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Bulletin Issue 18

June 2011

In this issue of

the Bulletin...

Welcome to theBulletin

1

Why should I careabout that?

2

LibrePlanet 2011 4Recommending licensesfor new projects

5

The danger of ebooks 6Spotlight: Merlin Cloud 8GNU Press news 10Free TechnologyAcademy

10

Come on in!

Welcome to the

Bulletin

by Matt Lee

Editor

Welcome to the first FSF Bulletinof our 26th year. In this issue

we have insights on some of the excit-ing developments in free software, aswell as articles reminding us of poten-tial threats to our freedom and auton-omy.

We also have some changes at theFree Software Foundation. After tenyears with the Foundation, our formerexecutive director Peter Brown has de-cided to move on to new pastures —handing over the reins to a familiarface, John Sullivan. John has helda number of positions in the Founda-tion, most recently serving as opera-tions manager. He has returned toBoston after his brief dalliance withlife on the West Coast. Josh Gay,who some of you may remember as acampaigns manager from a few yearsago, has also returned to continue thatwork.

Finally, throughout this issue youwill see various pieces of GNU artwork.These were recently rescued from ourdecaying archive and scanned. Ourthanks go to Etienne Suvasa for all ofhis work over the years providing uswith these glorious pieces of art.

1

Why should I care about

that?

by John Sullivan

Executive Director

At the FSF, we have a goal of in-creasing the size and strength of

the free software movement. To ex-pand the movement, we need to getthe attention of people who have neverheard of free software before, and ex-plain why it’s important. We have tomake the case for the four freedomsthat characterize free software, and tosucceed fully, we must be able to dothis for people who don’t care to knowmore than they have to about comput-ers.

Freedom 0, the freedom to run theprogram for any purpose, is the eas-iest to explain. A word processor, for

example, should not come with restric-tions that say you can’t use it to writeRepublican campaign materials. Be-cause running a program on a com-puter to do something one wants todo is the minimal definition of whatit means to use a computer at all, theimportance of this freedom is easy toexplain.

Likewise, Freedom 2, the freedomto redistribute copies so you can helpyour neighbor, is straightforward. Likefreedom 0, it is not hard for every-one who encounters computers to seehow this freedom directly impacts theirlives. When using a computer, it isprima facie beneficial and empower-ing to be able to exchange with oth-ers copies of programs that do usefulthings.

So far, so good. But now we areleft with the two freedoms for whichaccess to the “source code” is a pre-condition: Freedom 1, the freedom tostudy how the program works and tochange it to make it do what you wish;and Freedom 3, the freedom to subse-quently distribute copies of your mod-ified versions to others.

The importance of these freedomshas always been difficult to explain topeople who aren’t familiar with howprograms are written. We lack anequivalent of Schoolhouse Rock’s “Howa Bill Becomes a Law” showing howsource code becomes a running pro-gram. Even if we had one, we couldn’texpect everyone to be interested.

Unfortunately, things on this fronthave recently taken a turn for theworse. As of this writing, the top re-sult when searching Google for “sourcecode” is not a definition talking aboutthe human-readable language in whichprograms are written. It’s a JakeGyllenhaal movie. I haven’t seen this

2

restrictions; and more specifically tocontribute to the building of a criticalmass in the use of free technologies.

• The Free Technology Academyconsists of an advanced virtualcampus with course materialsthat are followed entirely online.

• The contents of the program arefocused on free technologies anddesigned by e-learning experts.

• The Free Technology Academy isspecially oriented to IT profes-sionals, students, educations anddecision makers.

• All learning materials used inthe FTA are published under li-censes that allow them to befreely used, modified and redis-tributed. Learners who enrollin the FTA receive tuition fromthe partner universities’ teachingstaff, and FTA credits are recog-nized by these universities.

• The FTA aims to share the bur-den and benefits of developingand exploiting course modulesrelated to free technology. Or-ganizations interested in joiningforces are welcome to strengthenthe Partner Network.

Why?

The use of free technologies is con-sidered a key factor for sustainabil-ity: Free standards guarantee interop-erability and provide a level playingfield for developers; free software im-plementations help to prevent the for-mation of monopolies that hinder freecompetition in the ICT sector.

The presence of free technologiesis steadily growing in many sectors,

such as public bodies, entertainment,embedded systems, mobile computing,etc. The FTA courses cover these fieldsform several points of view: technical,economic, organizational, and legal.

For whom?

FTA is for people who want to acquireknowledge about these topics and ob-tain a certificate that is accepted at themaster level by the university partners.However, holding a university degree isnot required to enroll. Typical partic-pants are ICT professionals, educators,students, civil servants, and decision-makers from different countries.

Learning methodology

All courses provided by the Free Tech-nology Academy are conducted en-tirely online at the FTA Virtual Cam-pus. The FTA learning methodol-ogy allows learners to define their ownstudy schedules: asynchronus commu-nication tools, few deadlines, and ac-tivities that can be joined at differentdates and times. This model allows foranyone to follow FTA courses, regard-less of their location and job, as longas they have regular access to the In-ternet.

11

We use it internally to provisionnew virtual machines within our pri-vate cloud. Merlin will then provisionthese instances and even register themautomatically in DNS. It makes therapid creation of large numbers of pro-visioned virtual machines particularlyquick and easy, which I would say isa general, if unwritten, expectation ofcloud computing.

GNU Press news

by Donald Robertson III

Sales Administrator

The FSF is proud to announcesome new merchandise available

at shop.fsf.org. We have two newbooks out right now: Free as in Free-dom (2.0): Richard Stallman and theFree Software Revolution and the sec-ond edition of Free Software Free So-ciety: Selected Essays of Richard M.Stallman. Signed copies are also avail-able through the store, but supplies arelimited.

We’ve also introduced a new ad-dition to the GNU menagerie, theadorable and soft baby gnu. We stillhave our traditional stuffed gnu as well,but for a limited time only.

Looking ahead, we expect to releasea new edition of the GNU Emacs Man-ual soon, updated for Emacs 23.3.

As always, FSF associate memberscan get a discount of 20% off all pur-chases at shop.fsf.org.

The new GNU Emacs manual design

Free Technology Academy

by Matt Lee

Campaigns Manager

The Free Technology Academy pro-vides formal training at the uni-

versity level about free software andstandards. The FTA Consortium aimsto contribute to a society that per-mits all users to study, participate andbuild upon existing knowledge without

10

movie, but I’m told that in it, the“Source Code” is a government experi-ment revolving around a program thatenables one person to cross over intoanother’s identity in the last eight min-utes of life. I’ve mostly gotten overthe theory that this movie is in fact aconspiracy designed to make our jobsharder.1

The prominence of Gyllenhaal’sSource Code is just more buckshot fornaysayers who claim we will never beable to convince people on a large scalethat the freedom to modify a programis critical, because most people in theirlives will never want to modify a pro-gram. So why should they care?

Richard Stallman has been askedand has answered this question manytimes. In his answers, he highlights theimportance of what amounts to liter-acy. He says that, with access to sourcecode, anyone can learn to be a pro-grammer and come to value this free-dom; and it doesn’t take much workto learn how to do a lot, even for peo-ple who don’t ever intend on becomingmaster programmers.

I can testify that his answer workedfor me. What little I know aboutprogramming is self-taught from freesoftware, other than a couple highschool classes in Pascal and BASIC.But I know enough — most impor-tantly enough about how to look upanswers for the things I don’t know —that I can accomplish a great deal inmy personal computing environment.

Even such minimal literacy isemancipatory; it is the surest way tomake sure that you are not a prisonerof the software you use. But I also rec-ognize that this appeal doesn’t work

1But if you have evidence, please contact

me.

for everyone, and that’s okay. I believewe can also earn the support of peoplewho can think of nothing they wouldlike to do less than learn or change howtheir computer works.

In this effort, we are up againstpowerful marketing machines like Ap-ple, who spends millions of dollars totell us repeatedly that nobody shouldwant anything more than for theirtechnology to just work, in the pro-cess paradoxically defining freedom tomean the antithesis of both the de-sire and the ability to change anythingabout one’s circumstances. This mar-keting strategy runs from their soft-ware down to their physical devices,which are known for prohibiting sim-ple things like changing the battery orinstalling a new storage card.

Of course people want their tech-nology to work. But Apple’s trend-setting overemphasis on this idea hasmade them the Fox News of technol-ogy. Just as Fox News rides on themotto “Fair and Balanced,” heavy-handedly implying that viewers don’tneed any other news sources, so Ap-ple and its budding copycats ride onthe idea that users don’t need real free-dom, because they are already havingthe best possible experience.

Free software certainly isn’t alwaysbest when it comes to functionalityor ease of use, and in many places itcan learn from proprietary software.But just as plenty of people who donot write news articles themselves stillstrongly support freedom of the pressso that others can write articles forthem to read, so plenty of people cancome to recognize the ways in whichproprietary software company effortsto crush the creativity and intelligenceof those who do want to modify sourcecode — of the non-Gyllenhaal variety

3

— end up hurting everyone who everneeds to run a program to do any-thing. Like the news media in placeswith no free press, proprietary softwaremeans gate-kept control over informa-tion, tools, and knowledge, and that’sscary.

“Fair and Balanced” exists in thecontext of the First Amendment. Like-wise, companies like Apple can ex-ist and offer their users streamlinedchoice-free experiences serving mediacertified by Steve Jobs, but they mustdo so in a free world, eschewing thesubsidized backing of government co-ercion they currently enjoy in the formof copyrights, patents, and Digital Re-strictions Management. They can havetheir image, but they must not rely onfundamental user freedom being illegalin order to do so.

Many people can and do value free-doms that they themselves do not exer-cise, because they empathize with theimportance of those freedoms to oth-ers, and recognize that the alternativeis for their own, more dear freedomsto someday be threatened (“First theycame for the. . . ”). Many people alsocare about the way in which the thingsthey use are produced, and they wantthose methods to be ethical. Wheninviting new voices to the free softwaremovement, we can and should appealto these empathies, but we don’t needto depend on them. The character ofthe software available to any of us is de-pendent on the ethical environment inwhich that software is made. Whetherprogrammers or not, we all need theprograms we use to be made and runin freedom.

LibrePlanet 2011

by Matt Lee

Campaigns Manager

In March we had our third Libre-Planet conference here in Boston.

This year we wanted to run a smallerevent, with the expectation that nextyear’s conference will be a larger affair— our biggest conference to date.

Because we planned a smallerevent, we chose a smaller venue thanin previous years. With only a sin-gle track of talks, it was clear wecould find a suitable lecture hall atmany of the universities and collegesin the Boston area. For us, BunkerHill Community College proved idealfor our needs. Minutes from the heartof downtown Boston and so close tothe subway system that it has its ownstation, BHCC features prominently inthe movie Good Will Hunting in the of-fice of Robin Williams’s character.

4

can mean Amazon AWS, which hasmany significant ethical concerns, butit can also mean something like Euca-lyptus/UEC (the GPLv3-licensed ver-sion), or other free software which pro-vides similar services.

Merlin allows you to quickly re-quest the creation of new virtual ma-chines and storage volumes, and canalso assist in provisioning them (get-ting them ready to do real work). Ithandles a lot of details in the back-ground (such as Puppet certificatesigning, BIND dynamic DNS updates,etc.) and aims to make day-to-daycloud operations as easy as a coupleof clicks. It also aims to provide afree software option versus the propri-etary software or closed web servicesthat are used to interface and interactwith clouds today.

What technologies are used to

make Merlin work?

As I said, Merlin is a Ruby on Railsproject. I actually used the projectas an excuse to learn Ruby/Rails, asI had only used Django or Zope in thepast. Underneath the hood, it uses Ac-tiveMQ to pass messages between thefront end and the back end, and ofcourse a whole basket of Ruby gems.Merlin also assumes that you are usingPuppet to provision your systems.

What can developers who are

interested in Merlin do to help it

succeed?

Merlin, primarily, needs more at-tention. It works for me, in my envi-ronment; it would be helpful if otherswould try using it. It really needs bet-ter packaging and documentation: itisn’t as simple as installing it and click-ing a few things. It also needs quite abit of work on its UI, and I am hopingto get it to a beta release where a lotof the basic functionality will be a bit

more implemented than it is now. Inthe future, Merlin will support spawn-ing entire groups of machines, or en-tire self-contained systems, within thecloud. I would also like Merlin to beAPI-agnostic, and support a wide va-riety of cloud software. All that beingsaid, the software is available today, soanyone who wants to hack on it can doso.

We’ve seen some rather gloomy-

looking options from big compa-

nies who are talking up the cloud

as the solution to all our prob-

lems. What can Merlin do to

give people some flexibility with-

out requiring them to give up

their control?

Primarily, the real issue with thepervasiveness of clouds with ethical is-sues for users is simply that they arethere, and they are the only real op-tion unless you are looking very care-fully. The average user isn’t yet awareof the traps and pitfalls involved in us-ing cloud services, and is very muchattracted to the ease of use and sim-plicity that the cloud promises — es-pecially the idea of their files or databeing available “everywhere.” Unfor-tunately, this simplicity comes with aprice — it is inherently linked to anexpropriation of freedom and privacywhich becomes harder and harder toreverse the more one relies on the cor-porate clouds.

To my knowledge, no one has at-tempted to build a large, scalable freesoftware cloud that inherently respectsthe freedom and privacy of its users.I sincerely hope Merlin can be helpfulin this regard, even if it is only to en-courage communities of users to buildtheir own small private clouds insteadof always using the big companies.

How do you use Merlin?

9

• To design players so users cansend authors anonymous volun-tary payments.

Ebooks need not attack our

freedom, but they will if compa-

nies get to decide. It’s up to us to

stop them. The fight has already

started.

See gnu.org/graphics/license-logos.htmlfor more logos.

Spotlight: Merlin Cloud

by Matt Lee

Campaigns Manager

Justin Baugh is a former systemsadministrator at the Free Software

Foundation. Now he works deployinglarge-scale clusters for major corpora-tions, and in his limited spare timeworks on a new free software projectto help people deploy their own virtu-alization.

First, let’s dispel this myth

about cloud computing. What is

it, and why is it compatible with

free software ethics?

“Cloud computing,” unfortunately,is one of the most misunderstood termsin the recent history of computing. Lit-erally, it has a million different defini-tions to a million different people. Ilike to think of cloud computing sim-ply as an abstraction: a system thatprovides methods for requesting andutilizing computing resources withouthaving to know anything about the un-derlying systems providing them.

Primarily, cloud computing isabout (a) aggregating server, network,and storage resources into a seeminglycontiguous system (“the cloud”), (b)providing some kind of interface forthe user to request or release theseresources, and (c) making these re-sources network or location agnostic,so that the resources are accessiblefrom anywhere, even in the face of sys-tem or network failures.

I agree that there are many eth-ical considerations with “the cloud,”especially in its current invocation bylarger corporations. However, theircloud need not be ours; it is becom-ing more and more possible to use freesoftware to build clouds that respectfree software ethics and don’t require auser to compromise on their freedomsor privacy.

For instance, one could imagine aGNU cloud which only ran free soft-ware, and had strong privacy anddata protection safeguards, but pro-vided users the same type of experi-ence they might expect from Amazon’sEC2. This kind of vision is entirelypossible.

Okay, so what’s Merlin? Give

me the 30-second overview. . .

Primarily, Merlin is a Ruby onRails application that I created asa way of interacting and controllingEC2 API-compatible clouds. This

8

The event kicked off with a wel-come from our newly appointed execu-tive director John Sullivan, who listedsome of the things he’d like to achievenow that he’s running the show: betteraccess to the people running the orga-nization and an increased focus on ourcampaigns work. This was followedby a talk from Brett Smith about thework of the GPL Compliance Lab. TheCompliance Lab is responsible for re-solving license violations that involveGNU software. Brett acts as the liai-son between the FSF and its attorneysat the Software Freedom Law Center(SFLC) in New York City.

With the first two FSF talks out ofthe way, it was time for an outside per-spective. This came from conferenceregular Mairın Duffy, who works onthe Fedora distribution of GNU/Linux.Her talk Empowering Girl Scouts us-ing free software described a collab-orative effort to teach groups of GirlScouts and other young people in Mas-sachusetts how to use free creative soft-ware like GIMP and Inkscape. Thechildren made a variety of creativeworks, including t-shirts and posters,which were later printed and put ondisplay.

After lunch, Richard Stallman gavehis keynote speech. Unlike previousyears, he did not announce a newphilosophical essay, but instead offereda warning about the dangers of cellphone tracking and proprietary soft-ware on mobile devices. There waspositive news to report in this space:the Replicant project has successfullybuilt a fully free, functional version ofthe Android/Linux operating systemfor the HTC Dream phone.

Lightning talks followed. Bob Call,Jason Self, Asheesh Laroia, Mary-Anne Wolf, and Dave Crossland of-

fered short but sweet insights into theirwork on router hacking, Python ad-vocacy, real-world accessibility for dis-abled people, and free fonts.

The conference concluded with ourannual Free Software Awards cere-mony. GNU Gnash maintainer andGNU veteran Rob Savoye received theAward for the Advancement of FreeSoftware, while Andrew Lewman fromthe Tor Project stepped up to takehome the Award for Projects of SocialBenefit.

Recommending licenses

for new projects

by Brett Smith

License Compliance Engineer

We recently published a new pageon our site, entitled “How to

choose a license for your own work.”2

It’s a comprehensive set of license rec-ommendations for new projects. It ex-plains what factors are important to

2gnu.org/licenses/

license-recommendations.html

5

consider when making licensing deci-sions, and suggests specific licenses fordifferent scenarios.

Publishing resources like this helpsthe Compliance Lab achieve a coupleof different education goals. Most ob-viously, it serves as a guide to helpnew projects make good licensing de-cisions. It also illustrates how the FSFuses licensing as a tool to encouragethe adoption and development of freesoftware. Sometimes people have themistaken impression that we care moreabout a program’s license than free-dom. They claim on Internet forumsthat the FSF wants everything to beGPLed. This page clears up that mis-conception and puts the GPL in itsproper context as a means to an end.

During the drafting process for thisguide, we decided to make one ad-justment to our existing recommenda-tions: in situations where a copyleft li-cense is not appropriate, we now rec-ommend the Apache License 2.0. Thisshift was spurred on by several changesthat have taken place over the pastfew years. As sad as I am to admitit, patents remain a growing threat tofree software. Since the US SupremeCourt’s decision in Bilski v. Kappos,software patent litigation has contin-ued as before, and cases that have fol-lowed like Bedrock v. Google are clearattacks against free software. We willnever be completely safe until softwarepatents are abolished, but any defenseswe can implement today are worth-while.

The Apache License 2.0 is the bestnon-copyleft license that does whata copyright license can to mitigatethreats from software patents, andthe Apache Software Foundation de-serves credit for their efforts in thisspace. The Apache License is a well-

established, mature license that users,developers, and distributors alike areall comfortable with. It also enjoyssupport from other free software li-censes: GPLv3 is compatible with it,and the forthcoming Mozilla Public Li-cense 2.0 should be as well.

It’s unfortunate that the ApacheLicense 2.0 isn’t compatible with olderfree software licenses like GPLv2. Aswe considered this change to our rec-ommendations, this point was eas-ily the most important one weighingagainst it. Fortunately, every majorcopyleft license has or will soon haveApache compatibility in their latestversions, which mitigates those con-cerns. Ultimately, we went ahead withthis change because we want our rec-ommendations to help projects makedecisions that will serve them well fora long time to come, rather than fo-cusing too much on today’s immediatecircumstances.

I hope our new guide and this ar-ticle help people understand how goodlicensing decisions can go a long way tohelp protect and promote free software.If you have questions or feedback aboutany of this, please don’t hesitate towrite us at licensing@fsf.org; we’realways happy to hear from our sup-porters.

The danger of ebooks

by Richard Stallman

President

In an age where business dominatesour governments and writes our laws,

every technological advance offers busi-ness an opportunity to impose new re-strictions on the public.

Technologies that could have em-

6

powered us are used to chain us in-stead.

With printed books:

• You can buy one with cash,anonymously, and then you ownit.

• You are not required to sign a li-cense that restricts your use of it.

• The format is known, and no pro-prietary technology is needed toread the book.

• You can give, lend or sell thebook to another.

• You can, physically, scan andcopy the book, and it’s some-times lawful under copyright.

• Nobody has the power to destroyyour book.

Contrast that with Amazon ebooks:

• Amazon requires users to iden-tify themselves to get an ebook.

• In some countries, Amazon saysthe user does not own the ebook.

• Amazon also requires the user toaccept a restrictive license on useof the ebook.

• The format is secret, and onlyproprietary user-restricting soft-ware can read it at all.

• An ersatz “lending” is allowed forsome books, for a limited time,but only by specifying by nameanother user of the same system.

• No giving or selling is permitted.

• To copy the ebook is impossibledue to Digital Restrictions Man-agement in the reader and pro-hibited by the license, which ismore restrictive than copyrightlaw.

• Amazon can remotely delete theebook using a back door — Itused this back door in 2009 todelete thousands of copies ofGeorge Orwell’s 1984.

Even one of these infringementsmakes ebooks a step backward fromprinted books. We must reject ebooksuntil they respect our freedom.

The ebook companies say denyingour traditional freedoms is necessary tocontinue to pay authors — the currentcopyright system does a lousy job ofthat; it is much better suited to sup-porting those companies. We can sup-port authors better in other ways thatdon’t require curtailing our freedom,and even legalize sharing.

Two methods I’ve suggested are:

• To distribute tax funds to au-thors based on the cube root ofeach author’s popularity.3

3stallman.org/articles/

internet-sharing-license.en.html

7