Earlier this week, the Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the relaxation of rules prohibiting export of software to Iran and Sudan. The new exemptions build on a recent easing of some rules governing exporting telecommunications technology to Cuba. These moves are surely an attempt to capitalize on the Iranian election demonstrations last summer that some called the "Twitter Revolution". They are also a sign that the Obama Administration is carrying out its plans to make internet freedom a pillar of US diplomacy.

I hope the revised OFAC rules are the beginning of a broad and nuanced re-examination of US technology export policy. They are certainly good news for Free Software developers who are currently prohibited from distributing their software in embargoed countries.

Read More...

Public Safety is not a matter of Private Concern

In a recent article, Slate's Farhad Manjoo attempts to play down fears of faulty software in car braking systems as a potential cause of traffic accidents. Citing numerous studies which conclude that “the overwhelming reason we get in crashes is driver error,” Manjoo reasons that “the less driving people do, the fewer people will die on the roads.”

While it may certainly be true that most crashes occur because of intoxication, distraction, or driver fatigue, and that computer controlled cars may decrease driver error, Manjoo doesn't seem to see the obvious implication of his own assumptions -- “opaque” and “inherently buggy” software which could endanger public safety should be subject to review.

Read More...

New York Times reporters John Markoff and Ashlee Vance correctly pointed out that "nations, private corporations, and even bands of rogue programmers are capable of covertly tunneling into information systems," by exploiting bugs in a program's source code in their January 20th story, "Fearing Hackers Who Leave no Trace."

Read More...

This is the first installment of a weekly blog about the SFLC 's work or a development in the free software community.

Read More...

I spent last Thursday and Friday in Brussels, attending the European Commission’s Oral Hearing in the competition investigation of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. The proceedings at the Oral Hearing were confidential; I cannot write about the presentations made there by others. I can, however, summarize the three points I made during my brief presentation on Friday; my previous written submission to the commission is already available. I want to explain what I said and where I think we stand now that the Oral Hearing is over.

Full post here

Read More...

Black Duck Software recently published some summary statistics about free and open source software license adoption, based on data it collected by crawling the web. The report lists “top 20 licenses that are used in open source projects” and the proportion of projects which use each license, as well as historical figures purportedly representing the number of projects using and planning to use GPLv3 variants for each month of the last two years. Because of inherent difficulties in collecting this kind of data, and because Black Duck's own methods are opaque and unverifiable, the report is largely meaningless.

Read More...

Law.com recently ran a sensationalist piece by Edmund J. Walsh warning of the impending “dangerous real world business dispute” in store for any for-profit company that uses free software. Walsh points to lawsuits filed by SFLC on behalf BusyBox as a source of this danger, and having worked on those lawsuits, I hope I can provide a helpful counterpoint.

Read More...