FreeSoftware on Björn Schießle - I came for the code but stayed for the freedom

New challenges for Free Software business models

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 08:00:00 +0200

This year the FSFE community meeting was combined with the “South Tyrol Free Software Conference” (SFScon) in Bolzano. For me this was a special event because the first international FSFE community meeting ever happened as well at the SFScon in 2006. Back then I met many people from FSFE in person for the first time. For me this was the starting point for getting more and more involved in the Free Software Foundation Europe.

At this years conference I gave a talk about the “New challenges for Free Software business models” at the FSFE track. A few weeks ago I published a article about this topic in the German Linux Magazine. As many of you may know, Free Software as such is not a business model but a license model which can be combined with many different business and development models.

Distinction between business-, license- and development-model

I’m convinced that working business models around Free Software are a important building block for Free Software to compete successfully with the proprietary software world. The questions how to make money with Free Software and how to build sustainable and strong companies around Free Software are important topics almost right from the beginning of the Free Software movement. Over time we come up with various business models which worked quite well. But the change in technology over the last few years start to put some of the more successful business models at risk. The talk summarized the current challenges and invited the audience to think about possible solutions.

(This blog contain some presentation slides, you can see them here.)

The recording can be found here.

After the talk I had many interesting discussions. Most people agreed that this is a problem. One suggestion was to have a look at Mozilla for a successful business model. Another idea was that the big IaaS providers might buy some of the companies behind the software in the future and continue the development, which wouldn’t be a problem as long as they would stick to Free Software. Yet another interesting thought was that if you look at the software market as a whole you will realize that Free Software is still a small piece of the cake. As long as the cake as a whole and the Free Software part in particular grows fast we don’t have to worry that much how the Free Software part is split up, there will be enough space for everyone. The e.foundation was also mentioned as a possible example for a successful business model and many more ideas floated around.

I don’t want to comment on the individual ideas here but it shows that we had a lively discussion with many interesting ideas and thoughts.

Do you also have some thoughts around this topic? Feel free to share them in the comments!

Cultural Techniques

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0200

These days I looked up the German word “Kulturtechnik” at Wikipedia which translates to “cultural techniques” in English. Surprisingly there is no English Wipipedia article for it, so I have to quote the German one. This section attracted my attention the most:

[Für Kulturtechniken] sind ein oder mehrere Voraussetzungen nötig: das Beherrschen von Lesen, Schreiben und Rechnen, die Fähigkeit zur bildlichen Darstellung, analytische Fähigkeiten, die Anwendung von kulturhistorischem Wissen oder die Vernetzung verschiedener Methoden.

Bei der Entwicklung von Kulturtechniken handelt es sich nicht um Leistungen von Einzelpersonen, sondern um Gruppenleistungen, die in einem soziokulturellen Kontext entstehen. Alle genannten Voraussetzungen benötigen daher immer die soziale Interaktion und gesellschaftliche Teilhabe (Partizipation).

According to this description, cultural techniques are not capabilities of individuals but achievements of a collective, done in a socio-cultural context, it always requires social interaction and participation. This means that reading, writing or math are no culture techniques by itself, but collaborative writing would qualify as such, for example with a wiki or any other collaboration platforms.

Free Software as a cultural technique

When talking about Free Software I argued already in the past that software is a new cultural technique. My arguments typically was along the line that software is everywhere and shapes our world. Software changed the way we live, learn, work, communicate, participate in society and share our culture. I think that’s still true, but this Wikipedia article added an important aspect to me. With the distinction between the tools and what we achieve collectively with it, I think we can argue that software alone is not a cultural technique, but Free Software is.

By definition Free Software is a licensing model for software. A software license that gives the users the freedom to use, study, share and improve the software makes it Free Software. These days Free Software influence all areas of our live. Cars, airplanes, cash terminals, pay machines, the internet, televisions, smart phones, I could continue the list indefinitely, nothing would be possible without Free Software. The freedom given by the license and the influence it has on all areas of our live changed the way we develop software. A new development model was established and is used for most Free Software these days. The most successful Free Software is developed by open communities with a strong focus on collaboration and participation. This model is embraced by individuals and large organizations. According to the 2017 Linux Kernel Report, 4300 developers from over 500 companies have contributed to the kernel, with a impressive list of large companies. Everyone works at the same code, often in parallel. People discuss the changes proposed by each other and improve it together until it is ready to be released. The community is not limited to the code, in a similar collaborative way the corresponding design, documentation, artwork and translations are created. People exchange ideas in online forums, real time chats and meet at conferences. All this happens in a transparent and socio-cultural context, open for everyone to join.

But not only the way Free Software is build, also the usage of the software fits the definition of cultural techniques. From a user perspective, Free Software fosters collaboration and participation in many ways. It can be shared freely so that it encourage collaboration in its area of use. For example pupils can exchange the software they use to do their homework or to prepare their presentation. This teaches a culture of collaboration and make sure that everyone has the same possibilities to participate. Different departments in organizations can exchange software and give it to as much employees as needed without worrying that the maximum number of users, allowed by the license is already exceeded.

In a world defined by software, access to software decides who has access to our culture, to our communication tools, about our possibilities in education and at work. Free Software makes sure that everyone has the same possibilities to participate in today’s society. It fosters collaboration and participation in contrast to proprietary software which divides people and make sure that everyone is on his own.

All this proves to me that Free Software is the latest cultural technique. As such it requires special attention by policy makers and society. I think it is in all our interest to protect and foster this new cultural technique.

Software freedom in the Cloud

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0200

What does software freedom actually means, in a world where more and more software no longer runs on our own computer but in the cloud? I keep thinking about this topic for quite some time and from time to time I run into some discussions about this topic. For example a few days ago at Mastodon. Therefore I think it is time to write down my thoughts on this topic.

Cloud is a huge marketing term which can actually mean a lot. In the context of this article cloud is meant as something quite similar to SaaS (software as a service). This article will use this terms interchangeable, because this are also the two terms the Free Software community uses to discuss this topic.

The original idea of software freedom

At the beginning every software was free. In the 80s, when computer become widely used and people start to make software proprietary in order to maximise their profit, Richard Stallman come up with a incredible hack. He used copyright to reestablish software freedom by defining these four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the software for every purpose
The freedom study how the program works and adapt it to your needs
The freedom to distribute copies
The freedom to distribute modified versions of the program

Every software licensed in a way that grants the user this four freedoms is called Free Software. This are the basic rules to establish software freedom in the world of traditional computing, where the software runs on our own devices.

Today almost no company can exist without using at least some Free Software. This huge success was possible due to a pragmatic move by Richard Stallman, driven by a vision on how a freedom respecting software world should look like. His idea was the starting point for a movement which come up with a complete new set of software licenses and various Free Software operating systems. It enabled people to continue to use computers in freedom.

SaaS and the cloud

Today we no longer have just one computer. Instead we have many devices such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, small home servers, IoT devices and maybe still a desktop computer at our office. We want to access our data from all this devices and switch during work between the devices seamlessly. That’s one of the main reasons why software as a service (SaaS) and the cloud became popular. Software which runs on a server and all the devices can connect to it. But of course this comes with a price, it means that we are relaying more and more on someones else computer instead of running the programs on our own computer. We lose control. This is not completely new, some of this solutions are quite old, others are rather new, some examples are mail servers, social networks, source code hosting platforms, file sharing services, platforms for collaborative work and many more. Many of this services are build with Free Software, but the software only runs on the server of the service provider and so the freedom never arrives at the user. The user stays helpless. We hand over the data to servers we don’t control. We have no idea what happens to our data and for many services we have no way to get our data again out of the service. Even if we can export the data we are often helpless because without the software which runs the original service, we can’t perform the same operations on our own servers.

We can’t turn back the time

We can’t stop the development of such services. History tells us that we can’t stop technological progress, whether we like it or not. Telling people not to use it will not have any notable impact. Quite the opposite, we the Free Software movement would lose the reputation we build over the last decades and with it any influence. We would no longer be able to change things for the better. Think again what Richard Stallman did about thirty years ago. He grew up in a world where software was free by default. When computers become a mass market product more and more manufactures turned software into a proprietary product. Instead of developing the powerful idea of Free Software, Richard Stallman could have decided to no longer use this modern computers and ask people to follow him. But would have many people joined him? Would it have stopped the development? I don’t think so. We would still have all the computers as we know them today, but without Free Software.

That’s why I strongly believe that, like thirty years ago, we need again a constructive and forward looking answer to the new challenges, brought to us by the cloud and SaaS. We, the Free Software community, need to be the driving force to lead this new way of computing into a way that respect the users freedom. Same as Richard Stallman did it back then by starting the Free Software movement. All this is done by people, so it’s people like us who can influence it.

Finding answers to this questions requires us to think in new directions. The software license is still the corner stone. Without the software being Free Software everything else is void. But being Free Software is by no means enough to establish freedom in the world of the cloud.

What does this mean to software freedom?

Having a close look at cloud solutions, we realise that it contains most of the time two categories of software. Software that runs on the server itself and software served by the server but executed on the users computer, so called JavaScript.

Following the principle of the well established definition of software freedom, the software distributed to the user needs to be Free Software. I would call this the necessary precondition. But by just looking at the license of the JavaScript code we are trying to solve today’s problems with the tools of the past, completely ignoring that in the world of SaaS your computer is no longer the primary device. Getting the source code of the JavaScript under a Free Software license is nice but it is not enough to establish software freedom. The JavaScript is tightly connected to the software which runs of the server so users can’t change it a lot without breaking the functionality of the service. Further, with each page reload the user gets again the original version of the JavaScript. This means that, with respect to the users freedom, access to the JavaScript code alone is insufficient. Free JavaScript has mainly two benefits: First, the user can study the code and learn how it works and second, maybe reuse parts of it in their own projects. But to establish real software freedom a service needs to fulfil more criteria.

The user needs access to the whole software stack, both the software which runs on the server and the software which runs the browser. Without the right to use, study, share and improve the whole software stack, freedom will not be possible. That’s why the GNU AGPLv3 is incredible important. Without going into too much details, the big difference is how the license defines the meaning of “distribute”. This term is critical to the Free Software definition. It defines at which point the rights to use, study, share and improve the software gets transferred to a user. Typically that happens when the user gets a copy of the software. But in the world of SaaS you no longer get a real copy of the software, you just use it over a network connection. The GNU AGPLv3 makes sure that this kind of usage already entitles you to get the source code. Only if both, the software which runs on the server and the software which runs on the browser is Free Software, users can start to consider exercising their freedom. Therefore my minimal definition of freedom respecting services would be that the whole software stack is Free Software.

But I don’t think we should stop here. We need more in order to drive innovation forward in a freedom respecting way. This is also important because various software projects already work on it. Telling them that these extra steps are only “nice to have” but not really important sends the wrong message.

If the whole software stack is Free Software we achieved the minimum requirement to allow everyone to set up their own instance. But in order to avoid building many small islands we need to enable the instances to communicated with each other. A feature called federation. We see this already in the area of freedom respecting social networks or in the area of file sync and share. About a year ago I wrote an article, arguing that this is a feature needed for the next generation code hosting platforms as well. I’m happy to see that GitLab started to look into exactly this. Only if many small instances can communicate with each other, completely transparent for the user so that it feels like one big service, exercising your freedom to run your own server becomes really interesting. Think for a moment about the World Wide Web. If you browse the Internet it feels like one gigantic universe, the web. It doesn’t matter if the page you navigate to is located at the same server or on a different ones, thousands of kilometres away from each other.

If we reach the point where the technology is build and licensed in a way that people can decide freely where to run a particular service, there is one missing piece. We need a way to migrate from one server to another. Let’s say you start using a service provided by someone but at some point you want to move to a different provider or decide to run your own server. In this case you need a way to export your data from the first server and import it to the new one. Ideally in a way which allows you to keep the connection to your friends and colleagues, in case of a service which provides collaboration or social features. Initiatives like the User Data Manifesto thought already about it and gave some valuable answers.

Conclusion

How do we achieve practical software freedom in the world of the cloud? In my opinion this are the corner stones:

Free Software, the whole software stack, this means software which runs on the server and on the users browser, needs to be free. Only then people can exercise their freedom.
Control, people need to stay in control of their data and need to be able to export/import them in order to move.
Federation, being able to exercise your freedom to run your own instance of a service without creating small islands and losing the connection to your friends and colleagues.

This is my current state of thinking, with respect to this subject. I’m happy to hear more opinions about this topic.

Nextcloud Conference 2017: Free Software licenses in a Nutshell

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 15:44:52 +0200

At this years Nextcloud conference I gave a lightening talk about Free Software licenses. Free Software developers often like to ignore the legal aspects of their project, still I think it is important to know at least some basics. The license you chose and other legal decisions you make are a important cornerstone to define the basic rules of the community around your code. Making good choices can enable a level playing field for a large, diverse and growing community.

Explaining this huge topic in just five minutes was a tough challenge. The goal was to explain why we are doing things the way we are doing it. For example why we introduced the Developer Certificate of Origin, a tool to create legal certainty, used by many large Free Software initiatives such as Linux, Docker or Eclipse these days. Further the goal was to transfer some knowledge about license compatibility and give some useful pointers for app developers how to decide whether a third party license is compatible or not. If the five minute lightening talk was to fast (and yes, I talked quite fast to match the time limit) or if you couldn’t attend, here are the slides to reread it:

(This blog contain some presentation slides, you can see them here.)

Freedom for whom?

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 20:34:22 +0000

This discussion is really old. Since the first days of the Free Software movement people like to debate to whom the freedom in Free Software is directed? The users? The code? The developers? Often this goes along with a discussion about copyleft vs non-protecting Free Software licenses like the BSD- and the MIT-License. I don’t want to repeat this discussion but look at the question from a complete different angle. I want to look at it from the position of a software company and its business model.

If you talk to Free Software companies you realize, that very few have a business model completely based on Free Software. Most companies add proprietary extensions on top and use this as the main incentive for customers to buy their software. In 2008 Andrew Lampitt coined the term open core to describe this kind of business models. There are many ways to argue in favor of open core. One argument I hear quite often is that the proprietary parts are only useful for large enterprises, so nothing is taken away from the community. This way the community gets reduced to the typical home user, which is a interesting way of looking at it. Why should we make such a distinction? And why does home users deserve software freedom more then large organizations?

I understand that freedom in the context of software is a concept which can sound scary to some companies at the beginning. After all, that was the main reason why Open Source was invented, a marketing campaign for Free Software to make business people feel more comfortable. Interestingly this changes quickly if you go into more details about what software freedom really means. More entrepreneurial freedom, control over the tools they use, software freedom as a precondition for privacy and security, independence, freedom to chose the supplier with the best offering and in case of software development the freedom to build on existing, well established technology instead of building everything from scratch. These are freedoms well understood and appreciated by entrepreneurs and they demand it in many other areas of their daily business. This lead me to the conclusion that software freedom is not only something for home users but it also important for large organizations.

Open core often comes with a important side-effects. Most companies pick a strong copyleft license like the GNU GPL or the GNU AGPL, and then demand that every contributor signs a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). This CLA puts the company in a strong position. They are the only one who can distribute the software under a proprietary license and add proprietary extensions. This effectively removes one of the biggest strengths of copyleft licenses. If you set CLAs aside, copyleft licenses are a great tool to create an ecosystem of equal participants. Equality is really important to make individuals and organizations feel confident that joining the initiative is worthwhile in the long term. Everybody having the same rights and the same duties is the only way to develop a strong ecosystem with many participants. Therefore it is no wonder that projects using CLAs often get slowed down and have a less diverse community.

RedHat was one of the first company which understood that all this, CLA’s and proprietary extensions, do more harm than good. It slows down the development. It keeps your community smaller as necessary and it adds the burden to develop all the proprietary extensions by your own instead of leveraging the power of a large community which can consists of employees, hobbyists, partners and customers. This goes so far that RedHat even embrace competitors like CentOS, which basically gives RedHat Enterprise Linux away for free to people who don’t need the support. For a truly open organization this is not a problem but a great opportunity to spread the software and to become more popular. That’s a key factor to make sure, that RedHat is the de facto standard if it comes to enterprise GNU/Linux distributions.

If a initiative is driven by a strong company it can be useful to move some parts out to a neutral entity. RedHat did this by founding the Fedora project. Another way to do this is by creating a foundation which makes sure that everyone has the same rights. Such a foundation should hold all rights necessary to make sure the project can continue no matter what happens to individual participants, including companies. For the governance of such a foundation it is important that it is not controlled by a single entity.

This is exactly what makes me feel so excited about what we are doing at Nextcloud. We are building a complete free cloud solutions, not only for home users but for everyone. This solution will be much more than just file sync and share, from a company point of view stuff like calendar, contacts and video conferencing will become a first class citizen. All this will be Free Software, developed together with a great community. Home users, customers and partners are invited to be part of it, not just as a consumer but as part of a large and diverse community. Everybody should be empowered to change things to the better. In order to make all this independent from a single company we will set up a foundation. As described above the foundation will make sure that we have a intact and growing ecosystem with no single point of failure. This guarantees that Nextcloud can survive us and any other participant if needed.

Free Software, Open Source, FOSS, FLOSS – Same same but different

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:24:50 +0000

There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also find different combinations and translations like FOSS, Libre Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to people involved in Free Software often raises the question: Why do they use one term or another and how they differ from each other?

Historical background

Historically, Free Software was the first term, created somewhere around 1984 together with the Free Software definition. In 1997 Debian, a project aiming to create a completely free and community based GNU/Linux distribution, defined the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) as a check-list to decide whether a program can be included in the distribution or not. In 1998 the Open Source Initiative was set up as a marketing campaign for Free Software and introduced the Open Source definition by copying the DFSG and replacing “Free Software” with “Open Source”. According to a public statement by Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the OSI and author of the DFSG and Open Source Definition, the Open Source term was introduced as a synonym for Free Software. Perens eventually decided to return to the roots of the movement and to speak about Free Software again. This historical development shows that both Open Source and Free Software describe the complete set of software licenses granting the right to use, study, share and improve the software.

In the course of time people came up with even more terms. Today, terms such as Libre Software, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) or FLOSS (Free, Libre and Open Source Software) are often used to describe Free Software. In some cases people also use terms like “organic software” or “ethical software”. Often the motivation for these terms is to stay out of the terminology debate and to avoid confusion generated by words like “open” or “free”. At the end those terms create more confusion than they help because they virtually invite people to search for differences between the terms where actually no differences exist, regarding the software they describe.

In short, these different terms share the same historical root and describe the same set of software, although the choice of one term over the others highlight different aspects of Free Software.

Usage of the terms by different people and organisations within the movement

Today the Free Software movement is a large and diverse community. People have different interests in Free Software and different motivations to take part in this movement. But these differences are not necessarily related to the language they use. There are many people using the term Open Source and highlight the social and political dimensions of Free Software while on the other hand there are a people in our community who prefer the term Free Software but concentrate more on the practical benefits. This means that the terms Open Source and Free Software are not a good criterion to identify these different motivations.

Beside individuals there are also many well known organisations in the Free Software ecosystem. Many of them play an important role and emphasize different aspects of Free Software. For example, some organisations focus on the technical direction of Free Software projects, some on legal aspects, some on political, social and ethical aspects and some focus on license evaluation. These organisations typically have decided to use one or another term and sticked to it. But this should not lead to the conclusion that the term they use is the critical factor regarding their motivations. The critical factor are the people driving the organisation and the goals of the organisation as such. The practical experience with different organisations and people in the community shows that the line can’t be drawn along the language they use.

This diversity is good, as it reflects that Free Software provides many advantages in many different areas of our life. But we should not divide our community just by the term someone prefers. No matter what term someone uses and what his initial motivation is, at the end most of us work on the same set of software and on the enhancement of software freedom and any other aspect of Free Software.

License evaluation

There are three entities in the Free Software movement which people look to for evaluations of Free Software licenses: The Debian project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Most of the time they come to the same conclusion. In some corner cases they may disagree. In such cases the differences do not lie in different terms or different definitions, which as already shown have the same origin, but in the fact that it happens quite often that different people come to different conclusions for challenging legal questions. It would be a big mistake to use these cases to divide our community.

Protective and non-protective licenses

Looking at Free Software licenses there are two main categories, protective or Copyleft licenses and non-protective licenses. While Copyleft licenses are designed to protect the rights to use, study, share and improve the software non-protective licenses allow to distribute the software without those rights. Sometimes people think that the terms Free Software and Open Source are used to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses. The lists of Free Software licenses by Debian, the FSF and the OSI show that both protective and non-protective licenses comply with the Free Software definition and the Open Source definition. This means that neither the terms Open Source and Free Software nor the different definitions are suitable to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses.

Protective licenses and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses recognized by the Open Source Initiative and the FSF. Copyleft or non-Copyleft is not a criteria suitable to distinguish between Open Source and Free Software, both terms describe the same set of software.

Development model

When looking at software we have to distinguish between the software model and the development model. While the software model describes the attributes of the software (e.g. free or proprietary) the development model describes different ways to develop software. As described at full length in “What makes a Free Software company?” the different development models are defined independently of the software models and work for both Free Software and proprietary software. Development models that leverage the advantage of an open and collaborative community can show their full strength in combination with the Free Software model. However this does not mean that an open, collaborative development process is a criterion for Free Software. There are Free Software projects developed by a single person or a company with little or no outside input. On the other hand developers of proprietary software have adapted collaborative development models to fit into their software model, e.g. SAP with its partnership program.

While the development model can be a crucial factor for the success of a software project it is not suitable to distinguish between proprietary software and Free Software or one of its synonyms.

Why do I still insist on calling it Free Software if it is all the same?

If all these terms describe the same software people may wonder why I insist on using the term Free Software. The easiest answer is that I simply have to choose a term if I want to talk about Free Software. As explained in the article all the terms describe the same set of software, therefore I don’t see any value in combining them (e.g. FOSS or FLOSS). Quite the contrary, this combinations often create more confusion than clarity. So the remaining terms are Free Software and Open Source and I decided to stick with Free Software.

Free Software is the oldest term. All other terms have their roots in the Free Software definition. It is a good tradition in science to use the first term and definition given by its author. Furthermore it is also advantageous if a term can be easily translated into different languages. This enables people to talk about Free Software in the most natural way, in their first language. In many cases Free Software even translates unambiguously into other languages, e.g. “logiciel libre” in French, “software libre” in Spanish, “software libero” in Italian or “Fri Software” in Danish which avoids the ambiguity between freedom and price of the English word “free”. I believe that it is important to use a clear terminology. I want to convey a strong message about freedom. Language is important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software and the language we use influences our thoughts about a subject. For me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want that my language reflects this.

Free Software, which is easy to translate in different languages and emphasises the aspect of freedom for individuals, business and public institutions, together with the clear definition provides these values. All this makes Free Software the right choice for me and I invite you to follow me.

Conclusion

For historical reasons there are different terms to describe software that is free to use, study, share and improve. All terms, Open Source, Free Software or one of the combinations have the same roots and describe the same set of software. When it comes to people and groups within the Free Software movement we see a large diversity of motivations, different people or groups focus on different aspects of Free Software. But whatever the motivation may be it is not the doing of the software, it is the people. Neither is it possible to distinguish the people according to the term they use nor is it the business of the Free Software movement or part of the Free Software definition to find and define groups within our community. The Free Software movement identifies Free Software and works on the enhancement and adoption of it with all its positive aspects. Regarding licenses, different groups agree in their evaluation of Free Software licenses except for some corner cases which shows the complexity of legal documents but not a division between people, movements or software along the terms they use. Protective (Copyleft) and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses and are recognised as such by all groups in the Free Software movement. These two categories are not suitable to separate Open Source and Free Software.

Even if all these terms describe the same set of software the terminology we use is still important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software. I want to put freedom first, for me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want to respect the naming by the founder of the Free Software movement. These are the main reasons why I invite you to join me and speak about Free Software.

But no matter which term we use, we should not allow people to split our community just because of different terminology. At the end most of us work on the same set of software, improve it and foster software freedom no matter what our motivation or preferred term is. The community needs to stay together to have an impact on all levels of involvement and to improve Free Software in all aspects. Don’t let others use the strategy of “divide and conqueror” to harm our movement.

In this context you should also read “It’s time for the community to take charge of its brand”.

“Frühjahrsfestival zum Datenschutz” at Stuttgart

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:19:58 +0000

Today the “Frühjahrsfestival zum Datenschutz” (engl. “spring festival of privacy”) starts at the public library of Stuttgart. This will be a 4 day event from 25. to 28. March 2009.

Today the event will start at 19:30 with a speech by Padeluun, he is a member of the Big Brother Award panel in Germany and a chairman of the FoeBuD e.V., an association which works for civil rights and privacy. The title of his talk will be “Datenkraken. Die Kommunikationsgesellschaft und ihre Feinde” (engl: The communication-society and their enemies). Don’t miss it!

The next days there will be a lot of workshops for pupils, parents and teenagers and other interesting talks.

The last day (Saturday, 28. March) will be organised by the Chaos Computer Club Stuttgart (CCCS) with a lot of interesting speeches and practical examples how to improve privacy. At 14:00 I will give a speech about “Freie Software und Datenschutz” (engl: Privacy and Free Software). This are the slides to my talk:

(This blog contain some presentation slides, you can see them here.)

Don’t miss the event! I’m sure it will be great!

Quick Guide to GPLv3

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:30:24 +0000

The FSF has released a Quick Guide to GPLv3. This article explains all major changes in an easy-to-understand overview. So it is a good staring point for everyone who wants to understand GPLv3.

It is also a good resource for developers who plan to release their software under the GPLv3.

Test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL

Björn Schießle (bjoern@schiessle.org) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:17:14 +0000

While reading some FSF Blogs i found a link to a license quiz where you can test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL.. If you want to test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL than try the license quiz.

I remember that i had found this test already some years ago but forgot about it. So i tried it again to see if my licensing knowledge has improved. The last time i did the test i remember that i answered a few questions wrongly but this time everything was correct. Too bad that in a few months we will have a new GPL and LGPL. 😉