Pre-class Discussion for Jan 11

• Speaking of selling your soul (er, data) to an OSP, here's your postal mail online--the last(ish) frontier? Personally I would love this service, my snail mail is all but a hassle for me at this point. But of course, there are a slew of concerns from privacy to control to reliability, which somehow, quite irrationally, I worry about less with all my online communications. --Jumpingdeeps 23:00, 10 January 2008 (EST)

Normative Principles for Evaluating Free and Proprietary Software

Prof. Zittrain briefly mentions in his conclusion one solution for the legal imbalance between the free software and proprietary models: shortening the Statute of Limitations on copyright claims against free software providers. Granting that this would, by its nature, reduce the potential volume of litigation against free software providers, does it resolve the problems Prof. Zittrain identified (imbalance of litigation funds, increased identifiability of copyright violations in open source code, anonymity of authorship)? My first instinct is "no, it wouldn't," although Prof. Zittrain noted he would be writing an article about the subject, so perhaps I just haven't sufficiently thought it through.

To my mind, though, there seems no good legal resolution to this problem. The greatest difficulty seems to be that there's no effective locus of liability (or point of control, if you prefer): given that proprietary source code is not open-sourced, the only party involved with a free software project who could have knowledge of copying (or, alternatively, patent violation) is the individual code editor (who, incidentally, is almost assuredly judgment-proof). Thus, so long as there is at least one unscrupulous editor in the pool of editors working on a project - and given GNU/Linux's thousands of editors, there will almost certainly be an unscrupulous editor somewhere - a copyright or patent violation is almost certain. So who can be liable for a violation? As noted, the editors themselves are liability proof; the end-users (see SCO v. IBM) have no knowledge of violations, so if they were liable, the resulting uncertainty about the costs of using a particular product would scare them away from free software generally; and there doesn't appear to be a primary distributor of free software products, nor, if there was one, could it have any greater knowledge of violations than the end-users.

Thus, it appears to me that the only effective defense of the free software movement is blanket liability protection, but doesn't this simply invite users to steal code from proprietary products? Is there some other balance that I fail to see, or are free software and proprietary software simply irreconcilable? Kratville 09:55, 11 January 2008 (EST)

A Quick Guide to GPLv3

• Full text of GPLv3
• Client alert on GPLv3 that I helped draft.

Rlumpau 09:43, 11 January 2008 (EST)

Microsoft Takes On the Free World

• Do Microsoft's threats demonstrate that free software is more vulnerable than proprietary software to legal action, or does the Open Invention Network suggest that the problem is less significant? Smaller, less business-oriented free software projects are less likely to get this kind of help from large corporations, but are these projects less susceptible to legal threats as well? JoshuaFeasel 09:59, 11 January 2008 (EST)

What This Gadget Can Do is Up to You

• It looks like other companies are warming up to the idea of open hardware. In September 2007, AMD/ATI released over 900 pages of GPU specifications; AMD is now working an on open-source driver for their recent chipsets. PDF goodness available from x.org.
  • By way of background, the consumer-grade GPU market is dominated by NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, and Intel. Until recently, most of the drivers (as distinguished from hardware specifications) for Linux have been distributed as object code without the accompanying source code. Intel has been working on free drivers for their hardware, and a number of independently created drivers are available. However, the reverse-engineering process is quite difficult without access to hardware specs, so the AMD/ATI move is excellent news for the free software community.
• Another example of free hardware is OpenMoko, an open hardware/software mobile phone platform. Unlike Google's Android and the closed iPhone, OpenMoko provides access to hardware specs.

Rlumpau 09:58, 11 January 2008 (EST)