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I primarily write articles promoting the use of Free Software. I consider myself to be a member of the free software movement, not the open source movement. If you want to know why, please read about the difference between the two movements. My articles are copyrighted works licensed to you under a simple verbatim copying and distribution license:
Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
The trouble with proprietary software: Lessons from Dualabs
What can we learn from Dualabs and why is this history important?
Why I can't trust Magnatune.com
This issue has been amicably resolved but my experience makes me wary of trusting that everything in Magnatune's catalog is licensed properly.
Objecting to "field of use" restrictions in W3C's proposed patent policy
The W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards making body of businesses) has decided to allow the use of patented ideas in their proposed standards. These patents are licensed royalty-free but the W3C wants to allow the patents to be restricted so that the ideas can only be implemented to do what the standard specifies, nothing more. These patents are said to have a certain "field of use".
To see how this can bite you consider the following hypothetical situation: if there was a patent on HTML (the lingua franca of the WWW) that only allowed graphical web browsing like Mozilla allows, anyone who makes an off-line web browser or a braille web browser (just to name a couple programs one might use) could lose a patent infringement lawsuit. This seriously injures everyone's use of the WWW and particularly targets the poor who use off-line browsing to reduce the cost of being on-line.
In the words of the W3C, the royalty-free license:
may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is required by the Recommendation
If this part of the W3C's patent policy is allowed to persist most programmers will not be able to innovate. You will not be able to make use of patented technology beyond that which is allowed in the prescribed "field of use". Free Software development (particularly software licensed under the GNU GPL, a license which allows sharing and modifying software for any purpose) will be slowed to the point where it cannot compete. This is why big corporate patent-holders want "field of use" restrictions; they find GPL-covered software to be a threat they can't beat.
It must be made clear that software patents stifle competition by making the playing field uneven. Free Software developers are talented and can compete when given the chance. This patent policy affects everyone who uses computers (directly or indirectly).
The Free Software Foundation has written a summary of the problem and has urged everyone to write a letter to the W3C's patent policy mailing list to compel the W3C to remove the "field of use" restriction. I wrote such a letter. You can find a copy of my letter on the W3C patent policy comment mailing list archive as well.
The Problem With Copy Prevention: Why Copy Prevention Doesn't Work
My essay (a work in progress) explains in plain language why copy prevention doesn't work and never will.
Opposing the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)
On Wednesday, March 27, 2002 I submitted my feedback to the the Senate Judiciary Committee's Patrick Leahy and Ranking Republican Member Orrin Hatch via their form (formerly at http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/input_form.cfm?comments=1, now offline) regarding the CBDTPA (neé the SSSCA). Not one person who submitted feedback to the Senate Judiciary Committee through this form approved of the CBDTPA. This bill, introduced by by Senator Fritz Hollings at the behest of the US entertainment industry, is an attempt to force American digital technology to automatically recognize copy restrictions on digital media. Such attempts have been tried for decades by the private sector and they always fail. Somehow the entertainment companies (most notably Disney) think US technology companies simply haven't been working hard enough to stop this "problem" and need to be pushed by the government into supplying copy restrictions.
In addition to the issues I raise in my feedback, consider the following footnote from the appellate court Rio decision. I disagree with the use of the word "piracy" to describe unauthorized duplication. "Piracy" is a propaganda word used to make sharing seem worse by painting anyone who shares to be an awful person.
Whether or not piracy causes such financial harm is a subject of dispute. Critics of the industry's piracy loss figures have noted that a willingness to download illicit files for free does not necessarily correlate to lost sales, for the simple reason that persons willing to accept an item for free often will not purchase the same item, even if no longer freely available. See Lewis Kurlantzick & Jacqueline E. Pennino, The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 and the Formation of Copyright Policy, 45 J. Copyright Soc'y U.S.A. 497, 506 (1998). Critics further note that the price of commercially available recordings already reflects the existence of copying and the benefits and harms such copying causes; thus, they contend, the current price of recordings offsets, at least in part, the losses incurred by the industry from home taping and piracy.
In addition to these charges consider that an unauthorized duplicator who would have otherwise purchased the copyrighted material might not have chosen to pay the copyright holder for that legal copy. There are plenty of outlets to legally obtain used copies of books, records, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, and any other media.
Updates
For whatever reason, the Senate Judiciary Committee has apparently refused to publish my letter with the other letters they have received. It's not clear to me why my letter was not included on their webpage.
ORBZ & George J. Strand, City Manager of Battle Creek, Michigan
Introduction
A little bit of setup for the uninitiated: ORBZ (pronounced orb-ZEE) was a blacklist for "open relays". E-mail servers are supposed to only route e-mail to certain users—the users who are customers or clients of that site (i.e., America On-Line's e-mail servers should only relay mail for America On-Line customers, University of Illinois e-mail servers should only relay e-mail for people affiliated with the University of Illinois, etc.). An "open relay" will route e-mail to anyone, even if they're not customers or clients of the open relay's site. Spammers like open relays because open relays help hide spammers' true location on the Internet.
Gulliver's service, ORBZ—Open Relay Blacklist Zone—tested e-mail servers to determine if they were open relays. If the server passed the tests it would not be added to the ORBZ blacklist. If the server failed the test, it would be added to the blacklist. The ORBZ blacklist became useful for determining which servers were more likely to relay spam. E-mail server administrators could use ORBZ to help decide whom to accept e-mail from.
Unfortunately for Gulliver, a company called Lotus (of "1-2-3" fame) released an e-mail server (called "Domino") that effectively locks up when it receives a certain kind of e-mail spammers commonly use. When Domino receives this e-mail nobody can use that server until it is forcibly shut down and restarted. The City Manager's office chose Domino to host their e-mail services, probably not knowing of this bug at the time they selected Domino. One of Gulliver's tests triggered this bug in the City Manager's Domino server. The Battle Creek City Manager's office noticed their e-mail server was not working one day and ultimately reacted by taking their issue to a Michigan court who is apparently only too eager to issue search warrants without full knowledge of what's going on.
Why the overblown reaction? The City Manager's detective erroneously suspected Gulliver of maliciously stopping their e-mail server. What could the City Manager's office have done instead? They could have called Lotus or visited Lotus' website for updates to their e-mail server. They could have switched to a Free Software e-mail server that doesn't have this problem in the first place. There were plenty of options.
Gulliver shut down ORBZ when he received a threat of criminal charges from the Battle Creek, Michigan's City Manager. As a result, the world is now minus one valuable tool for fighting spam (spam costs Internet operations billions of dollars to pay for the bandwidth wasted on the e-mail nobody wants to receive).
The city manager issued a press release on
the entire affair in which they recognize that he
[Gulliver] has done us a service
. Unfortunately the
price of this service is the loss of a valuable,
widely-appreciated, and effective anti-spam blacklist.
Battle Creek, Michigan should help Gulliver put ORBZ back
up. We should not let lawsuit threats or the damage that
results from those threats go unnoticed.
But don't take my word for it. Read Wired's story or the Register's less informative story that mentions a workaround for the Lotus Domino problem in addition to a patch (meaning there's now four viable alternative solutions the Battle Creek, Michigan's City Manager's office could have taken: upgrading, patching, reconfiguring, or switching to another server). But why bother with doing any of those things when you can get a search warrant and threaten an innocent sysadmin with criminal charges?
Feedback from the City Manager's office & my opinion
In response to my letter, I received a copy of the city manager's second press release. They say they'll investigate the matter and issue word of their findings at an unspecified date.
It was entirely unnecessary to get a court involved in this issue. Bringing down this global service injures everyone. I hope the Battle Creek City Manager's office will choose to help Gulliver reestablish ORBZ online by doing one of two things:
- Give Gulliver and his lawyer written notice they will not pursue charges against him in this instance and contribute some money to help Gulliver pay his undoubtedly large bandwidth bill.
- Get a copy of the ORBZ zone file and help fund someone who is willing to set up ORBZ again. Gulliver might be too scared to do this but someone else might not be (perhaps someone in a country where obtaining search warrants requires due diligence or someone in a country with laws that encourage anti-spam services.
Updates
It appears Gulliver is replacing ORBZ with DSBL—Distributed Sender Boycott List. Unfortunately DSBL is no replacement for ORBZ, the DSBL is essentially useless. The e-mail server testing is gone and as a result the procedure for getting on and off the DSBL is entirely voluntary: Send e-mail to a certain address to get on the blacklist, submit the IP address of the blacklisted e-mail server to a web form to get that server off the list. This opens the door for abuse because it's entirely too easy to get one's ISP listed in the blacklist. An angry customer of a ISP could submit their ISP's well-behaved e-mail server to DSBL and DSBL would dutifully add that server to its blacklist. ORBZ did not have this problem because submission to ORBZ resulted in a test. ORBZ's test resulted in a blacklist entry only if the server failed the test.
Clueless administrators will launch lawsuits even if e-mail testing is stopped. This case has less to do with suing for creating a denial of service and more to do with how this clueless organization with big legal guns abuses their power. I stand by my two suggestions for a real fix and I hold Strand's office responsible for their misdeeds. If Strand's office can't hire competant in-house sysadmins or learn to handle problems with a cooler head they should outsource their Internet access to those who can investigate problems thoroughly and use the court system responsibly. There are times when courts need to be brought in. This was not one of those times.
Free software and proprietary software
My reponse to Bram Moolenaar's Vim Article is just that—a response to an article by Vim's author and maintainer, Bram Moolenaar, published in Free Software Magazine's (FSM) first issue. The second issue of the magazine initially carried my response. Unfortunately, due to FSM publishing a mangled version of my article, I had to request they cease publishing their altered version of my article.
There are many problems with FSM's version of my article. The biggest of these problems is that FSM did not abide by my license and publish my article verbatim. One of their biggest errors was to remove my properly attributed quotes making it appear that I plagiarized Moolenaar's article.
I did not forget to properly cite quotes from Bram Moolenaar. FSM failed to publish the quote marks (or the properly marked-up HTML) clearly showing where I was quoting Moolenaar and where I was speaking for myself. As a result, people apparently were not able to easily distinguish what I said from what I quoted in Moolenaar's article. I know this because some readers e-mailed me.
If you review my article, please review this version, not the altered version FSM generated which, contrary to my copyright, has been distributed.
United States Department of Justice & Microsoft
My Tunney Act letter to the US Government (local copy) is my letter regarding the US Department of Justice settlement with the Microsoft corporation. I didn't mention free software in the letter because I was trying to keep the letter brief and familiar to a judge who is probably not familiar with the issues of free software. After seeing some of what other people wrote I now realize I could have supplied a much longer letter detailing the 'share and share alike' mindset of the free software community as it pertains to the settlement.
You can compare my letter to what the US Government is publishing (it should be the same text, but it appears not all of the letters are being published as submitted). The last time I checked my letter as published by the US Government it was accurate. But electronic texts can change over time, so this may not always be true. The Slashdot discussion about not publishing all the Tunney Act letters as written includes comments that at least one (presumably non-spam) submission wasn't included at all.
Updates and Links
More recently, Microsoft has made the predicted change to using patents to prevent Microsoft systems from being interoperable with free software. The GNU project has a response to Microsoft's license. Microsoft's license specifically excludes GNU GPL and GNU LGPL'd software from being used on their system.