April « 2009 « Luis Villa

April, 2009

thoughtlessness in open source

I think professionalism is usually bullshit, and I like it when people have a thick skin. Making people uncomfortable can even be useful if it helps shock people into looking at problems in a new way. I’ve been fairly consistently against behavior codes in open source projects, and I know I’ve on occasion even been the one making people uncomfortable (though I hope that is rare.)

But some lines should absolutely never be crossed, like making 50% of the population uncomfortable about who they are – physical characteristics that they can’t change - rather than what they believe.

STOP sexism

STOP sexism by Casey West. License:

If you’re not clear why I’m drawing that line today, go read this post on a recent rails conference. Fun all the way around.

Some people don’t get it; I think I’m with this comment on why’s post in addressing that problem:

Unless you’ve walked into a professional meeting and had conversation stop while everyone looked at you like “what you you doing here?” it’s probably hard to imagine the impact.

When an entire community has background assumptions about you based on your physical characteristics, even if they aren’t overtly racist or sexist, bad things can happen. This isn’t particular to code; it happens elsewhere too- anywhere where even very well-intentioned people don’t stop to think about what impact their words and actions are having on other people. Those small, unintentional things can easily add up to an uncomfortable or even hostile environment.

Not that the communities I’m involved with tend to have this problem in a particularly bad way, but it does happen, I think this is the right overall response, and I’m on board:

I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer.

Well said. I will help stop thoughtlessness and make people more conscious of what they’re doing and how it is being perceived by others.

law / licensing — 4 Comments
29
Apr 09

me on gizmodo on the realDVD case

Gizmodo says in a post today:

Testing the waters with a low-stakes product isn’t a bad idea in itself, but RealDVD is the wrong low-stakes product for the job. Real claims that Facet copies DVDs to an internal HDD, but offers absolutely no means by which these files could be shared—they’re DRMed, disconnected from the outside world a locked in an actual box. RealDVD, on the other hand, copies films to your PC’s drive and wraps them in iTunes-style DRM, which allows playback on up to five machines. That opens opens a piracy angle for the MPAA—one that could conceivably swing the case in their favor, killing RealDVD and precluding production of Facet for reasons that don’t even apply to it.

On some instinctive level, I see where Gizmodo is coming from here. You never want to give courts a reason to dislike you when you’re walking in their doors, and ‘piracy’ is certainly going to make courts a little skeptical, even if the ‘piracy’ is of a very limited sort that hundreds of millions engage in every time they use their ipod.

At the same time, once you look at it a little more deeply, RealDVD is probably a perfectly fine case for Facet- two big features of the law at issue make it very unlikely that the courts would decide any differently for one product or the other. They sink or swim together.

First, Real is very wisely making very loud noises about the chilling effects on product innovation that the DMCA has here. Since Sony, courts have been told to be very concerned about this issue, and generally, they have been. Even in Grokster, where the Supreme Court absolutely creamed Grokster, the justices were very careful to say that they didn’t want to discourage all innovation- only innovation that was imagined, implemented, and marketed as piracy gear. So Real is getting off on the right foot- focusing on personal use and innovation.

More importantly, the law in this particular case makes it clear that piracy doesn’t matter- so the (relatively) subtle difference between what the two Real products do after the copy takes place aren’t something the court should pay much attention to. There are two relevant sections of the DMCA:

17 USC 1201(a)(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the copyright act].

17 USC 1201(a)(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that … (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

Take a quick read of that first part. If you “circumvent” a “technological measure”, the law as written doesn’t care if you’re doing it to ‘pirate’ or to find the author’s email address so you can send him a billion dollars. You’ve violated the DMCA, period. So both Real products are essentially the same – from the perspective of the law – on this score. The second restriction is similar- it is illegal to sell a system whose core reason for being is focused around DMCA violation. We don’t ask what the non-circumventing functionality is (does it use the copies to club baby seals or save orphans?). We only ask whether it has ‘limited commercially significant purpose’ other than the ‘circumvention.’ Again, the Real products, while different from a consumer (and maybe PR) perspective, violate (or don’t violate) the law in roughly the same way.

Given the importance of innovation, and the irrelevance of piracy to the DMCA, this is probably a perfectly fine test case- maybe not ideal, but as good as they are going to get given the flaws in the law they are trying to get around.

gnome / QA / software — 15 Comments
22
Apr 09

a rumbling about X QA

As I rebooted this morning as a result of RH bug 473347¹ two serious questions popped into my head:

do any of the major core X contributors² employ a full-time X QA person? As far as I know the answer is ‘no’ but I’d love to be wrong.
would a full-time X QA person funded fractionally by the major X contributors, reporting to the development managers for each of those contributors, but formally employed by freedesktop.org, make even more sense?

My sense is that this kind of position that may be hard for any one contributor to justify but that it is the kind of thing that is probably necessary for a complex piece of software to succeed, so a position with costs shared across the various contributors might make sense.

(This is only partially inspired by Owen’s recent call on behalf of Friends of GNOME and the sysadmin team, but I’ve always thought a full-time GNOME QA manager would make sense- it really is vastly more efficient for everyone involved if much of this sort of stuff is done upstream. And it just struck me today that probably the same is true for X.)

this was today’s first reboot, but recent experience suggests I’ll reboot at least one more time and probably at least twice more today [↩]
RH, Intel, Novell, as far as I know? [↩]

law / licensing / paper ideas — 1 Comment
19
Apr 09

all the cool kids are writing about the google book search settlement

Samuelson

Picker

Grimmelman

Perhaps some day before the case settles I’ll actually be able to read them all. In the meantime linking here so that I can find them all later.

misc. — 7 Comments
9
Apr 09

the world needs more lawyers like this

The world needs more lawyers like this:

I often explain to businesses that the main reward for a great, original product is a succesful business based on that product, and that intellectual property notwithstanding, the best way to protect most great ideas is by consistently excellent execution, high quality, responsive customer service, continued innovation and overall staying ahead of the competition by delivering more value.

Fender, according to the record in this opinion, understood this well for decades… Only in the feverish IP-crazy atmosphere of our current century did the company deem it “necessary” to spend a fortune that could have been used on product development, marketing or any darned thing on a quixotic quest for a trademark it never believed in itself. That is more than in impossible dream — it’s a crying shame.

I remember telling a room full of execs in 2002 (in the context of a discussion of Lego’s threatened use of trademark to restrict legOS) that the correct response to criticism of their product of the internet was to build better products. They looked at me like I was a naive child. And I suppose it was in part naive; there are going to be crazy people who criticize no matter what, which I’m not sure I understood at the time. But overall I’m glad to see that others (even lawyers!) still think I’m not completely nuts.

(See also Matt Haughey recently on a basically related topic.)

misc. — 2 Comments
6
Apr 09

in case you thought data in the cloud was safe

Some anecdotes on data loss in the cloud:

A more complex case, where the provider did (mostly?) the right thing:

Yahoo closing its locker service after 10 years

These are not necessarily straightforward; each failure has disparate causes (too much reliance on expensive hardware in the first case; too little, perhaps, in the ma.gnolia case). But understanding what happens and when here is important as more and more of our data moves cloud-ward.

gnome — 1 Comment
2
Apr 09

upcoming GNOME board elections

As some have noticed, my upcoming ‘free time’ suggests that I might be able to run for the board again, when I said during my last candidacy statement that I’d be running for one term and one term only. While I’ll still be available to help the Foundation out on some legal tasks, I will not be running again- it is time for me to focus on what comes next, regardless of the details of what that is.

In the mean time, I’m excited that at my instigation we’re moving to preferential voting. I think this will give us a more representative board and reduce strategic voting, and I think those are both good things. I look forward to casting my vote as a ‘mere’ member for some very good candidates.

If you’re involved, and feel like you want to help lead and steward the resources of the Foundation, you should definitely considering becoming a candidate yourself. Vincent’s post says it better than I can, but of course, if you’ve got questions, feel free to contact me.

forfacebook / law / school — 2 Comments
1
Apr 09

failures of the legal academy

Because of this blog, I get an email every other month or so asking about law school- should I go? where should I go? etc. My responses are usually, frankly, fairly negative- I’ve had a fairly decent experience, but I think that is in large part for fairly unusual and idiosyncratic reasons. Via madisonian.net I stumbled on one paper and one collection of papers that I’ll now be recommending to anyone who wants to go to law school.

The first is “Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy“by Duncan Kennedy. There are a lot of damning (and quite a few not-quite-as-damning-as-the-author-thinks) bits in the piece, but I think perhaps the most dead on was this one:

The point of the class discussion will be that your initial reaction of outrage is naive, non-legal, irrelevant to what you’re supposed to be learning, and maybe substantively wrong into the bargain. There are “good reasons” for the awful result, when you take a legal and logical “large” view, as opposed to the knee-jerk passionate view; and if you can’t muster those reasons, maybe you aren’t cut out to be a lawyer.

Of course, as the article points out, there are multiple ways you could teach this- you could teach it with context, pointing out that your instincts are valid and giving examples of how justice can still be done within the context of the law; or you could teach it in the most soul-crushing, status-quo-reinforcing manner possible. No cookie for guessing which one happens in law school. Even if not all of the author’s assumptions seem plausible¹ he’s dead on about how the law school experience is structured and the pernicious impact it has on how even well-meaning people react to the status quo.

The second set of papers is in the most recent Georgetown Law Journal, centered around a piece called ‘Spam Jurisprudence‘ by Pierre Schlag and a series of responses to it. Again, I recommend them to anyone entering law school. First, because they are not an easy read², so if you can wrap your head around them you’re probably ready for law school. More importantly, they discuss a serious problem in legal academia- the lack of impact on the real world, and the lack of intellectual challenge involved in most academic legal work. Again, the paper is almost a caricature of the reality – Posner’s response in particular does a good job of pointing out areas where there is real intellectual ferment in today’s legal scholarship – but Schlag does point out some serious structural issues that will frequently cause disappointment if you come in with the idea of challenging current thinking through legal research and writing.

Of course, neither of these articles come with practicable solutions attached, in large part because (as both authors point out) these problems reflect the problems of the profession³, and so can’t be solved in isolation. But interesting to think about anyway.

I do think that there are significant differences between both students and professors, even if our hierarchies brutally overvalue and usually mis-measure those differences [↩]
I’d go so far as to say ‘bizarre’ read, perhaps entertaining if you get the in-jokes [↩]
maybe part of the plan should be fixing the ABA? [↩]

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