Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Any Boston area Free Software folks who’d like to come talk to MS’s lead lawyer are welcome to stop by Harvard Law School today for a talk titled “The Future of Software, the Internet, and Innovation.” Come by- you might even get to see me explode with rage. ;)

Matt Asay and I have had our disagreements, but this is a great post by him on the links between the Reformation (specifically, the King James Bible) and Free Software.

Somedays the Berkman beat is pretty routine, but some days sovereign nations like Tunisia try to threaten your coworkers. (Background here and here.) Crazy. We hope everyone makes it out in one piece, but on the other hand, we’re glad it is becoming more apparent what a farce it is for the UN to talk about the political benefits of the internet in a repressive, defacto single-party state like Tunisia.

It was pointed out over drinks (the Berkman Center is a happening place) that perhaps the better model for open source projects to use to think about trademark is not traditional software or business, but political parties. There is no trademark on ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’, or the donkey or the elephant, but those organizations manage to do OK (at least as organizations- whether or not they succeed at doing good things is a different question, unrelated to their use of trademark.)

Offhand, they do this in a number of ways, though I’m sure there must be others:

• They tolerate failure. Some nutball claims he is a democrat? That is irritating but not the end of the world.
• Local parties just about everywhere- little incentive to create parallel organizations, because you can always just get involved in the local one. You have more influence within the real one anyway.
• There must be more but my brain is melting.

Of course, the model doesn’t apply perfectly by any stretch of the imagination- for one thing, all parties are similarly ‘crippled’, whereas the competition of free software does not (yet) have similar trademark/identity issues.

Anyway, I think I’ll think about this more. It seems inevitable that if I go back to school I’ll get drawn back to my aborted senior thesis topic- relationship of the GPL and BSD to organizational structure in Free Software (though I’d probably generalize it now to something like ‘goods licensing in commons-based peer production.’)

I hear Dave Camp has completed his COBE training. Everyone should congratulate him.

life

Had a great copyright meeting yesterday at the Center, on the impact of copyright in education. Could probably have locked everyone in a room for a week and still not have had enough time to cover all the issues. Best question of the day, to me (summarized): are the various educational exceptions to copyright law applicable to a child’s homework? A child’s teacher can excerpt from CNN without substantial problem (at least under US copyright law), but it is unclear if the child can use the same excerpt in their homework. It gets less clear if they post that homework in a portfolio on the web. What if it then gets remixed into wikipedia? [Tangentially, would wikipedia's copyright status be different if it were encyclopedia.harvard.edu? Should it be?]

Today I have a hiring interview for the scumware/spyware/adware project job- still plenty of time to apply if you haven’t yet.

reading

Have started reading Yochai Benkler’s Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials, which is excellent, if for no other reason than it contains an excellent definition of peer production- focused and succint, and yet sufficiently detailed.

Next up on the reading list is Beth Noveck’s ‘A Democracy Of Groups’.

politics

As usual, fafblog is the best place to go for all your torture related commentary needs. [fafblog: what would happen if Adult Swim were crossed with Daily Show.] [Which reminds me that I forgot to tape the first Boondocks. I suck.]

Unusual comment in #xchat-gnome last night, after discussion of the just committed network-manager support and pending gnome-screensaver support:

<purple_cow> bug list is getting awfully short
<luisv> good problem to have :)
<purple_cow> obviously people aren’t requesting enough good features
<luisv> I’ll have to brainstorm tomorrow ;)

After talking about it in IRC, one thing that did come up that could obviously be improved was the user list. It is an obviously suboptimal way to solve a lot of problems. The question then is ‘what do you do in IRC that the user-list is the only current solution for?’ If you read this blog, and have an answer to that, email trowbrds]at[gmail – David Wants You to help define what the uses are so he can figure out what the best solution is.

Random stuff from the weekend:

• More than 30% of American teens have created and shared work over the internet. This is a huge trend, and a great one for society. If we’re all creators the world is a richer place. (Interesting details in the article on copyright awareness.)
• Yochai Benkler has a new paper up on peer production of educational materials, which has been an interest of late because of my work on h2o. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m excited to get to it tomorrow or Tuesday.
• Have gotten quite a bit of feedback on the resume suggestion. Will post the best (and probably a first cut at the latest resume) in a few days. Still waiting for the Killer Advice, though, so keep sending them ;)
• I ate like a king this weekend. I’m so spoiled.
• As many know, before I left Novell, I agitated for the company to focus on one desktop, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend I’m not pleased by Novell’s recent announcement. While I wish it hadn’t taken layoffs for it to happen, as a stockholder I’m pleased that the company has chosen to reduce duplication and focus on really kicking ass at one desktop instead of merely being good at both. I’m also pleased as a stockholder that the company has (apparently) chosen to work with Sun and Red Hat on building a common platform for ISVs instead of continuing to fragment the all-too-small linux desktop market. With my GNOME hat on, the implications of the announcement are more nuanced and less uniformly positive. I’ll leave that analysis for another time, but suffice it to say that the KDE community is vibrant and strong and this announcement will not change that in the least. Whatever Novell and others at the corporate level do, at the community level, GNOME and KDE need to continue to work together where it makes sense, like freedesktop.org and accessibility, so that our users benefit from interoperability, and to compete vigorously where we have true, meaningful differences, so that we each improve. That will continue to advance Free Software- which is after all what we’re here for.

Oh great not-so-lazyweb- I’m updating my resume for school applications, and trying to find a format that reflects the fact that I’ve had two parallel careers for the past four years- ximian/novell by day and gnome by night. Most of the layouts I’ve seen put such ‘volunteer’ work separate and towards the end, but that doesn’t reflect the importance of GNOME to who I am and what I’ve done. I’m currently putting it in the same list as my employment history, though I’m not happy with that either. If anyone has any suggestions for how to show that the volunteerism-that-has-consumed-as-many-hours-as-work is basically on a part with work, while not being work, I’d appreciate it.