When I was at Mozilla and WMF, I frequently got asked how to give proper credit when using Creative Commons-licensed images in slideshows. I got the question again last week, and am working on slides right now, so here’s a quick guide. The basics First, a quick refresher. To comply with Creative Commons (CC) attribution…
I got multiple emails last week about React’s patent license, and this analysis made the rounds. So a few quick thoughts. tl;dr: React’s patent license (1) isn’t a bad idea, because the BSD license is not explicit about granting patent rights; and (2) probably meets the requirements of the Open Source Definition.
I just explained why open and copyleft licensing, which work fairly well in the software context, might not be legally workable, or practically a good idea, around data. So what to do instead? tl;dr: say no to licenses, say yes to norms.
Public licenses for databases don’t work well. Before going into solutions to that problem, though, I wanted to talk briefly about some things that are important to consider when thinking about solutions: real-world examples of the problems; a common, but bad, solution; and a discussion of the motivations behind public licenses.
tl;dr: Open licensing works when you strike a healthy balance between obligations and reuse. Data, and how it is used, is different from software in ways that change that balance, making reasonable compromises in software (like attribution) suddenly become insanely difficult barriers.
tl;dr: Databases are a very poor fit for any licensing scheme, like copyleft, that (1) is intended to encourage use by the entire world but also (2) wants to place requirements on that use. This is because of broken legal systems and the way data is used. Projects considering copyleft, or even mere attribution, for…
Below is the talk I gave at LibrePlanet 2016. The tl;dr version: Learning how political philosophy has evolved since the 1670s shows that the FSF’s four freedoms are good, but not sufficient. In particular, the “capability approach” pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum is applicable to software, and shows us how to think about…
Legal friends! The world needs you. Here’s the graph of readership of All Writs Act on Wikipedia: That’s 45,035 reads yesterday (by humans, not bots).((Big thanks to the tech team for figuring out how to differentiate – not something we could do until fairly recently, at least for public stats!)) That would put it 5th…
There is a small genre of posts around re-inventing the interfaces of popular open source software; I thought I’d collect some of them for future reference: Recent: Drupal WordPress: ma.tt, wp.com Older: Firefox: 0.1 release notes Visual Editor: first blog post I can find (though I’m sure there are many emails), Economist The first two…
tl;dr: I want to liberate people; software is a (critical) tool to that end. There is a conference this weekend that understands that, but I worry it isn’t FSF’s. This morning, social network chatter reminded me of FSF‘s 30th birthday celebration. These travel messages were from friends who I have a great deal of love…