I think the best example of how this is handled is Wikipedia. That project is AWESOME! They have written a whole darned encyclopedia as Free Software (under the GNU FDL), the level of scholarship is high, and it is coming up a lot on google of late because their page ranking is now very high. This means it is answering questions for a lot of "real" people, not just Free Software developers:-).
They seem to have a meta-discussion process for handling argument, but I haven't looked very deeply into it. They get stuff done.
Please don't think in any way that I'm trying to detract or slam your new project.
Of course not. The goal here is to get good documentation into Open Source, which is something we have had a problem with so far. The more of it, the better, wherever it comes from.
And you don't have to be "honored", I'm just a fat old guy who posts on Slashdot.
The license, at present, is the Open Publication License with no options taken. If any of the options were taken, it would not be an Open Source license (the options restrict modification and commercial use). We are open to other Free Software licenses, my contract explicitly allows the GNU Free Documentation License (which I would like to see used without immutable sections, which I feel make the work not Open Source).
I'm not claiming to be the first. Go look at Creative Commons for a list of people who got there before me. But Prentice is the world's largest technical book publisher and that's important. They have done individual titles under the OPL before, but never a series.
Excellent! I would just love to get into a do-gooding competition with Tim. It would be great fun and would get a lot of good documentation into Open Source.
Please make sure Creative Commons knows about it. Oops, I'd better register my books there too.
Anyone in the know about Open Source will understand that the books are free text when they see my name.
The copyright page says it's OPL licensed, although there is a bug in the copyright page which I will fix in the electronic version, because someone didn't understand the OPL when putting together the copyright page. It goes to the trouble to say that you can use it under the OPL, and then after that says "no copying". Duh!
Please be sure to register the book with Creative Commons. I know that there's a Debian Astronomy package set, besides the ham radio package set which has a lot of satellite stuff. Lots of people can use it.
Dan Gilmore pointed that out to me, and we are getting after Barnes and Noble about it. Somebody must be typing really fast! We think it might have happened at the wholesaler, who sends data batches to the bookstores.
I sincerely did not ask for it to be named after me. That's Prentice's idea, and they need my name there to differentiate them from any other Open Source line that someone else does. I find it a bit embarassing, but will live with it for the good of making books that are Open Source licensed.
Actually, it has created tremendous difficulty for me. I have to get all of the doors widened in my home now, so that I can get my head through them:-)
It's a soft cover. Pretty much like every other technical book these days. I haven't tested the binding for durability, but I'd hope these folks have that down by now.
Let's give them a run for their money:-) To do that, we need to make this a big bookshelf. Want to write something? I need authors. It won't make you rich, but it will do good for both you and the world.
The assumptions are not necessarily flawed, they just may not apply to 100% of the people. We want to make some money. We're willing to experiment.
This series is in retail stores. I appreciate that demand publishing can do great things, but it's more of a mail-order phenomenon until it gets inexpensive enough to put the unit in a vending machine. And will that change things!
I don't want to diminish O'Reilly's efforts, they did the original Open Sources book mostly in Open Source, and a number of others, and some other publishers have as well (about my favorite is the Ruby book). But Prentice Hall is the largest technical book publisher in the world.
(4) Q. Are agents of the attorney bound by the privilege?
A. Yes. According to Arizona law an attorney's paralegal, legal assistant, secretary, stenographer, and clerk are all covered by this testimonial privilege statute. This is recognition by the Legislature that the practice of law requires, of necessity, the assistance of non-lawyer assistants. Information provided to any such person is subject to statutory protection.
Now, this is Arizona-specific, but I suspect it is similar to other states.
Well, be sure to separate the civil violation of NDA from the criminal espionage. I suspect that recieving and making use of a document that you know you aren't supposed to have, from someone who you know isn't supposed to give it to you, would 1) make you an accomplice and 2) make it likely that you would get a subpoena to say who provided the document.
And by the way, since we're speaking about industrial espionage, is ESR's involvement with the Haloween memos - which presumably he received from a Microsoft employee and published - industrial espionage? I think technically it might be, although MS has more to lose from charging him than it does from leaving him alone. Unless, of course, they are delibrate leaks.
It also sounds as if he may have violated the attorney-client privilege between the law firm that employed him and their customer DirectTV. The information he is said to have taken is information that you could not have gotten under subpoena in the US, because customer-attorney discussions are treated as secret in the law. Besides being against whatever NDA the law firm made him sign, this is probably something that would offend most judges.
Well, some of the companies in the working group are IBM, Lucent, Motorola. I unfortunately can't tell you how they voted, but I can say that the vote was not along "friends/enemies" lines. Some of our enemies voted on our side, and some companies that promote their involvement in Linux did not.
These companies that have money to invest in the creation of Internet standards. We are not able to replace all of their efforts with "free" ones, we can't even support the Free Standards Group properly to make the LSB. Some of these companies would love for free software to be unable to participate in common Internet protocols. Our primary goal is to maintain our ability to do so. We beat them back, but just as we can't make patents disappear, we can't make them give up all patent rights.
If your company is a W3C member and owns a patent that is being embedded in a W3C standard, you would be required to license it royalty-free for the purpose of implementing the standard, but not for any other purpose.
The problem with the GPL is that the GPL text prohibits use of a patent license that is limited to certain fields of use. So, the problem is really in the GPL rather than the W3C draft policy. However, the GPL is the way it is because we don't like software patents! So, I'm not really blaming the GPL. However, I don't believe we can get the patent holders to give up quite so much as the FSF would like. Instead, they would move to a standards organization that would let them charge royalties on standards.
and that although algorithm implementation is clearly a big part of the foundation of software development, it isn't the whole house.
Nice argument, Farley, but I think you led yourself astray at one point. Aren't the things that are being patented algorithms? I suppose that and (to a much lesser extent) data-structures.
In addition, I would think that the form of an algorithm for solving a particular problem is an extremely close relative of the mathematical model of the problem.
One day they will come back after some patent issue blows up and tell you that "You endorsed it."
Well, certainly people here will give me a hassle about that. But the folks on the patent-holder side can't give me much of a problem because I've made it clear at every step of the way that I oppose software patents entirely. If I find the compromise doesn't work for us, I'll be able to come back to the topic.
To All Members of the Free Software and Open Source Community,
For the past two years, I've been working on the W3C patent policy on your behalf, to make it safe for Free Software to implement W3C standards. Now, I'm worried that we could lose that fight, not because of the patent holders, but because of our own community.
There's a long discussion below. I'm asking you to do something once you read that discussion: Please write to and tell them something like this (please elaborate - everyone discounts rubber-stamp comments):
To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Subject: Approve of draft policy - disapprove of software patenting.
I request that W3C approve the draft patent policy, because it's a
compromise that protects the right of Open Source / Free Software
programmers to implement W3C standards.
And you may want to add this:
I object to software patents, and support efforts to eliminate them
at the legislative level.
Now, to the discussion.
Three representatives of the Free Software / Open Source community: myself, Larry Rosen of the Open Source Initiative, and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation, worked on the W3C patent policy for two years. We spent between 1/8 and 1/4 of our time on the project for all of that time, participating in many face-to-face meetings and conference calls. Across the table were some companies that, I feel, wanted to "farm" their own patents in W3C standards and would have erected lucrative "toll-booths" to collect royalties from every implementor of web standards. If they had their way, we would have been locked out.
We got you the best deal we could get. It's not everything we want, and it can't be. The draft policy is at http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-200 2111 4/.
The proposed W3C patent policy grants a royalty-free right for everyone to practice patents that are embedded in the standard by W3C members who own those patents. It prevents "patent farming", the biggest problem that faced us. The problem is that the patent grant is limited - it only applies to code that actually implements the standard. This is called a "field-of-use" limitation. The problem this creates for the Free Software community is that other uses of the same patent in our code, for anything but implementing the standard, could be covered by royalties.
I object to software patents entirely, and many of you do as well. Why, then, did I (on your behalf) approve of a policy containing that limitation, and why am I asking you to support it?
The answer is simple. Patent holders won't continue their membership in W3C if that membership forces them to give up their patent rights for non-standards-related applications. They will instead move their standards-making activities to other organizations that allow them to charge patent royalties on the standards. And we will have lost.
It comes down to what we can compel people to do, and what they won't stand for. The patent holders want the W3C brand on their standards, and will give up something for that. If we ask them to give up more, they'll do without the W3C brand, and we have no way to control what standards organization they move to. If we wish to fight software patents outside of standards, I think our only choice is to do so at the legislative level.
The field-of-use limitation presents special problems regarding the GPL, because the GPL disallows a field-of-use-limited patent license. There is a work-around for this. The code that makes use of the patented principle must be under the MIT license, which allows a scope-limited patent license. That may be linked into GPL code and distributed. I'm less than comfortable with this, but my discomfort arises from the basic injustice of software patents. A work-around is the best we can do in this case.
FSF, by its tenets, was bound to protest the field-of-use-limitation. I respect that protest, as it is rooted an a belief that I share - that software patents are fundamentally wrong. However, if the Free Software/ Open Source community comes out against the W3C patent policy, and the patent holders who want unlimited rights to charge royalties come out against it, just who will speak for it? The result will be that W3C will fail to give final approval to the policy, and we will not even have the limited protection from software patents that we've won. Thus, I have to ask you _not_ to do what FSF asks this time. Of course, this disagreement does not diminish my respect of FSF, and I will continue to work with them as I have on many projects for years.
Thus, I'd like you to write that email now. It's very important that W3C see support for the draft policy, or we'll be back to the old, bad policy again. Thanks!
As always, please feel free to call me to discuss this at 510-526-1165 (California time) or write me at bruce@perens.com.
Well, there are about 100 existing standards organizations they could turn to, and many of them will let them do exactly what I'm talking about, today. One of those organizations is IETF which has a policy that's a good deal closer to "anything goes" than the W3C draft. And if you want vendor-dominated-entirely, there's always WS-I.
So, in summary, I think the problem's worse than you realize. And I have spent a long time working on it.
Slashdot Mirror
They seem to have a meta-discussion process for handling argument, but I haven't looked very deeply into it. They get stuff done.
Bruce
Of course not. The goal here is to get good documentation into Open Source, which is something we have had a problem with so far. The more of it, the better, wherever it comes from.
And you don't have to be "honored", I'm just a fat old guy who posts on Slashdot.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Please make sure Creative Commons knows about it. Oops, I'd better register my books there too.
Thanks
Bruce
When we put the books online, there will be an "ask bruce" on the site.
Thanks
Bruce
The copyright page says it's OPL licensed, although there is a bug in the copyright page which I will fix in the electronic version, because someone didn't understand the OPL when putting together the copyright page. It goes to the trouble to say that you can use it under the OPL, and then after that says "no copying". Duh!
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Actually, it has created tremendous difficulty for me. I have to get all of the doors widened in my home now, so that I can get my head through them :-)
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
This series is in retail stores. I appreciate that demand publishing can do great things, but it's more of a mail-order phenomenon until it gets inexpensive enough to put the unit in a vending machine. And will that change things!
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
http://www.asu.edu/counsel/brief/privilege.html. Sorry!
Bruce
Check out this link. Note that it says
Now, this is Arizona-specific, but I suspect it is similar to other states.Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
These companies that have money to invest in the creation of Internet standards. We are not able to replace all of their efforts with "free" ones, we can't even support the Free Standards Group properly to make the LSB. Some of these companies would love for free software to be unable to participate in common Internet protocols. Our primary goal is to maintain our ability to do so. We beat them back, but just as we can't make patents disappear, we can't make them give up all patent rights.
Bruce
The problem with the GPL is that the GPL text prohibits use of a patent license that is limited to certain fields of use. So, the problem is really in the GPL rather than the W3C draft policy. However, the GPL is the way it is because we don't like software patents! So, I'm not really blaming the GPL. However, I don't believe we can get the patent holders to give up quite so much as the FSF would like. Instead, they would move to a standards organization that would let them charge royalties on standards.
Bruce
Nice argument, Farley, but I think you led yourself astray at one point. Aren't the things that are being patented algorithms? I suppose that and (to a much lesser extent) data-structures.
In addition, I would think that the form of an algorithm for solving a particular problem is an extremely close relative of the mathematical model of the problem.
Thanks
Bruce
Well, certainly people here will give me a hassle about that. But the folks on the patent-holder side can't give me much of a problem because I've made it clear at every step of the way that I oppose software patents entirely. If I find the compromise doesn't work for us, I'll be able to come back to the topic.
Bruce
Here are more coherent comments:
0 2111 4/ .
/
.
To All Members of the Free Software and Open Source Community,
For the past two years, I've been working on the W3C patent policy on
your behalf, to make it safe for Free Software to implement W3C standards.
Now, I'm worried that we could lose that fight, not because of the patent
holders, but because of our own community.
There's a long discussion below. I'm asking you to do something once you
read that discussion: Please write to
and tell them something like this (please elaborate - everyone discounts
rubber-stamp comments):
To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Subject: Approve of draft policy - disapprove of software patenting.
I request that W3C approve the draft patent policy, because it's a
compromise that protects the right of Open Source / Free Software
programmers to implement W3C standards.
And you may want to add this:
I object to software patents, and support efforts to eliminate them
at the legislative level.
Now, to the discussion.
Three representatives of the Free Software / Open Source community:
myself, Larry Rosen of the Open Source Initiative, and Eben Moglen of
the Free Software Foundation, worked on the W3C patent policy for two
years. We spent between 1/8 and 1/4 of our time on the project for all
of that time, participating in many face-to-face meetings and conference
calls. Across the table were some companies that, I feel, wanted to
"farm" their own patents in W3C standards and would have erected
lucrative "toll-booths" to collect royalties from every implementor of
web standards. If they had their way, we would have been locked
out.
We got you the best deal we could get. It's not everything we want,
and it can't be. The draft policy is at
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20
The proposed W3C patent policy grants a royalty-free right for everyone
to practice patents that are embedded in the standard by W3C members who
own those patents. It prevents "patent farming", the biggest problem
that faced us. The problem is that the patent grant is limited - it only
applies to code that actually implements the standard. This is called a
"field-of-use" limitation. The problem this creates for the Free Software
community is that other uses of the same patent in our code, for anything
but implementing the standard, could be covered by royalties.
I object to software patents entirely, and many of you do as well. Why,
then, did I (on your behalf) approve of a policy containing that
limitation, and why am I asking you to support it?
The answer is simple. Patent holders won't continue their membership
in W3C if that membership forces them to give up their patent rights
for non-standards-related applications. They will instead move their
standards-making activities to other organizations that allow them to
charge patent royalties on the standards. And we will have lost.
It comes down to what we can compel people to do, and what they won't
stand for. The patent holders want the W3C brand on their standards,
and will give up something for that. If we ask them to give up more,
they'll do without the W3C brand, and we have no way to control what
standards organization they move to. If we wish to fight software patents
outside of standards, I think our only choice is to do so at the legislative
level.
The field-of-use limitation presents special problems regarding the GPL,
because the GPL disallows a field-of-use-limited patent license. There is a
work-around for this. The code that makes use of the patented principle
must be under the MIT license, which allows a scope-limited patent
license. That may be linked into GPL code and distributed. I'm less than
comfortable with this, but my discomfort arises from the basic injustice
of software patents. A work-around is the best we can do in this case.
FSF, by its tenets, was bound to protest the field-of-use-limitation.
I respect that protest, as it is rooted an a belief that I share - that
software patents are fundamentally wrong. However, if the Free Software
Open Source community comes out against the W3C patent policy, and the
patent holders who want unlimited rights to charge royalties come out
against it, just who will speak for it? The result will be that W3C
will fail to give final approval to the policy, and we will not even have
the limited protection from software patents that we've won. Thus, I
have to ask you _not_ to do what FSF asks this time. Of course, this
disagreement does not diminish my respect of FSF, and I will continue
to work with them as I have on many projects for years.
Thus, I'd like you to write that email now. It's very important that W3C
see support for the draft policy, or we'll be back to the old, bad policy
again. Thanks!
As always, please feel free to call me to discuss this at 510-526-1165
(California time) or write me at bruce@perens.com
Thanks
Bruce Perens
So, in summary, I think the problem's worse than you realize. And I have spent a long time working on it.
Thanks
Bruce