tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154868882024-03-12T23:04:47.759-04:00Decoding LiberationFree and open source software issues - dissected threadbareSamir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.comBlogger159125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-16476812132023622072009-03-03T14:18:00.003-05:002009-03-03T14:23:37.084-05:00Book of the month at RCCS<a href="http://rccs.usfca.edu/default.asp">The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies</a> ("an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture"), amongst its other activities, features book reviews each month. <a href="http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~bcfoss/DL">Decoding Liberation</a> features as Book of the Month for March 2009. <a href="http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=578&BookID=415">Check out reviews by Brian Carver, Andrew Famiglietti and our responses</a>. As always, we'd be very interested in feedback.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-5769349343105539822008-07-30T18:13:00.002-04:002008-07-30T18:25:17.089-04:00Must Redirect the DroolThe FSF makes a <a href="http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/why-free-software-and-apples-iphone-dont-mix">frustratingly compelling case</a> for rejecting Apple's latest palmtop-that-happens-to-make-calls. <br /><br />I might, just might, have been able to talk myself around these arguments, except for the quote from the iPhone license (specifically, the "Developer Program License Agreement"): <br /><br /><blockquote>You further represent and warrant to Apple that the licensing terms governing Your Application, or governing any third party code or FOSS included in Your Application, will be consistent with and not conflict with the digital signing or content protection aspects of the Program or any of the terms, conditions or requirements of the Program or this Agreement. In particular, such licensing terms will not purport to require Apple (or its agents) to disclose or make available any of the keys, authorization codes, methods, procedures, data or other information related to the Security Solution, digital signing or digital rights management mechanisms utilized as part of the Program.</blockquote><br /><br />which is clearly a right-back-atcha to GPLv3; pretty disgusting. <br /><br />But the (very) bright side of the FSF piece is the mention of the <a href="http://www.openmoko.com/product.html">Neo FreeRunner</a> from OpenMoko, which looks really promisingScott Dexterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02026671956504291790noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-7124212361747733822008-06-07T09:17:00.003-04:002008-06-07T09:19:37.280-04:00Mako on DL in Minds and Machines<a href="http://mako.cc/">Benjamin Mako Hill</a> has written <a href="http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Eschopra/MMDL.pdf">a very good review of Decoding Liberation in Minds and Machines, Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2008, pp. 297–299</a>. Mako has some nice things to say about DL, and also offers an interesting critique of some of the distinctions we make between the free software and open source movements. Do check out the review (and if you want, read <a href="http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Esdexter/copyleft_ethics.html"> our comparative assessment of free software licensing schemes</a>, which is some of the material that Mako is critiquing). Mako's points are worth further discussion and we'll do so very soon on this blog.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-31586494607691687442008-06-06T13:05:00.003-04:002008-06-06T13:18:14.947-04:00Bender on Sugar, FOSS, pedagogy<a href="http://www.openeducation.net/2008/06/03/walter-bender-discusses-sugar-labs-foundation">An interesting interview with Walter Bender over at OpenEducation.net</a>. Of particular interest are his comments on the interaction between FOSS philosophy and pedagogical imperatives (something Scott and I looked at in Chapters 3 and 4 of DL with regards to writing code and computer science education respectively). Bender goes on to talk about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_%28interface%29">Sugar</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child">OLPC's</a> "desktop" and notes its potential for fostering collaborative learning:<blockquote>At its core is the concept of an “Activity”. Activities are software applications such as a web browser, a word processor, or even a calculator, that, when “Sugarized”, are enhanced by three key features: (1) the application is readily shared with others; for example, to share what you are reading with others requires just one “button click”; in the word processor, Sugar provides the ability to do peer-to-peer editing, again with just one click; a chat window is always available for seeking help, sharing ideas, or exchanging data; (2) a journal entry is created every time an application is run; not only are files and data automatically saved, but a diary is created so that a child, his/her teacher, and parents can monitor progress; and (3) applications run full-screen in a simplified framework, yet there is no upper bound on the complexity that can be reached;</blockquote>And lastly, there is an interesting discussion of pedagogical philosophy and its resonance with FOSS:<blockquote>Papert and his students found that children learn best when they are in the “active role of the designer and constructor” and that this happens best in a context where the child is “consciously engaged in constructing a public entity” — something “truly meaningful” for the learner. Further, the creation process and the end product must be shared with others in order for the full effects to take root.</blockquote>Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-54625664632634723512008-05-09T13:34:00.004-04:002008-05-09T13:38:57.504-04:00Not so fast<a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8769&tag=nl.e622">A strange article over at ZDNet</a>, fretting about Linux's immaturity, and salivating over the possibility of Solaris and Linux merging because both will be GPL V3'd (in some possible world). Clearly, Perlow doesn't seem to understand just how difficult relicensing the kernel would be. Linus isn't the one who makes the decision in this regard; there are thousands and thousands of contributors to the kernel, all of whom would have to be contacted and their permission taken for this relicensing. This is what I might delicately describe as an intractable problem. While all the net chatter about Linus' resistance to GPL V3 was entertaining (as flame wars usually for a while), there is very little chance that Linux will be relicensed.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-23914584674563354612008-05-06T10:47:00.003-04:002008-05-06T10:55:13.480-04:00Professor Duffy's bombshellI'm not sure (by a long margin) what the impact of <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1128311">John Duffy's analysis of the supposed unconstitutional appointments of patent judges</a> will have on the world of patents but one thing is clear: if you thought the world of patents, patent laws, patent litigation and all of the rest was in bad shape, then this finding, that the entire edifice of patent judge appointments has been without the appropriate authority since 2000, should convince you that the mess is worse than we thought, and that it is going to require some very creative thinking for this boondoggle to not get worse. Keep an eye out for Translogic Technology, Inc. v. Dudas in the days to come.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-57678086781005583172008-05-01T15:57:00.002-04:002008-05-01T16:13:52.175-04:00Plenty of politics out there<a href="http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=898">Biella Coleman has an interesting post at her blog</a> that resists the notion (recently floated by Jonathan Zittrain) that hackers are not political enough. First off, I’m not sure why anyone would think this, though it might seem tempting if one falls for the trap of actually believing those folks who say things like “technology is just technique, man” or “I don’t care about politics, I just wanna code” or “the best technology will just win out” and so forth. But Biella’s post is directed at remarks made by Jonathan Zittrain and my suspicion is that what is to blame is a particular understanding of the word “politics”. In this understanding, “politics” is a very particular sort of activity, which takes place in very particular ways in particular arenas. Politics in this understanding is a fairly organized activity that takes place in well-known recognized channels, and is always easily recognizable as such. So, someone voting or signing petitions or writing policy is definitely doing politics but if you are simply buying things or talking in cafes or organizing a local farmer’s market, then you aren’t doing anything political. From this point of view, the FOSS movement just looks like a bunch of hackers who want to hack on the code of whatever it is they are using, and so, all they are doing is computer stuff – just messing around with technology and if its political impacts are noted, then that is some sort of incidental activity. Politics enters this picture just because the politics of the “external world” impinges on what these folks would most want to be doing with their time. But if you think of work as political, if you think of making choices about how to work as a political, if you think affecting how technology impacts us is political, and so on, then hackers are up to their necks in politics and a profusion of political principles can be read off their activity. Then what hackers seem to be doing is politics through and through, very explicitly and straightforwardly. From this perspective, a hacker who claims to be just coding, and doesn’t want to be bothered by the political impact of his choices is just revealing another political preference (to be honest, whenever someone says that , I just read it as “this doesn’t agree with my politics”). JZ might be thinking that hackers don’t do enough of the politics at the level of the larger entities around (though that’s wrong too, as many, many cases of hacker involvement in legal and policy battles do); he might be mistaking the chatter of hacker communities as just that, chatter, while its actually the working out of issues germane to an intensely politicized group; and he might not be paying attention to the fact that technology-labor is a political beast, and its most passionate residents and citizens are hackers, and what they do, and how they choose to do it, is first and foremost, a political choice. Listen closely to the conversation of hackers – every single statement highlights an ideological perspective. There’s plenty of politics being done out there; you just have to have the right kind of measuring instruments to detect it.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-88292756433076590292008-04-18T18:48:00.002-04:002008-04-18T18:53:13.449-04:00And over at openstudents...Some time ago, <a href="http://www.gavinbaker.com/">Gavin Baker</a> of <a href="http://www.openstudents.org/">OpenStudents.org</a> (amongst other things), asked me to write <a href="http://www.openstudents.org/2008/04/10/my-academic-publishing-experience/">a guest post on their blog about my publishing experience with Decoding Liberation</a>. The post went up last week; hope you find it interesting. (Not sure why I didn't link to it earler; possibly laziness; yes, that must be it). Do check the various posts and links at openstudents.org; open access in academia could do with all the help it can get.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-60140537856215493042008-04-04T15:25:00.004-04:002008-04-04T15:34:22.443-04:00Section 108.2.3.5.7, gerritt?<a href="http://laboratorium.net/archive/2008/03/31/the_revolution_will_not_be_archived_if_the_section">Here is some trenchant commentary by James Grimmelmann</a> on the efforts of the study group convened by the Copyright Office and Library of Congress (back in 2005) to find ways of revising copyright law (especially Section 108, which provides exceptions for librarians and archivists) to "to ensure an appropriate balance among the interests of creators and other copyright holders, libraries and archives in a manner that best serves the national interest". I'm not going to comment at this stage, because James has done a more than adequate job. His views might be summed up, in his own words, as:<blockquote>This isn’t a matter of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This is more like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, if the Titanic were sinking because of the absurdly large number of deck chairs it was carrying.</blockquote> Oh, and also:<blockquote>Redrafting it [Section 108] would be like helping a hungover drunk pull on enough clothes to go out without being arrested, so he can go to a bar and get even more plastered.</blockquote>Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-60210185924496397462008-03-24T21:32:00.004-04:002008-03-24T21:44:27.352-04:00FOSS at SIGSCEOur Birds-of-a-Feather session at the <a href="http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08/">SIGCSE conference</a> went off well to say the least. Attendance was spectacular: we were expecting about ten attendees at most, and got some thirty-five. Discussion was intense, and we could have spent the entire night talking about the issues that came up. It was interesting to note the different ways in which FOSS is playing out in computer science education: from classes simply stressing open source tools as an underlying environment, to those using it as a software engineering methodology, to those using the availability of code to demonstrate the application of algorithms and data structures (and so on). Scott and I have started up a Google Group to continue this discussion and if you'd like to be a member do drop us a line at bcfoss AT gmail DOT com. <br /><br />Scott and I also attended the <a href="http://www.hfoss.org/">HFOSS project</a> workshop. The HFOSS project seems to have come up with a solution to a problem that I've encountered before with students: how does one encourage/facilitation in an open source project (not for recruitment purposes, no, but mainly to get students to tackle non-trivial programming work, and to get them to experience software engineering principles in a serious setting). I tried this at Brooklyn College with some of the members of the student club, but was stymied by the students being intimidated by the complexity of some of the projects and the lack of guidance. And I simply did not have the time to be an adequate mentor. In the HFOSS project though, this work is structured around a class, and the students interact with a developer group (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahana_FOSS_Disaster_Management_System">the SAHANA project</a>) that is keen to work with them as well. The students learn about FOSS tools such as PHP and MySql, read about FOSS principles, and go on to make small, but crucial contributions to the SAHANA project. All in all, very impressive, and you could do worse than check out the stuff that <a href="http://www.hfoss.org/index.php?page=people">Ralph Morelli and his gang</a> are up to.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-75338752277411644732008-03-22T19:46:00.004-04:002008-03-22T20:01:19.100-04:00Open code and law<a href="http://civilities.net/Software_Oppressiveness">An interesting post by Jon Garfunkel over at Civilities</a>, provocatively titled "Oppressiveness by Software" (the piece is in response to an excellent paper by <a href="http://james.grimmelmann.net/">James Grimmelmann</a>, titled <a href="http://www.yalelawjournal.org/114/7/1719_james_grimmelmann.html">"Regulation by Software"</a>, which really, I should respond to in some detail as well sometime). I've posted a comment, which in a burst of self-indulgence, I reproduce below:<blockquote>It seems to me that the openness of code as demanded/requested by the free software camp is a pretty important step toward getting the sort of accountability you speak of (find desirable). An analogy with the law that is worth making is the visibility of the textual portion of a law. Ordinary citizens might not be able to decipher all of the language of a statute, but the statute being visible and its readability by someone trained to do so can be an important determinant of what makes it into the text of the statute - and the authorship of the statute can be easily determined. Similarly, transcripts of congressional hearings can be made available for the concerned and determined citizen. When code is open, when its authorship (via changelogs, emails etc) is known, there is some measure of accountability packaged into the code. As with a goverment or power structure whose workings are open and visible, which ensures some awareness or sensitivity on those in power, so with open code. When governmental function is delegated to software and that portion of the govermental functioning gets closed off behind non-open code, we've done nothing less than make governmental power opaque, something that sneaky congressional sessions (or over-ambitious central executives) try to do sometimes. Technological opacity of delegated governmental function is yet another technique in the power-seeker's armory. The demand for free software is sometimes seen as something having to do with a new software engineering model; the application and relevance to governance by code, should make it clear that its way more important than that.</blockquote>Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-20909171742801733272008-03-06T23:52:00.002-05:002008-03-07T00:14:19.015-05:00Merce Cunningham and Open-Source Software for the ArtsSome exciting news from the arts . . . our colleagues over at the <a href="http://dancenotation.blogspot.com">Dance Notation Bureau</a> have alerted us to the fact that Merce Cunningham and colleagues at <a href="http://www.openendedgroup.com/">The OpenEnded Group</a> have released <a href="http://www.openendedgroup.com/index.php/artworks/loops-2001-present/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Loops</span>,</a> an "abstract digital portrait of Merce Cunningham that runs in real time and never repeats," as open source. Specifically, 3D representations of the choreography are licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>, and the authoring source code, <a href="http://www.openendedgroup.com/index.php/software/">Field</a> (and some related components), will (most likely) be licensed under GPL3 in November.<br /><br />The motivation for the open-source release is eloquently discussed in the context of the "<a href="http://www.openendedgroup.com/index.php/artworks/loops-2001-present/loops-ecology/">Cultural Ecology</a>" of <span style="font-style: italic;">Loops</span> and Field:<br /><blockquote>It is a convenient fiction that completed artworks exist in perfect and isolated purity, framed for eternity. But the truth is more entangled than that, for artworks both grow from, and survive within, what you might call a <span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="smallCaps">CULTURAL ECOLOGY</span></span>. . . . The cultural ecology for <em>Loops</em> is a good case in point for it is under constant threat. As a dance, can it outlive the now-88-year-old who is its sole performer? As a digital artwork, can it survive the rapid obsolescence of its hardware and software?<br /></blockquote>More specifically,<br /><p></p><blockquote> By releasing our code as open source, we seek to share it with others in hopes that they will become invested in using the same tools that we do — and indeed to expanding and refining those tools. If a broad community takes up our approach, then the likelihood of <em>Loops</em>' survival and evolution becomes far greater than if we were to try safeguarding it exclusively.</blockquote> <p></p>Scott Dexterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02026671956504291790noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-21397127408276775062008-03-04T20:49:00.006-05:002008-03-04T21:18:07.269-05:00FOSS Birds-of-a-Feather at SIGCSE 2008Team Decoding Liberation will be at the <a href="http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08/">SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education</a> in Portland, OR next week; I think it's fair to characterize this as the most significant annual conference about CS education in North America. The conference's theme is "Diversity through Accessibility," which is hard to argue with.<br /><br />One would think that FOSS might be an important aspect of "accessibility," but that doesn't seem to be the case. Samir and I will be leading a "Birds-of-a-Feather" session on Thursday evening for people interested in thinking about FOSS and CS education; I have no idea how many attendees to expect. We'll also be attending a workshop on<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" > teaching and building humanitarian open source software, led by Ralph Morelli and his colleagues on the <a href="http://www.hfoss.org/">HFOSS project</a> (Ralph will also be helping us out with our session Thursday). Otherwise, the FOSS presence is fairly thin. I do note, looking at the <a href="http://db.grinnell.edu/sigcse/sigcse2008/Program/Program.asp">program-at-a-glance</a>, that vendors, most especially Microsoft, but also Sun, Intel, Cisco, and Google, have dedicated parallel sessions throughout the conference -- so Thursday morning I'll have to decide whether to go to a panel on "</span><a href="http://db.grinnell.edu/sigcse/sigcse2008/Program/viewAcceptedSession.asp?sessionID=127">Computers, Culture, and Society</a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" >" (including a paper about a course on collaborative computing by some folks from Auckland) or listen to Microsoft talk about "</span><a href="http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08/vendor.html#sessionID125">External Research Efforts and Assessment in Education Research</a>" (they're going to be showcasing new educational technologies!)<br /><br />The one moment in the schedule where FOSS leaps out is Saturday morning (sadly, as I expect we may be spending that time enjoying anything Portland might have to offer <span style="font-style: italic;">out<span style="font-style: italic;">side</span></span> the Convention Center). Another Microsoft Vendor Session, this one on "<a href="http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08/vendor.html#sessionID335">Comparing Windows and Linux in OS courses</a><a name="sessionID335"></a>." Just for the sparkling brevity of it all, here's the abstract of the talk:<br /><blockquote> The presentation provides a top-level overview of kernel architecture, using Windows to teach OS, and how Windows fundamentally differs from Linux. </blockquote>I'm sure we'll have more to say when we get back. If you're going to be there, please track us down . . . .Scott Dexterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02026671956504291790noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-63570088731359598902008-02-18T16:06:00.002-05:002008-02-18T22:43:50.139-05:00Problems with peer review, Part ThreeThe problems I noted with peer review in my post below are, perhaps, too well-known to most people in not just the sciences, but the humanities as well. Too many submissions, not enough time, too much deference to authority, not enough recognition of new, potentially paradigm-challenging work, and so on. As a result, too many papers of poor quality get published, too many papers that could make interesting contributions to a field don't get published. The problem with this picture is that all the review is anonymous, and that a very small set of reviewers is in charge (over the community as a whole quite a few members might be reviewing, but for a given paper, the number is very small, sometimes just one or two, and there is no opportunity for author response or clarification). <br /><br />Instead, it might be better for both workshops and conferences for the submitted papers to be made able to a wider audience, and with reviewers able to make both anonymous and identifiable comments, and authors able to make responses. Take a small workshop with approximately 10 members in its program committee. It receives something like 20-30 contributions, and it plans to select about 10 for final presentation. The submitted papers could be placed online with annotation tools for commenting and author responses. The program committee could send out notifications of submissions to the community at large, inviting commentary on the papers. The review period could begin on a rolling basis, with papers becoming available for review as they are submitted, and staying online till some point, at which stage authors could either submit a revised version or the PC could declare an end to the reviewing process. <br /><br />One particularly salutary consequence of this system would be the chance for authors to respond to critiques, and for a real discussion to break out on the papers. In fact, I suggest that this process of public submission, open review, author response, ensuing discussion, and subsequent revisions might even be more valuable than the intended presentation at the workshop. For what happens in that scenario under the current system? The author sends the paper out, it gets reviewed in the hurried fashion I described in my last post, and then when it is submitted, his only audience is the small one at the workshop or conference (yes, there is the advantage of the oral presentation, but it can also very easily become a disadvantage). The community is only partially represented at the workshop (even if it is a specialized area, very few people can actually travel to workshops and conferences; funding is especially hard to come by for people in theoretical fields). The public process also ensures that poorly written, superficial, content-free papers that make it just because a PC member wrote a hasty, superficial review that was not vetted by anyone else on the PC will have a harder time getting through. It will also ensure that papers written by so-called 'authorities' will be subject to a wider critique than just a couple of possibly star-struck reviewers. And the length of the review process will also ensure more thoughtful reviews as people can add points over a period of time (I'd certainly consider making incremental comments on papers made available for public reviewing). But what about star-struck reviewers afraid of upsetting the 'stars' in the field? There isn't much that can be done if you are worried about reprisals but you needn't worry if your primary concern is that you might say something wrong. But why would this worry about reprisals be a problem? It'll only be one if a critique is made in intemperate fashion, where the content is obscured by its form. Which of course is a huge problem in anonymous reviewing where the amount of vituperative swiping from the safety of the anonymous reviewers position is quite amazing. <br /><br />To sum up (and to be sure this is a very quick take on things), while the problem of volume in today's academic world can't be easily solved, the workshop and conference world in the sciences would greatly benefit from a public, open, extended, iterative review process. Plenty more to be said here, of course. but all in good time.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-7427476028405946022008-02-16T08:40:00.004-05:002008-02-16T12:07:08.606-05:00Problems with peer review, Part TwoAs usual, I begin with an apology. Sorry for taking so long to get to the second part of this intended series of posts on peer review. So, why do I think peer review is busted in the sciences? (please see caveats below about this being based on my own personal experience). Firstly, and I think this should come as no surprise to anyone, there is simply too much material being sent forward for publication. In computer science, there are thousands of annual conferences and workshops held annually. I don't exaggerate, you simply need to check whether on any given day there are at least three events being staged somewhere or not. The reviewing for these events is typically done by the program committee (PC), a bunch of academics who got together to organize the event; some of them were part of the original plan to put together the workshop or conference, others were invited to serve on the PC for various reasons (sometimes to add heft to the PC - as academics will often judge a meeting's quality by the star rating of the PC, and sometimes, quite simply, to aid in the reviewing). When submissions arrive, the papers are parceled out to the PC for reviewing. Sometimes papers are assigned to more than one member of the PC. More often than not, this stage of the reviewing is one-way-blind (I know the name of the author, but he does not know mine). In larger conferences, the reviewing is double-blind. More often than not, the PC member is over-committed. He has signed up for as many academic invitations as he can, all in a rush to add lines to the CV, to increase his visibility in the community, to network a bit more. But now, the papers are in the Inbox, and they need to be reviewed. Typically, the PC member is late with the reviews. He then receives reminder emails from the head of the PC, and he rushes off to review the paper, which is invariably read in perfunctory fashion, and then hastily reviewed/summarized/critiqued. The effect of this on the quality of the papers submitted to a typical event should be clear. Sometimes, the PC member will sub-contract the reviewing, either handing it on to a Ph.D student or to a colleague who he thinks might be able to help out (I should point out that Ph.D students can be both very harsh, or very mild, reviewers; the former is eager to show off his talents and knowledge, the latter is still convinced he does not belong in academia, and is very diffident in his reviews). <br /><br />There are other problems. Sometimes a workshop or a conference will not receive enough submissions. Then the PC members panic; the event will not be viable if a miniscule number of papers are accepted. At this stage, other instructions go out to the PC members: "lets accept papers if they will spark discussion; lets accept them if they show some promise; lets accept them even if <insert condition here> is not-met". So the event floats and all is well. The quality of the papers is uneven, but at least the workshop or conference did not get canceled. <br /><br />There are problems of authority. Publications in premier conferences carry a great deal of prestige in the community. Paper acceptances are much desired. And attendance lists are familiar. Some of this has to do with the quality of the papers, some of this has to do with the established nature of the authors. Double-blind reviewing sounds very good in theory; but in fact, its quite easy to make out who the author of a paper is: writing style, subject matter, even the formatting style of mathematical symbols (a research group in France insisted on using MS-Word to format their papers, as opposed to Latex, others used idiosyncratic symbols for logical operators). A not-so-confident reviewer, confronted with a paper written by an 'authority', holds fire. The paper makes it through. Yet another, knowing that this is written by an 'authority', simply lets it go through, because 'it must be good'; others simply support friendly research groups. Peer review responsibility has been abdicated, and because a small group has been picked, there are no other opportunities to correct this. And often, because paradigms are jostling for first place (as often happened in my field, logics for artificial intelligence), reviewers are not too keen to promote papers that promote rival paradigms (but are keen to promote those that show their own favored paradigm in a good light). A colleague of mine who was trying to suggest an alternative formal framework had great difficulty getting his papers accepted; reviews of his paper were clearly off-base, prejudiced and hostile. Finally, another academic advised him to simply forget about the premier conferences and concentrate on journals whose editors would intervene, and who would guarantee him a chance to respond to his referees. So much for the impartiality of the peer review process. <br /><br />Not much can be done about the volume of publication/writing problem. The modern academy demands that everyone get on the writing and publishing treadmill, and like obedient children, we jump on (how else would we get promotion and tenure?). But something can be done about the blind reviewing problem, all imperfect solutions to be sure, but they strike me as offering a better chance of ensuring the quality of that which gets through to be published. More on that later. I'll also try and write a bit on grant proposal review.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-16770428385231396782008-02-11T07:00:00.000-05:002008-02-11T07:03:03.834-05:00Problems with peer-review, Part OneIn Chapter 4 (Free Software and the Scientific<br />Practice of Computer Science) of Decoding Liberation, while writing of the ideal of objectivity in science and the role of free software in ensuring it in computer science, we spent some time examining the phenomenon of peer-review. In this post (there'll be two actually), I want to revisit that discussion by way of amplifying one of the points made in there. I'll post a couple of small parts in this first post, and then follow-up tomorrow with my own comments<br /><br />In Chapter 4, We started by noting that <blockquote>Free software and current scientific practice share a reliance on peer review to help ensure that results are of the highest possible objective quality. Peer review’s role in science was formalized in the eighteenth century, when the Royal Society of London’s “Committee on Papers” was granted the power to “solicit expert opinions.” Peer review became an indispensable part of scientific practice due to the sharp increase in scientific work after the Second World War (Drummond 2003). Just as the increased complexity of science, due to its increasingly mathematical nature, required scientists to conduct peer review in the era of patronfunded science during the Renaissance, the increase in both variety of disciplines and volume of submissions drove formerly self-reliant journal editorial boards to seek larger pools of reviewers.</blockquote><br />From this point onwards, though, we note a problem, which will ultimately be the subject of these posts:<blockquote>But peer review, especially its anonymous variant, might not improve the rigor of the review process and thus not adequately facilitate objectivity (van Rooyen et al. 1999). Instead, anonymous peer review might act as a damper on innovation, by placing guardians at the gates to science: paradigms remain unchallenged as the authority of powerful scientists remains unquestioned (Horrobin 1990). The discipline of computer science is not immune to these problems; anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that practitioners are disgruntled about this process. Anonymous critique of papers, they point out, results in a familiar attendance list at premier academic conferences. But a more serious charge can be leveled against anonymous peer review: it provides no guarantee of the quality of published work (Horrobin 1990, 1996, 1981). An examination (Rothwell and Martyn 2000) of the correlation among reviewers’ evaluations of submissions to neuroscience journals and conferences revealed that <blockquote>For one journal, the relationships among the reviewers’ opinions were no better than that obtained by chance. For the other journal, the relationship was only fractionally better. For the meeting abstracts, the content of the abstract accounted for only about 10 to 20 percent of the variance in opinion of referees, and other factors accounted for 80 to 90 percent of the variance. (Horrobin 2001)</blockquote>It is difficult to value this form of peer review when little distinguishes it from arbitrary selection.<br /></blockquote><br />Thats the problem; we go on to talk about open, non-anonymous peer review as a particular solution, and about free software's methods of peer review and its value as an ideal for the practice of computer science at large. In the second post, I want to talk a bit about how badly, it seems to me, peer review is busted in the sciences. This will be anecdotal, insofar as I will be reliant upon my own experiences and observations. Still, considered as a report from the trenches, it might have some value for the reader. I should also qualify my comments by saying that while peer review seems to work reasonably well in journal article review, it is undeniably broke in conference article and grant proposal review, two fairly large and important parts of the practice of science today. We can then return to the solutions mentioned above.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-52461750834975509112008-02-10T13:37:00.000-05:002008-02-10T13:38:43.154-05:00Tale of a buttonOk, so this is a frivolous post (you weren't expecting a very serious one after this prolonged hiatus from blogging, were you?) I wear a "Free Software - It's all about freedom" button on my winter jacket (I picked it up at a swag dispensing sessions after a RMS talk a year or so ago). Here is a quick laundry list of the reactions I've gotten to this button (very few, and hence I can list them all):<br /><br />#1. Student of mine sees me in the cafeteria, walks up, and says, "Free software? Where? I want some!". Interesting reaction; clearly, a free lunch is still attractive, but she seemed to be remarkably undiscriminating in her desire for software. Any software, so long as it was free, would do. I tried explaining the button, but I'm not sure I got anywhere. <br /><br />#2. I visit a bar in Brooklyn for a friend's birthday party. A young man also invited to the party sees the button, and putting on a "save-the-whales" voice, speaks: "Set the software free, set the software free". I grin back, and he continues, "Information just wants to be free, doesn't it"? I'm getting tagged as a crunchy hippie here, but its allright, as more people crowd into the bar and disrupt our 'conversation'. <br /><br />#3. Its my friend's daughter's 10th birthday party. His brother-in-law spots my button (I think he works downtown in Manhattan) and guffaws loudly. "You're such a dork, dude. Why don't you wear a peace button or something?". My intended response is cut off as my SO asks me if I want a drink. I shuffle off in pursuit of greater pleasures. <br /><br />#4 And to bring things full circle. I run into the student mentioned in item #1 above. It's been a few months, memories have faded. For she says again, "Free software! Where? I want some!". And I try to return to my as-usual-futile explanation.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-34422510852124076002007-12-01T19:52:00.001-05:002007-12-02T09:49:31.804-05:00In with the new/out with the oldThe grand Decoding Liberation book tour is officially over. We had our last book party at the <a href="http://web.gc.cuny.edu/pcp/">Center for Place, Culture, and Politics</a> at the <a href="http://web.gc.cuny.edu">CUNY Graduate Center</a>. <a href="http://web.gc.cuny.edu/anthropology/fac_smith.html">Neil Smith</a> was kind enough to host us and we look forward to more collaborations with the Center down the line. The discussion was the shortest out of all the four events thus far, but way more wine was consumed (in fact, watching the very efficient replacement of empties by full bottles was one of the highlights of the evening). <br /><br />Scott and I have also sent off an article to the journal <a href="http://www.springer.com/west/home/humanities?SGWID=4-40361-70-35553605-0">Ethics and Information Technology</a>; it considers what the ethical import of Freedom Zero is and what contribution it makes to our understanding of the ethical uses of software (it spins off some thoughts that first occurred to us during the writing of Chapter 2 of Decoding Liberation). We'd love to get comments on it, so please pick up a copy from <a href="http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~schopra/EITSubmission.pdf">this link</a>, and tell us what you think.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-70953690541741285982007-11-26T15:17:00.000-05:002007-11-26T16:51:02.835-05:00Think Free Press, not Free Beer: Toward a Discourse Ethic for SoftwareA few strands starting to weave together . . . at the Brecht Forum book event, Biella, Samir, and I talked a bit about the tension between the communitarian and libertarian impulses within FOSS . . . at the Brooklyn College/Wolfe Institute book event a couple weeks ago, Mako talked a bit more about his dissatisfaction with our treatment in the book of the distinction between the free software and open source software movements . . . and Samir and I are finishing up a journal article, based on our presentation at NA-CAP last July, about why Freedom Zero is so important.<br /><br />One of our arguments for Freedom Zero (which essentially says that the creator of a piece of software can't forbid its users from using it for any particular purpose) is that it supports an aspect of discursivity both within the development community and within the user community (to the extent those are distinct).<br /><br />Doing a little research to see how that kind of idea has been fleshed out elsewhere, I stumbled across some surprisingly interesting sources. One is a piece by Nick Couldry, "Digital divide or discursive design? On the emerging ethics of information space," which appeared in <span style="font-style: italic;">Ethics and Information Technology</span> 5 in 2003. In it, Couldry meditates on the extent to which the Internet (broadly construed) might be cast as a 'discursive design.'<br /><br />The notion of 'discursive design' was introduced by political scientist and critical theorist John Dryzek in 1990, in his book <span style="font-style: italic;">Discursive Democracy</span>. As Couldry points out, Dryzek represents<br /><blockquote>a particular strand within deliberative democracy theory, which insists it should not be limited to considering the ideal speech situation and the broad principles of democratic participation but must think concretely about the institutional preconditions for any actually existing public sphere.</blockquote>Couldry goes on to quote Dryzek's short definition of discursive design:<br /><blockquote>a social institution around which the expectations of a number of actors converge [which] . . . therefore has a place in their conscious awareness as a site for recurrent communicative interaction among them . . . as citizens, not as representatives of the state or any other corporate or hierarchical body.</blockquote>From that definition, Couldry raises a number of questions concerning how and whether the Internet meets this definition, questions that are relevant to the consideration of FOSS. Among them, not surprisingly, are the question of what it is to 'converge,' and who exactly converges; what 'recurrent communicative interaction' means and what it can produce (as Couldry points out, "Deliberation is not just talk . . . . [it] must be more than a talking-shop without consequences."); how state and corporate power relate to this deliberation; and how such putative discursive designs evolve over time.<br /><br />Dryzek's book itself is rich with suggestive material (especially the first half; the latter part of the book is rich in case studies that would likely be of interest to a political scientist but are a little hard to abstract from). One relevant observation of Dryzek's about the difficulties of maintaining true discursive designs:<br /><blockquote>State and corporate actors may seek some association with, or even participation in, discursive forums. The door is open to manipulation by these actors. They can cloak private interests in a rhetoric of public concern, perhaps even in the genuine belief that what is in their own interest must also be in the public interest. They can make superficial concessions to opponents and thereby secure passive acquiescence on the part of potential troublemakers. (p. 81)</blockquote>It seems to me that the 'discursive design' framework is one worth exploring more carefully to see what it teslls us about FOSS. In particular, I'm intrigued that it echoes ideas in Coleman's dissertation that we need to be analyzing FOSS in terms of what hackers are actually doing and saying, and it explicitly incorporates an idea Mako spent some time talking about at Brooklyn College, that of the appeal of the "institutional independence" of FOSS.<br /><br />At the same time, I ran across a piece by Patrick Lee Plaisance, "The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory," which appeared in <span style="font-style: italic;">Communication Theory 15(3)</span> in August 2005. I first misread the title as referring to "new media" rather than as "news media," which caused me no small confusion. But it's a very relevant piece of writing. Knowing next to nothing about theories of the press, I was delighted to learn that there is an ongoing and vigorous (at least in some circles) debate about whether the purpose of the media is best defined in accordance with libertarian or communitarian principles. Plaisance makes plain the importance of the difference:<br /><blockquote>In the libertarian framework, the media system should express man's "natural," Lockean state, which advocates have said must be a robust, unfettered marketplace of ideas that ought not to constricted by a constant insistence on social justice. In the communitarian framework, the full self-realization of each individual, both as freedom-loving beings and as engaged members of a community, must be the underlying motive of all media policies. They do not rest on the same moral foundations and thus are essentially posing different moral questions.</blockquote>It's almost hard to believe he's not talking about FOSS.<br /><br />Plaisance goes on to critique libertarian press theory, with the final assessment that<br /><blockquote>Libertarian press theory, at bottom, is hampered as a moral theory by its unsubstantiated assertion that the product of the media marketplace, which is only one out of an infinite number of possible outcomes, somehow has privileged status as "the truth" . . . . To resort to such is to strip truth of its moral power and leave autonomy stripped of any function save its own worship.<br /></blockquote>Now, journalistic 'truth' doesn't have an obvious cognate in the vocabulary of software engineering, but certainly this critique echoes some of the critiques of libertarianism that have been leveled at some open source advocates.<br /><br />On the other hand, a communitarian press ethic suggests that (here Plaisance quotes from E. Lambeth's 1992 text, <span style="font-style: italic;">Committed Journalism</span>)<br /><blockquote>by action on yet another principle--stewardship of free expression--the committed journalist embraces the concept of community defined as the shared practice of inquiry. By cultivating and pursuing standards of excellence in the craft of reporting and interpretation, the journalist acquires the truth-telling ability to stimulate and assist the inquiry of fellow citizens.</blockquote>Plaisance goes on to sketch out a "discursive-network model" for the media:<br /><blockquote>At the core . . . is a fundamental shift in our understanding of audience expectation and participation. Conceiving of the "public" served by media as a population for moral agency requires more than the instrumental application of ethics . . . . [T]his model sets forth the justification . . . to expect news practitioners not merely to view ethical standards . . . as proscribing their own behavior . . . by rather that the cultivation of moral agency be embraced as a central objective of the press.</blockquote>Which brings me to the title for this posting: I wonder what happens if we analogize the social good provided by software with a free press rather than with free speech. I'm increasingly convinced that the real ethical meat of free software lies in the sorts of public discourse it supports, both among developers but also, and arguably more importantly, among 'regular' users; of course free speech is a necessary condition for that, but I'm not certain that it's the goal toward which free software should be conceived of as moving.Scott Dexterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02026671956504291790noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-59356987315178760662007-11-20T12:23:00.000-05:002007-11-20T22:39:56.140-05:00Math and Open Source<a href="http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/cirasella/">Jill Cirasella</a>, Decoding Liberation's in-house librarian, points out <a href="http://www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001279p.pdf">a recent piece</a> in Notices of the American Mathematical Society which speaks to the increasing significance of FOSS in mathematical research. (One of the authors, <a href="http://modular.math.washington.edu/">William Stein</a>, is lead developer of <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/">SAGE</a>, an open source mathematics software system.) Stein and co-author <a href="http://web.usna.navy.mil/%7Ewdj/homepage.html">David Joyner</a> offer this scenario:<br /><blockquote>Suppose Jane is a well-known mathematician who announces she has proved a theorem. We probably will believe her, but she knows that she will be required to produce a proof if requested. However, suppose now Jane says a theorem is true based partly on the results of software. The closest we can reasonably hope to get to a rigorous proof (without new ideas) is the open inspection and ability to use all the computer code on which the result depends. If the program is proprietary, this is not possible. We have every right to be distrustful, not only due to a vague distrust of computers but because even the best programmers regularly make mistakes. </blockquote>Indeed, as the authors point out, the makers of proprietary mathematics software, such as Mathematica, are perfectly aware of this limitation, though they deploy some contorted rhetoric in order to cast it as nothing more than an occasional minor inconvenience. Joyner and Stein quote briefly from the Mathematica tutorial document "<a href="http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUsuallyNeedToKnowAboutInternals.html">Why You Do Not Usually Need to Know about Internals</a>," which is worth taking a closer look at. First, according to the tutorial,<br /><blockquote>You should realize at the outset that while knowing about the internals of <i>Mathematica</i> may be of intellectual interest, it is usually much less important in practice than one might at first suppose.</blockquote>Why? Oh, because<br /><blockquote>the vast majority of the computations that <i>Mathematica</i> does are completely specified by the definitions of mathematical or other operations.<a name="21653"></a> Thus, for example, <span class="IF">3^40</span> will always be <span class="IF">12157665459056928801</span>, regardless of how <i>Mathematica</i> internally computes this result. </blockquote> <a name="21234"></a>Fabulous news, really -- <span style="font-style: italic;">Mathematica</span> always produces correct results! Guess we can fire all those guys down in testing (and my friends who do formal methods research will have to retool). One of the keys to this is, apparently, the fact that<br /><i></i><blockquote><i>Mathematica</i> can usually use its arbitrary-precision numerical computation capabilities to give results where every digit that is generated follows the exact mathematical specification of the operation being performed.</blockquote>But wait: maybe you're not at all worried about correctness (a secondary consideration for most mathematicians) but would like hack up a more efficient approach for some <span style="font-style: italic;">Mathematica</span>l calculation. Might you not need to analyze the implementation of said calculation? Not really, because<br /><blockquote>most often the analyses will not be worthwhile. For the internals of <i>Mathematica</i> are quite complicated, and even given a basic description of the algorithm used for a particular purpose, it is usually extremely difficult to reach a reliable conclusion about how the detailed implementation of this algorithm will actually behave in particular circumstances.</blockquote>There you have it: the code of <span style="font-style: italic;">Mathematica</span> is <span style="font-style: italic;">so</span> complicated that analyzing it wouldn't help you get a more efficient implementation, yet it's <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> so complicated so as to prevent blithe assurances of <span style="font-style: italic;">exact mathematical</span> correctness.Scott Dexterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02026671956504291790noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-55770856925874541292007-11-16T10:11:00.000-05:002007-11-16T10:40:50.524-05:00Decoding Liberation at the Wolfe InstituteYesterday, the <a href="http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/wolfe/about/index.html">Wolfe Institute at Brooklyn College</a> hosted an interdisciplinary colloquium to celebrate the release of <a href="http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~bcfoss/DL">Decoding Liberation</a>. The featured speakers were <a href="http://www.shortell.org/">Tim Shortell</a> and <a href="http://mako.cc/">Benjamin "Mako" Hill</a>. <a href="http://www.iawa.net/rviscusi.htm">Robert Viscusi of the Wolfe Institute</a> kicked things with a little welcome spiel, pointing out the importance and relevance of the free software community's discourse about creativity and 'intellectual property' to the humanities ("Shakespeare wouldn't have been able to publish in today's copyright regime"!); Scott Dexter read out parts of Decoding Liberation's introduction; I followed with a brief discussion of how the book project started and what its various chapters covered, and then handed off to Tim Shortell. <br /><br />Tim started with a little recounting of how he came to encounter the free software philosophy by way of his experiences while working as doctoral student in social psychology that wanted to write text-processing tools for discourse analysis. The fledgling community of researchers in that field gladly shared code and techniques, enabling each other to build on the shared work and to go further than anyone would have been able to go on their own. Tim then proceeded to ground his discussion of Decoding Liberation on the theme of alienation, finding various manifestations of it in the different chapters: alienation of workers from their products, of users from technology and within the science of computing, of scientists from the works of other scientists. He then framed a few questions about possible futures for free software and turned it over to the audience for discussion. This first stage touched upon some expected themes: the reluctance of corporate incumbents to let go of established business models that stress proprietary regimes, the applicability of free software concepts and models to other fields, the possibility of reworking notions of knowledge as a commodity and our understandings of intellectual property. <br /><br />For the next stage, I introduced Benjamin Mako Hill, who began by providing some interesting perspectives on the real and supposed differences between the free software movement and the open source movements, stressing that differences were largely tactical rather than ideological. There were some interesting historical notes, and the notion was developed that the freedoms of free software, as developed and articulated in the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free Software Definition</a>, the <a href="http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php">Open Source Definition</a>, and the <a href="http://www.debian.org/social_contract">Debian Free Software Guidelines</a> were by far the most important principles for the community, more important than any ideological differences, whether political or technical (I loved the story about the two Debian developers who, in the course of arranging a key-signing meeting, found out that one was a delegate for the Republican National Convention, and the other a protester). Mako then went on to talk about how the community's strongest point was its institutional independence, its ability to respond to user needs in a manner and fashion unknown to its proprietary counterpart, and its dire need of bug-catchers to help iron out kinks in development efforts. Mako's talk was followed by more interesting discussion about the extension of free software notions to literature, the possibility of free software extending its reach into domains like gaming where it lags, and clarifications of copyleft, the problem of patenting, and the importance of free software to computer science pedagogy.<br /><br />All in all, a great discussion, very educative and thought-provoking. My sincere thanks to the audience, to the speakers, and to the Wolfe Institute. <br /><br />As a reminder, the <a href="http://web.gc.cuny.edu/pcp/events.html">Center for Place, Culture and Politics</a> will be hosting a book party for us at the <a href="http://web.gc.cuny.edu">CUNY Graduate Center</a> on November 29th (6PM - 8PM).Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-62982391757411219692007-11-08T06:19:00.000-05:002007-11-08T06:32:27.403-05:00A funding appeal from the SFLCI know, I know, a big gap in blogging again. Let me try and get things started again by forwarding Eben Moglen's appeal for funding for the <a href="http://www.softwarefreedom.org">Software Freedom Law Center</a>. (As its Eben, the appeal is eloquent):<br /><br /><br />Dear Friend,<br /><br />I am writing to you to ask that you consider a donation to the Software Freedom Law Center this year as you make your year-end giving plans. Now completing its third year of life, SFLC has produced a body of distinguished legal work in the public interest. Our ability to continue this work relies on your support.<br /><br />http://softwarefreedom.org/donate<br /><br />When my colleagues and I formed SFLC in 2005, with the generous support of the Open Source Development Lab and its member companies, our intention was to build a legal services organization for a unique community: the far-flung collection of programmers and projects that constitute the non-profit Free Software and Open Source landscape. Our philosophy of practice is that early legal assistance offered to projects when they are young prevents problems, reduces friction, and benefits everyone. We are primarily counselors and advisers, rather than litigators; we believe in being, where appropriate, "lawyers for the situation," in Louis Brandeis' classic phrase, rather than partisans.<br /><br />Our clients are talented and generous people who put their technical virtuosity and hard work into making wonderful software everyone can freely copy, modify, and share. Our practice on their behalf conforms to their values: we try to create agreement and eliminate artificial barriers to innovation and access to technology. Our goal is to eliminate risks today, rather than to sue over them tomorrow.<br /><br />In these last three years we are proud to have built a client list that includes the Apache Software Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Sakai Foundation, the Software Freedom Conservancy and X.org to name just a few. Some high-profile activities, like our involvement in the making of GPLv3, have received more than their share of attention. But it's the less visible aspects of our practice that have, in my opinion, created the most value for our clients and the surrounding community. For example, we have helped projects to restructure and reorganize themselves to ensure sound corporate form and governance, limiting liability that could have jeopardized the very projects that those structures were establish to protect.<br /><br />Reproduced below is our information sheet that lists some of the work we can talk about. We've been active invalidating patents, reviewing code bases sullied by accusations of infringement, providing licensing assistance, pursuing enforcement, developing copyright and trademark policies with our clients and publishing educational materials that we hope will benefit the whole community.<br /><br />I've been practicing legal education as well as law for twenty years, and from my perspective, SFLC is as important for its role in training lawyers specialized in these issues as it is for the client service it provides. SFLC is able to recruit, employ, and train lawyers who will carry on the representation of FOSS programmers not only in the US, but around the world. We are preparing to open our first affiliated practice, in New Delhi, India, where we plan to participate from the ground up in the development of the Indian free software development community.<br /><br />Of course, as every fundraising letter must sooner or later surrender to cliche and disclose, "all this costs money." Vendor support is still the mainstay of our funding; we're very grateful for the generous support of the companies who provide funds to ensure that hackers have counsel.<br /><br />But if the vendors are our only contributors, we put at risk our definition as a public charity, and rightly so. We don't want to be lawyers offering services to hackers on behalf of a community of corporations: We want to be lawyers working for, coming from, and supported by the community as a whole.<br /><br />Free software law from the beginning--or at least as far back as my experience extends--was always about reducing friction by increasing the peace. The cardinal idea that we all do better by sharing, which has gone hand in hand with transparency and peaceful methods of dispute resolution, has created both economic and social value beyond all but the most wildly optimistic expectations. Please help me, and the outstanding colleagues who practice with me at SFLC, to continue doing what we can to represent, cherish, and foster this way of making software.<br /><br />http://softwarefreedom.org/donate<br /><br />Software freedom is good for almost everyone, and it needs to be protected. This year, please give generously.<br /><br />Thank you,<br /><br />Eben Moglen<br />President and Executive Director<br />Software Freedom Law Center<br /><br />November 2007<br />About Us<br /><br />The Software Freedom Law Center provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Founded in 2005, we now represent many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects. As an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, we are able to offer our services for free to the developers we represent.<br />What We've Been Doing<br /><br />The Software Freedom Law Center has made significant strides in accomplishing our mission to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Since our founding, we have:<br /><br /> * Built from scratch the technological infrastructure required to run a law firm using entirely Free and Open Source Software. This includes a VoIP system that allows for sophisticated telephone call routing and conference calling at a fraction of the traditional costs of such services, as well as a time tracking system that allows SFLC staff to record and report time spent on SFLC activities.<br /> * Provided legal and organizational support to our client's process of updating the GNU General Public License to version 3 (GPLv3). SFLC created a web-based public document commenting system which facilitates public discussion of documents. SFLC helped draft the new license and mediated the GPLv3 discussion committees.<br /> * Successfully defended against a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Indiana alleging that the GPL is an anticompetitive restraint of trade.<br /> * Published white papers to share our legal expertise with the broader FOSS community. These papers have considered: using GPL licensed software in light of Sarbanes-Oxley; alleged patent issues with implementing the OpenDocument format; U.S. rules governing Software Defined Radios; standards for copyrightability; and guidelines for maintaining permissive-licensed code in a GPL project.<br /> * Launched the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization that acts as a fiscal sponsor to FOSS projects and provides them with financial and administrative services. Member projects now include ArgoUML, Boost, BusyBox, Inkscape, Libbraille, Mercurial, OpenChange, SurveyOS, Samba, uCLibc and Wine.<br /> * Co-hosted a conference on software patents held at Boston University and MIT. Held our first annual legal summit and included an afternoon of educational presentations to the public.<br /> * Filed a formal request with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, asking them to re-examine Blackboard's patent on e-learning systems. The Patent Office accepted the request and ordered re-examination of the patent.<br /> * Audited OpenHAL's code base and determined that there was no illegal copying from Atheros' proprietary HAL code. We also analyzed its ISC license compatibility. OpenHAL is low-level interface software for Atheros-based wireless cards, which is used in both Linux and OpenBSD systems.<br /> * Filed the first-ever U.S. GPL infringement lawsuit on behalf of developers of BusyBox against Monsoon Multimedia. The case has settled and the defendant has promised to comply with the GPL.<br /><br />Inside SFLC: Review of Linux Wireless Code Completed<br /><br />Last month, SFLC announced that it had carefully reviewed the lineage of the open source Atheros wireless driver for Linux and determined which portions can be distributed under the ISC license (also known as the 2-clause BSD license).<br /><br />The licensing situation for the Atheros driver is complex because much of it was originally derived from an OpenBSD project called ar5k. This original code is licensed under the ISC license, but Linux code is typically licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL places specific additional requirements on distributors of software to ensure that its users are able to obtain the software's source code, and freely to copy, modify, and redistribute all subsequent modified versions.<br /><br />Ultimately, all the copyright holders of the Linux ath5k-driver code, derived from ar5k, were contacted and agreed to license their changes under the ISC license, thus allowing improvements to be re-incorporated into OpenBSD. One of the three historical branches of the code reviewed by SFLC, however, included portions that are only licensed under the GPL, and SFLC has determined that it would be very difficult to re-incorporate that code into OpenBSD.<br /><br />To share its knowledge with the FOSS and legal communities and to share background regarding its analysis, SFLC also released two documents of general interest. One document is a set of guidelines for developers who wish to incorporate code with a permissive license, such as ISC, into a GPL-licensed project. The other paper discusses the legal standards of originality with regard to computer programs under U.S. and international copyright law.<br /><br />This is not the first time that SFLC has worked with the Linux Wireless developers. In July, SFLC announced that it had performed a confidential audit of the open source Atheros driver and determined that no portion of it was illegally copied from Atheros' proprietary code.<br />For More Information...<br /><br />Visit us at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-64166062092476143562007-10-15T22:06:00.000-04:002007-10-15T22:36:36.408-04:00From the Forum to the 'hood<a href="http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=836">Biella Coleman pens some thoughts on the Decoding Liberation book launch party at the Brecht Forum last week</a> (and segues nicely into some ruminations on Web 2.0 and FOSS). <a href="http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-decoding-liberation.pdf">Her opening remarks on Decoding Liberation</a> were very thoughtful, and I truly appreciate her putting in the time needed to work on them (especially given teaching work!). We'll be having our next event at <a href="http://www.voxpopnet.net/">VoxPop, our local favorite coffee shop</a>, this Thursday, October 18th at 7 PM, so, please come on out if you can. The structure will be a little different; Scott and I will read from a couple of chapters each and then get into questions/discussion. VoxPop serves great beer (my favorite American brewers, DogFish feature on tap!) and has very good politics. It should be an interesting evening.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-15730895077953763902007-10-06T19:45:00.000-04:002007-10-06T19:56:14.635-04:00Decoding Liberation at the Brecht Forum<a href="http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=827">Our first book-release event took place this past Wednesday at the Brecht Forum</a>(I haven't linked to the Forum's site because their domain name seems to have expired!). <a href="http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman">Biella Coleman</a> was the commentator and she did a wonderful job in explicating some of the book's central points (hopefully, Biella is going to post her comments up at her blog very soon). It also led to some good questions and a lively discussion. Some questions: if we are so critical of non-copyleft licensing in Chapter 2, why do we let the FSF off the hook for their tolerance of non-copyleft licensing? What does the FOSS movement really mean for day-to-day non-sophisticated users of technology? Does using FOSS automatically bring political reform/liberation/liberalism in its wake? Does the use of different kinds of FOSS licenses affect the quality of software? What implications does the FOSS model have on other domains of production? There were also some requests for clarification on the nature of licenses and terminology. All in all, a good night with a few bottles of wine helping things along. The next book-release event will be on October 18th at 7 PM at <a href="http://www.voxpopnet.net/">VoxPop on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn</a>. Come one, come all. For other events, at Labyrinth Books, Brooklyn College, and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, check out the book's information page on the right.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15486888.post-91524097376726141242007-09-26T20:05:00.000-04:002007-09-26T20:26:34.362-04:00A murky PRISMThis post isn't about free software, but about open access to scientific knowledge (oops, sorry, one and the same thing). Anyway. A new coalition called PRISM is here, and apparently its not so happy about the kinds of things our friends at Open Access are trying to accomplish. I checked out their website, which is horribly vague about who they are. But I did find a couple of (vague) gems. Here is what PRISM Is worried about:<blockquote>the unintended consequences of unfunded government mandates and mandatory one-size-fits-all policies that underestimate the complexities and differing needs of the scientific community and scientific journals.</blockquote><br />They are also worried about<blockquote><span class="style1"> Government mandates that ignore the need for sufficient and sustainable financial support for peer-reviewed journals -- whether the source of support is from users, authors, or sponsors</blockquote>because these,<blockquote> risk undermining the very fabric of the system of independent, formal peer-reviewed publication, a system that is of crucial importance for scholarly communication and the preservation of scientific knowledge.</span></blockquote><br />Clearly the worry is about "government mandates" (I don't know what the "unfunded" in the first bit is referring to). What could such a "mandate" be? Could it be <a href="http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.asp?ArticleID=15852">the requirement that all (or some) publicly-funded research be made available to all and sundry</a> i.e., that it be Open Access? Now, that sounds like an onerous requirement to me. But PRISM is seriously creepy. Check out <a href="http://www.linux.com/feature/119413">this piece by Bruce Byfield at Linux.com</a> if you feel like getting a bit more creeped out.Samir Choprahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695797351920330874noreply@blogger.com1