The Software Freedom Law Show

Episode 0x00: Introducing the Software Freedom Law Show

11 November 2008

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Summary

The Software Freedom Law Center is proud to announce its new podcast, The Software Freedom Law Show. Hosted by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler, this bi-weekly podcast will bring interviews and explanations on legal issues related to Free, Libre and Open Software Software (FLOSS).

Our first episode introduces the format and the hosts interview each other so you can get to know them better.

This show was released on Tuesday 11 November 2008; its running time is 00:32:39.

Show Notes

Our first episode introduces the format and the hosts.

Segment 0 (at 00:23)

Numbering of the Episode
- Dijkstra's article, Why numbering should start at zero.(00:49)
- Karen mentioned the Zeroth law of Thermodynamics (00:52)
- Bradley referred to the laws of robotics, to which Asimov added a Zeroth Law in his later books (making the law the first in priority of application, if not first in order of appearance). (00:52)
- Bradley is a “Podcast Monitor”, not a “Hall monitor”. (01:30)
SFLC

An article announcing the founding of SFLC in March 2005 (02:43).
The team of SFLC (04:50)
Karen mentioned attorney client privilege which may be a term unfamiliar to our hacker listeners. (07:16)
We mentioned that SFLC (and Conservancy) are each 501(c)(3) charities in the USA. (07:37)
If your not-for-profit FLOSS project needs legal help, write to <help@softwarefreedom.org>.

Software Freedom Conservancy

An article that announced formation of the Conservancy.
Karen mentioned that Conservancy helps projects handle their Google Summer of Code funds. (08:46)
A discussion of umbrella organizations is contained in SFLC's legal primer. (12:11)
Conservancy's Board of Directors is different from SFLC's, since they are separate organizations. (15:13)
If your not-for-profit FLOSS project is looking for a non-profit, incorporate organizational home, write to <conservancy@softwarefreedom.org>.

Segment 1 (at 16:17)

For the curious: NYC Noise Ordinance regarding emergency vehicles. (16:30)
Hiawatha Bray often called the FSF Cambridge-based, as he did in this article about the SCO law suit. (17:20)
Bradley's first Unix system was an AT&T 3B2/600. It ran System V R3, which didn't have streams (the SYSV equivalent to sockets). (18:18)
The vi Lovers homepage says it's pronounced “vee eye”. Bradley doesn't love vi, so he'll go back to saying “vye”. (18:40)
Bradley couldn't find a good web page that discussed the full history of Backspace vs. DEL in Emacs, but the Emacs Wiki hints at the controversy. (19:30)
Bradley briefly mentioned the Xemacs fork. (19:40)
Bradley mentioned The GNU Manifesto. (20:07)
Bradley probably had his dates mixed up of his first GNU/Linux install. 0.99pl12 came out in early 1993, so he probably installed SLS in early 1993 during his sophomore year in college. He found his Xconfig file from his old laptop with a filedate of 15 December 1993. (Remember when you had to write Xconfigs by hand and they would break your monitor if you did it wrong?) (20:44)
Bradley mentioned helping RMS start the license list. Here's the earliest known web archived version and its modern decendent. (21:28)
Bradley stopped using Quicken in 2000 in favor of Gnucash, but he actually uses Ledger now. (22:30)
Karen indicates Fortan is still relevant, and the Wikipedia entry seems to agree. (24:21)
Chairman of SFLC's Board, and its Director-Counsel, Eben Moglen, is also a law professor at Columbia University, and was Karen's professor in Law School. (25:28)
Karen mentioned doing a “Choose your own essay” program in C for Eben when she was law school, based on the idea of Choose Your Own Adventure books, which both Karen and Bradley read as children. (25:43)
Bradley mentioned Eben and Larry Wall both being influenced by APL. Bradley is sure, although it doesn't seem to appear in the transcripts, that during one of his early State of the Onion speeches, Larry joked that he'd use Unicode Perl operators to reinvent APL. (26:20)
Bradley mentioned his Master's thesis and the Parrot project. (26:42)
We mentioned that law school is extremely expensive. (27:50)

Trackbacks

(Done by hand, currently. ;)

Our producer, Dan Lynch, blogged about the start of the show, and also started a thread in the Linux Outlaws forum.

Send feedback and comments on the oggcast to <oggcast@softwarefreedom.org>. You can keep in touch with the SFLC on our IRC channel, #sflc on irc.freenode.net, and by following SFLC on identi.ca.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, numbering, fsf, sflc, conservancy

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