Jonathan Riddell's Diary

A post on the Fridge today claims “both councils collaborated and resolved any tensions together”.  The Ubuntu Community Council bullied me for asking questions that made Canonical feel uncomfortable and this is the only response to that.  That bullying someone until they leave a project is the UCC way of resolving tensions leaves me speachless.  That nobody else has commented in the Ubuntu project in public (I’ve had people in private tell me they’re wanting to leave Ubuntu and/or Canonical) confirms to me the project has a culture of fear.

Canonical still claims restrictions on Ubuntu software which do not exist and which are against Ubuntu policy.

This is the Jonathan Riddell™ IP Policy.  It applies to all Jonathan’s intellectual property in Ubuntu archives.  Jonathan is one of the top 5 uploaders, usually the top 1 uploader, to Ubuntu compiling hundreds of packages in the Ubuntu archive.  Further Jonathan reviews new and updated packages in the archive.  Further Jonathan selects compiler defaults and settings for KDE and Qt and other packages in the Ubuntu archive.  Further Jonathan builds and runs tests for Ubuntu packages in the archives.  Further Jonathan Riddell™ is a trademark of Jonathan Riddell™in Scotland, Catalunya and other countries; a trademark which is included in all packages edited by Jonathan Riddell™.  Further Jonathan is the author of numberous works in the Ubuntu archive.  Further Jonathan is the main contributor to the selection of software in Kubuntu. Therefore Jonathan has IP in the Ubuntu archive possibly including but not limited to copyright, patents, trademarks, sales marks, geographical indicators, database rights, compilation copyright, designs, personality rights and plant breeders rights.  To deal with, distribute, modify, look at or smell Jonathan’s IP you must comply with this policy.

Policy: give Jonathan a hug before using his IP.

If you want a licence for Jonathan’s IP besides this one you must contact Jonathan first and agree one in writing.

Nothing in this policy shall be taken to override or conflict with free software licences already put on relevant works.

“Ubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of free software development; we encourage people to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on.” is what used to be printed on the front page of ubuntu.com. This is still true but recently has come under attack when the project’s main sponsor, Canonical, put up an IP policy which broke the GPL and free software licences generally by claiming packages need to be recompiled. Rather than apologising for this in the modern sense of the word by saying sorry, various staff members have apologised in an older sense of the word meaning to excuse. But everything in Ubuntu is free to share, copy and modify (or just free to share and copy in the case of restricted/multiverse). The archive admins wills only let in packages which comply to this and anyone saying otherwise is incorrect.

In this twitter post Michael Hall says “If a derivative distro uses PPAs it needs an additional license.” But he doesn’t say what there is that needs an additional licence, the packages already have copyright licences, all of them free software.

It should be very obvious that Canonical doesn’t control the world and a licence is only needed if there is some law that allows them to restrict what others want to do. There’s been a few claims on what that law might be but nothing that makes sense when you look at it. It’s worth examining their claims because people will fall for them and that will destroy Ubuntu as a community project. Community projects depend on everyone having the freedom to do whatever they want with the code else nobody will give their time to a project that someone else will then control.

In this blog post Dustin Kirkland again doesn’t say what needs a licence but says one is needed based on Geographical Indication. It’s hard to say if he’s being serious. A geographical indication (GI) is a sign used on products that have a specific geographical origin and possess qualities or a reputation that are due to that origin and are then assessed before being registered. There is no Geographical Indication registration in Ubuntu and it’s completely irrelevant to everything. So lets move on.

A more dangerous claim you can see on this reddit post where Michael Hall claims “for permissively licensed code where you did not build the binary, there is no pre-existing right to redistribution of that binary”.    This is incorrect, everything in Ubuntu has a free software licence with an explicit right to redistribution. (Or a few bits are public domain where no licence is needed at all.)  Let’s take the libX11 as a random example, it gets shipped with a copyright file containing this licence:

“Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”),  to deal in the Software without restriction”

In Matthew Garrett’s recent blog post he reports that “Canonical assert that the act of compilation creates copyright over the binaries”.  Fortunately this is untrue and can be ignored.  Copyright requires some creative input, it’s not enough to run a work through a computer program.  In the very unlikely case a court did decide that compiling a programme added some copyright then they would not decide that copyright was owned by the owners of the computer it ran on but on the copyright owners of the compiler, which is the Free Software Foundation and the copyright would be GPL.

In conclusion there is nothing which restricts people making derivatives of Ubuntu except the trademark, and removing branding is easy. (Even that is unnecessary unless you’re trading which most derivatives don’t, but it’s a sign of good faith to remove it anyway.)

Which is why Mark Shuttleworth says “you are fully entitled and encouraged to redistribute .debs and .iso’s”. Lovely.

I always say the best way to tour a city is from the water

The GCC 5 Transition caused the apocalypse so we went out to see the world while it still existed

No Soy Líder, Ahora Soy El Capitán

See Hoarse

El Torre

We will climb this!

David reached the top

Fin de la terre!

HJens Lunch Time

Jens describes Skittles and Doritos

The wonderful organising team!

Elite Kubuntu developer Scarlett wins an Akademy Award!

Sebas shows off Plasma Mobile phone with a look that suggests he wants world domination by next year

Group photo

hacking area

GCompris demos, ooh la la

The opening ceremony to remember absent friends

Yesterday we revealed the project we’ve been working on for the last few months, Plasma Mobile and images of it on Kubuntu.

KDE has been trying for years to get Plasma working on different form factors with mixed success, so when I first started on this I was pretty intimidated.  But we looked around for how to build this and it turns out there is software for it just lying around on the internet ready to be put together.  Incredible.

It got very stressful when we couldn’t get anything showing on the screen for a few weeks but the incredible Martin G got Wayland working with it in KWin, so now KDE has not just the first open mobile project but also one of the first systems running with Wayland.

And with Shashlik in the pipeline we are due to be able to run Android applications on it too giving us one of the largest application ecosystems out there.

The question is will there be traction from the community?  You can join us in the normal Plasma ways, #plasma on Freenode and plasma-devel mailing list and #kubuntu-devel to chat about making images for other devices.  I’m very excited to see what will happen in the next year.

Plasma Mobile announcement.

Video

Los transparencias de mi presentación de ayer a Akademy-ES es ahora en mi página web de charlas.

Voy a ir Akademy-ES el jueves para dar una charla se llama “Plugfest Conferencia Protocolos”. Es un revisión de esta conferencia an Marzo y un corto versión de mi charla se llama “interoperabilidad del escritorio Linux”.

Today Canonical published an update to their IP Policy by adding in a “trump clause” paragraph saying that “where any other licence grants rights, this policy does not modify or reduce those rights under those licences”.

I’ve been going on about this IP Policy (which is Canonical’s but confusingly appears on the Ubuntu website) and how it was incompatible with the Ubuntu policy for years.  I’ve been given a lot of grief for querying it having been called a fucking idiot, aggressive, swearer of oaths and disingenuous, dishonest, untrustworthy and unappreciative.  It really shows Ubuntu at its worst, and is really amazing that such insults should come from the body which should be there to prevent them. And I’ve heard from numerous other people who have left the project over the years because of similar treatment.  So it’s nice to see both the FSF and the SFC put out statements today saying there were indeed problems, but sad to see they say there still are.

“Canonical, Ltd.’s original policy required that redistributors needed to recompile the source code to create [their] own binaries” says SFC, and “the FSF, after receiving numerous complaints from the free software community, brought serious problems with the policy to Canonical’s attention“.  Adding the trump clause makes any danger of outright violation go away. 

But as they both say there’s still dangers of it being non free by restricting non-GPL code and using patents and trademarks.  The good news is that doesn’t happen, the Ubuntu policy forbids it and there’s a team of crack archive admins to make sure everything in the archive can be freely shared, copied and modified.  But the worry still exists for people who trust corporate sayings over community policy.  It’s why the SFC still says “Therefore, Conservancy encourages Canonical, Ltd. to make the many changes and improvements to their policy recommended during the FSF-led negotiations with them” and the FSF say “we hope they will further revise the policy so that users, to the greatest extent possible, know their rights in advance rather than having to inquire about them or negotiate them“.  Well we can but hope but if it took two years and a lot of insults to get a simple clarifying paragraph added and stuff like this happen “After a few months working on this matter, Conservancy discovered that the FSF was also working on the issue” (did nobody think to tell them?), I don’t see much progress happening in future.

Meanwhile the Ubuntu Developer Membership Board wonders why nobody wants to become a developer any more and refuses to put two and two together.  I hope Ubuntu can re-find it’s community focus again, but from today’s announcement all I can take from it is that the issues I spoke about were real concerns, even if no more than that, and they haven’t gone away.

Joel Leclerc’s recent post The importance of freedom in software reminds us that the reason we contribute to projects like Ubuntu is that they it is made for sharing. Use it, modify it, improve it, share it. Anywhere, any time and with any number of people all over the world. No licence required.  Take that away and you take away the reason for people to contribute.

Recent comments by a CC member that our ability to modify, improve and share it might be restricted by compilation copyright are a dangerous threat to our community.  It’s the sort of thing the Community Council should be there do take a stand against, but alas no.

Compilation Copyright?

Compilation copyright is an idea exclusive to the US (or North America anyway).  It restricts collections of items which otherwise have unrelated copyright restrictions.  A classic example is a book collection of poetry where the poems are all out of copyright but the selection and ordering of poems is new and has copyright owned by whoever did it.

It’s completely irrelevant outside the US where most of the world is located but we like to look after everyone so what’s the situation for people in the US?

Kubuntu images are made from lists of packages in seed files which get made into meta packages.  You could indeed argue that this meta package is subject to compilation copyright, I couldn’t find any case law on it so I suspect it’s entirely undefined.  The good news is the meta package has always been GPL 2 licenced so voila, no copyright restrictions beyond the norms of free software.

The seed respoitory has curiously lacked a licence until I added the GPL the other day.  It has a number of copyright holders primarily me (from before and after I worked for Canonical) and Canonical (from when I did).  Anything on Launchpad has to be free software so we could say the same applies here but more reliably the seed isn’t what’s distributed on the images, the meta package is.

And of course it’s easy to replicate, the list of packages is just those that come from KDE for the most part so you can argue any compilation copyright is KDE’s, which in the case of Plasma is me again as release dude.  And I pick GPL.

And in case anyone is getting confused, this has nothing to do with GCC style compilers, running some code through a compiler makes no difference whatsoever to what copyrights apply to it and nobody has ever seriously said anything different unless they’re trying to muddy the waters.  I recently had Mark Shuttleworth say that of course you could copy individual binaries from Ubuntu.

But but… you’re not a lawyer

It’s too complex for you…you’re too small and too wee and you need those weapons of mass destruction to prevent terrorism… was the self-deprecating argument the unionist politicians came up with for voting no to Scottish independence.  It worked too, for now, amazing.

Similarly I’m amazed at how otherwise very intelligent free software geeks look down on their ability to understand copyright and other laws.  If we took this attitude to coding I’d never have started contributing to KDE and I’d never learn what real coding is like.  If you want to know about an area of law it’s the same as coding, you read some textbooks, read some acts of parliament, read some EU directives, read some case law and come up with a decision.  It’s exactly what judges do when they make a decision, no different.

Based on the above I have maintained the KDE licence policy and reviewed thousands of packages into the Ubuntu archives. So I feel equally competent to make the obvious declaration that compilation copyright has no relevant to Kubuntu because we freely licence the meta package.  Remember geeks you are strong and free, don’t let anyone talk you down with unspecified scaremongering like “things get even more complicated” if they can’t say what makes it complicated then you can safely ignore it.

Protocol Plugfest photos are up

Interoperabilidad

I don’t lead you, but I can’t stop you following me

Totally gnarly waves dudes

Some photos

“Martin my KWin crashed”

Un Soupson Garcon?

Sebas does the best cooking

Literally the best photo

I lead nothing

If this was UDS we’d have a hot tub here

I’d like to thank all the Kubuntu members who just voted to re-affirm me on the Kubuntu Council.

Scott Kitterman’s blog post has a juicy details of the unprecedented and astonishing move by the Ubuntu Community Council asking me to step down as Kubuntu leader.  I’ve never claimed to be a leader and never used or been given any such title so it’s a strange request without foundation and without following the normal channels documented of consultation or Code of Conduct reference.

I hope and expect Kubuntu will continue and plan to keep working on the 15.10 release along with the rest of the community who I love dearly.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Protocols Plugfest Europe 2015.  It was really good to get out of the bubble of free software desktops where the community love makes it tempting to think we’re the most important thing in the world and experience the wider industry where of course we are only a small player.

This conferences, and its namesakes in the US, are sponsored by Microsoft among others and there’s obviously a decent amount of money in it, the venue is a professional conference venue and there’s a team of people making sure small but important details are taken care of like printed signposts to the venue.

What’s it all About?

In 2008 Microsoft lost an EU antitrust case because they had abused their monopoly position in operating systems.  This required them to document their file formats such as MS Office and protocols such as SMB.  This conference is part of that EU requirement meaning they have to work with anyone who wants to use their formats and protocols.  They have a website where you can file a request for information on any of their documents and protocols and everyone said they were very responsive in assigning engineers getting answers.

Since 2008 Microsoft have lost a lot of ground in new areas in the industry such as mobile and cloud.  Because they’re not the dominant player here they realise they have to use formats and protocols others can use too otherwise they lock themselves out.

The Talks

I spoke about Interoperability on the Linux Desktop which seemed well received, the reason Linux desktop hasn’t taken off is there are many other systems we need to interoperate with and many of them don’t want to interoperate with us. (Of course there are financial reasons too.) It was well received with many people thanking me for a good talk.

I went to talks by people working on Samba, LibreOffice and Kolab which all gave pleasing insight into how these project work and what they have to do to workaround complex proprietary protocols and formats.  LibreOffice explained how they work with OpenDocument, they add feature and for any feature added they submit a request for it to be added to the standard.  It’s a realistic best practice alternative.

I went to a bunch of Microsoft talks too about changes in their file formats, protocols and use of their cloud service Azure.

The inter-talks

It was great meeting some people from the free software and MS worlds at the conference.  I spoke to Christopher about how he had been hired to document SMB for MS, to Dan about taking over the world, to Miklos about LibreOffice and many others.  On the MS side I spoke to Tom about file formats, Darryl about working with Linux, to Jingyu about developing in MS.

I hope I won’t offend anyone to say that there’s a notable culture difference between the open source and the MS sides.  Open Source people really do dress scruffy and act socially awkward.  MS people reminded me of the bosses in Walter Mitty, strong handshakes, strong smiles and neat dress.

One part of the culture that depressingly wasn’t difference was the gender ratio, there was only half a dozen women there and half of those were organising staff.

The Microsoft people seemed pretty pleased at how they were open and documented their protocols and formats, but it never occurred to them to use existing standards.  When I asked why they invented OOXML instread of using OpenDocument I was told it was “MS Office’s standard”.  When I asked if Skype protocols were open they seemed not to know.  It probably doesn’t come under the EU court requirements so it doesn’t interest them, but then all their talk of openness is for nothing.  When I suggested Skype should talk XMPP so we can use it with Telepathy I was given largely blank faces in return.

Talking to Samba people and OpenChange people about my opinion that their products should be stop gaps until a better open protocol can be used was met with the reasonable argument that in many cases there are no better open protocols.  Which is a shame.

I went into the MS testing lab to test some basic file sharing with Samba and reminded myself about the problems in Kubuntu and discovered some problems in Windows.  They had to turn off firewalls and twiddle permissions just to be able to share files, which was something I always thought Windows was very good at.  Even then it only worked with IP address and not browsing.  They had no idea why but the Samba dudes knew straight away that name browsing had been disabled a while ago and a DNS server was needed for that.  Interesting the MS interoperability staff aren’t great at their own protocols.

Zaragoza

I had a great time in Zaragoza, only spoiled by travellers flu on the last day meaning I couldn’t go to the closing drinks.  It’s on the site of a 2008 world fair expo which feels like one of those legacy projects that get left to rot, 2008 wasn’t a great year to be trying to initiate legacy I think.  But the tapas was special and the vermut sweet.  The conference timetable was genius, first day starts at 9:00 next at 10:00 and final at 11:00.  The Zentyal staff who organised it was very friendly and they are doing incredible stuff reimplementing exchange.  It’s lovely to see MS want to talk to all of us but they’ve a way to go yet before they learn that interoperability should be about an even playing field not only on their terms.