's plenty of other sites and application software distributors out there that I didn't look at. FDroid is a major one. I was gonna contrast that with the Google Play Store but didn't have time to fit in in here. They do list some license information there. But we learned that next step for a lot of these channels like Google OpenOffice in particular is to display license info at all. That's certainly the first step. Also learned that sites that do display license info can still be made better. In particular, it was kind of a broken record about the or any later version point, but that is really important because it really does specify what versions of the license a user can receive software under and redistribute it under in particular. And nobody seems to provide searchability by license, which I think is important for many reasons. I think that when we're talking about general public users maybe it's more important to provide a way to search for software that is free rather than by any particular license. But when it comes to say commercial uses or corporate usages it seems pretty important to work towards getting some of these sites to provide searchability even by particular licenses. So you can see all of the GPL license extensions, GPL v3 license extensions or all of the Apache license extensions, et cetera. We have tried to change this already. We've had conversations with some of these companies and projects asking them to add more license information and also to add if not a full search capability, at least a way to a place we could link to that would show only the free extensions so that we could be sure that we were not directing our supporters and our users as we distribute software towards anything proprietary. And so we've gotten a lot of explanations. I'll be charitable in not calling them excuses but reasons why people don't have this information there already. Believe it or not, bandwidth, every byte is sacred. Interface clutter, not all that persuasive given interfaces that we saw, the three screenshot Google Play interface I think has room if they want to put it there. This was a big one. They don't want to disparage the proprietary software. So especially for things like the Google Play Store, the Windows Store, where they accept a mix of proprietary and free software, they don't want to make their proprietary constituency seem less good. And I think when it comes to that one, that's just sort of a clashing worldview thing. We do think free software is better. So of course we want to promote it more. They don't agree, they're trying to balance these needs but I think there's probably a middle ground here we can find that allows people to make their decisions about whether they want to download the free software, proprietary software without being too editorial in ways that these companies aren't comfortable with themselves. There's also the fact that most of the software at least should tell you what the license is after you install it. So it's not as though this is the only opportunity for users to learn about it, but that's not enough. You have to download every application and start it before you learn what the license is. That's not efficient, that's not user friendly. And in some cases, because free software can be sold and is sold in places like the Google Play Store for money, this doesn't get to you until after you already install the software. And the biggest one is the claim that users don't care. And this is one of the biggest things that we have to break through. It's a chicken and egg problem because if users aren't told or aren't informed about whether software is free or not free, then how are they supposed to care to begin with? It's sort of like saying that people don't care about healthy food in a world without nutrition labels on the food. They don't have the ability to make the choice. So how can you even measure whether they care or not? The context there determines the things that people are able to care or send a signal about. So providing better information has twofold effects. Both enables users who already know why free software is important to act on that and send a stronger signal to the software distributors and developers. And it also gives people who don't yet care an opportunity to learn, to be exposed to the information, something we can point to in advocacy materials and educational materials. So some conclusions, ways to take action to try to fix these problems, make this better. All these sites have some sort of feedback mechanism. If you care about this too, then you can send a message using those channels. Also, of course, the out-of-band communication, tweeting at people and advocating inside your companies if you happen to be at one of these places or projects. Move toward a more consistent system for conveying and communicating license information. SPDX is a project that has, this is a goal that we've been doing some work with at the EPSF lately. And basically, you saw the variability in the license fields that were there. Everybody's using a different vocabulary, a different name for the same license. So this effort to standardize a set of abbreviations and names for licenses could be really helpful towards getting a format that works for the user-facing interfaces and the app store and all the extensions or repositories. You can send pull requests. I don't think the source for Google Play is online, but the sources for a lot of these other places are online and you could actually submit some patches. And in the meantime, until we get some better change here, we can do third-party providing the information. We're trying to do that through the free software directory to list and communicate software that is free, even if it's not labeled from the places where it's primarily distributed. And I do wanna acknowledge that getting the copyright license communicated doesn't really end the story here. There's lots of other risks that come to freedom that come along with downloading pieces of software. Getting the copyright license information communicated clearly won't necessarily help people understand the patent risk of the software that they might be using, but it is a big step. And I think if we can fix this, we'll have something to build on in order to continue our process of growing and amplifying this movement, especially for non-technical and non-licensing savvy people, which is, frankly, most of the people that we need to talk to. Thank you, I don't know if I have time for a question. Pretty close. Two minutes, all right. Anybody have a question, comments? That's good to know. I think typing the license, we have that problem with descriptions being non-uniform, but if they're providing a way to do it, and that'll probably continue to get better over time, that's great. Sorry, the question was that GitHub does provide a way to search for license fields. It's in the advanced search area, and you can also use the open-ended full-text search to search for the license cross-repositories. In the back. Can you shout? I'm sorry. Can you shout? Yeah, so the question is what about the domain or language-specific package managers that are out there? I think you're right that a lot of them, well, I've seen at least a lot of talk lately that a lot of them are providing confusing and incorrect license information. I think Lewis is looking at that. I didn't look at it for this presentation, so I would recommend seeing what he's been saying about it. Lewis, Mila, in the back. So, sort of. So it's not, the question is, besides the usability and kind of communication issues, are there also compliance issues raised by this? There are other, the obligation for most licenses comes in doing the right thing, and the software that the user actually receives. So, the copy of the GPL will still be in there, license notices will still be in there, even if the metadata on the user interface doesn't show it. I think that's not an issue, but an example of an issue that is related is that if you contribute an extension to the Mozilla Extensions Repository, you are asked to choose a license for it. And we've encountered actually quite a bit of confusion from people thinking when they upload it and they pick the license, that that ends, that's all they need to do in order to specify the license for their project. So they're not including a copy of the GPL or any file headers, they're just clicking the Mozilla dropdown, and thinking that's enough. And that could be a compliance issue, or at very least it's kind of a licensing hygiene issue that's related to this. Yeah, yeah. I'll say I try not to use the mother as an example, because we're talking about non-technical or people in general who are all genders and ages. But I think that, yeah, it's not necessarily the name of the license, that's the key thing. It's for that use case, it's whether it's free or not free. So I would like to see search by license also provide search by characteristics of that really important characteristic, yeah.