This episode of the Software Freedom Law Show is a recording of Bradley's speech on network service software freedom, a keynote from the 2008 Plone Conference.
The slides
from the talk are available online and you can follow along. The
numbers after each bullet point is the time index when you should hit the
space bar to move onto the next point or slide.
In this episode of the Software Freedom Law Show, Bradley and Karen
interview Brett Smith, the
Licensing Compliance Engineer at the
Free Software Foundation.
Running time: 00:30:57.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:26)
Bradley mentioned that the FSF is the one of the oldest non-profit
organizations in the Free Software space. The FSF
was founded on 4 October 1985. (01:25)
Brett and Bradley discussed how old and ground-breaking the FDL was.
FDL
was first released in March 2000. Bradley didn't have a chance to
tell his story as to why the first version was 1.1; maybe he will
sometime. :)
In this episode of the Software Freedom Law Show, Bradley and Karen
discuss the differences and similarities of software developers /
engineers and lawyers. They also interview their first guest, Scott
K. Peterson, Senior Counsel at HP.
Bradley said the phrase high-order calculus, which was confusing. He
was probably thinking
of first order
predicate calculus, which he studied in graduate school, but he was
actually trying to make reference to the fact that Karen studied more
complex calculus applications such
as differential
equations
and multivariable
calculus. (02:05)
Cooper Union, which provides full scholarships to all of its students, doesn't have liberal arts majors.
Karen talked about how engineering school can be good preparation for legal writing and for law school, generally. Apparently, physics and math majors score higher on the LSAT. (04:36)
Many contracts and/or licenses contain a list of definitions that indicate how certain terms should be interpreted. See section 0 of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 for an example. (04:54)
A statute is a law passed by any legislative body. As the statute is
the “letter of the law”, it is usually the first thing lawyers look at
when determining what the law is and its application. Interestingly,
statutes are also often referred to by lawyers as
code. (09:20)
Dicta (plural of dictum) are statements contained in a court's
decision that are explanatory and not necessarily part of the legal
rationale or doctrine of the decision. (09:50)
Scott is an “inside counsel”, sometimes called
“in-house counsel” at HP. (13:35) In-house lawyers are
employees of the company or organization as opposed to external counsel,
who are lawyers hired by the company or organization that advise it from
the outside. External lawyers are often employees of law firms.
Scott mentioned Apollo Computer,
which became a division of HP in 1989. (14:18)
Scott compared the GPLv3 process to standard setting performed by standards
bodies.
Scott mentioned that he's a patent attorney.
People who practice patent law before the United States Patent and Trademark Office
must have a technical background (usually an undergraduate degree in
science or engineering). You actually don't have to go to law school to
do that; non-lawyers with the appropriate technical educational background
can take the “patent bar” exam and become a “patent
agent”. (33:25)
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.
Running time: 00:32:39.
Show Notes
Our first episode introduces the format and the hosts.
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)
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 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)
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
hisearly State of
the Onion
speeches, Larry joked that he'd use Unicode Perl operators to
reinvent APL. (26:20)
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