C. Titus Brown delivering his presentation.

Here’s the first of my notes from the Science 2.0 conference, a conference for scientists who want to know how software and the web is changing the way they work. It was held on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 29th at the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto and attended by 102 people. It was a little different from most of the conferences I attend, where the primary focus is on writing software for its own sake; this one was about writing or using software in the course of doing scientific work.

This entry contains my notes from C. Titus Brown’s presentation, Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects. Here’s the abstract:

The explosion of free and open source development and testing tools offers a wide choice of tools and approaches to scientific programmers.  The increasing diversity of free and fully hosted development sites (providing version control, wiki, issue tracking, etc.) means that most scientific projects no longer need to self-host. I will explore how three different projects (VTK/ITK; Avida; and pygr) have chosen hosting, development, and testing approaches, and discuss the tradeoffs of those choices.  I will particularly focus on issues of reliability and reusability juxtaposed with the mission of the software.

Here’s a quick bio for Titus:

C. Titus Brown studies development biology, bioinformatics and software engineering at Michigan State University, and he has worked in the fields of digital evolution and physical meteorology. A cross-cutting theme of much of his work has been software development for computational science, which has led him to software testing and agile software development practices. He is also a member of Python Software Foundation and the author of several widely-used Python testing toolkits.

• Should you do open source science?
  • Ideological reason: Reproducibility and open communication are supposed to be at the heart of good science
  • Idealistic reason: It’s harder to change the world when you’re trying to do good science and keep your methods secret
  • Pragmatic reason: Maybe having more eyes on your project will help!
• When releasing the code for your scientific project to the public, don’t worry about which open source licence to use – the important thing is to release it!
• If you’re providing a contact address for your code, provide a mailing list address rather than your own
  • It makes it look less “Mickey Mouse” – you don’t seem like one person, but a group
  • It makes it easy to hand off the project
  • Mailing lists are indexed by search engines, making your project more findable
• Take advantage of free open source project hosting

• Distributed version control
  • “You all use version control, right?” (Lots of hands)
  • For me, distributed version control was awesome and life-changing
  • It decouples the developer from the master repository
  • It’s great when you’re working away from an internet connection, such as if you decide to do some coding on airplanes
  • The distributed nature is a mixed mixed blessing
    • One downside is "code bombs", which are effective forks of the project, created when people don’t check in changes often enough
    • Code bombs lead to complicated merges
    • Personal observation: the more junior the developer, the more they feel that their code isn’t “worthy” and they hoard changes until it’s just right. They end up checking in something that’s very hard to merge
  • Distributed version control frees you from permission decisions – you can simply say to people who check out your code "Do what you want. If I like it, I’ll merge it."

• Open source vs. open development
  • Do you want to simply just release the source code, or do you want participation?
    • I think participation is the better of the two
  • Participation comes at a cost, in both support time and attitude
    • There’s always that feeling of loss of control when you make your code open to use and modification by other people
    • Some professors hate it when someone takes their code and does "something wrong" with it
    • You’ll have to answer “annoying questions” about your design decisions
    • Frank ("insulting") discussion of bugs
    • Dealing with code contributions is time-consuming – it takes  time to review them
  • Participation is one of the hallmarks of a good open source project

• Anecdote
• I used to work on the “Project Earthshine” climatology project
  • The idea behind the project was to determine how much of the sunlight hitting the Earth was being reflected away
  • You can measure this be observing the crescent moon: the bright part is lit directly by the sun; the dark part is also lit – by sunlight reflected from the Earth
  • You can measure the Greenhouse Effect this way
  • It’s cheaper than measuring sunlight reflected by the Earth directly via satellite
• I did this work at Big Bear Lake in Califronia, where they hung telescopes to measure this effect at solar observatories
• I went through the the source code of the application they were using, trying to figure out what grad student who worked on it before me did
• It turned out that to get “smooth numbers” in the data, his code applied a correction several times
• His attitude was that there’s no such thing as too many corrections
• "He probably went on to do climate modelling, and we know how that’s going"
• How do we know that our code works?
  • We generally have no idea that our code works, all we do is gain hints
  • And what does "works" mean anyway, in the context of research programming? Does it means that it gives results that your PI expects?
• Two effects of that Project Earthshine experience:
• Nowadays, if I see agreement between 2 sources of data, I think at least one of them must be wrong, if not both
• I also came to a stunning realization that:
  • We don’t teach young scientists how to think about software
  • We don’t teach them to be suspicious of their code
  • We don’t teach them good thought patterns, techniques or processes
  • (Actually, CS folks don’t teach this to their students either)
• Fear is not a sufficient motivator: there are many documented cases where things have gone wrong because of bad code, and they will continue to do so. Famous cases include:
  • Therac-25 – a radiation therapy machine that administered lethal doses of radiation to patients
  • Pfizer Backtracks on Benefiit of Atorvastatin over Simvastatin – the result of a “programming error”
  • A Sign, a Flipped Structure and a Scientific Flameout of Epic Proportions – several scientific papers retracted after a programming error was found
• If you’re throwing out experimental data because of ifs lack of agreement with your software model, that’s not a technical problem, that’s a social problem!

• Automated testing
  • The basic idea behind automated testing is to write test code that runs your main code and verifies that the behaviour is expected
  • Example – regression test
    • Run program with a given set of parameters and record the output
    • At some later time, run the same program with the same parameters and record the output
    • Did the output change in the second run, and if so, do you know why?
    • This is different thing from "is my program correct"
    • If results change unintentionally, you should ask why
  • Example – functional test
    • Read in known data
    • Check that the known data matches your expectations
    • Does you data loading routine work?
    • It works best if you also test with "tricky" data
  • Example – assertions
    • Put "assert parameter >=0" in your code
    • Run it
    • Do I ever pass garbage into this function?
    • You’ll be surprised that things that "should never happen", do happen
    • Follow the classic Cold War motto: “Trust, but verify”
  • Other kinds of automated testing (acceptance testing, GUI testing), but they don’t usually apply to scientists
  • In most cases, you don’t need to use specialized testing tools
  • One exception is a code coverage tool
    • Answers the question “What lines of code are executed?”
    • Helps you discover dead code branches
    • Guide test writing to untested portions of code
  • Continuous integration
    • Have several "build clients" building your software, running tests and reporting back
    • Does my code build and run on Windows?
    • Does my code run under Python 2.4? Debian 3.0? MySQL 4?
    • Answers the question: “Is there a chance in hell that anyone else can use my code?”
  • Automated testing locks down "boring" code (that is, code you understand)
    • Lets you focus on "interesting" code – tricky code or code you don’t understand
    • Freedom to refactor, tinker, modify, for you and others

• If you want to suck people into your open source project:
  • Choose your technology appropriately
  • Write correct software
  • Automated testing can help
• Closed source science is not science
  • If you can’t see the code, it’s not falsifiable, and if it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science!

O’Reilly’s conference on Open Source, OSCON, takes place this week in San Jose, California. One of the events taking place at OSCON is the Open Source Language Roundtable, the abstract for which appears below:

We all have our favorite languages in our tool-belt, but is there a ‘best’ overall language? If anyone can hash that out, it will be the members of this roundtable discussion, some of the stars of the open source language space. This wide-ranging session, hosted and moderated by the O’Reilly Media editorial staff, and broadcast live on the web, will try to identify the best and worst features of each language, and which are best for various types of application development.

The roundtable will me moderated by O’Reilly Media’s James Turner and will cover the following languages, listed below with the corresponding panelist:

• Java: Rod Johnson (SpringSource)
• Perl: Jim Brandt (Perl Foundation)
• PHP: Laura Thomason (Mozilla)
• Python: Alex Martelli (Google)
• Ruby: Brian Ford (Engine Yard)

You can catch this roundtable even if you’re not going to be at OSCON because O’Reilly is webcasting the event. It takes place this Wednesday, July 22nd at 10pm EDT (7 pm Pacific) and is expected to run 90 minutes. It costs nothing to catch the webcast and you’ll even be able to ask the panelists questions via chat, but you’ll need to register.

About Make Web Not War

If you’re interested in web design and development, you should attend Wednesday’s Make Web Not War conference. It’s being presented by Microsoft Canada and is about the how open source tools like PHP and Microsoft technologies like IIS and SQL Server 2008 can be used together to make great web sites and applications. No matter how much (or how little) Microsoft technology you use in your web development, there’s a lot to see at Make Web Not War!

Who’s Speaking?

We’ve got a number of speakers, each talking about some different aspect of the interoperability between Microsoft and open source technologies, as well as their experiences and lessons learned working in the web industry:

David Crow, Microsoft

David Crow is an emerging technology and start-up advocate. At Microsoft Canada, he is responsible for helping Canadian start-ups through programs like BizSpark (details at microsoft.com/bizspark). David helps companies understand emerging technology and design practices for creating compelling digital experiences. David focuses on helping companies to extend their customers’ reach with next generation technology for the desktop, digital devices, standards based applications for the Web, and rich media applications. He has been named Toronto’s Best Web and Tech Evangelist for his efforts in DemoCamp, BarCampToronto, Founders & Funders and StartupEmpire.

Mano Kulasingam, Digiflare

Mano Kulasingam is a founding partner and principal interactive designer /developer with Digiflare, focusing on presentation layer technologies like Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation and SharePoint 2007. He also has several years of experience developing B2B and B2C eCommerce and Content Management Web applications using ASP.NET (2.0 and 3.5) and Visual C#. His design skills include working with the latest professional design tools including Microsoft Expression Studio 2, which has earned him a Microsoft Expression MVP nod. He is a co-founder and host of the Toronto Silverlight User Group.

Brendan Sera-Shriar, PHUG.ca

Brendan is a prominent member of FlashinTO, PHUG – Open Source Culture, has taught web design at Long Island University Brooklyn campus, and has been a professor at Seneca College in the School of Communication Arts for over 7 years. Brendan currently owns and operates BackSpaceStudios, a web company specializing in WordPress development, social media applications. He is also the founder of PHUG, an open source community for designers and developers with currently over 4000 members, faculty at Seneca College, and organizer for WordCamp Toronto 2009. Brendan has contributed to many open source projects including papervision3D, red5, Firefox, WordPress, and Drupal, just to name a few.

Stephen Nichols, Softcom

Under the brand myhosting.com we offer Shared and Virtual Web Hosting as well as Exchange 2007 and WSS hosting to customers around the world.

Stephen is Vice President of Sales at Softcom, a Gold certified Microsoft Partner based in Toronto and specializing in transactional hosting with a focus on the SMB market. His key role is to oversee the customer life cycle experience and drive new sales opportunities through the direct, affiliate and partner channels.

Yann Larivee, PHP Quebec

Yann Larrivée has been developing web applications for over 7 years and is currently offering PHP consulting services. In the past he has worked in many position from, project manager for a Linux consulting company to web architect for a well know company in the gaming industry. He also founded the PHP Quebec community in 2003 and organizes an international PHP conferences and an IT JobFair.

Get Windows Server 2008 R2 for Free!

Windows Server 2008 R2 is a great server operating system, and this is your chance to take it out for a spin! Bring a machine to the Make Web Not War Installfest – it could be a server, desktop or even a laptop – and we’ll walk you through the process of installing your own free copy (which is good for a year). Space is limited – we’ve only got room for 100 people, so sign up soon!

See the Utltimate FTW! Throwdown

The Ultimate FTW! Throwdown was a challenge pitting student developers against professionals to develop a new PHP-on-Windows app or port an existing PHP-on-LAMP app to run on Windows Server with IIS. There were even bonus points for apps that made use of SQL Server as their database!

We took in a bunch of submissions, and the judges have narrowed it down to two finalists, one student, one professional:

In the professional corner is Dac Chartrand, whose submission is Sux0r, a content-management system incorporating blogging, RSS aggregation, bookmark repository and photo publishing, all with a focus on naive Bayesian categorization and probabilistic content. The extra Bayesian/probabilistic goodies allow Sux0r to auto-categorize its content and users to train it to categorize better.

His student opponent, Carson Lam, submitted Transit DB, which aims to transform the way commuters interact with public transit information system. The application is Carson’s answer to the question “How can we provide a modern, clean and user-friendly interface for transit data in cities?” The current version covers public transit for the Metro Vancouver region.

Dac and Carson will be competing for bragging rights and cold hard cash – may the best project win!

(For more details about the Ultimate FTW! Throwdown, see its page on PHPonWindows.ca.)

Interact

We don’t want to do all the talking at Make Web Not War, we also want to hear from you!

That’s why, when you arrive at the event, one of the first things we’ll do is hand you an AVW-TELAV audience response doohickey. It’s a microphone for the Q&A sessions at the end of each presentation, but it’s also an instant audience polling device for quick surveys that we’ll have throughout the day.

Chill Out

All work and no play makes you a dull and burned-out web designer or developer, which is why we’ve also got a lounge where you can just hang out, meet the speakers, ask me questions about Microsoft’s web tools and tech and play XBox games.

Win prizes

We’ve got all sorts of prizes that you can win throughout the day, from software to books to trainign courses to Zune media players to XBox games to a brand new laptop.

Get Fed

Yup, we’re providing breakfast and lunch. You can’t conference on an empty stomach!

Okay, How Much to Attend?

Around this much:

Instead of charging a standard admission, we’re charging a “Donate what you can” rate, with all proceeds going to PREVNet.ca, an anti-bullying group. The suggested donation is a mere $10.

When and Where?

Once again, Make Web Not War takes place this Wednesday, June 10th and runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m..  It’s happening in Toronto at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management (55 Dundas Street West – that’s Dundas between Bay and Yonge, right by the Best Buy and Canadian Tire). There’s parking aplenty in the area, and it’s right by Dundas Station on the Yonge/University/Spadina subway line.

How Do I Register?

Visit the Make Web Not War registration page and fill out your details, and we’ll see you there on Wednesday!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Make Web Not War event in Toronto takes place in exactly one week! We’ve been spreading the word about the event and I thought I’d do my part by helping out with a video, accordion-style:

MAKE WEB NOT WAR – VIDEO FOUR – TORONTO from The Biz Media on Vimeo.

There’s only one mistake in the video – “accordion” is misspelled. If you’d like the follow me on Twitter, the correct ID is AccordionGuy, not AccordianGuy.

For more details about Make Web Not War, see:

• Canadian Developer Connection
• Global Nerdy (my personal tech blog)
• David Crow’s blog

The “sea change” that’s been going on at Microsoft for the past little while is one of the things that convinced me to join the company and one of the factors in their even asking me to come in for a job interview. One of the most telling signs of this sea change is in Microsoft’s new approach to open source and web, with initiatives like the Open Source Lab, improved standards support in IE8, PHP on Windows, the Web Platform Installer and Open Source Initiative-approved MS-PL license, to name a few.

We know that the web is a big salad bar of various technologies put together by different vendors and organizations, and at long last, it seems that we’re cool with that. We’ve been reaching out to web developers of all stripes, from Microsoft “true believers” to people who don’t typically build their stuff with or on our stuff.

Make Web Not War is an event being held in Vancouver on June 2nd and Toronto on June 10th where we invite people building solutions on the web – whether you build on Microsoft tech or not – to get together and:

• Hear from people who build on open source and Microsoft technologies
• Network with other web developers living and working in your area
• Learn about the latest Microsoft technologies and how they work with open source
• Get technical training to build your web development portfolio
• Win prizes and get your Web Warrior DVD featuring all the latest Microsoft Web Resources

The Vancouver event takes place today, June 2nd at Microsoft’s Vancouver office (1111 W. Georgia, 11th floor). It’s a half-day event featuring a presentation by Morten Rand-Hendriksen from Pink and Yellow Media as well as breakfast, a web partner community showcase and a lunch social.

The Toronto event takes place on Wednesday, June 10th at the Ted Rogers School of Management (use the entrance at 55 Dundas Street W.) and runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.. It’s a full-day event with presentations by:

• David Crow, Microsoft
• Mano Kulasingam, Digiflare Inc.
• Brendan Sera-Shriar, PHUG.ca / Rich Media Institute
• Stephen Nichols, Softcom
• Yann Larrivée, PHPQuebec

The Toronto event will feature breakfast, keynote, web partner community showcase, another keynote, lunch, breakout sessions, a Windows Server 2008 InstallFest, a web developer technical session and the FTW! competition final showdown. It’s be a very full day.

The registration fee for both the Vancouver and Toronto events is “donate what you want”, with a suggested donation of CAD$10. The money will go to a good cause: PREVnet.ca, the anti-bullying network.

Whether you’re a died-in-the-wool ASP.NET type, think in PHP or create new web applications by typing in rails mynewapp at the command prompt, Make Web Not War has something for you. For more details about Make Web Not War, check out the official site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m doing a lot of running around today. First, I’m off to the University of Waterloo to talk to students about PHP on Windows and the PHP FTW! contest. Then, it’s back to Toronto, where I’m headed downtown to catch up with Garrett Serack from Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab to talk about The Empire, Open Source (which includes PHP, of course) and how they fit together. If this sounds like a conversation you’d be interested in joining, drop me a line!

To give you a taste of what Microsoft is doing with PHP, I present the slides from Garrett’s talk, PHP on Windows: The Undiscovered Country, which he gave last year. Things have advanced since then, but I thought it would give you an idea of what The Empire is thinking and where we’re going with PHP on the Windows platform:

If…

• you’re a PHP developer or curious about what Microsoft is doing in the world of open source
• you’re in the downtown Toronto area tomorrow (Tuesday, May 12th) after work
• you like free food and drink

…then drop me a line. I’m helping out at an event that you might be interested in.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I caught the afternoon sessions of MeshU, the day of workshops that precedes the Mesh Conference. MeshU had three tracks – Design, Development and Management – and I chose to attend the sessions in the Development track.

Leigh Honeywell on Writing Secure Software

First up was HackLabTO cofounder Leigh Honeywell, (pictured on the right) whose presentation was titled Break It to Make It: Writing (More) Secure Software. She works at the MessageLabs subsidiary of Symantec, which makes security products for email systems, and before that, she worked as an independent security consultant. Simply put, security is both her job and her hobby.

Leigh provided an informative and entertaining summary of the most common security vulnerabilities in applications and the recommended best practices for writing secure apps. Here’s a photo of her slide showing OWASP’s ten principles that you should follow in order to write secure applications:

The ten principles are:

1. Minimize attack surface area
2. Establish secure defaults
3. Least privilege
4. Defense in depth
5. Fail securely
6. Don’t trust services
7. Separation of duties
8. Avoid security through obscurity
9. Keep security simple
10. Fix security issues correctly

She also covered what OWASP considers to be the current top ten vulnerabilities:

1. Cross-site scripting
2. Injection flaws
3. Malicious file execution
4. Insecure direct object references
5. Cross-site request forgeries
6. Information leakage / improper error handling
7. Broken authentication and improper error handling
8. Insecure cryptographic storage
9. Insecure communciations
10. Failure to restrict URL access

At the end of her presentation, Leigh listed a couple of books that she considered to be valuable security references. One of them was Writing Secure Code, Second Edition, written by Michael Howard and Steve Lipner and published by Microsoft Press.

This was a surprise to many people in the audience, the majority of whom were not building apps on Microsoft technologies and generally (and often mistakenly) think of the term “Microsoft” being synonymous with “insecure”. A number of people chatted with me after the presentation and it seemed like this was one of many things from Microsoft that caught them by surprise, along with other unexpected things including the MS-PL license, CodePlex and the Open Source Lab, the new emphasis on standards and interoperability…and hey, even taking on “unlikely” evangelists such as David Crow and me.

Here’s her slide deck:

Pete Forde Does the iPhone Dance

Next was Pete Forde, one of people behind the development shop Unspace and the RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences. He started his presentation, Is That an iPhone in Your Pocket, or are You Just Happy to See Me?, with a Napoleon Dynamite-esque dance number set to the tune of Start the Riot by Atari Teenage Riot. Here’s the video of the dance that Leigh Honeywell shot:

And here’s the video that I shot:

Pete’s presentation covered the options that developers have when building iPhone apps. For the curious, here’s the deck he used:

The one thing that he wanted you to take away from his presentation is, in his own words:

Consider iPhone web applications and side-stepping the iTunes Application Store (and their 30% gross cut) completely.

The one thing that I took away from the presentation (in addition to the one above) was that it’s not all smiles and sunshine in iPhone development land. Yes, the iPhone provides an excellent user experience and the App Store has been a hit with the customers and many developers. However, a good chunk of Pete’s presentation was about how some of the biggest obstacles for iPhone developers come from Apple itself; I’ve heard that there were similar grumblings at an iPhone developer meetup that took place later in the week. I think that there are some things that Windows Mobile developers (and the Windows Mobile team at Microsoft) can learn from these obstacles, and I’m going to write about them in a later article.

Chris Wanstrath and the Story of GitHub

The final presentation of the afternoon, Building a Business with Open Source, was given by Chris Wanstrath of GitHub, a hosting service for software repositories created with the Git distributed version control system. There are a number of open source projects hosted on GitHub, including one you might not expect: Microsoft’s very own IronRuby.

Chris explained that GitHub was an answer to a problem that he and his friends had: they were working on a number of open source projects, so many that managing them was “beginning to wear them down”. GitHub was created as a solution to that problem: it took care of the tedious parts of source code management so that they could focus on their code.

Although GitHub hosts a number of open source projects and uses Git, which is open source, it is not open source. Chris explained that managing an open source project takes up more time that he or the others on the team have. “Ironically,” he said, “starting GitHub has given me less time to work on open source.” After hinting at his dissatisfaction with the GNU General Public License, an audience member asked "Does the GPL cause you nightmares?"

“Yes,” he replied, after which he endorsed his preferred open source license. “MIT license all the way,” he said.

To promote GitHub, they took an approach that was closer in spirit to evangelism than standard marketing. “Companies still believe in old-school advertising, and they also think that what works offline works online,” he said. So they rely on the standard offline methods of promoting their wares: advertisements and marketing campaigns. In the online world, people trust their peers, so they opted for an approach that he called “guerilla marketing”: instead of spending money on ads, they spent money to hang out with developers, buy them beer and pizza and provide “a human face” to GitHub. He summed up the approach with a good one-liner: “Who knew that actually spending time with your customers would be good for business?" A great point, especially in today’s word-of-mouth-y, interconnected world.

Microsoft’s new web development framework, ASP.NET MVC, which developers working with Rails, Django and other MVC web frameworks will find familiar, was recently released as an open source project under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). As you might expect, the mere mention of Microsoft doing something open source has gotten some tongues a-wagging, especially in the more zealous corners of the F/OSS world. As you might not expect, a lot of what they said was positive (even if grudgingly so).

Consider what a commenter on Slashdot had to say about our license (the emphasis is mine):

I really don’t want to like the MS-PL or anything Microsoft, but I read it, and re-read it, and I can’t see anything wrong with it. In fact, at the risk of being modded to oblivion, I gotta say it’s a far cry easier to understand than the GPL license, seems straightforward, and truly "open." It seems roughly as open as the BSD license. It doesn’t even require you to open your own code under the same license. What am I missing? Is this a late April Fools’ joke?

In case you were wondering what the MS-PL looks like, I’ve included it below. It’s OSI-approved. It’s also short and sweet: what you see is not the preamble or a set of introductory statements, it’s the whole thing. Take a note of the language: it’s simple, straightforward and quite free of legalese. As the Slashdot comment above says, the rights, terms and conditions conferred and imposed by MS-PL license are like the BSD license:

Microsoft Public License

This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the software.

1. Definitions
The terms "reproduce," "reproduction," "derivative works," and "distribution" have the same meaning here as under U.S. copyright law.
A "contribution" is the original software, or any additions or changes to the software. A "contributor" is any person that distributes its contribution under this license.
"Licensed patents" are a contributor’s patent claims that read directly on its contribution.

2. Grant of Rights
(A) Copyright Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create.
(B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software.

3. Conditions and Limitations
(A) No Trademark License- This license does not grant you rights to use any contributors’ name, logo, or trademarks.
(B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.
(C) If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software.
(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
(E) The software is licensed "as-is." You bear the risk of using it. The contributors give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this license cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, the contributors exclude the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Recommended Reading

• In case you’re curious, here’s the Slashdot discussion on ASP.NET MVC’s release as an open source project.
• Take a look at Codeplex, Microsoft’s repository of open source projects, where you’ll find ASP.NET MVC and a lot of other projects licensed under MS-PL.

I attended last night’s presentation at the Mississauga Campus of the University of Toronto featuring Mr. Free Software himself, Richard M. Stallman. The presentation was titled Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks.

Here’s a brief abstract of the presentation, courtesy of Greg Wilson’s blog:

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright—to promote progress, for the benefit of the public—then we must make changes in the other direction.

Scott Graham, the new acting chair of Mathematical and Computing Science at U of T Mississauga did the introduction, after which I took notes, which appear below.

Note: anything in quotes is a direct quote from Stallman.

What’s This About?

• This is not a speech about free software
• Rather, it’s an answer to a question that people often asked me after my free software speeches

Free Software: A Quick Review

The Four Freedoms

• Free software is software that respects the user’s freedom
• Many people mistakenly believe it’s about software that’s free as in “no cost” because of the ambiguity of the English word “free”
• The “free” in “free software” is free as in the French libre, not as in the French gratuit
• The way we explain it to English speakers is “free as in speech, not free as in beer”
• We believe that there are 4 essential freedoms that a software user must have:
  • Freedom 0: The freedom to run program as you wish, for any purpose.
  • Freedom 1: The freedom to study the program’s source code to learn how it works and make changes to it. You need access to the source code to do this.
  • Freedom 2: The freedom to help neighbour, by being able to distribute copies of the software.
  • Freedom 3: The freedom to contribute to community by being able to give away your modified versions of the software.

The GNU Project and Linux

• The opposite of free software is proprietary software, which is unethical software
• The purpose of free software is to correct the social problem of proprietary software by replacing unethical proprietary software with an ethical system.
• In 1983, I set out to create a free operating system, GNU
• GNU is short for “GNU’s Not Unix”, a tip of the hat to the Unix operating system, from which GNU takes some technical ideas
• Began development of GNU in January 1984
• In 1992, GNU nearly had all the essential components to be a complete operating system
• The last gap was filled in 1992 by the Linux kernel, which was released in 1991, but adopted the GPL as its distribution licence in 1992
• The combination of GNU and Linux the Linux kernel formed a complete operating system, GNU plus Linux
• Many people call it “Linux”, which is wrong; Linux is just the kernel of the system, and ignores the effort that went into the other parts
• Through the 90s, more and more people invited me to talk about free software
• At the end of these talks, I would often be asked “Do these ideas apply to anything other than software?”

Applying Free Software Principles to Physical Objects

• For something to be free, it must respect the four freedoms
• Let’s test physical objects against the four freedoms:
  • Freedom 0: Yes. If you own a physical obkject, you’re free to use it as you wish (within legal constraints). See? we’re already better off, rights-wise, with physical objects than with a lot of software.
  • Freedom 1: Yes. In general, if you own a physical object, you’re free to make changes to it, as long as it was feasible.
  • Freedom 2: No. It’s hard to copy an object. For physical objects, this is a meaningless question.
  • Freedom 3: Once again meaningless, as it’s hard to make copies of physical objects

A Brief History of Copyright

• Information is different — it’s more easily copied
• With published works, copyright law is the only thing that might deny you the four freedoms
• Software isn’t like that, because a lot of it comes with additional restrictions
• What should copyright law say about those other kinds of works?
• We need to look at the history of copyright law

Ethics and Technology

• Copyright is closely connected to copying technology
• Technology can’t change basic ethical principles — they’re too deep
• However, we can apply basic ethical principles to new technologies
• Changes of context can change the consequences — consider: if we ever developed a technology that could realibly resurrect the dead, would murder still be a serious crime?

Copying By Hand

• In the ancient world, copying was simple: you read one copy, you wrote another
• Using this method of copying, there are no economies of scale — to make 10 copies took 10 times as long
• No special skill or equipment was needed, other than the skill and tools to read and write (which in those days, few people had)
• Result: copying was done in a decentralized fashion
• As far as I can tell, nothing like copyright in the ancient world

The Printing Press

• The printing press represented an advance in copying
• It made copying more efficient, but not uniformly — some kinds of copying worked better than others
• Printing was relatively fast, but setting up the type was time-consuming
• Efficient only for mass production
• It required specialized equipment and skill, which most people didn’t have it
• Result: copying was done in a centralized fashion
• Hand-copying still common in the first centuries of printing: they very rich had hand-copied books because custom books were expensive, as did the very poor, because copying books was the only way they could own one

Precursors to Copyright

• The concept of copyright began in the age of the printing press, c. 1500
• The first English system that was similar to copyright was a form of censorship — a permanent monopoly granted by the king to a publisher
• This was — “after the glorious revolution” — replaced with a system of copyright, which was granted to the author for 14 years
• Copyright was meant to encourage writing by making it more feasible for authors to make money from writing
• It was a constitutional decision: Congress was allowed to set up a copyright system as a means of promoting progress
• Not an entitlement, but an artifical scheme to modify people’s behaviour, to encourage the production of works to better society
• It was also a constitutional decision that copyright must last for a limited time

Copyright as Originally Intended

• The media corporations want people to believe copyright is something that authors inherently have and then hand over to publishers; they don’t want people to think of it in its intended context
• It’s an industrial regulation: copyright is meant to restrict what publishers could do, not readers
• As an industrial regulation, it was:
  • Fairly painless: readers were not restricted
  • Easy to enforce: it was enforced only against publishers, and it wasn’t necessary to invade people’s homes to enforce it
  • Publicly beneficial: people traded away a freedom they couldn’t exercise anyway, and they got a benefit
• As a result, copyright wasn’t very controversial

Copyright Now

• Now with digital data and computer networks, it much easier for us to copy and manipulate information
• Digital technology has changed the effect of copyright law
• Copyright used to be a power that was:
  • wielded by authors
  • over publishers
  • to yield benefits to the public
• Now it’s a power that is:
  • wielded by publishers
  • to punish the public
  • in the name of the authors
• Now the public wants to copy and share — what would a democratic government do?
• They’d say “We have to renegotiate this deal, now that the freedom freedom to copy can be exercised”
• You can measure the non-democratic tendencies of a government by their tendencies to do the opposite of the previous statement

Copyright’s Expanding Time

• Consider the dimension of time
• In 1998, the copyright period was extended by 20 years for both old and new works
• Extending copyright for old works: Did they have a time machine? How did they hope to encourage authors in the 1920’s to make new stuff?
• Extending copyright for new works: 20 more years of copyright now might theoretically encourage the creation of more works, but the marginal value of 20 more years of copyright discounted for 75 years in the future is zero
• Can a publisher give their projected balance sheets for 75 years in the future? Most industries don’t plan beyond the next 5 years
• Clearly, it’s just an excuse — politicians have been bought with campaign contributions and the corporate media are not examining it
• The law is the “Sonny Bono Copyright Act” — he was the Church of Scientology’s pet congressman, and they use copyright law to silence critics
• The law is also known as the Mickey Mouse copyright act since it was paid for by Disney
• The copyright of the first Mickey Mouse cartoons, Steamboat Willie, was about to expire [ed. note. Steamboat Willie is not the first cartoon to feature Mickey Mouse, but it's the one that made Mickey famous.]
• Steamboat Willie itself borrowed from other films
• This is “perpetual copyright on the installment plan”: they can’t officially establish copyright forever, so they do the next best thing: extend it for 20 years every 20 years
• The idea: nothing should ever go into the public domain again
• When there is a problem in the U.S., it doesn’t try to solve that problem, it tries to impose it worldwide — as with copyright

Copyright’s Expanding Breadth

• Now consider the dimension of breadth
• Copyright was not meant to restrict all uses of a work, just some
• In 1998, publishers got the DMCA passed, giving them total power
• It allows them to implement whatever rules they want, and bypassing them is illegal
• It effectively allows publishers to write their own laws
• DVDs: You have the right to watch them, but only on authorized players
• You do not have the right to use a free player
• The only authorized players are designed to restrict you — see defectivebydesign.org
• In France, it’s illegal to even possess a copy of the free software that can play DVDs
• In music, there are these “corrupt discs that look like real compact discs”, which are unreadable by computers
• In some countries, they have to be labelled as such
• Once while in Spain, I was given such a disc and I said: “Here we see the face of the enemy. Please take this back to the store because I don’t want them to keep your money.”
• Since there is free software that can read encrypted DVDs, movie compnies want a replacement system and came up with AACS (used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray)
• “Give AACS the axe!”
• It didn’t take long for ACCS to be cracked — someone found the key and published it
• It was posted on many community sites, and although those sites took those posts down, other people re-posted
• It was “an upswell of popular resistance against a new tyranny”
• “Just seeing that the spirit of resistance can well up doesn’t mean it’s over”
• Consider the Sony rootkit [a.k.a. XCP -- Extended Copy Protection]
  • It contained illegally copied GNU software (it did not follow the terms of the GPL in copying it)
  • In spite of this, Sony wasn’t prosecuted for copyright infringement (only ordinary people will get charged with that!)
  • Sony was made to promise never again include a rootkit in their materials
  • So they’re doing an end run by putting rootkits right into computers from the get-go
  • And this rootkit? “It’s called Windows Vista”
• “Restricting users is the purpose of Windows Vista”
• Visit BadVista.org for details
• “Even if you’re not ready to escape to the free world, at least don’t let Microsoft tighten the chains on you!”
• “Vista is one big back door”
• It forces users to use specific software>/li>
• It enabled Microsoft to send a command to computers running Vista to stop using any specified piece of hardware (useful if the hardware doesn’t support DRM or other similar anti-user measures)
• “What arrogance!”

eBooks

• Book publishers would like to take away certain traditional freedoms associated with books, such as:
  • The freedom to read it anywhere you like
  • The freedom to borrow it from a library
  • The freedom to lend it to a friend
  • The freedom to sell it at a used bookstore
  • The freedom to keep the book as long as you want and pass it on to your kids
• Publishers realize that they might face opposition to the loss of these freedoms, so they’re trying to sneak it in through ebooks
• The DMCA took away these freedoms from ebooks — now the next step was to get people to switch to ebooks
• The first step worked, but the second didn’t, but not because people valued their freedom too much; rather it’s that reading off the screen wasn’t good enough
• The screen-reading experience will improve with epaper, and then the publishers will try again
• There’s a dental school in the U.S. where all the textbooks are ebooks that expire after a year
• I had a brush with ebooks: a publisher that wanted to start a line of ebooks with my biography
• I would only let them do this if they would publish it unencrypted. They balked, but eventually, there was a publisher who would agree to my terms
• There’s an organized hype campaign to promote ebooks
• One bit of evidence: on a flight in Brazil, I was reading an in-flight magazine and in the spot where there would be an editoral in a “real” magazine, there was an article speculating on how many years it would take for ebooks to be adopted
• In airline magazine, unless the article is about a destination that the airline covers, you can be sure it’s paid for
• We can be sure that they’ll push ebooks again
• We have to be constantly ready to defend our freedom

• What would governments do if they were truly democratic?
• They’d reduce the amount of power exercised over us

Proposed Changes to Copyright Time

• Let’s look again at the dimension of time
• Instead of extending copyright terms, reduce them!
• Over time, we’ve seen that the publication cycle has been getting shorter
• In U.S., and I’m sure the situation is similar in Canada, most books are remaindered within 2 years and out of print within 3
• Shorten the copyright period to a decade, starting with date of publication (rather than the date it’s finished being created; we want authors to have the time to find a publisher) — start the clock ticking at the time of first publication
• When I proposed this, a well-known fantasy author beside me said “10 years? Anything more than 5 is intolerable!”
• Copyright not good for most authors. Superstars, yes, but for most authors, no
• Publishers grind authors at the same time they “defend” them
• The fantasy author beside me told me that he wanted the rights to his book back since they were out of print, nut his publisher kept claiming they weren’t (meaning that the rights still rested with them)
• He had to sue to get his rights back — that is, to get permission to hand out copies of his own books
• This sort of thing is not unusual; it extends to all fields
• More than 5 years of copyright would not affect him unless he became a superstar
• We should start with a 10-year copyright period, watch the results, and fine-tune the length of the period as needed
• This will get rid of the bulk of the problems we have now where copyright can sometimes last 150 years

Proposed Changes to Copyright Breadth

• Now let’s look at the dimension of breadth
• We should arramge different copyright deals for different kinds of works
• Works should be distinguished not by media, but by the way the works contribute to society
• Each type of work is important in a different way, but no type is more important than any other
• Works could be divided into these three categories:
  1. Practical functional works
  2. Works that witness the thoughts of certain parties
  3. Arts and entertainment

Practical functional works

• These are things that we use to do practical useful work
• Examples:
  • Reference works
  • Educational material
  • Designs of equipment and buildings
  • Programs
  • Recipes
  • Fonts
• These must be free (as in the four freedoms). If you use the work to do practical things, you must be free to control what you do.
• These are things that society needs
• There must be freedom to distribute unmodified and modified versions of these works
• 20 years ago, it might have been rational to say that without a scheme to restrict the sharing of such works
• Proprietary software makes no contribution to society
• I would like to maximize the amount of free software and minimize the amount of proprietary software, “preferably to zero”
• Society’s needs can be satisfied by free software
• Look at recipes: recipes are shared, yet there are gainfully-employed cooks everywhere
• Look at Wikipedia: it’s proof that it’s possible for a free reference work to exist and also be good
• Educational works need to be free

Works that witness the thoughts of certain parties

• Modifying these works misrepresents the authors
• When I write essays, I don’t grant the permission to modify them
• I recommend a compromise copyright system that would prohibit modification and commercial distribution
• There would still be the freedom to non-commercially distribute unmodfied copies
• Sharing the basis of society — attacking sharing attacks the basis of society — “That’s as anti-social as anything gets”
• The same as now, but with an essential minimum freedom

Arts and entertainment

• The purpose of these works lies in the impact they make on the user
• The issue of whether to allow modification: difficult to deal with
• There are valid arguments on both sides
• One on hand:
  • A work can have an artistic integrity
  • This is sometimes true…
  • But not as often as the authors think!
  • Witness the number of authors who are all too willing to have Hollywood butcher their work
• On the other hand:
  • Modification is a way to make a contribution to art
  • The folk process is based on modifying work
  • Consider Shakespeare: he borrowed plots from other plays written just decades before — they’d be illegal if done today — one could say to him “You’re just making a cheap ripoff”
• In the end, what allowed me to resolve this is that there’s no rush to make a modfied version of a work
• “You can wait 10 years!”
• This restriction is not acceptable for works of practical use, but acceptable for works of art
• I propose a compromise: you should be free to non-commerically distribute unmodified copies for 10 years, after which you should be free to distribute modified copies

On Music Sharing

• Music sharing on the net should be legal
• Record companies like to pretend it’s a disaster for musicians
• But really, musicians can’t lose what they’re not getting
• Mainly long-established superstars are the only ones making money from their records
• The rest generally don’t unless they’re wildly successful
• Overall, the record companies make up for 4% of all musicians’ income
• The money given to a band to cover the costs of publicity and recording is considered to be an “advance”
• Given that the record companies treat the musicans so badly, musicians aren’t going to lose money if we don’t buy their records
• The main benefit of the record companies to musicians is that they provide publicity, which in turn gets people to attend their concerts, which is where they really make their money
• We can give them publicity by sharing their music
• “Pry loose of the grip of the hype”
• The record companies just provide “carloads of money, squeeze it into something like music and dish it out at us”
• Music will be better off without them
• Legalize music sharing

• Also: support musicians better
• There are two ways we can do this:
  1. 1. A tax:
     • A tax on anything that relates to internet use
     • Divide up this money among musicians based on their popularity, but not in linear fashion
     • Have function that tapers off
     • A superstar that is 1000 times as popular will not get 1000 times the money, but 10 times
     • Guarantees better money across the board for all musicians
     • Want the tax to support musicians so they don’t have to get a day job, but concentrate on their music
  2. 2. Voluntary payments:
     • Imagine if every player had a button you could push to send a dollar to the band
     • “You wouldn’t miss one dollar”
     • Imagine people pushing that button once a month or even once a week
     • Read: I read that the average American spent $20/year on music
     • If the average American sent a dollar a year directly to the musicans, musicians would be supported just as well as the current system
     • If they push the button twice a year, that would cover not just performers, but composers too
     • We could make a PR capaign with a positive message, instead of those “piracy” campaigns: “You like those bands, have you sent them a dollar today?”
     • I don’t like the way they equate people who share music and movies they like with people who rob ships at sea

Q & A Session

“How can programmers hope to make money under free software?”

One of the first questions was the inevitable one about how programmers can make money with free software. I skipped taking notes for this one, as I needed a break from typing and I’ve seen this played out time and again. The guy who asked the question — presumably a student — made the mistake of referring to the operating system as “Linux” and not “GNU plus Linux” or “GNU/Linux” when talking to Stallman, which prompted the usual eruption.

I could’ve sworn that knowing never to call it just plain “Linux” in front of RMS was basic knowledge or lore in our field, but perhaps I’m just not seeing it from a student’s perspective.

Question about the GPL

RMS pointed out that any license that recognizes the four freedoms is free software. When asked about what the GPL v3 had to say about “software as a service”, RMS asked the person to clarify what he meant by that term (he hates terminology he considers ambiguous).

The person asked if a service that lives on a server was being used, did the users have the four freedoms with the software behind that service?

His answer was that the four freedoms in that case belonged to the owner of that server. He also said that if you run a service and the software is under the GNU Afero licence, you have to share the code. The GNU GPL3 licence does not require this.

Question about patents

When asked about patents, Stallman said:

• There is nothing in common between copyright law and patent law — this is a widespread misconception
• The issues they raise have nothing in common
• Comes from the fashionable and misleading term intellectual property”
• The term is used to confuse
• Reject the term “intellectual property”
• I’m not totally against either law, but applying patent law to software creates a problem
• Developing a program require incorporating a large number of ideas
• Software patents are “an absurd system of getting software developers tied up in knots”
• Corporations file patents because they figure they’ll gain on the balance
• Software patents should not exist
• An analogy: software and say, symphonic music or novels:
  • They combine lots of ideas
  • Suppose each idea could be patented — what would the effect be?
  • There is no danger that someone you’ve never heard of or never dealt with will have copyright on your work
  • But there is a danger that someone you’ve never heard of or never dealt with might have a patent on something in your work
• In the U.S. Constitution, copyrights and patents each have one line
• Amother ambiguity with the term “intellectual property” is that it includes tradmark law, which unlike copyrights and patents, is not an incentive for creators
• The term “intellectual property” generalizes too far
• Whenever you hear someone say it, say “Hold on, this discussion is confused! IP is not a coherent reference to anything!”

One Final Word

He closed with “Get active and fight against [Canadian copyright bill] C-60…and I don’t mean Buckyballs!”