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Free software discussion group this Thursday 15 August
by Adam Bolte 13 Aug '13

13 Aug '13

Hi everyone, The time of our next monthly meet-up is approaching. Take a look at what we've got lined up: * Ben McGinnes of Pirate Party Australia Ben will be discussing the Pirate Party's take on copyright, patents and privacy. This had to be postponed by a month due to a last minute emergency, but it will be on this Thursday to be sure! * Intro to GnuPG, followed by keysigning The revelations of the PRISM program have made everyone rethink what they are exposing online, and GnuPG is perhaps one of the best tools to help protect yourself. We will walk you though the basics of how it works, and how to get started. Additionally, we will be holding Free Software Melbourne's first ever official keysigning event, helping you put that GPG knowledge to immediate use! If this interests you, don't forget to bring along sufficient proof of ID. Ideally 2 forms of government issued photo ID should be used. If you are already a GnuPG user and are interested in participating in the keysigning, it would be helpful if you could print out up to 20 small strips of paper with the output of the following command on each: gpg --fingerprint KeyID Also note on the strip if you want your signed key returned to you or published directly to a public keyserver. More details on all of this is here: http://keysigning.org/methods/adhoc * Followed by dinner at a nearby restaurant We haven't decided on a place for dinner yet, but we're always open to suggestions. Don't forget to mark the event on your calendar - Date: Thursday 15 August Time: 6-9pm Location: VPAC Head Office Training Room Level 1, Building 91, 110 Victoria Street A map is on the website: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/ Hope to see you there! Cheers, Adam

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FOSS
by Sven＠GMX 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

A useful page I just came across while searching for a stock management application: http://freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Main_Page -- Sven

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Software freedom discussion on Byte Into It, 2013-07-24
by Ben Finney 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Howdy all, On 3RRR's Byte Into It show for Wednesday 2013-07-24, we discussed several topics of interest for software freedom. * Attorney-General's Department misled Parliament on data retention legislation. * CyanogenMod to include SELinux for secure permissions control. * Wine 1.6 adds native MacOS X support, window transparency, and Mono support. * Magic Lantern facilitates HDR photography by supplementing the camera's operating system. * Dr Paul Gardner-Stephen from Flinders University expounded on the potential of serval mesh technology, and the Speak Freely project. You can get the episode online at <URL:http://rrrfm.libsyn.com/byte-into-it-26-june-2013>. -- \ “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” | `\ —David Hume | _o__) | Ben Finney

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Free Android app for ABC iView
by Alex Fraser 28 Jul '13

28 Jul '13

Hi all, There was some discussion about watching iView at the last meeting; you might be interested to know that there's now an Android app available under a 2-clause BSD licence: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.aview.app https://github.com/aviewdevs/aview I think it currently uses the built-in Android media player in some capacity. I'm not sure if it that means it has non-free dependencies. It might be possible to make it use VLC instead. Cheers, Alex

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Conflict between software freedom and trademark restrictions
by Ben Finney 25 Jul '13

25 Jul '13

Howdy all, A perennial issue in free software is: what to do about trademark restrictions? Recently on the ‘debian-legal’ forum, someone working at an organisation that produces free software made a very reasonable request. Paraphrased, the request was: Here is our GPL-licensed software, which also has a trademark; Here are the trademark terms, which we've modified to allow OS packagers to patch and redistribute it. Is that good enough to satisfy software freedom, and if not, what more do I need to ask from our lawyers to modify the terms? It rarely gets as friendly as that: someone has done a lot of work to advance the freedom of this work, and has even got trademark restrictions altered to try to reconcile them with software freedom. Here is an excerpt from my response, as a way of raising the topic for general discussion aside from that specific example. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts. ===== > […] my ideal response to this mail is "looks good, awesome!". My > second ideal response is "tweak the language this way" and our lawyers > are happy with that. Trademark is a tricky area for software freedom. The software freedom of the recipient of a work includes the freedom to modify the work to any degree, for any purpose, and redistribute the result as free software. Trademark, on the other had, has a laudable but largely opposite purpose: to ensure the public can know the provenance of a product, by means of *restricting* what recipients may do with its associated mark. A trademark license author that seeks to maintain the integrity of the mark has very little scope to restrict the recipient's modifications of the work before violating the recipient's software freedoms as above. So there are few – if any – examples of generally-applicable trademark licenses that simultaneously maintain the integrity of the mark and preserve the full DFSG freedoms of the recipient. The Debian project has wrangled with this issue for the Debian trademark <URL:http://www.debian.org/trademark>, which also provides some guidance on the purpose of the license, what is and is not permitted, and how to use the mark. The openSUSE project also has a Trademark Guidelines document <URL:http://en.opensuse.org/File:OpenSUSE_Trademark_Guidelines.pdf> (is that a trademark license?) for the openSUSE mark. But notice that these still require that, for anything but a narrow class of modifications, the recipient must remove the mark if they wish to redistribute the result. If the same were true for a work being considered for inclusion in Debian, IMO it would not pass the DFSG without removing the mark. This has been done with, for example, the works from the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox is free software only in the absence of its trademark restrictions, so we have re-named and re-branded it Iceweasel; and so on for the other products under the same trademark restrictions). So these are still not examples of trademark terms in harmony with the DFSG: the only way to satisfy both, in these cases, is to remove the mark and redistribute the free-software work without the original brand. I hope that helps. Others may be able to give you a different angle, but I believe the incompatibility is still not resolved between the intent of trademark and the intent of software freedom. ===== The archived copy (Message-id: <7wehawbsfz.fsf(a)benfinney.id.au>) is at <URL:https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2013/07/msg00057.html>. -- \ “Even if the voices in my head are not real, they have pretty | `\ good ideas.” —anonymous | _o__) | Ben Finney

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Re: [free-software-melb] GNU FDL and software freedom
by Adam Bolte 22 Jul '13

22 Jul '13

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 09:31:08AM +1000, Andrew Pam wrote: > On 22/07/13 03:15, Adam Bolte wrote: > >I wouldn't define music or video as software either, for the same > >reasons - even though these are commonly distributed on CD or DVD. > > People do define music and video as "software", though: > > "Software means /computer instructions or data/. Anything that can > be stored electronically is software, in contrast to storage devices > and display devices which are called hardware." > http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/software.html > "soft.ware noun > 2.anything that is not hardware but is used with hardware, > especially audiovisual materials, as film, tapes, records, etc.: a > studio fully equipped but lacking software. > 3.Television Slang. prepackaged materials, as movies or reruns, used > to fill out the major part of a station's program schedule." > http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/software?s=t > > "software n 2. (Electronics) video cassettes and discs for use with > a particular video system (Collins English Dictionary) > software n 2. any material requiring the use of mechanical or > electrical equipment, esp. audiovisual material such as film, tapes, > or records. (Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary)" > http://www.thefreedictionary.com/software > > "Definition of SOFTWARE b: materials for use with audiovisual equipment" > http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/software The most trustworthy source of the above links would appear to be Webster, but that's also easily the most vague. Let's have a look at the dictionaries actually distributed by the Debian project as packages: From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]: software n 1: (computer science) written programs or procedures or rules and associated documentation pertaining to the operation of a computer system and that are stored in read/write memory; "the market for software is expected to expand" [syn: {software}, {software program}, {computer software}, {software system}, {software package}, {package}] [ant: {computer hardware}, {hardware}] From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (18 May 2012) [foldoc]: software computer program program ... Software includes both {source code} written by humans and executable {machine code} produced by {assemblers} or {compilers}. It does not usually include the data processed by programs unless this is in a format such as {multimedia} which depends on the use of computers for its presentation. This distinction becomes unclear in cases such as {spread sheets} which can contain both instructions (formulae and {macros}) and data. There are also various intermediate compiled or {semi-compiled}, forms of software such as {library} files and {byte-code}. Some claim that {documentation} (both paper and electronic) is also software. Others go further and define software to be programs plus documentation though this does not correspond with common usage. > >Fonts are definitely not a software program, although some > >software and document files such as PDFs may optionally include > >them. > > That depends on the format. Some fonts are instructions to a font > renderer, and therefore definitely are a software program in a > defined font language. I'm not familiar enough with font renderers, so if true then you make a fair point.

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Linux Flash support
by Brian May 21 Jul '13

21 Jul '13

This is where I got my information from, as discussed at the last meeting. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/07/msg00208.html -- Brian May <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au>

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GPG encryption by default
by Adam Bolte 21 Jul '13

21 Jul '13

Lately, I've been running my MUA with e-mail configured to encrypt e-mail by default. This has the side-effect that whenever I want to e-mail somebody who does not have a PGP/GPG key, or has not given me his/her key, I have to go nag them. Otherwise, I have to keep unticking the "Encrypt Message" box, or make an exception in my configuration specifically for that particular person (or mail list, as the case may be). It also means that, since I'm basically forcing people to get into the habit of reading encrypted messages, more people will have their e-mail client configured correctly and are more likely to also send encrypted e-mail (or at least help make it socially acceptable). Since running with this setup, I haven't really had many complaints. After all, if somebody didn't want to receive encrypted e-mail they simply won't have a public key for me to encrypt a message with. I have discovered that some people are quite happy to try using GPG encryption regularly, but have never had a strong motivation to do so (possibly due to not knowing anyone else who might be interested), and also may not have participated in any key-signing, which would perhaps lessen its usefulness. The only complaint I've heard of so far has come from people who (perhaps not exclusively) use the GMail web interface, who apparently can still use GPG in text fields with browser extensions, but lose the ability to search through existing encrypted email. I don't actually feel too bad about this (see below), but am not sure what the correct response to this problem is (given that the people in question seem big Google fans and are generally reluctant to give it up). On the flip side, I'm conscious that Google could very well be (and probably is) building up a profile on me, even without owning a Google account. If I'm exchanging unencrypted e-mails with enough people who use GMail or Google Apps (without GPG encryption), it would not make much difference who controls my e-mail server. I'm also conscious that it's absolutely not in Google's best interests to support GPG, or any other type of encryption that they cannot decrypt - official GPG support from Google for any e-mail interfaces it provides will not be forthcoming. Since I imagine a lot of people interested in free software would also be big on privacy, I would like to know what other people here think of the idea of leaving GPG encryption on by default. Does anyone practise it? Is there any good reason why we shouldn't? -Adam

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Free software discussion group this Thursday 18 July
by Adam Bolte 18 Jul '13

18 Jul '13

Hi everyone, Our next monthly meet-up will soon be upon us, and we've got a great line-up of talks and discussions prepared, including: * Pirate Party's take on copyright, patent and privacy (Ben McGinnes, Pirate Party) * Ouya game console: Does Ouya respect your freedom? (Adam Bolte) * Alex's free software release: Raster Storage Archive (Alex Fraser) * Followed by dinner at a nearby restaurant Don't forget to mark it on your calendar - Date: Thursday 18 July Time: 6-9pm Location: VPAC Head Office Training Room Level 1, Building 91, 110 Victoria Street A map is on the website: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/ New faces are always welcome. Hope to see you all there! Cheers, Adam

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PyCon AU 2013 roundup on Byte Into It, 2013-07-10
by Ben Finney 11 Jul '13

11 Jul '13

Howdy all, On Melbourne 3RRR's technology show, Byte Into It, last night (Wednesday 2013-07-10) I gave a breathless summary of PyCon AU 2013. Have a listen <URL:http://rrrfm.libsyn.com/byte-into-it-10-july-2013>. -- \ “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a | `\ finite world is either a madman or an economist.” —Kenneth | _o__) Boulding | Ben Finney

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