Shaking Hands - Credit: Aidan Jones on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The FSF has settled its suit against Cisco.   Cisco will have to appoint a Free Software Director, fix their issues, and give the FSF some unspecified amount of money.

Cisco has agreed to appoint a Free Software Director for Linksys, a subsidiary of Cisco, to supervise Linksys’ compliance with the requirements of free software licenses such as the GPL (the GNU General Public License). The Free Software Director will report periodically to the FSF regarding Linksys’ compliance efforts. Cisco has further agreed to take certain steps to notify previous recipients of Linksys products containing FSF programs of their rights under the GPL and other applicable licenses, to publish a licensing notice on the Linksys website, and to provide additional notices in a separate publication. In addition, Cisco will continue to make the complete and corresponding source code for versions of FSF programs used with current Linksys products freely available on its website. Cisco will also make a monetary contribution to the FSF.

The parties recognize Cisco’s ongoing obligations under the GPL and other free software licenses. The FSF will continue to independently monitor Linksys’ compliance with these licenses, and work with Linksys to resolve any new issues that may arise.

“We are glad that Cisco has affirmed its commitment to the free software community by implementing additional measures within its compliance program and dedicating appropriate resources to them, further reassuring the users’ freedoms under the GPL,” said Peter Brown, Executive Director of the FSF. “Our agreement results in making all of the relevant source code available in the fastest way possible.”

That’s good.

• FSF
• Slashdot

Stickers - Credit: steevithak on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The FSF has started a new internship program.  They will be unpaid.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Thursday, May 7, 2009 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced a new internship program for free software activists, inviting students to apply for its first round of openings by Monday, May 25th.

The program provides opportunities for participants to work closely with FSF staff members for twelve-week terms in core areas of the FSF’s work, including campaign and community organizing, free software licensing, systems and network administration, GNU project support, and web development.

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The internships are unpaid, but the FSF will provide the documentation needed for students to receive funding or credit from outside sources. A limited number of positions are available, and priority will be given to candidates able to work full-time on-site at the FSF headquarters in Boston.

I dare you to fill you application with how much you love the “Linux operating system” and “open source.”

• FSF

GPLv3 - Credit: fsf.org

The GCC Runtine Library has a new license exception that will allow GCC to be licensed under the GPLv3.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Tuesday, January 27, 2009 — Today the Free Software Foundation (FSF), together with the GCC Steering Committee and the Software Freedom Law Center, announced the release of a new GCC Runtime Library Exception. This license exception will allow the entire GCC codebase to be upgraded to GPLv3, and enable the development of a plugin framework for GCC.

“GCC includes runtime libraries that are automatically built into all the object code that GCC creates,” explained Brett Smith, license compliance engineer at the FSF. “Because we decided a long time ago to allow developers to compile proprietary software with GCC, these libraries have always had license exceptions. This way, programs that are merely compiled with GCC don’t have to be released under the GPL.”

I didn’t realize GCC wasn’t under the GPLv3.

• FSF

Jammie Thomas and Lawyer - Credit: mightyomedia

The FSF has given Jammie Thomas $3000 in order to compensate an expert witness to rebut the RIAA’s expert witness.

In Capitol Records v. Thomas, which is scheduled for its second trial to take place on March 9th, the verdict from the first trial having been set aside, the defendant has received a grant of $3000 from the Expert Witness Defense Fund of the Free Software Foundation to enable her to retain an expert witness.

In the first trial, she could not afford an expert witness to rebut the expert witness used by the RIAA.

Accordingly, her attorney has made a motion for an extension of the discovery deadline.

This is the second case in which the FSF’s Expert Witness Defense Fund has lent assistance, the first being UMG Recordings v. Lindor, where it granted $2046.92 to compensate the expert witness and $750.00 to compensate the technical consultant. A full report of the Expert Witness Defense Fund’s receipts and disbursements as of December 31, 2008, is available here.

I hope that the expert witness is successful.

• Recording Industry vs. The People

FSF - Credit: fsf.org

The FSF has sued Cisco for GPL-noncompliance.  Cisco has distributed binaries of GPL licensed programs, without the source code as well.

Most of these programs are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and the rest are under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Both these licenses encourage everyone, including companies like Cisco, to modify the software as they see fit and then share it with others, under certain conditions. One of those conditions says that anyone who redistributes the software must also provide their recipients with the source code to that program. The FSF has documented many instances where Cisco has distributed licensed software but failed to provide its customers with the corresponding source code.

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“We began working with Cisco in 2003 to help them establish a process for complying with our software licenses, and the initial changes were very promising,” explained Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer at the FSF. “Unfortunately, they never put in the effort that was necessary to finish the process, and now five years later we have still not seen a plan for compliance. As a result, we believe that legal action is the best way to restore the rights we grant to all users of our software.”

I actually don’t see what the big deal is in not redistributing unmodified code.  Why can’t they just link back to it?  “Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software”…I’m pretty sure they can still download the source code to gcc and modify it if they want to.  I feel like this clause was designed for a world where few people have internet connections.

• FSF

FSFE - Credit: fsfeurope.org

Free Software Foundation Europe’s Freedom Task Force (FTF) and GPL-Violations.org have just formed a partnership that has released a guide to reporting and fixing license violations.

The best way to solve compliance issues is to prevent them happening in the first place”, says Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator. “We work to support this by educating the community at large. When problems do occur, we want people to be able to share information and resolve them effectively.” Of course, the ideal is for there to be no license violations, but when they happen, it’s good to know how to handle it without making things worse. I notice that they suggest being careful about posting a suspected violation on a public message board. When I took a course in the GPL from the FSF some years back, from the US perspective, they said exactly the same thing. For one thing, most violations are not intentional, so why make it harder to resolve it by branding someone in public? There are better and friendlier ways. So what should you do instead? And if you are a business accused of such a violation, what are some tips to resolving it quickly and effectively? One, I see, on the top of the list is do acknowledge quickly receiving word of the allegation. Read on for the rest of their advice, based on their experience handling such matters.

Sources:

• Groklaw
• FSF EU

FSF - Credit: fsf.org

The FSF has released version 1.3 of their Free Documentation License.  The biggest change is that it is now compatible with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

This new permission has been added at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia project. The same terms are available to any public wiki that uses materials available under the new license. The Wikimedia Foundation will now initiate a process of community discussion and voting to determine whether or not to use CC-BY-SA 3.0 as the license for Wikipedia

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Version 1.3 of the GNU FDL also adopts the license proxy and termination clauses that are part of the GNU General Public License version 3, released last year. The full text of the new license, along with more information, is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html. The text of CC-BY-SA 3.0 is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

The FSF is still accepting comments as it considers a major revision of the license, FDL version 2.0. More information is available at http://gplv3.fsf.org/.

I discussed the compatibility of the FDL with CC BY-SA in March.  He didn’t seem happy about the idea of making them compatible, but I’m not sure why (something about taking away people’s freedom).

• FSF

FSF

The FSF has received a 10 thousand dollar grant from worldlabel.com Inc, and has plans to distribute the money in order to attack the biggest challanges that average users have with using completely libre software.

Russell Ossyndover, owner of WorldLabel.com, said, “smaller companies and individuals can pool their resources in support of critical free software projects, but awareness is key. There are many threats from proprietary software and I wanted to contribute to a program that can help solve those problems. I am looking forward to working with the FSF to find creative ways to promote the cause.”

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The list is online at http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/. It includes Gnash, a project to replace Adobe’s proprietary Flash player; Coreboot, a free software replacement for proprietary BIOSes; a call for a free software replacement for the VOIP and multimedia chat program Skype; a free software membership and donor transaction and contact system for non-profit organizations; a free software replacement for Google Earth; and several more.

In my opinion, Gnash is a bandaid on a much deeper issue.  We really need to pump effort into animated svg.  But this is good news, regardless of that little comment.

• FSF