I’m celebrating the end of my portion of my trial by … spending all weekend in meetings, specifically the OSI’s annual face-to-face board meeting, which we’re holding this year in Chicago¹. It’s been a very productive meeting so far, with lots of good discussion about both our vision and our plan for attacking the future. The organization still has a long way to go but there is a lot of potential here.

1. Yes, during the NATO Summit. Perhaps not our best move ever.

“Hello, My Name is Open Source” by opensourceway, used under CC-BY-SA license

I’ll write more about my goals for OSI (and for my participation in it) in the coming months, once I’ve gotten a chance to actually meet with the rest of the board and better understand the projects that are already underway. But right now I think it’s very important to note how I became a member of the board, because I think it says something important about where OSI is going, and about why I agreed to invest my time and energy.

Specifically, at FOSDEM, OSI announced that it was beginning to shift in part to an affiliate model, where open source organizations like Mozilla, KDE, and others would have input into OSI’s processes and decisionmaking.¹ One of the first tangible outcomes of that process was to ask affiliate orgs to nominate board members. The result: Mozilla nominated me, and Eclipse nominated fellow new board member Mike Milinkovich. Because of this, our election is less about us,² and more about taking very concrete steps towards an OSI with deeper ties to the broader open source community. And that, I think, reflects what OSI has not always been, but could be – a place where the best of open source can talk and work together to move common interests forward.

1. Ask me how your organization can join!
2. Though obviously I expect we’ll be great :)

The main reasons given for not using per-file headers are two-fold:

1. They’re awkward in short files. Many programming frameworks these days (most notably rails) are encouraging creation of many short files, so this is becoming a bigger problem than it was when per-file headers were first created.
2. They’re not considered very relevant in languages or frameworks that are library-centric, especially those with package managers that are heavily used (like ruby’s gems). Again, many modern language frameworks include tooling that encourages this approach, so some developers are thinking “why can’t I just express the license once per library?”

The case for per-file copyright headers is put well, and succinctly, by Larry Rosen:

“[O]ur goal is to pass on any important IP information that might be useful … in the place(s) [downstream licensees] are most likely to find it.”

Larry’s comment makes two assumptions that I want to flesh out and support.

First, Larry assumes that the place where people are “most likely to find” licensing information is in per-file headers. It is true that in the best case scenario in many modern languages/frameworks, library-level is a great place to put licenses – in normal use, they’ll get seen and understood. But lots of coding in the wild is not “normal use.” I review a lot of different codebases these days, and files get separated from their parent projects and directories all the time. And then you have to use fairly complex (and often expensive) tools to do what should be a simple task- figure out what the license is. So, yes, modern frameworks should in theory reduce the need for per-file licensing information – but in practice, that is often not the case.

Second, Larry assumes that you actually want people to use your code. Lots of publishers of open source code seem surprisingly unconcerned by this, unfortunately. The functional, practical benefits of open source all start with someone else reusing your code, so if you’re publishing open source code at all, you should be concerned about making it easy for people to use the code you publish. Again, putting licensing information in each file can help make this easier, by making it easier for people to figure out their rights and responsibilities. (This is particularly true if you want commercial uptake, since so many commercial users of open source are getting more conservative about using source code that is not properly labeled and licensed.)((Larry also perhaps assumes you want people to respect your license when using your code; that is a surprisingly complex topic that I will try to address some other day.))

So, yes: if you want people to find your licensing information, and  to use your code, per-file headers are the way to go. They may not be ideal but they really are worth the effort.

Yesterday was a nice punctuation mark to that, featuring a long ride down to the ocean, a great view, and a very satisfying fish and chips.

I am definitely enjoying some time out of the office and looking forward to a great 2012- hope my friends are too. Now I just need to figure out what life improvement can trump “get back on a bike.” Suggestions welcome :)

Fine Print by CJ Sorg, used under CC-BY 2.0

I’ve published the experiment (Compare with the plain-jane HTML MPL 1.1). This is just an experiment and a personal hack, but I’m happy to hear more suggestions and improvements, and if the final result works, I’ll suggest we use it instead of the traditional plain HTML version. Some notes on the process, including links to the (abbreviated) blog posts at the TFL website (for much more thought and detail, buy the book):

• Fonts: This was hard. The author of Typography for Lawyers is himself a former font designer, and (correctly, I think) a font snob. Given that I was not going to splurge for fancy webfonts just for this project, I spent a lot of time browsing and playing with Google Web Fonts. This is clearly not ideal (for example, it has only one monospace option for Exhibits A and B, and I’d like a slightly more subtle serif for the titles) but I think I found a decent combination of fonts – or at least an improvement on the system fonts. Presumably, if this became Official, some better font choices could be used.
• Small Caps: I’d never given small caps much thought until reading TFL. The book is quite positive on them under certain circumstances, and that led me to experiment and eventually to use them as headers. Unfortunately, Google Web Fonts is limited here – none of the Google Web Fonts appear to have true small caps. TFL recommends strongly against fake smallcaps, but I think these look decent so I’ve used them; I’d be happy to replace with a better one if that was available.
• Hyphenation and Justification: TFL does not necessarily recommend full justification, but demands hyphenation if you do fully justify. Since Mozilla just added support for hyphenation, I turned on hyphenation and justification, and I think it looks good (if you’re using a recent build.) In production, it would probably be better to either use something like hyphenator that works cross-browser, or use some sort of browser feature detection to turn off justification for browsers that don’t also support hyphenation.
• Line length: TFL recommends something between 45 and 90 characters per line. (The Supreme Court’s well-designed documents are about 65 characters per line.) Unfortunately, as best as this CSS newbie can tell, there is no good way to do this simply in CSS. I ended up with a total hack, using the “alphabet trick” described in  TFL to estimate the right width.
• ALL CAPS: TFL IS AGAINST ALL CAPS FOR ENTIRE PARAGRAPHS. My experimental HTML version uses some gross CSS to create a highlighting box around the two traditionally all-caps blocks in the text.
• “smart” quotes: We know that people copy and paste from the HTML version of the license into plain text files, even though (with MPL 2) we’re going to provide a very nicely formatted plain text version of the license. And of course, copying and pasting curly quotes into plain text gets… messy. And so, I am conflicted about this. The HTML linked above uses smart quotes, while the plain text uses straight quotes. Inevitably that will lead to some problems; suggestions on how best to fix (use javascript to modify what is copy-and-pasted if someone does that?) are welcome.

Of course, I’m still very bad with CSS and HTML, so I’m sure this document can be improved, and I’m happy to take suggestions and fixes. Regardless, it has been an educational experience for me and I’m glad I toyed with it.

Free and open software and culture have been very good to me, and I’m glad that the Mary and Val (and hopefully soon a fleet of others) will be working to make it more accessible to women and girls. As big a force for change as this movement has been in the past two decades, things can only improve when we consciously work on being accessible to the 50% of the population that is currently all too often excluded.

Not every venture is about capital, by Fligtar, used under CC-BY-NC-SA

Congrats to all my friends on a very solid release and on reinvigorating their important message of public service.

FAQ, by photosteve101/planetofsuccess.com, used under CC-BY

Besides the usual (small tweaks to some language in a further attempt to get it Just Right; improvements to the GPL language; etc.) I also published a bit of an experiment: a draft of the license which replaces the traditional section headers with FAQ questions, like so:

Traditional:

2.2. Grants.

Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license: . . .

FAQ-style:

2. What rights are granted to me by this license? Who are these rights granted by?

Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license: . . .

The inspiration for this came from the apartment lease I signed in December, which was done in this style and (oddly) almost a pleasure to read.

This approach has two advantages. First, it helps you draft and organize things more clearly. Since every paragraph was the answer to a question, things were broken up into what normal human beings would consider more logical units, instead of the giant blocks of text legal documents sometimes sprawl into.  Preparing the FAQified version of Beta 2 made us aware of some MPL sections that had this problem, and it helped us reorder and reorganize text as a result- something which you can see in (for example) the new Section 8 of MPL 2 Beta 2, which is part of the old Section 9 broken out so that it makes more sense independently. Because of this, these changes will help every reader of the license, even if we never publish another “FAQified” version.

Second, the questions clue a reader in to the key concepts of a section. It is important that people still read everything. We’ve tried to ensure that the questions do not change the meaning of the “answers;” i.e., the body of the text, both by ensuring that the “answer” or body text is the same between both versions and by disclaiming any changes in the license itself. In other words, this will help non-lawyers understand- but if for some reason, you need to be absolutely sure, you (and possibly your lawyer) need to read the whole thing carefully and without reference to the questions.

We’re looking forward to feedback on this, both from non-lawyers (does this help you understand?) and from lawyers (this is an unusual technique, and so suggestions on how to do it better are welcome). So download it, read it, and let us know what you think.

[postscript: The first comment reminds me that this is only one of the steps we've taken to simplify and clarify the license. Most notably, Beta 2 is almost exactly 1/2 the length of  MPL 1.1, but we've also worked with Mozilla folks to simplify requirements where the old license was over-specific, and with lawyers with a reputation for good writing on how to simplify language and remove redundancy. But there is still time to make it even better, so please continue reading and giving feedback!]