LWN: Comments on "This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state"

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

flussence — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 22:26:45 +0000

It was a year or so ago, but I saw an article proposing MPEG-1 as the minimum standard WebRTC codec because it was newly patent-free at the time and Apple was (is) throwing a tantrum over VP8/9.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

JanC_ — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:25:39 +0000

Small correction: Iran has signed the Berne Convention, but the USA is blocking that signature from being accepted.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

JanC_ — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:21:24 +0000

Is MPEG-1 video still used for anything nowadays?

My guess is it's obsolete, unless you have some antique Video CDs you recorded somewhere in the Middle Ages… ☺

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

ceplm — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 21:14:45 +0000

Checking for licenses of all almost 6000 TeXLive packages would really push spot over the edge to drinking.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Wol — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 18:57:34 +0000

I would add also, as a scientist, that "common sense" usually == "wrong".

Cheers,
Wol

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

unilynx — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 19:57:14 +0000

Which non-proliferation treaty is that?

It would be a brilliant quote to (re)use, but Berne's 171 signatures don't seem to beat the NPT's 190.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

rahulsundaram — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 16:19:20 +0000

It is included in the repo. Not installed by default in Fedora 25. That is the plan for Fedora 26

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

KAMiKAZOW — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 16:07:14 +0000

I didn't see a fresh Fedora installation since a while (I just upgrade mine) but I hope your calender did not forget the MPEG-1 video patents. Considering that MP3 is the newest of MPEG-1 standards, video playback and probably even encoding should also work OOTB.

mp3 patents

KAMiKAZOW — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 16:04:27 +0000

There are two dates to consider: Date of filing and date of grant. The filing date + 20 years is IIRC April 2017, so just in time for Fedora 26.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

elopio — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 21:20:33 +0000

Ubuntu user here, with a phase through gNewSense. I owe you a couple of beers for sure!

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

marcH — Sun, 19 Feb 2017 08:12:03 +0000

I was referring to music "encoded" by others.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

tao — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 19:32:24 +0000

I've never cared about mp3 ever since Ogg Vorbis (and, since the arrival of affordable large harddisks/SSDs, Ogg FLAC).

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

marcH — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 18:26:01 +0000

> MP3 decoding is now in Fedora because the patents have expired,

Wow, time flies. Now I need a drink too.

(not like I care any longer about MP3 thanks to... <troll>DRM'ed</troll> streaming)

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

intgr — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 11:54:12 +0000

Maybe it's meant to avoid incidents like this: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-u-s-dispute-nuke-soft...

> Earlier this month, Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, a nonprofit military research organization based in Washington, D.C., wrote that Russian nuclear scientists last year found a bug in Microsoft's SQL Server database software that threatened the security not only of Russian nuclear weapons materials, but also of U.S. nuclear materials.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

intgr — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 19:42:47 +0000

For the rest of us not in the know, perhaps you could explain it. :)

A side question re wiFi and the FCC

pabs — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 01:52:47 +0000

Pretty much every distro ships CRDA etc and most Linux WiFi drivers know about the new system.

I've noticed some WiFi devices ship with completely the wrong regulatory information for where they are being shipped to, especially when that is not the USA. I think the only way to get correct regulatory info is to manually configure it.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

pizza — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 20:32:33 +0000

>That makes no sense. If a patent is on the calendar, that means they knew about it and avoided using it . Pretty much the opposite of willful infringement.

"Willful infringement" is a legal definition, which may or may not bear any semblance to common sense.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

sfeam — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 19:47:20 +0000

That makes no sense. If a patent is on the calendar, that means they knew about it and avoided using it . Pretty much the opposite of willful infringement.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

niner — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 19:43:47 +0000

My guess is, publishing the calendar makes it public which patents Redhat does know about. That makes it easier to claim and/or prove willful infringement which can triple the damages.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Gladrim — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 17:40:33 +0000

Interview with Dr Evil in his jail cell:

Interviewer: Your plans to take over the world failed. How were you stopped? Was it James Bond? The Avengers? Sherlock Holmes...?

Dr Evil (sobbing): No, I read the EULA...

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

hifi — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 16:49:35 +0000

Hasn't this been solved already for the firmware that has been included with the kernel? Those blobs should have redistribution rights for this very purpose.

I'm not arguing we should start packaging extracted firmware without consent from hardware vendors but when we do have that it should be a no-brainer to include them within distributions.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

jcrawfordor — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 16:33:17 +0000

On the upside, the Debian project does now distribute install images with nonfree firmware already included:

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd...

They're just "unofficial" and you have to do some digging to find them. This way I can do a netinstall on my laptop without having to sit by the ethernet jack.

A side question re wiFi and the FCC

davecb — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 14:42:51 +0000

Fokks, can you comment on whether the wi-fi code that in the blobs (for closed source) or the drivers sets compliance-critivcal parametrers like which challes to use and how much power?

The US FCC have asked for comments (and got them from Dave Taht and Vint Cerf!) about how to keep software open versus not letting people triviually misconfigure their wi-fi to mess up things like airport weather rader. The paper is at http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/~d/fcc_saner_software_pract...

I was an editor on the Dave-and-Vint comment, and would love to chat, here or in email, in particular about whether wi-fi vendors are using the Linux networking team's cryptographically signed configurations for radio devices, the Central Regulatory Domain Agent (CRDA, at https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/regulatory)

Or something else cool!

--dave
davecb@spamcop.net

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

karkhaz — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 13:33:35 +0000

A security update for iTunes 12.5.7 is available for your PC.

Changelog
---------------
As well as QuickTime Player and Safari, your iTunes now comes with a gratuitous copy of Stuxnet.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

robbe — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 13:13:48 +0000

Thanks, this made my day.

Aaand the Berne Convention has more signatories than any non-proliferation treaties, including (the mind boggles) North Korea.

Iran is missing from the list, though, so they can listen to (copied?) music via an unlicensed iTunes while the centrifuges keep spinning...

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

cesarb — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 12:58:37 +0000

> My personal belief is that hardware shouldn't be treated any differently if a firmware is uploaded as a binary file compared to being burned to a physical ROM on the board.

For the hardware, it doesn't make a difference, but in the firmware upload case, your distribution is distributing non-free software, while in the ROM case, your distribution isn't distributing anything (since you already have it).

Ideological reasons aside, this means that in the firmware upload case, the distribution has to worry about the license for the firmware files.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

pizza — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 12:46:32 +0000

> My personal belief is that hardware shouldn't be treated any differently if a firmware is uploaded as a binary file compared to being burned to a physical ROM on the board. It gives false impression of "freedomness" when older hardware with ROM firmware is compliant but modern that needs the uploaded blob isn't even though both use non-free firmware to operate in the end.

You left out a third case -- "stored in flash on the device". If the user lacks the ability to update the device firmware, the hardware is somehow "more free" than someone figures out how to update the stored firmware.

This is one of my personal beefs, and one of the very few areas where I strongly disagree with the FSF. I can understand the legal argument for why they draw the line where it is, but it's hard to see how arguing for a worse user experience is somehow a more moral stance, especially when the "uploaded as a blob" at least provides a path towards the possibility of truly Free Firmware being developed one day.

This isn't a theoretical argument; back in the day I was responsible for the drivers for the prism2 802.11b devices -- which started as non-user-updatable flash, became user-updateable due to horrible bugs in older firmware, and eventually lost onboard flash altogether as a cost-saving mechanism. Despite the ones lacking onboard firmware actually providing (by far) the best user experience, they were somehow the worst ones from a "freedom" perspective given that the proprietary firmware blob was completely identical.

(To this day, the firmware blobs I host on my personal website are downloaded about 4000 times a month, nearly entirely by Debian users..)

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

farnz — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 11:13:00 +0000

I'd guess that it's more prosaic; the calendar is effectively a nice way to present legal advice that could be trivially rewritten as "Red Hat's legal team believe that there are no patents affecting $thing after $date". Given that it's legal advice, you run into the usual "this isn't legal advice and I'm not your lawyer" issues - from Red Hat's point of view, it's simpler to not publish the calendar at all (in any form) than to publish it, have to keep it updated, deal with problems caused when they update it on the basis of new information but you don't get the update etc.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

vxIjhjYG — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 09:59:33 +0000

I am curious to know the reasoning behind that. To avoid interested parties trying to prolong their patents somehow, maybe?

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

nim-nim — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 09:39:32 +0000

Thanks a lot spot ! Wonderful achievements over the years. Amazing you managed to sum them up in a single conference slot. Extreme case of the dirty under-valued stuff distros do for software projects.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

hifi — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 06:10:43 +0000

This is what being practical means. It's great to know there are people like him trying to make things better while being reasonable for all parties involved.

I was a Debian user for quite some time but switched to Fedora for unrelated reasons and I have never looked back yet. It did, however, bother me that the Debian guidelines force (binary) firmware into the non-free repository. It's not that I don't understand the reason but it's one of those things that makes everything harder than it should be for the end user. You also get "exposed" to actual non-free software by enabling the non-free repository.

My personal belief is that hardware shouldn't be treated any differently if a firmware is uploaded as a binary file compared to being burned to a physical ROM on the board. It gives false impression of "freedomness" when older hardware with ROM firmware is compliant but modern that needs the uploaded blob isn't even though both use non-free firmware to operate in the end.

There are projects like nouveau trying to implement their own and that's of course a good thing but it's probably an endless road of pain as the generation of hardware moves faster than you can RE a firmware. Then NVIDIA started requiring firmware signing on the hardware so that ended abruptly.

Long term hardware that will be used for many years to come like the Raspberry Pi are probably the best targets for such effort as it doesn't get obsoleted as fast as PC GPUs and such.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

gdt — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 04:58:54 +0000

There's two reasons, usually intermingled and combined with legal inertia.

Firstly, there are risks who's outcomes are so large as to be uninsurable. You could imagine a program which melts down a reactor and not only kills a fair number of New York's residents but also makes uninhabitable some of the most expensive and litigious real estate in the world.

What should a company which sells software do to reduce its exposure to third-party damages? One possible response is to inhibit the programs use in these uninsurable situations and then take out insurance for the remaining insurable situations. You then copy the list of exclusions from your insurance policy into your software license or contract.

Secondly there is the Wassenaar Arrangement and its friends. These prevent the export of dual-use technologies. How do you prevent your average program from being tainted as a dual-use technology, which may then fall under the laws enabling this Arrangement? Using the same approach as above, you prevent the use of your program in fields of endeavour which may incorporate your program into a dual-use technology.

Now your lawyer leans back in their chair satisfied at a day's work well done, every 6 minutes billed out. But does this legal cleverness work in practice? Well have you ever seen a software license updated due to a change in insurance policy exclusions? So we're already fraying at the edges. And if you do contaminate large chunks of Manhattan, aren't the legal fees alone going to doom your company, especially since the insurer won't be helping pay them. There really is no practical legal protection offered, you're going to have to rely upon legislative limits.

The military-industrial complex has done its bit too. The export rules for dual-use technologies are far clearer than they used to be. After looking up some tables you can determine if your software is dual-use or not. If it is dual-use then its dual-use whether it has been used in a dual-use application or not: there is no theory of 'contamination'. Moreover there's a separate documentation dealing with exports -- the end-user certificate -- so there's no need to repeat all that in the software license or contract: the certificate itself can be your warranty from the exporter that they won't re-export the software. That allows the same license for exportable, dual-use and controlled technologies.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

mcatanzaro — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 03:56:45 +0000

Thank you spot!

*Drinks*

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

adam820 — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 02:00:28 +0000

The joke/comment about the TeXLive packages was pure gold. Actual out-loud chuckle.

Great talk!

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

rgmoore — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:17:29 +0000

and doesn't explain why there's similar language limiting how you can use your music library program.

My best guess for that part is that a company like Apple it's a matter of simplicity. For a company that doesn't care about abstract issues like software freedom, it does no harm to include a license term forbidding people from using the software to design nuclear weapons or engage in some other nefarious activity. Nobody is going to complain about a license term telling them they mayn't do something that's either impossible or forbidden. If it's impossible, the restriction is irrelevant, and if it's illegal then the people who were going to do it anyway aren't going to let a license term stop them.

To the lawyers who draft the licenses, though, including the term is a definite benefit. On the one hand, it means they only have to have one license, the one that includes those terms, rather than multiple licenses tailored to the capabilities of the programs they're applied to. On the other hand, it means nobody has to sit down and figure out which license applies to any piece of software. That's not only tedious, but nobody wants to be in the position of getting it wrong and exposing the company to liability because they left out a restriction they should have included.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

jhoblitt — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:16:49 +0000

In the talk video, it is mentioned that RH's lawyers asked that said calendar not be made public. There is no reason the community can't create such a calendar though.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

eternaleye — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:14:00 +0000

Any odds you might see fit to publish that calendar as an iCal feed or similar?

Let's be real, I doubt I'm the only one who'd find that FAR more useful (and interesting) than "US Holidays" or whatever other people's calendar software tends to throw in! (This despite that I do, in fact, live in the US.)

mp3 patents

cjwatson — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 23:58:06 +0000

Dunno about spot, but Wikipedia thinks it's 31 Dec 2017.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

mspevack — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 23:19:38 +0000

Just popping up to give a very heartfelt and sincere "thank you for everything you do for Fedora" to an old friend.

mp3 patents

bfields — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 22:47:59 +0000

Anyone know when spot's calenda goes "bing" for mp3 encoding? It's a minor annoyance, I'd rather use ogg, but when I'm sending somebody something that doesn't always seem to work, alas.