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Save the Web from software patents

lundi 1 octobre 2012 à 21:43
PersonalWeb's software patent suit against Github and others threatens the freedom of the Web. In order to make sure that the Web can remain a free and accessible space for everyone, we need to rid ourselves of all the patents that threaten its viability. We need to end software patents.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at CERN, invented the World Wide Web as we know it. When he created it, he could have chosen a path wherein the Web would have remained under his control. Instead, he chose to share his work with the world. Thanks to that decision, the standards behind the Web are free to all. The ability to communicate and share freely via the Internet has become such an integral part of our lives that the U.N. has stated that access to the Web should be considered a human right.

In short, the Web belongs to everyone. But now and then an individual, a nation, or a company decides that this should not be the case. Today that company is PersonalWeb, a shell company from the Eastern District of Texas, which has set out on a course of patent litigation against some of the largest Internet companies in an attempt to claim the Web as their own. In December of 2011 they filed a series of suits against Amazon, Caringo, EMC, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and NetApp regarding a bevy of software patents they partially hold. They have followed this action up recently with even more lawsuits, this time against the likes of Apple, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They even accidentally sued Rackspace, a company that merely hosts Github, the company they were actually trying to assault.

For several years, now, through our campaign to end software patents, we have been warning people that a day would come when simply running a Web site could subject you to a ruinous patent lawsuit. It appears that this day has come. PersonalWeb claims that their patents cover a whole slew of functionality and technology integral to the Web. In particular, they even claim to have patents covering certain ways of sharing source code. This particular claim poses a threat to free software developers, but PersonalWeb's scatter-shot approach to filing lawsuits shows that they will go after almost anyone with a Web site.

If PersonalWeb succeeds in getting a judgment or a settlement out of these large companies, it will only increase the "market value" on these sorts of ridiculous patents. It will make it easier and more profitable to extract larger and larger payments from anyone who tries to run a Web site while having money in their bank account. It will encourage opportunistic individuals to file or buy more broad software patents in a land rush to try and lock down and seek rent on the Web.

While PersonalWeb's claimed patents are particularly onerous (the name of the examiner who granted these patents has been suggested as a sort of "Heisman" trophy of patent misfortune, an "award to best commemorate the ultimate, the outrageous, the most horrifically unacceptable patent examination performance of the current patent system"), the reality is that there are literally thousands of patents that could cover the basic tools necessary to run a modern Web site. Tim Berners-Lee actually set foot in a courtroom for the first time this year in order to defend against another patent monopolist who laid claim to the web. PersonalWeb is just the latest example of how software patents threaten freedom on the Web.

In order to make sure that the Web can remain a free and accessible space for everyone, we need to rid ourselves of all the patents that threaten its viability. We need to end software patents.

You can help

Hampshire College distributes free software bundle to all incoming students

lundi 1 octobre 2012 à 21:36
Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira's organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.

My name is Kira, and I am a campaigns organizer for the FSF as well as a full-time student at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. I wanted to share some of the progress we have made at Hampshire. Thanks to the success of our student organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, the school has just taken big steps to promote students' adoption of free software. Firstly, all incoming Hampshire College students this semester received a USB drive with download links for free software (listed below). The drives also included information about our student group and the importance of free software because people need to know how it is different from nonfree software and why the distinction matters. Secondly, GNU/Linux has been added as a boot option on all computers in our library. The student group has managed to achieve both of these milestones in the span of just two semesters.

This type of action is surprisingly easy to reproduce; if you try it at your own school, you'll almost certainly be able to make important headway whether or not you succeed in getting full institutional support. You can start a LibrePlanet chapter for your school as a local team to organize with your peers, or you can work independently. If you are a high school or other pre-university student, join GNU Generation to meet other young activists and get help starting a club. While you should always try to get support from your school's IT department and administrators, an enthusiastic group is all you need to distribute free software to your peers. On the other hand, if you would like to add GNU/Linux as a boot option on school computers, you will definitely need to work with the sysadmins.

One of LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture's next steps at Hampshire is to provide better support for the GNU/Linux boot option, including a desktop wallpaper with text explaining how to contact us for support, what GNU/Linux is and, again, why free software matters. We are also working on improving the default list of applications that are installed on the non-free operating systems. Already, Firefox and LibreOffice are on all school computers, but we would like to find free software replacements to other proprietary applications still being used. Our big goal for this year is have the school require professors to use Open Document Format so that students are no longer forced to pay for expensive, proprietary software.

Hampshire College is definitely in a relatively good place in regards to recommending free software, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of work and effort needed to move things forward. Other schools may not be as receptive to promoting free sof Read More… tware, but that is what makes your involvement so important. Never underestimate what a small number of committed individuals can accomplish. Join the LibrePlanet Activists and our discussion list to share your experiences and get help promoting free software at your school.

Below is the list of links that were distributed to each incoming Hampshire student this fall. They were .url internet shortcut files organized into folders for easy reference. We distributed them on USB drives, but if those aren't something your school provides, you could just as easily post fliers or send a mass email containing the same information. We paid particular attention to the difficulty of navigating each of the programs' websites. For any that did not have a prominent download link or had a confusing path to the download, we included direct links to download the software for Windows and OS X. We will be iterating this list in the future and we invite you to make your own improvements. You can see what other software we are recommending to students on our free software recommendations page on Hampedia, Hampshire College's wiki.

Folder names are in quotes:

GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry (September 2012)

vendredi 28 septembre 2012 à 21:58
There were 12 new GNU releases this month!

New GNU releases as of September 26, 2012:

To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

I'd like to specially mention the new release of GNU GSRC http://www.gnu.org/software/gsrc/, providing a simple way to install GNU packages from their original sources, entirely independent of any distro packaging system. Its maintainer, Brandon Invergo, has developed additional and most welcome support for configuring Python-based packages in the standard way for GNU http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=7375.

This month we welcome John Meinel as the new maintainer of GNU Bazaar, aka bzr. We also welcome Gary Vaughan as the new maintainer of GNU Zile, in addition to being co-maintainer of GNU libtool and GNU m4. Many thanks to Reuben Thomas, Zile's original author, for contributing the program (and much else).

Several GNU packages, as well as the GNU system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please seehttp://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to the GNU operating system, see http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to me, karl@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

jeudi 27 septembre 2012 à 04:38

Join the FSF and friends on Friday September 28th, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the Free Software Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today!

Hi, I'm Zak (one of the new campaigns managers)

lundi 24 septembre 2012 à 23:22
I just started here at the FSF, so I thought I'd introduce myself on the blog.

My background is in activism around digital rights and environmental issues, along with some plain old software engineering. I'll be doing activism and writing with the FSF, as well as working with the community. So far, I've spent my first two weeks deepening my understanding of free software philosophy, getting to know the awesome staff and volunteers at the FSF and learning about existing FSF campaigns. I've also written one other blog post, calling for an end to software patents in Europe.

I'm interested in free software because I think our economy is way too focused on using technology to manipulate people, when we should really be using it to make the world more productive and just. This issue became important to me when I was studying robotics engineering in college. It upset me to see the kind of life my fellow students looked forward to as professional engineers: do the work that's put in front of you, hope it's fun and makes you money, but give no serious thought to the effect that it has on the broader world. Technical skills bring such power, but our culture discourages us from thinking about the ethics of the ways they are used. I decided I'd make a career where I could use my technical background for something I thought people really needed. Though that decision has made it a lot harder for me to find a job, it led me into tech activism and eventually to the FSF. Here is a community of people who know their technical skills are needed to make our society more fair and our communities stronger.

My feeling is that the FSF's the kind of organization we need to open people's eyes in our high-tech society. We're living at a time of great technological change, and I think it's extremely important that we learn to make and use software in a way that is conscientious and principled. Thirty years from now, I want to see a world where people feel empowered by information technology and use it to solve the big problems of the 21st century, not a world where giant corporations use our personal computers to spy on us (any more than they do now). So basically, I'm here for a reason, and I'm excited to be a new FSF campaigns manager.

I can see that the FSF and the GNU Project have a wonderful community, and I'd love to meet to you all. Expect to see emails from me in the future, and please hit me up on Freenode's #fsf IRC channel under the name Zakkai or by email at campaigns@fsf.org with campaigns ideas and discussion or zak@fsf.org with anything else.