GNOMG

Some of the things I’ve worked on recently

Here’s a quick list of some of the things that come to mind that I’ve worked on in the last two weeks:

• GNOME 3.2 release press
• helped with organization of the Montreal Summit. I also have been trying to book my travel to go but it’s been extremely difficult – I can get a flight late enough to Burlington, VT (only 2 hours away!) that will allow me to accommodate yom kippur but it turns out that the rental car companies all close right when I’d land, and there are no hotels or b&bs available that are accessible by cab. If I fly Sunday morning directly to Montreal or to Burlington, I’ll get in so late it probably doesn’t make sense to go. Any ideas I’m missing? now made possible, thanks to a suggestion by Marina!
• talked to a few reporters about medical devices and also GNOME.
• talked to our bank about fraudulent checks that have been sent out, appearing like they are from GNOME. Rosanna took good steps already to ensure that the checks can’t be cashed, but I talked to the bank about whether they can investigate the matter. They’re completely not set up to do run an investigation like that, which is fascinating. I think it reflects the fact that there is so much fraud that they can only cooperate with the authorities when they are investigating, not take any independent initiatives. Fraud of this kind is just so common.
• worked on scheduling a meeting time for the marketing team – if you’d like to help out with marketing, join the list!
• followed up on outstanding invoices to GNOME
• helped with the Q2 report

And it’s not something I worked on, but last week was rosh hashanah – happy new year everyone! I hope this year is a good one for GNOME.

GNOME Outreach Program for Women is now open for applications

If I’ve seen you in person since I’ve started at GNOME it’s fairly likely that I’ve talked to you about the Women’s Outreach Program. I’ve been so impressed at the work that Marina, Stormy, and the rest of the GNOME Community have done in setting it up. It amazes me how the program systematically provides paths to overcome so many of the problems that we identify as possible reasons for the lack of involvement by women in free software.

Last year I was interviewed for an article about the topic, and when discussing this with Alex Skud Bayley (formerly Kirrily Robert – congrats to Alex on the name change) at last year’s OSCON, she said something like “if you are a woman in free software at some point you will be considered an expert about women in free software.” I wanted Alex’s thoughts because her 2009 OSCON keynote on the topic was really great. And while I like telling my story and giving my thoughts about the participation of women in free software, I think Alex was right – I’m mostly speaking from personal anecdotal experience. What I love about the Outreach Program is that it’s something concrete. It takes proactive steps to get women involved and try to keep them involved. And it has gotten great results.

I met many of the last round of participants in the program at the Desktop Summit and even listened to a few of them give presentations about their work. I was extremely impressed. Even better, some of these women stick around in our community after their internships are over, which is especially exciting. A couple of the women I talked to said that they believe that their careers have been kickstarted by the program and they’re not sure if they would have gone down that path otherwise.

As Marina writes, in the last session there were seven female interns among the 27 GSoC interns in GNOME. The most it had in previous years was one female participant. She noted that all of the women who applied for GSoC in 2011 found mentors and project ideas, made a first contribution, and navigated the application process with the help of the resources available through the OPW.

Extra thanks to outside funders of the program: Collabora, Google, and Mozilla. They make it possible for the program to have the reach it does.

The new application period for the program is open right now through the end of October, so if you know someone who may be right for the program please send this information their way!

GNOME is an innovative Free Software desktop. It is easy to use and is the most popular desktop distributed with free operating systems.

In an effort to get more women involved in Free Software, the GNOME project is sponsoring several internships for women from December 12, 2011 to March 12, 2012. The application deadline for the program is October 31. The applicants need to get in touch with individual GNOME projects ahead of time to decide which project they are interested in working on and make a small contribution to the project.

Participants will work remotely from home, while getting guidance from an assigned mentor and collaborating within their project’s team and the rest of the GNOME community. The projects include developing software for the core desktop, file management, messaging, popular applications, educational activities, and the platform libraries. There are also non-coding projects, such as graphic design, documentation, and marketing. The stipend for the program is $5,000 (USD).

Please visit http://www.gnome.org to learn more and apply. The mentorship opportunities are also available throughout the year for anyone interested in getting started contributing to GNOME outside of the internship program.

new laptop?

I’ve been thinking of getting a new computer for some time and of course I really love the ZaReason business model. The idea of buying a new computer that comes with the free distro of my choice is just so amazing. I’m thinking of getting the Terra HD. I’ve read a few of the reviews, but have you tried it? Should I get one?

GNOME 3.2 released!

GNOME has just announced the release of GNOME 3.2. Check out the release notes to see what’s been added. Kudos to the release team and the rest of the GNOME community who pulled together to make this happen.

Bradley and I held the release of this week’s Free as in Freedom episode a day to match the release date and you can hear us talk a bit about that as well as Matthew Garrett’s post about the UEFI issue. Since we’re often a little behind the times in reporting back about the conferences we’ve attended, we also include a brief interview from the Desktop Summit with Jos Poortvliet.

linux.conf.au

It was just announced that I’m giving a keynote at linux.conf.au in Ballarat, Australia in January. I really can’t wait – I’ve heard such good things about this conference in the past. Registration is already open and the draft schedule looks amazing.

Some of the things I’ve worked on recently

It’s been a fun past two weeks, other than being sick (which was a good time to think about copyright assignment – that’s what people do when they’re sick, right?) Anyway, some of the things I’ve worked on:

• got started on the press release for GNOME 3.2 – it’s very exciting, I can’t wait for the release next week!
• called and emailed a couple of advisory board members, which resulted in some great brainstorming about GNOME
• emailed new GNOME Foundation members to congratulate and welcome them. To be a Foundation member requires prior contribution to GNOME, so almost everyone I emailed has been actively engaged in the GNOME community well before I became Executive Director. Still, participation in the nonprofit as an actual member is a special thing. Since the members elect the board of directors, it’s the members that truly set the direction of the Foundation.
• helped answer questions about the proper use of GNOME’s logo under our trademark guidelines for third parties. There’s more work to be done here, as good questions were raised about GNOME’s trademarks in response to a proposal I made on foundation-list to improve the guidelines.
• helped with some of the logistics regarding the Montreal Summit (and made a few last efforts at organizing it in Boston). I also helped with the logistics of a couple of not-organized-yet events
• helped SFLC work on a couple of issues that may affect all free software nonprofits, including GNOME. SFLC also helped GNOME with issues it had outstanding this week (it’s great when free software nonprofits work together!)
• worked on a few press opportunities – more coming on those soon!

Jim Nelson’s GNOME 3 write-up

I’ve been meaning to link to Jim Nelson’s blog post from last month about GNOME 3. He was the first person I heard focusing his review of GNOME 3 on his personal productivity levels (so I asked him to put it in writing!).

Also, Jim’s part of the great team at Yorba, making great software in a nonprofit way. He’s also a new member of the GNOME Foundation!

Happy Software Freedom Day!

Find an event near you from the good organizers of the yearly celebration. I’m celebrating by working on a new talk about Software Freedom!

copyright assignment

I’ve been very overdue for a post – I’m under the weather the past few days, so decided I need to focus on my ailing blog!

One of the recurring conversations since the Desktop Summit is the subject of a panel discussion that I moderated. There has been some talk of the panel online but since I was the moderator it was my responsibility to stay neutral to drive the conversation. So I didn’t really have the chance to chime in with my own opinion.

I did get a chance to discuss this issue with Bradley on a recent episode of our oggcast, Free as in Freedom, which we recorded around a talk by Richard Fontana that he gave at OSCON last month. I think it’s worth setting out my views here too, since it seems there’s quite a bit of strong reaction around this.

I’m only going to talk about one specific part of the issue here: when (if ever) does it make sense to grant some other entity the right to relicense your code or enforce a copyright on your behalf? This can be accomplished by “copyright assignment” or by “CLA” (license agreement), and it’s not the mechanism by which that grant is given (either CAA or CLA) that I think is of interest, it’s the concept of the grant that we should be evaluating. To make it easy, I’m just going to call it a relicense grant and an enforcement grant. I’m also mainly going to be talking about projects that have chosen a copyleft license.

The way I see it, there are a few reasons to give these grants to someone else:

• to allow them create a proprietary version of the codebase later to promote a for-profit business model
• so that they can enforce the copyrights on your behalf in case somebody violates the license
• to provide for relicensing the code to deal with some license incompatibility or to deal with some deficiency in the original license.

I think the first bullet point is easily to understand. Not to over simplify too much, but most developers aren’t interested in allowing someone else to make a proprietary version unless they’re part of that for-profit enterprise in some way. If they were interested, they probably would have chosen a permissive license.

The second point touches on another controversial area because not everyone agrees whether enforcing copyleft licenses against infringers is the right thing to do. By giving an enforcement grant, you leave that decision up to someone else. You also allow someone else to take over the hassle of dealing with enforcement. On the other hand, if you give no enforcement grant, you can enforce against an infringer yourself. (In the United States at least, you don’t need to aggregate all of the copyright holders in a work to bring an enforcement action.)

The third point is one that I think a lot of folks underestimate the importance of. I’ve had to work on relicensing efforts once in a while as a lawyer, and I think it’s something we may see more of in the future. Sometimes code may need to be relicensed in order to incorporate other code that’s licensed under an incompatible license and a new feature can’t be added without addressing the situation. Sometimes there’s a deficiency discovered in the license. We just don’t know what the issues will be down the road and whether the licenses we have are written to protect our software in case there’s a change in the law or some other fundamental change in the way software is treated. For example, I can imagine some change in the law with respect to the warrantees provisions that would beg for some adjustment to the license text.

Once you are trying to relicense a code base, it’s a lot of work and if the contributors are diverse it’s often impossible to track everyone down. Sometimes developers’ contact information has changed and they’re no longer in touch with anyone in the community. Sometimes, even, the developer has died, and you end up having a painful discussion with the surviving spouse or family, explaining why free software is important and why they should relicense the deceased’s copyrights. In either case you can be stuck rewriting pieces of code and spending a lot of time sorting out logistics.

I think there’s already a lot of sentiment against making these kinds of grants, but I think a lot of that is a knee jerk reaction to wanting to avoid proprietarization of the code base. I think that an appropriate solution can be more nuanced – give these grants, but only to a nonprofit organization with good governance. Good governance should include a promise as to how the relicense grant will be used. There should be an explicit contractual restriction on proprietary licensing. There should also be safeguards in place regarding the nonprofit governance itself. In my view, a good way to do this is to make sure that the nonprofit has some kind of check on its decision making power. A nonprofit with members, say composed of the the contributors, that can veto action by the board or impose restrictions as to organizational activities is more likely to be trusted over time. Unlike a for-profit entity, a nonprofit structured in this way would be beholden to the very people who have granted their rights to it. This can also be accomplished by ensuring that the organization has a tightly written mission statement and recognized nonprofit purpose specifically for free and open source software or through a board that is somehow especially trusted for some other reason.

The FSF has pioneered this effort by using an assignment agreement that implements a contractual restriction on relicensing and by encouraging developers to license their code under a certain version of the GPL “or later”, giving FSF the ability to fix licenses over time. For some, however, the FSF is not their preferred organization to do this but I don’t think that means that the idea of relicensing and enforcement grants should be rejected categorically. We need to create safe stewardship for our software going forward and we need to be ready for whatever lies ahead. Developing nonprofit homes for these grants that have the kind of governance I describe above could be the answer.

Off to Desktop Summit!

I’m leaving this afternoon to fly overnight to Berlin for the Desktop Summit! I’m really excited to meet everybody I haven’t already met, and I’m thinking of the conference as my real orientation. So please come and say hi (and feel free to give me any advice you may have)!

As I was finishing packing and getting ready to run out the door, I noticed the recent news around Linus Torvalds’ negative discussion of GNOME 3, so I’m taking an extra few minutes to think out loud here. As I said in my OSCON keynote, our software must be easy to use by all. As I understand it, the GNOME 3 redesign was largely based on usability studies on ordinary people. Folks that are deeply entrenched in what we had before can’t be the target of something new like this, and we must take risks in order to succeed. We won’t be able to make everyone happy, but all of the reports I’ve heard from people who switched to GNOME 3 and stuck with it for a little while had pretty positive responses, given how new it is. I think it takes a while to get used to but more importantly, we have to think about the changes needed for our software to be relevant to more than just hard core hackers. What GNOME 3 is trying to accomplish is really big.

I think it’s important to remember that it’s still early days. Lots of people are using GNOME 3 and loving it, lots of people haven’t really tried it because they don’t want to switch distros, and lots of people haven’t really given it enough use to see whether they will like it once they’ve gotten over their first reactions and adjusted to the change. I myself have one computer running fedora with GNOME 3 and another running debian and GNOME 2 (which is the one I’ll travel with as it’s lighter). I look forward to trying out other distros too.

All of that said, feedback on GNOME 3 is essential, and I think it’s going to be one of the hot topics of discussion at the Summit.

This is probably all too quickly written, and I hope some GNOME developers can respond too. I look forward to talking to you in Berlin!