software licensing

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File Synchronization Services

May 15, 2009 in software licensing by Greg Grossmeier | 14 comments

This past Monday Canonical announced the closed beta of UbuntuOne which is specifically written for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) systems.  UbuntuOne gives the user file synchronization between multiple computers.  It does this by uploading all of the files in the ~/Ubuntu One/My Files/ folder to Canonical’s servers (currently hosted by Amazon S3), with plans to migrate to a Canonical hosted installation of Eucalyptus). There is also a web interface where the user can upload and download files in their folder when away from their Ubuntu machine.

If this sounds familiar to you it is because that functionality is very similar to services such as Dropbox and Drop.io.  But where UbuntuOne is different is Canonical’s plan to incorporate other synchronization features such as email contacts, user settings, etc.
The service has great potential.

Unfortunately, Canonical will not be releasing the server software for UbuntuOne as Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). Thus, no user is able to install their own hosted version of UbuntuOne to ensure total ownership of the system and process. As someone who believes in the principles of the Franklin Street Statement, I would be much happier if UbuntuOne (or Dropbpox, Drop.io, etc) would release the server code under a FLOSS license as per the recommendation of the Franklin Street Statement.

Personally, I am proud to say I am a member of the Ubuntu community. I am the leader of the Michigan Local Community Team and really believe that what Ubuntu, as a whole, is doing is beneficial for the FLOSS community.  With that said, I believe that UbuntuOne would better serve the community, and even Canonical, as a Free Network Service.  It would show Canonical’s commitment to FLOSS and be a great example for other companies thinking about entering this area.  It would also be the flagship file sync Free Network Service and thus would gain much publicity, and users, because of that.  The for-pay option of getting a larger allotment of space would still be desired and marketable.

But. there is another option!

Novell has recently revived the iFolder project and has even assigned a Community Manager to the project (Brent McConnell).  Brent has even personally ensured me that they are “totally committed to keeping iFolder open and regret the poor management of the project over the last year or so.”

iFolder, unlike any of the other alternatives, is a Free Network Service.  The code that runs on both the client and the server is
licensed under the GPLv2 giving users complete control of their data on all ends.  I would whole-heartedly encourage any person who wants a Free Network Service alternative to UbuntuOne/Dropbox to check out iFolder and its planned set of features.

Launchpad’s License Will Be AGPLv3

January 15, 2009 in development, software licensing by bkuhn | No comments

I just wrote a brief blog entry in my SFLC blog about the announcement that Launchpad’s planned license is AGPLv3.

Now that Canonical has made an indication that they want to respect the freedom of network users, it’s very important for the community of users to pay careful attention to Launchpad’s process, to help them make it a user-freedom respecting network service.

AGPL Declared DFSG-Free

December 1, 2008 in software licensing by bkuhn | 1 comment

Late last week, the FTP Masters of Debian — who, absent a vote of the Debian developers, make all licensing decisions — posted their ruling that AGPLv3 is DFSG-Free. I was glad to see this issue was finally resolved after months of confusion; the AGPLv3 is now approved by all known FLOSS licensing ruling bodies (FSF, OSI, and Debian).

It was somewhat fitting that the AGPLv3 was approved by Debian within a week of the one year anniversary of AGPLv3’s release. This year of AGPLv3 has shown very rapid adoption of the AGPL. Even conservative numbers show an adoption rate of 15 projects per month. I expect the numbers to continue a steady, linear climb as developers begin to realize that the AGPL is the “copyleft of the Cloud”.

Complying with the Franklin Street Statement

October 13, 2008 in administrivia, development, software licensing by Benjamin Mako Hill | 5 comments

Our most important statement to date is the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It calls upon developers, implementors and users of network services to do a series of things to help ensure software freedom for network services.

Now we run a blog, of course, so, in that capacity, we’re one of the implementors our statement speaks to. We use Wordpress with a downloaded theme and a couple extra plugins — all of which are free and available online. We export our blog’s content using RSS and Atom under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License — a licensed approved for Free Cultural Works.

In the Franklin Street Statement, we ask implementors to choose free software for their services. We’ve done that. We ask them to release customizations under a free software license. Like most people who run blogs, we’ve not made any changes, so no action seems to be required. We don’t host any private data other than passwords. Public data on our blog is accessible via RSS and licensed freely.

So are we doing enough to comply with the statement’s guidelines? It seems so. But have we provided an ideal example? Perhaps not. We’ve argued that a free service is one that can be copied, changed and reimplemented by its users. With a little extra work from us, that could certainly be easier with regards to our service.

To work toward being a better example, I’ve put together a new page on our blog that links to local copies of source code for all the software running our blog. In building this list, I made several observations.

While I think many people running blogs would be happy to provide such information, perhaps they won’t be as motivated to take the time I did to put it together. Perhaps we need a plugin to generate such sets of links automatically. Perhaps such a plugin can go further than just RSS by providing database dumps that are automatically and appropriately cleaned of sensitive information like passwords and unpublished posts.

The process of building and auditing the list raised several important issues related to the software we use. The theme we’d been using had unclear and potentially problematic licensing status so I switched to one clearly released under the GNU GPL. It’s not clear to me what to make of the Akismet plugin which, while presumably free itself, uses a separate service and database to do spam checking. The freedom status of this system is much less clear. Now, the whole point of Akismet is build a centralized database resistant to spammers. Should we uninstall Akismet? Possibly. I’m not sure yet, but I hadn’t even considered it before I went through this process.

As more people try to implement the Franklin Street Statement, these types of questions, problems, reports, and shared solutions will help make it easier for others to comply in the future. Other’s who’ve gone through this process and have useful advice, tips, or code to share should contribute that to the Autonomo.us wiki or help write an article on this blog.

GPL, The 2-clause BSD of Network Services

September 4, 2008 in development, software licensing by bkuhn | 1 comment

So often, a particular strategy becomes dogma. Copyleft licensing constantly allures us in this manner. Every long-term software freedom advocate I have ever known — myself included — has spent periods of time slipping on the comfortable shoes of belief that copyleft is the central catalyst for software freedom.

Copyleft indeed remains a successful strategy in maximizing software freedom because it backs up a community consensus on software sharing with the protection of the law. However, most people do not comply with the GPL merely because they fear the consequences of copyright infringement. Rather, they comply for altruistic reasons: because it advances their own freedom and the freedom of the people around them.

Indeed, it is so important to remember that many of the FLOSS programs we use every day are not copylefted, yet do not actually have any long-term proprietary forks (for me, Subversion, Trac and Twisted come to mind quickly). Examples like this helped me to again re-eradicate some clouded thinking about copyleft as central tenant.

With this mindset fresh, Mike Linksvayer and I had an excellent discussion last month that solidified this connection to network services, and specifically, the licenses for network services software. Many GPL’d network service software give no source to users, but that may have little to do with the authors’ “failure to upgrade” to the AGPL. In other words, the non-source availability of network service applications that are otherwise licensed in freedom is probably unrelated to the lack of network-freedom provisions in the license.

In fact, more likely, the network service world now mimics the early days of the BSD licenses. Deployers are “proprietarizing” by default merely because there is no social effect to encourage release of modified source. Often, they likely haven’t considered the complex issues of network service freedom, and are following the common existing practices. Advent of the GPL did help encourage software sharing in the community, but the general change in social standards that accompanied the GPL probably had a more substantial impact.

Therefore, improved social standards will help improve source sharing in network services. We need to encourage, and more importantly, make it easy for network service deployers to make source of network applications available, regardless of their particular FLOSS license. No existing non-AGPL FLOSS licenses prohibit making the source available to network users. Network providers can and should simply do it voluntarily out of respect for their users. Developers of network service software, even if they do not choose the AGPL, should make it easy for the deployers to give source to their users. I hope to assist in this regard more directly before the end of 2008.