Hi all, Well, I had lost the minutes. But they have been recovered! and they are: == Topics == 1. Picking your battles 2. Ben Sturmfels' talk on software patents at a recent IP Australia forum in Sydney 3. Buggy Browser Blackmail 4. Fedora and Secure Boot == Discussion == - Briefly discussed KL's project, Eaterprises [1]. Looking forward to more discussion on the topic next time she comes to the meeting. - AF didn't have time to contact the Astor re: DRM; BG agreed to do it instead. === 1. Picking your battles === - Eric S. Raymond wrote an interesting article on determining importance when pushing for open source products [3]. - Eric is from the "open source" camp -> emphasis on reliability. - The article generally blasted RMS. - The categories of harm given in the article are useful, as is the idea of "importance". - Specific examples were not so good. - Organisations already do this, e.g. Mozilla has all but given up on WebM === 2. Ben's talk === - BS approached IP Australia; offered to be involved in future. They contacted him and asked him to talk in Sydney to a room full of patent attorneys. - Title: "Software Patents: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". - Ben spoke about "the bad". The talk went well (video [4]). After the talk, there were a lot of questions from the floor, and a good discussion. - "The good" was given by the guy who recently won a patent case against Microsoft for some DRM technology. The impression left for Ben was that he got a lot of money, but his quality of life suffered during the long legal battle (10 years, overseas?) - "The ugly" was a talk about stats, etc. given by a patent examiner. - It was a great learning experience for Ben, especially for how to respond to questions such as "how will the little innovators survive without patents". - The talk was shashdotted, and appeared on IT news web sites. The stories included decent quotes from Ben. - All in all, it was really good air time. - If anyone has ideas about action against patents, talk to Ben! === 3. Buggy Browser Blackmail === - The web used to suck. It's better now, but the journey has been horrible - largely due to IE. - Debugging web sites on IE is a huge time drain. - If it had been free software, perhaps the situation would have been better: people could have fixed the bugs (e.g. lack of compliance with standards). - We are now heading in an interesting direction, where the major browsers *are* free. But, if a monopoly is held by a free software browser, will there be problems similar to when IE dominated? - Kogan have an "IE tax": if you're using IE when you check out, you get charged extra! Some software developers at FSM also have an extra fee they charge if the customer wants IE to be supported. === 4. Fedora and Secure Boot === - If a computer manufacturer wants to display the Windows 8 logo (indicating compatibility), the computer must have a locked bootloader. This is supposed to combat malware, however it could stop a user from being able to install a free software operating system. - The user can disable it on Intel platforms, but not on ARM. - Fedora is buying a signing key from Verisign via Microsoft. - We discussed the implications of this for a while. - It seems that a key is not required for user space programs - only for kernel-space code and things that interact with hardware. Apparently, this will make it difficult to support features such as user-space video mode switching. - Some manufacturers may not pursue the Windows 8 logo. Vote with your money! == Action Items == - BG to contact the Astor about their recent problems with DRM [2]. Would they like to come and speak with us, or to BF on his radio show on RRR? == Next Meeting == Thu 19th of July. Topics: - Eaterprises - Free software business models, including the use of trademarks (e.g. restriction of the use of the word "Firefox"). See you there :) [1] http://www.eaterprises.com.au/ [2] http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/what-happened-last-night/ [3] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4371 [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzg-h9hXn_I