I just took the Subway (the "T" here in Boston) home from work and ran into Richard Stallman.  I saw the big RMS beard flowing and I flagged him down.  The next train was running late so we got to chat for a while about GPLv3 adoption and some other Free Software issues.

It's pretty cool to have a conversation with somebody who has influenced my life and ideals so very strongly.

It wasn't the first time I had met him, but it was the longest and most pleasant conversation I have had with him.

Good stuff!

O'Toole's Corollary of Finagle's Law: “The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum”

(no i didn't take his freakin picture today :)

awesome.

RIAA Lawsuits - Expert Witnesses Fund

(and tax deductible)

The Free Software Foundation just released the final version of the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AFDL).  This license covers software that is hosted on a computer network (SaaS - Software as a Service).  The regular GNU GPL only covers software distribution, so you are able to run modified GPL code on a network server without releasing your modified source code.  The GNU AFDL prohibits this and ensures source code for hosted software is made available.

from FSF:

"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3). This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software overa network to receive the source for that program."

It will be interesting to see which projects adopt this license and what its effects will be.  I can imagine that commercial companies would be very hesitant to use AFDL code.

The FSF just posted this:

A Quick Guide to GPLv3

A very nice high level overview of the current GPL and what it means.

There are lots of resources available online to learn about Free and Open Source Software.

If you want to understand the essence and ideals of this movement, a great start would be to read the following 4 books. After reading these, you will have a good grasp of the history and philosophy of freedom in the technology world.

• Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software (full text online)
• Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (full text online)
• Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (full text online)
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

It's Official...

From the FSF press release:

"On Friday, June 29, at 12 noon (EDT), the Free Software Foundation will officially release the GNU GPL version 3.  Please join us in celebration as we bring to a close eighteen months of public outreach and comment, in revision of the world's most popular free software license."

GPLv3 has been a long time coming.  This is a big moment in Free Software.

Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun Microsystems) posted an excellent article describing Sun's stark choice of how to re-invent itself.  They stepped towards Free software and embraced Open Source.  Microsoft is taking a much different stance.  They are asserting patent claims over many pieces of the GNU/Linux system.

Jonathan gives some great advice in his Free Advice for the Litigious:

"No amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach."

Can you hear us *now*?

OK, this is huge news: www.webload.org

The commercial performance/load test tool market is dominated by large proprietary commercial vendors (HP/Mercury, Borland/Segue, etc). Radview has a nice product called WebLOAD that competes in the space.

As of this morning, Radview announced they have released WebLOAD OS, an open source version of WebLOAD. It is full-on GPL licensed (no fake open source). I already browsed their source tree. They have a Subversion repository.. code is in C and C++,

The Open Source performance/load test tool market doesn't offer many choices. Currently the most popular tools are JMeter and OpenSTA. 

This will be exciting. I wonder how well Radview will deal with the community on this. Though if it's not good, GNU GPL certainly allows forking :)

more to come...

The Free Software Foundation's annual Associate Members Meeting is always an inspiring event for me.  It serves as a sort of State of The Free Software Union; where members gather to discuss ideas and listen to speakers.  Most of the FSF Board of Directors were there to speak.

I attended the meeting today (Saturday 03/24/2007) for the 4th time in the past 5 years.

It was held at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts):

I arrived during Joshua Ginsberg's (FSF Senior System Administrator) speech on “FSF Systems Administration”.  He gave an overview of some of the systems and internal work going at the FSF offices. Some highlights:

• FSF now runs LinuxBIOS on new Tyan servers for FSF and GNU Project resources.  They will be contributing documentation and information to help others install a Free BIOS.
• New and much improved FSF network infrastructure and connectivity for FSF/GNU hosted resources.
• FSF is switching from Zope to Django (both Python powered!) for web application development...  Lots of new stuff coming soon, including contributions back to the Django community.

Next up was Brett Smith, the new GPL Compliance Engineer at the Compliance Lab.  One thing Brett mentioned was that GPL license violations are pretty much kept secret and not disclosed to the community.  FSF prefers to negotiate with violators and talk them into compliance behind closed doors.  I'm not sure I agree with this practice.  I asked Richard Stallman about this during his Q&A Session... stating that I thought this information should be released to the public.  I don't see it as an overly aggressive move and I think publicly outing companies that are GPL violators would be a good way to give exposure to Free Software and help curb future violations.  RMS doesn't quite agree with my standpoint, but he asked some FSF staff to explore generically publicizing more types of violations.

Next was Gerald Jay Sussman, speaking about "Robust Design". Gerry was the author of my first Computer Science book, the venerable Wizard Book (SICP), and one of the authors of Scheme (a programming language dialect of LISP).  I was able to thank him for the pain and enlightenment his texts brought me during my CS studies.

Gerry is a complete madman when he gives presentations.  Forget the powerpoints and fancy presentation gear... he just slings around old school projector slides at blazing speed.  Admittedly, the stuff he talks about is far over my head.  I'm just a lowly computer programmer.  This guy has been at MIT since 1964 studying the cutting edge of computer science, mechanics, and electrical engineering. Watching him ease through functional programming and Scheme code is a little intimidating, but the entertainment value alone is worth it.

OK.. now the person most people came to see speak... the GNU Project founder, FSF President, former MIT AI Lab hacker, Emacs/GCC/GDB author, Chief GNUisance, and St. Gnucius himself... Richard Stallman:

RMS was in a surprisingly jovial mood. He is usually sorta moody and prone to outbursts.  I saw him shout at, and absolutely berate Larry Lessig a few years ago in front of a large audience at an FSF meeting.  However, today he was in fine form and gave his speech "Free Software and Software Patents".  He delivered well and really punched home the point about the absurdity of patents when applied to software.

After RMS was Eben Moglen, FSF Chief Council, Columbia Law Professor, and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center.  Eben is my favorite speaker.. bar none.  He speaks with passion and insight that is truly inspiring to watch.  He gave his "After GPLv3" speech.  It was an update on the current state of the GPL revision process.  Stallman and Moglen are leading the massive effort to complete GPLv3.  I am very thankful that people like Eben Moglen are on the front lines protecting our freedom.

Eben Moglen:

Bruce Perens was in attendance: 

He seems to have taken a very strong interest in the GPLv3 recently.

... and of course there were the obligatory FSF activist signs:

RMS listening to Moglen's speech:

Now... everyone... go join the FSF and become an Associate Member.
... or at least continue your Free Software hacking and advocacy.

Goldberg... out!

RMS has been on the "GNU/Linux" naming convention rant for years; urging people to give the GNU Project and the legions of contributors credit they deserve.  Afterall, the bulk of Free Software OS userland is made of GNU contributions.

One might think that a company like Sun Microsystems wouldn't grok this concept, since most GNU/Linux distributions themselves don't.

However, some folks at Sun definitely get it:

Tim Bray - Director of Web Technologies (talking about Ian Murdoch joining Sun):

"As of this weekend Ian wasn’t even on the payroll yet and was already in in a peppy little email debate over when to say “Linux” and when to say “GNU” and when to say both."

Simon Phipps - Chief Open Source Officer:

"the combination of the GNU operating system pioneered by Richard Stallman with the inclusive development delivered around the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds has brought a new life and energy to the extended family tree of Unix. The popularity of GNU/Linux bears testament to the vision and skill Stallman and Torvalds exhibit."