The second of our series of interviews with donors, we have another longtime Software Freedom Conservancy supporter (and former employee!) Tony Sebro. Tony recently served as Deputy and Interim General Counsel to the Wikimedia Foundation and is now General Counsel at Change.org. We "sat down" with him to talk a bit about us and what he's excited about right now.

Inspired by the log4j situation, The White House recently met with Big Tech on the issue of security vulnerabilities in FOSS used in the nation's infrastructure. While we are glad these issues have received attention at the highest levels of the administration, we are concerned that representation in these discussions is skewed. Hobbyists, and communities organized around public interest and consumer rights, who both use and develop a large portion of FOSS, were not represented. Additionally, the entities represented at the meeting were biased toward copyleft-unfriendly organizations. Unsurprisingly, these entities focused on Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) as a panacea for the problem of FOSS security. While SBOMs are a useful small step toward hardening the nation's software infrastructure, we believe the proper solution is to favor copylefted FOSS.

Our open letter to the White House which addresses our concerns is included in full below, and is also available as a PDF:

Software freedom is our goal. Copyleft is a strategy to reach that goal. That tenet is oft forgotten by activists. Copyleft is even abused to advance proprietary goals. We too often see concern about the future of copyleft overshadow the necessary fundamental question: does a particular behavior or trend — and the inevitable outcomes of those behaviors and trends — increase or decrease users’ rights to copy, share, modify, and reinstall modified versions of their software? That question remains paramount as we face new challenges.

Introduced first by Microsoft’s GitHub in their Copilot product, computer-assisted software authorship by way of machine learning models presents a formidable challenge to software freedom’s future. Yet, we can, in fact, imagine a software freedom utopia that embodies this technology. Imagine that all software authors have access to the global archive of machine learning models — and they are fullly reproducible. Everyone has equal rights to fork these models, train them further with their own datasets, provided that they must release new models (and the input code) freely in the global archive. All code produced by these models is also made freely available under copyleft. All code that builds the models, all historical input sets, and all trained models are all also made available to everyone under copyleft licenses.

We are passionate about and dedicated to the cause of software freedom and rights because proprietary software harmfully takes control of and agency in software away from users. In 2014, we started talking about FOSS as fundamental to “ethical software” (and, more broadly “ethical technology”) — which contrasts FOSS with the unethical behavior that Big Tech carries out with proprietary software. Some FOSS critics (circa 2018) coined the phrase “ethical source” — which outlined a new approach to these issues — based on the assumption that software freedom activists were inherently complicit in the bad behavior of Big Tech and other bad actors since the inception of FOSS. These folks argue that copyleft — the only form of software licensing that makes any effort to place ethical and moral requirements on FOSS redistributors/reusers — has fundamentally ignored the larger problems of society such as human rights abuses and unbridled capitalism. They propose new copyleft-like licenses, which, rather than focusing on the requirement of disclosure of source code, they instead use the mechanisms of copyleft to mandate behaviors in areas of ethics generally unrelated to software. For example, the Hippocratic License molds a copyleft clause into a generalized mechanism for imposing a more comprehensive moral code on software redistributors/re-users. In essence, they argue that copylefted software (such as software under the GPL) is unethical software. This criticism of copyleft reached crescendo in the last three weeks as pundits began to criticize FOSS licenses for failing to prohibit Putin from potentially using FOSS in his Ukrainian invasion or other bad acts.

We at Software Freedom Conservancy proudly and vigilantly watch out for your rights under copyleft licenses such as the Affero GPLv3. Toward this goal, we have studied the Neo4j, Inc. v. PureThink, LLC ongoing case in the Northern District of California , and the preliminary injunction appeal decision in the Ninth Circuit Court this month. The case is complicated, and we've seen much understandable confusion in the public discourse about the status of the case and the impact of the Ninth Circuit's decision to continue the trial court's preliminary injunction while the case continues. While it's true that part of the summary judgment decision in the lower court bodes badly for an important provision in AGPLv3§7¶4, the good news is that the case is not over, nor was the appeal (decided this month) even an actual appeal of the decision itself! This lawsuit is far from completion.

Defending your right to modify and repair the software on your electronics has been a cornerstone of Software Freedom Conservancy since its inception. We defend these rights in a variety of ways: petitioning the Copyright Office to return our repair and modification rights, investigating reports people send us where companies are using our member projects' code but aren't providing the source or repair and modification information that the project's license requires, contacting those companies to remind them of the license requirements, and (eventually, in rare cases after companies ignore our gentle reminders for many months) filing lawsuits against intransigent companies who refuse to give you the complete source and instructions you deserve (and that they are required to provide by the licenses of the software they freely choose to use).

In our previous update regarding our copyleft enforcement lawsuit against Vizio, we talked about how Vizio “removed” the case to USA federal court (namely, the Central District of California), and how we filed a motion to “remand” the case back to state court. While this all seems like minor legal wrangling early in a case, this very first skirmish in our case goes to the very heart of the right for software repair for consumers. While it won't be a final decision in the case, this motion will be the first indication whether the federal courts view the GPL as purely a copyright license, or as a contract, or as both. That question has been central to legal debate about the GPL for decades, and, thanks to our case, for the first time, a federal Court will directly consider this question.

Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge has yet to solve these problems. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.

GitHub has, in the last ten years, risen to dominate FOSS development. They did this by building a user interface and adding social interaction features to the existing Git technology. (For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site.) In the central irony, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge failed: they have convinced us to promote and even aid in the creation of a proprietary system that exploits FOSS. GitHub profits from those proprietary products (sometimes from customers who use it for problematic activities). Specifically, GitHub profits primarily from those who wish to use GitHub tools for in-house proprietary software development. Yet, GitHub comes out again and again seeming like a good actor — because they point to their largess in providing services to so many FOSS endeavors. But we've learned from the many gratis offerings in Big Tech: if you aren't the customer, you're the product. The FOSS development methodology is GitHub's product, which they've proprietarized and repackaged with our active (if often unwitting) help.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft quietly updated its Microsoft [app] Store Policies, adding new policies (which go into effect next week), that include this text:

all pricing … must … [n]ot attempt to profit from open-source or other software that is otherwise generally available for free [meaning, in price, not freedom].

While Microsoft has acknowledged the ensuing community outrage, they have not clarified their policy. In the meantime, this clause reverses long-standing app store policies, and is already disrupting commerce on their platform (with its tight countdown clock to implementation). In particular, Microsoft now forbids FOSS redistributors from charging any money for nearly all FOSS (i.e., “profit”). Since all (legitimate) FOSS is already available (at least in source code form) somewhere “for free” (as in “free beer”), this term (when enacted) will apply to all FOSS.

Suppose you go to your weekly MyTown market. The market runs Saturday and Sunday, and vendors set up booths to sell locally made products and locally grown and produced food. On Saturday, you buy some delicious almond milk from a local vendor — called Al's Awesome Almond Milk. You realize that Al's Awesome would make an excellent frozen dessert, so you make your new frozen dessert, which you name Betty's Best Almond Frozen Dessert. You get a booth for Sunday for yourself, and you sell some, but not as much as you'd like.

Today is Giving Tuesday, and I'd like to share part of my story that brought me to Software Freedom Conservancy. Having started as a donor over 5 years ago, I find myself now with even more passion for our mission as an employee.

Photo CC-BY Justin W. Flory

This year for our fundraising season, we are highlighting some of the incredible donors contributing to our matching fund (of $104,759!!). First up in our interview series is Justin W. Flory who has generously provided matching funds. He has repped Software Freedom Conservancy at a lot of recent conferences and it's always exciting to see him handing out our stickers and speaking to people about it. We were so happy to catch up with them and see what drives his passion behind software freedom and ethical technology.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Jondale Stratton

Next in our interview series, we have Jondale Stratton, a long time supporter of Software Freedom Conservancy. Jondale is the IT Manager for the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and the Technical Director for his local hackerspace, Knox Makers. In his spare time he enjoys laser cutting, tractors, playing with his bunnies, and replacing people with shell scripts.

Software Freedom Conservancy has today submitted its reply to the FTC's request for comments on how repair information should be displayed on EnergyGuide labels. In particular, SFC has recommended that the FTC mandate a "Software Repair Instructions" section on the EnergyGuide labels that are already required on a variety of home appliances, including televisions, refrigerators, clothes washers, and dishwashers. This would not be a new notice requirement for most manufacturers, since it (currently) only requires manufacturers to provide the notice when they already had obligations under copyleft licenses to offer source code already. This merely changes the prominence of such notices, so that users can more easily see which products contain copylefted software (and thus software repair instructions) or not. This is important because many manufacturers make efforts to deemphasize or obscure their offers (if they have them at all), which prevents consumers from learning that they have rights with respect to their software.

Today Software Freedom Conservancy is officially opening our call for track proposals for our first annual FOSSY conference! We will be holding the conference in Portland, Oregon July 13-16, 2023 at the Oregon Convention Center. We are looking for community driven tracks that can balance important and in depth technical and non-technical issues, while uplifting contributors of all experiences. Tracks will be modeled after the DevRooms at FOSDEM and the miniconfs at linux.conf.au. They may be between 1 and 4 days, and the organizers of the tracks will be in charge of outreach, calls for submissions, communicating with potential speakers in the track, determining the schedule and hosting the track in person at FOSSY.

I grew up on a farm. My parents worked hard to grow crops and manage the farm business. My parents also found additional jobs to make ends meet. As farmers have done for millennia, my family used tools to farm. Some of those tools were tractors. Farmers now, as they have for thousands of years, rely on their ability and right to fix their tools. Perhaps that's bending a hand rake back into shape. Maybe they need to weld a broken three-point hitch back together. Agriculture was humanity's first truly revolutionary technological advancement. Since its inception, each generation of farmers exercised their right to repair their tools. This has allowed agriculture to grow and improve immeasurably. We take for granted the benefits that this has given us, and the abundance of food it provides.

For approximately twenty years, Red Hat has experimented with building the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business model. Namely, Red Hat strives to create an operating system deployment and distribution model that looks, feels, and acts like a proprietary one, but nonetheless complies with the GPL and other standard copyleft terms. Software rights activists, including SFC, have spent decades talking to IBM's Red Hat and its attorneys about how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business model courts disaster and is actively unfriendly to community-oriented Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This article discusses the issue in depth, including the details related to GPL compliance with the RHEL business model.

At FOSSY 2023, there was a panel discusison about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) issue

When it comes to the law, people working on software freedom are often most concerned about copyright and contract law (and the licenses we use under both), since these appear to most directly affect software freedom. How people can use, study, modify, and redistribute the software is naturally of paramount importance and these laws heavily affect those rights. Generally FOSS projects don't consider their brand as much as the software and community being built, and so other fields of law, like trademark, get less consideration.