Bryan Lunduke's Blog, page 19

Software Freedom Law Center vs. Software Freedom Conservancy

Watch on: YouTube – Vid.Me – Patreon (audio RSS feed)

On November 3rd, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) wrote a blog post to let people know that the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) had begun legal action against them (the SFC) over the trademark for their name.

[There’s a lot of words here… but this is pretty important stuff for those of us in the Free Software community.  I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible while still conveying most of the important parts, as I see it.  I’ve also published a video outlining most of this (links up top).]

Who is the SFLC?

Started in 2005.
Funded with $4 Million from Open Source Development Labs.

OSDL: Used to employ Linus Torvalds.
OSDL merged with Free Standards Group (led by Jim Zemlin)

… and formed The Linux Foundation.




Founded by Eben Moglen.
“The Software Freedom Law Center provides pro-bono legal services to developers of Free, Libre, and Open Source Software.”

Who is the SFC?

Started in 2006.
Created out of the SFLC…

With initial directors including Eben Moglen (founder of the SFLC) and Karen Sandler (current Executive Director).


“Software Freedom Conservancy helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects.”

What happened?

Telling this story is, perhaps, best done by quoting the words of the people involved.  The SFC statement (from November 3rd) reads, in part:

“About a month ago, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the not-for-profit law firm which launched Conservancy in 2006 and served as Conservancy’s law firm until July 2011, took the bizarre and frivolous step of filing a legal action in the United States Patent and Trademark Office seeking cancellation of Conservancy’s trademark for our name, “Software Freedom Conservancy”. We were surprised by this spurious action. In our eleven years of coexistence, SFLC has raised no concerns nor complaints about our name, nor ever asked us to change it. We filed our formal answer to SFLC’s action yesterday.

…

SFLC’s action to cancel our trademark initiated a process nearly identical to litigation. As such, our legal counsel has asked us to limit what we say about the matter. However, we pride ourselves on our commitment to transparency.

…

SFLC made no efforts — over the last eleven years since Conservancy was formed, nor in the last five years since we registered our name as a trademark — to express any concerns about our name, or a desire for us to change our name. We first learned of SFLC’s complaints from this surprise attack of legal action.

…

We are prepared to defend our brand, not just for ourselves but for our many member projects who have their home at Conservancy, our Outreachy diversity initiative, and our collective efforts to promote FLOSS.”

Indeed, on November 2nd (the day before this post), the SFC responded with their formal answer to the SFLC (which you can read online).

On November 6th, the SFLC responded with a blog post of their own.  I am quoting a few key sections, but feel free to read the entire post for the full background.

“On Friday, while we were putting on our annual conference at Columbia Law School, a puff of near-apocalyptic rhetoric about us was published by SFLC’s former employees, Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn, who now manage the Conservancy, which was originally established and wholly funded by SFLC, and still bears our name. We were busy with our conference when this happened, which seems to have been the point. We are glad to have the chance now, after a little much-needed rest, to help everyone avoid unnecessary hyperventilation.

At the end of September, SFLC notified the US Patent and Trademark Office that we have an actual confusion problem caused by the trademark “Software Freedom Conservancy,” which is confusingly similar to our own pre-existing trademark. US trademark law is all about preventing confusion among sources and suppliers of goods and services in the market.

…

By no means does this situation justify the tone of defensive overreaction we heard from the Conservancy management on Friday, which was like reading a declaration of war issued in response to a parking ticket.

…

We have tried repeatedly for almost three years to get a meeting with Karen and Bradley in order to discuss this and other claims we have concerning their and the Conservancy’s activities. In all that time, they have never once agreed to meet with us to hear and discuss our concerns. They have presented transparently dilatory responses, such as being “too busy,” or even “always too busy” when we asked them to set their own time. Sometimes we have not been offered so much as the courtesy of a refusal.

…

Any project working with the Conservancy that feels in any way at risk should contact us. We will immediately work with them to put in place measures fully ensuring that they face no costs and no risks in this situation.

…

We are now, as we have been throughout, fully prepared to meet immediately for a discussion of all outstanding issues without preconditions. Otherwise, it seems evident that more shoes will drop.”

Digging Deeper

I reached out to both the SFLC and the SFC for comment — and with questions of my own.

The SFLC responded, after a bit of prodding on social media, with the following.  I am quoting their entire response.

“Thanks for your message.  We published a statement about this matter today on our blog”

I followed up that response with additional questions, an interview request, and a formal request for their non-profit report (which they state, on their website, that we can request a copy of).  No response, of any kind, was received from the SFLC.

I also reached out to the Software Freedom Conservancy.  Bradley Kuhn provided the following responses:

“We at Conservancy reiterate that SFLC never raised any complaint to us about our name, trademark, or branding prior to filing their USPTO petition.  We encourage SFLC to produce any documentation that shows attempts to raise this issue with us.

…

Our biggest concern is the waste of resources that are dedicated to the public good, in the form of donations to both charities.  The longer SFLC insists on this bizarre course of action, the more resources are wasted.

…

SFLC should withdraw the cancellation petition.  Conservancy will take an “all’s well that ends well” attitude if they do so.”

Reaction from the community

To give a little more background, Neil McGovern (ex-Debian Project Leader and Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation) write a post outlining his views.  Some of the interesting tidbits quoted below.

“It’s clear to me that for some time, there’s been quite a bit of animosity between SFLC and Conservancy

…

This culminated in SFLC publishing a statement, and Conservancy also publishing their statement, backed up by the FSF. These obviously came to different conclusions, and it seems bizarre to me that SFLC who were acting as Debian’s legal counsel published a position that was contrary to the position taken by Debian. Additionally, Conservancy and FSF who were not acting as counsel mirrored the position of the project.

…

Then, I hear of an even more confusing move – that SFLC has filed legal action against Conservancy, despite being the organisation they helped set up. This happened on the 22nd September, the day after SFLC announced corporate and support services for Free Software projects.

…

they also state: “Any project working with the Conservancy that feels in any way at risk should contact us. We will immediately work with them to put in place measures fully ensuring that they face no costs and no risks in this situation.” which I read as a direct pitch to try and pull projects away from Conservancy and over to SFLC.

…

the optics are pretty terrible. We have a case of one FOSS organisation taking another one to court, after many years of them being aware of the issue, and when wishing to promote a competing service. At best, this is a distraction from the supposed goals of Free Software organisations, and at worst is a direct attempt to interrupt the workings of an established and successful umbrella organisation which lots of projects rely on.

…

I truly hope that this case is simply dropped, and if I was advising SFLC, that’s exactly what I would suggest, along with an apology for the distress.

…

Before I took on the [Debian Project Leader] role, I was under the naive impression that although there were differences in approach, at least we were coming to try and work together to promote software freedoms for the end user. Unfortunately, since then, I’ve now become a lot more jaded about exactly who, and which organisations hold our best interests at heart.”

Then, on November 13th, another blog entry (“Eben Moglen is no longer a friend of the free software community“) was published by Matthew Garrett (a prominent developer and security expert in the Linux world, & ex-member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors), where he doesn’t exactly mince words.

“his [Eben Moglen’s] recent behaviour demonstrates that he is no longer willing to work with other members of the community, and we should reciprocate that.

…

In early 2016, the FSF board became aware that Eben was briefing clients on an interpretation of the GPL that was incompatible with that held by the FSF. He later released this position publicly with little coordination with the FSF, which was used by Canonical to justify their shipping ZFS in a GPL-violating way. He had provided similar advice to Debian, who were confused about the apparent conflict between the FSF’s position and Eben’s.

…

the FSF were forced into the position of publicly stating that they disagreed with legal positions held by their general counsel. Attempts to mediate this failed, and Eben refused to commit to working with the FSF on avoiding this sort of situation in future.

Around the same time, Eben made legal threats towards another project with ties to FSF. These threats were based on a license interpretation that ran contrary to how free software licenses had been interpreted by the community for decades, and was made without any prior discussion with the FSF. This, in conjunction with his behaviour over the ZFS issue, led to him stepping down as the FSF’s general counsel.

Throughout this period, Eben disparaged FSF staff and other free software community members in various semi-public settings. In doing so he harmed the credibility of many people who have devoted significant portions of their lives to aiding the free software community. At Libreplanet earlier this year he made direct threats against an attendee – this was reported as a violation of the conference’s anti-harassment policy.

Eben has acted against the best interests of an organisation he publicly represented. He has threatened organisations and individuals who work to further free software. His actions are no longer to the benefit of the free software community and the free software community should cease associating with him.”

Like I said.  No minced words.

And, just in case anyone thinks this is a new stance from Matthew Garrett… consider the following tweet that he posted over half a year ago:

“Eben Moglen has threatened and bullied multiple community members during his time in free software. Consider that before working with him.”

My opinion

I have no personal relationship with Eben Moglen or the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).  Never worked with them, never spent any significant time with them.  Based on this I have no reason to think anything negative about them.

That said.

The moves by the SFLC seem, at best, strange.  And, at worst… well… let’s just say that I can’t think of any positive outcome here for either the Free Software community or any other Free Software-focused organizations (such as the Conservancy or the FSF).

Twitter
Reddit
LinkedIn
Google+
Facebook

Lunduke goes 100% indie – Leaves SUSE & Network World

Watch on: YouTube – Vid.Me – Patreon (audio RSS feed)

I’m super excited to announce that, as of today (Monday, November 13th, 2017), I have become fully independent — and am no longer doing any work, of any kind, for SUSE or Network World.

What this means

I now have (significantly) more time to dedicate towards my show (The Lunduke Show) as well as my journalism work, other writing, and related projects.  This is now my full time job.
It also means that I am completely independent.  I am not employed by any company that can influence the words that I say or the topics that I cover.

A little background

I’ve been podcasting and writing articles for quite a long time now — with my start in podcasting dating all the way back to 2006 — but, until today, I’ve always had my primary paycheck come from another source.  Whether I was managing teams of engineers at video game companies or doing marketing work for a Linux firm… the bulk of my time, by necessity of keeping food on the table, had to be spent on areas other than my shows.

As the success of The Lunduke Show continued to grow, it became clear that the time was finally here — for the first time in the last 11+ years I could finally earn my living entirely by producing shows and writing articles/books… all on my own.

Network World

I started writing articles for Network World back in 2012 — over 5 years ago.  In that time I’ve written more articles (mostly on Linux) than I can shake a stick at.  I did the quick math and, in those 5 years, I wrote more words than make up The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring.  That’s a lot of words.

Now I’ll be writing those words for myself and publishing them (for the most part) here on Lunduke.com.

SUSE

For SUSE, I started working there in 2013 — about 4 years ago — in their marketing division.  Today, SUSE issued this press release:

NUREMBERG, Germany, Nov. 13, 2017 — Today, SUSE announced that Bryan Lunduke is leaving the organization. A long-time Linux industry journalist and social media figure, Bryan joined the SUSE team in December 2013 and was instrumental in helping the company greatly increase brand awareness and social media following.

At SUSE, Bryan served in a variety of roles including social media manager and most recently as technology and community evangelist. Having used these roles to successfully contribute to SUSE’s growth and momentum, Bryan is now looking to return to the world of journalism and pursue new projects and opportunities.

“Having the opportunity to work with, and build, the SUSE brand – one of the oldest in the Free Software and Linux world – has been an amazing experience,” Lunduke said. “I look forward to seeing what the SUSE engineers do in the future. But now is the right time for me to refocus my attention on my passion for journalism.”

This is thanks to you

This is possible thanks to all of you.

The supporters over at Patreon that helped to bootstrap my video production.  The amazing companies (System76 and Pogo Linux) that have supported me from early on in this endeavor.  And all of you for helping to spread the word about what I do.

To all of you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Twitter
Reddit
LinkedIn
Google+
Facebook

“Linux Thursday – MINIX and SystemD Edition” – Lunduke Show – Nov 8, 2017

Other Viewing Options: vid.me (video), Patreon (audio – exclusive for supporters)

It’s Thursday!  Well.  Technically it’s Wednesday.  But it feels like Thursday!

And that can mean only ONE thing… it’s Linux Day on the Lunduke Show! As is our way, we take a huge mountain of questions from you, the viewer, and talk about lots and lots of Linux.

== This episode sponsored by ==

System76: https://system76.com

Pogo Linux: http://www.pogolinux.com/

== About Matt ==

Freedom Penguin: https://freedompenguin.com/

Matt’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/freedompenguin

Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/matthartley

Twitter 0
Reddit 0
LinkedIn0
Google+0
Facebook 0

“Linux Thursday – Long Live HotBot Edition” – Lunduke Show – Nov 2, 2017

Other Viewing Options: vid.me (video), Patreon (audio)

It’s Thursday! And that can mean only ONE thing… it’s Linux Day on the Lunduke Show! As is our way, we take a huge mountain of questions from you, the viewer, and talk about lots and lots of Linux.

== This episode sponsored by ==

System76: https://system76.com

Pogo Linux: http://www.pogolinux.com/

== About Matt ==

Freedom Penguin: https://freedompenguin.com/

Matt’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/freedompenguin

Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/matthartley

 

Twitter 0
Reddit 0
LinkedIn0
Google+0
Facebook 0

Stories from inside Microsoft (1998 – 2003)

Other Viewing Options: vid.me (video), Patreon (audio)

I worked at Microsoft for around 5 years near the turn of the century. In that time I was yelled at by Bill Gates, spit on by Steve Ballmer, and had all manner of odd experiences. This is me telling those stories. All in one place.

== This episode sponsored by ==

System76: https://system76.com

Pogo Linux: http://www.pogolinux.com/

Twitter 0
Reddit 0
LinkedIn0
Google+0
Facebook 0

Lunduke gets schooled on SSD, NVME, & Flash Storage

Other Viewing Options: vid.me (video), Patreon (audio)

In this episode of the Lunduke Show I bring on an expert from Pogo Linux (Paul Bibaud) to school me on all things SSD, M.2, NVME, & Flash Storage. Because, clearly, I needed some schooling.

== This episode sponsored by ==

System76: https://system76.com

Pogo Linux: http://www.pogolinux.com/

Twitter 0
Reddit 0
LinkedIn0
Google+0
Facebook 0

Linux Foundation director runs… Mac OS?!

The Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, just declared 2017 to be the “Year of the Linux Desktop”. And he did so… while running a Mac. He’s not the only Linux advocate that doesn’t run Linux… and I let them all know what I think of that.

== This episode sponsored by ==

System76: https://system76.com

Pogo Linux: http://www.pogolinux.com/

Twitter 0
Reddit 0
LinkedIn0
Google+0
Facebook 0

“Lunduke Hour” hits 31k subscribers, more guests, events

HOLY GUACAMOLE WHAT IS GOING ON?!

In the last 20 days, my dorky little YouTube channel has grown to over 31 thousand subscribers.

And then there’s the guests — so awesome.  Earlier today was an interview with the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation… two weeks before that it was MC Frontalot.  How crazy is that?  Why these amazing people keep agreeing to hang out on my show… is beyond me.  But, hey!  I won’t object!

LinuxFest NorthWest

Just wrapped up a trip to the ever-excellent LinuxFest NW — a community-run Linux conference up north of Seattle.

My first show, on the first day, started at 9:30am (“They’re Watching You“).  Four back-to-back shows later (in the same room, luckily, so I only needed to set up the recording equipment once) I got a chance to take a break and kick my feet up for a couple hours… before the big conference party.  Good food and game-show (pub-style) with nerd trivia.  The conference organizers invited me to host the event and… how could I turn that down?  I got to play Nerd-Game-Show-Host for a night.  Had a total blast.

Videos for the first 3 are already up on the YouTube channel; The 4th one should be up shortly (once I get it edited).

Talked to some remarkable people and had a truly excellent weekend.

Now seems like a damn good time to thank everyone for their support (including the supporters on Patreon).  None of this would have been doable with you.  And a big thanks to the show sponsors: System76 and Pogo Linux.  You rule.

“Lunduke Hour” on a roll – 30k subscribers, Stallman, & more

“The Lunduke Hour“, my daily computing/nerd show, just turned 3 months old — and, holy moly, things are getting fun.

Over 30,000 Subscribers

The YouTube channel is growing like crazy.  Two months ago it was at 20k.  Now it’s up over 30k.

And, what’s better, the rate of growth is increasing.  You can’t see me right now… but I’m doing a happy dance.

Awesome Guests

Over the first 3 months of the show, I’ve been able to talk with some amazing people.  But two stand out at me as being the most exciting.

Richard Stallman (founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation).

Stewart Cheifet (host of the legendary Computer Chronicles TV show of the 1980s and 1990s).

I’ve been lucky enough to have guests on to talk about everything from “desktop Linux” to “3D printing” to “Internet decentralization” to “mobile hardware”.  It’s been an absolute blast for me.  The fact that so many of you are enjoying it too is just icing on the cake.

Upcoming Events

With the final “Linux Sucks” released about a month back (and already watched over 200,000 times), many people have asked me what’s next in terms of me getting up on stage and doing shows along those lines.

Of course, I’m not done.  

Lunduke interviews Richard Stallman

In today’s episode of the Lunduke Hour, I get the chance to sit down and chat with the one and only Richard Stallman. Founder of the Free Software Foundation. We talk about everything from the W3C’s stance on DRM to opinions on the movie “Galaxy Quest”.

More on the GNU Project: http://www.gnu.org/

== This episode sponsored by ==

System76: https://system76.com

Pogo Linux: http://www.pogolinux.com/

Twitter 0
Reddit 0
LinkedIn0
Google+0
Facebook 0