Free as in Freedom

The first live podcast of Free as in Freedom, hosted at SeaGL 2019 in November 2019. Hear questions from the studio audience and answers from Bradley and Karen.

Producer Dan speaks on mic to introduce that this is a live show.

• This is a live show from SeaGL 2019, a community-organized FaiP (02:15)
• Carol Smith from Microsoft asked about being a charity in the USA under recent tax changes regarding tax deduction and, and asked about Conservancy's annual fundraiser which had completed by the time this show was released. (04:53)
• Deb took a photo during the show (07:30)
• A questioner asked about the so-called “ethical but-non-FOSS licenses”. Bradley gave an answer that is supplemented well by this blog post (10:15) and Karen mentioned at CopyleftConf 2020 there was a discussion about this. (15:15) The follow up question was also related to these topics (15:44).
• Eric Hopper asked about how Conservancy decides when a project joins, and what factors Conservancy considers in projects joining (18:14)
• A written questioner asked how to handle schools requiring proprietary software as part of their coursework. (22:00)
• Michael Dexter asked about Karen's teaching at Columbia Law School. (27:25)
• A written questioner asked about copyleft-next's sunset clause. (29:22) Karen mentioned “Copyleft, All wrongs reversed” as it appeared on n June 1976 on Tiny BASIC, which inspired the term copyleft to mean what it does today. (30:45)
• Karen spoke about the issues of copyright and trademark regarding Disney, that is supplemented by this blog post. (32:52)
• Carol Smith asked what Karen and Bradley thought were Conservancy's and/or FOSS' biggest achievements in the last decade. (35:20) Karen mentioned Outreachy was a major success. (37:08)
• A questioner asked about using the CASE Act to help in GPL enforcement. Bradley discussed how it might ultimately introduce problems similar to arbitration clauses. (41:42) Since the podcast was recorded, the CASE Act has also passed the Senate, but does not seem to have been signed by the President. (47:30)
• Bradley noted that Mako Hill has pointed out that FOSS has not been involved in lobbying enough. (48:10)
• A questioner in the audience asked about the Mozilla Corporation structure would allow Mozilla to do lobbying for FOSS. (50:57) Karen explained the Mozilla corporate legal structure (51:35).
• A questioner in the audience asked about Mako Hill's keynote and how individuals can help further the cause of software freedom. (54:53)
• Michael Dexter asked if software patents are still as much of a threat as they once were. (1:01:30)
• Carol asked about the supreme court hearing the Oracle v. Google case (1:09:04)

Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter. We are working on setting up a group chat again, too!

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).