Copyleft in Commerce.
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Allison, Jeremy
This talk will cover how Samba uses GPLv3 to work with both proprietary andFree Software companies to maintain software with a vibrant commercial andamateur user and developer community.
 Everybody? Jeremy Allison. Hi. Thanks very much for coming to my talk. We had a little technical difficulties, so the top and bottom of the slides, maybe a little pruncated, I'm afraid, I'll have to work around that. So, my name is Jeremy Allison, I'm the co-creator of the Samba Free Software Project. My day job is working for Google Open Source Programs office, but I want to make absolutely clear, and the best way of doing this is by doing this. Sorry. This, sorry. This is not a Google talk. I'm going to be saying things here that Google don't agree with. This is the view of myself and quite possibly the Samba Project. So, I'm going to be talking about GPOB3. This is not a Google talk. So, if I see any press center or anything later saying Google engineer says, A, I shall be really cross and probably shout it out, my boss, and B, I'll just deny ever having said it as a Google engineer. I'll, you know, using the latest theory of fake news, I'll just say, No, I never said that, and who are you going to believe, you know, me or your own lying eyes. So, yeah, this is a Samba related talk, not Google related. Bradley asked me to give a talk on how GPL has affected GPO, moving to GPOB3 has affected Samba. I already gave a talk a few years ago on why we did it. I'm going to talk about what the consequences are and what I think how the GPL is moving to GPOB3 has affected us. It started off as a nice, fluffy, how to use GPOB3 to get companies to work with you, kind of, GPOB3 in commerce talk, as you may have seen from the abstract. It kind of got darker than that as I started to write it. For some reason I got angrier and angrier, and as you'll see, more of the anger came out in the talk, possibly, than I intended. So, just going back, you know, copy left has always been commercial. The early funding of the Free Software Foundation was Richard selling those big sun and other tapes and shipping them out. Interestingly enough, the early days of Samba, one of the first requests we ever had was from the Australian Defence Establishment, who insisted on having an invoice sent by Tridge for Samba to them so that they could use it. So, he carefully made up an invoice for $0 and sent that in. And apparently their accountants were perfectly happy with that, so long as they had a piece of paper saying that they had the right to use the software and they had an invoice and that they had paid it. I don't know whether they sent him a check back for $0. The other thing was, when I first moved to SGI, who were doing a Samba-based product, one of the first things that SGI did at that time was to essentially realise that Red Hat was making a lot of money and started charging for Samba support contracts because as my VP said at the time, nobody values what they're getting for free. So, the idea that copy left is, you know, non-commercial, obviously Red Hat put that idea to bed a long time ago. And in fact, you know, I get paid to write GPLv3 software. So, GPLv2. Everybody loves GPLv2, right? Is anyone here old enough to remember working with corporate lawyers who basically accused you of being a communist trying to destroy the software industry because you were using good old GPLv2? Yeah, thank you. The licence that now people say, oh man, that thing's great. I understand that it fits like an old shoe. I'm just so happy about GPLv2 walking shoes. At the time that people were lawyers, corporate lawyers were absolutely and utterly terrified of it. And in fact, the Linux kernel has seemed to have adopted that. Well, GPLv2 is great. We don't need anything else. Why would you ever change? Why are you causing trouble? We were, Samu was one of the earliest adopters of GPLv3. Well, as you can't see there, the software world is much more complicated now than it was in 1991 when GPLv2 was published. And in fact, let me take you back to the years of 2007, which was when GPLv3 was first getting created. So there were three issues. I don't know whether people remember this at the time that were emerging that made, at least myself and obviously the Free Software Foundation think that GPLv2 was becoming, was not built to address. It addressed some of these things, but not fully, not in a way that the FSF felt protected the investments in GPL software that were being made. So the first one is the Microsoft-Novell agreement. Anyone remember that? I quit my job at Nivell over that and ended up at Google. What a shame. So I suppose that wasn't so bad. So that, and I'll go into that more in the next slide, essentially that was an attempt to add additional conditions to violate GPL section seven, to add additional conditions that would contradict the license. And I just remember when I first saw that agreement, I was actually, I think it was just after FOSDEM and I was in England visiting my family and one of the Nivell lawyers emailed me this and said, yeah, maybe you should take a look at this. Let me know what you think. And I emailed back saying, why is this not a section seven violation of the GPL? And the response I got was, thank you for your input. Please delete the previous email. So they went ahead with it. The second threat, more serious, is, of course, software patents. And the fear at the time was that essentially writing free software would just collapse. There would be lawsuits on individual developers, projects would be unable to create things. There were rumblings at the time. There was a file system, Tux 3, I think it was, Tux 2 or Tux 3, that NetApp started claiming was violating the WAFL patents. That was publicly abandoned, possibly more due to the temperament of the developer than anything else, but there were lots of threats coming that patents were going to end the world as we know it. And of course, the final one was DRM. And the one that bugged me the most, actually, was DRM. And I just, I grew up in a world where I was able to get access to the source code of many of the devices that I ran. And if I didn't like them, I could put other software on there. And the idea of a world where things were completely locked down, you know, what it essentially ruined the utility of everything I'd learned, because what use is having the source code if you can't do anything with it? Yeah, you can learn from it, but if you can't install it or anything, it really is not much use. And things have only gotten worse since then. I'll go into that in a little while. So let's talk about the novella agreement. It was very interesting. It was a patent indemnification pact. And it was structured as a covenant not to sue. And essentially what it allowed Microsoft to do was to charge per-seat royalties on any Susie Linux that was being shipped. And this was seen as, it was the end of the world, it was going to turn GPL software into proprietary software. And there's actually a wonderful quote from one of the VPs at Red Hat basically saying, after this agreement in one year's time, Susie will have collapsed. There will only be Red Hat as the last standing Linux distributor, etc. Which didn't happen, but yeah, I was nice, wishful thinking. So what actually did happen? Well, it didn't really matter. Because essentially companies violate Section 7 all the time. And they do add additional conditions. You can't see the last line which says, I don't have proof of this. So what happened was they just kept cross-licensing patents. Under NDA, to companies, TomTom, you name it. The interesting case was the Barnes and Noble one, because they actually published, I think, one of their proposed agreements. Because they refused to sign it. Eventually they did sign, cross-license. At one point it was $2 billion a year business for Microsoft, which is, you know, I mean, it's not a lot for them. But it's not quite pocket change either, the funder department, I guess. And they're still doing that. But the big thing that changed between the specific Microsoft and Nivell deal is that, and I genuinely believe this, Microsoft has changed and they now, I wouldn't say they're an open source company, but they have learned to live with open source and will learn, increasingly learn to use it commercially ongoing. I remember having a dinner with a Microsoft VP in Mantivew Tidehouse and telling him, why don't you guys put SQL Server on Linux? You're crazy. You should have done this years ago. You know, why won't you do it? And him holding his head in his hands and saying, the Windows team won't let me. You know, they were frightened that it was going to take away their monopoly power on Windows. And now, last year, SQL Server is coming to Windows. Change has come. Microsoft is no longer the threat to free software. And it's all about money makes the world go round. They finally figured out how to make money on open source free software. And the other thing is, I've actually heard from engineers, because it's always engineers who pass you the real dirt, that most companies who want to do cross licensing just do so with no thought whatsoever to how this is violating any of the terms. They just do it. They do it on an NDA. No one ever hears about it. You know, I have no proof whatsoever. You know, even nobody will go on record of saying, yes, my company signed an NDA agreement that cross-licensed patents that violated the GPOV2 or 3. But these things, I believe, happen all the time. If anyone wants to stand up and say, yes, my company does that, yeah, great. Feel free to do so. I'd be very happy to talk to you. So that moves on to the next thing that the GPOV3 was trying to address, which is software patents. And that's, if you can't see, that's actually a little map of East Texas, the rocket docket. So Scott Peterson, I don't think he's here, he's getting a lot of good press in these talks. So my fear was that I was going to get personally sued over violating people's patents because I was writing software and, you know, I thought if people wanted to stop Sam, maybe they're going to sue me. Maybe I'm going to lose my house and whatever. And I remember on a wonderful phone call with Scott Peterson because he and I were both working at HP at the time. And I said, you don't have to worry, you idiot, you don't have any money. He said, you're poor. HP has to worry. We've got the money. So that actually turned out to be absolutely true. Many people, patent trolls, have sued to become a multi-billion dollar industry, and they sent it in East Texas, which is a very interesting place. There's a marvelous American, I think it's This American Life or Planet Money, they did a wonderful podcast on the company's headquarters in East Texas that are essentially a post office box inside one big building that are the patent trolls. Yes, all software has suffered, but it hasn't specifically targeted free software or open source. I mean, all software sucks, all software violates patents. Nobody ever looks at patents. They are completely purposeless. Their original intent was to teach people how to do things. No one ever looks at patents. Just a quick poll. Does anyone here whose company has actually ever said to an engineer, yes, you should look at patents so that we can discover this interesting new thing we can do? Anyone? Yes, what is it? Really? They asked you to look at patents. I'm sorry, where do you work? I'm just very curious. I work in a company called Inakoni Villain. Inakoni Villain, and they asked you to look to... They've asked... My God, you guys are not going to be in business long. Okay, sorry. Yes, another comment. Actually, my university encouraged me to do this. Oh, universities don't count. They're crazy. I mean, they see patents as a profit center. They encourage me to do the research. Oh, sure. And they almost certainly want to file so that they can sue other people. I mean, the university is not quite a non-practising entity, but pretty damn close. But I'm very surprised. You are the only software company I've ever heard of who's done that, and good luck to you. Everyone else, at least in the US, is paranoidly warned. Never, ever look at this. You will be in severe danger. The triple bammages, et cetera, are going to kill you if you do this. All right, so how did the DPL v3 patent provisions cost us in Samba? Well, so Bradley told me an interesting story. I knew that Apple were involved in DPL v3 drafting. I knew the objected to the patent clause, but I didn't know exactly how. Apparently, what they would do is say, we object to these clauses, and then when the FSF came back to them and said, oh, okay, what's wrong with the wording? What would you like us to change? How would you like it to be corrected? They never replied. So they do say, yes, we object to this. Well, how do you object to it? Well, we object to it. It's bad. So what they ended up doing was they pulled Samba, and in fact, they're slowly but surely pulling most DPL software, v2 or v3. It doesn't really matter for them. They've created a proprietary SMB2 server and removed Samba for Mac OS X. They're the only vendor to publicly say, we can't use Samba because it's DPL v3. In practice, we probably lost some of the vendors. I'll go into that a little bit more later on. I can't remember this next slide or not because Fedora doesn't have the open office that allows me to see the next slide in advance. So it's just a much of a mystery to me as you. I can't remember what I wrote, but I do go into it further. So yeah, that was discouraging. We probably lost some code contributions, but not that much. Most of the Apple code contributions were actually fixing Samba to work on Mac OS. So yeah, so here's an interesting thing. The confluence of two things. Samba moving to DPL v3 and Microsoft losing the EU antitrust case and then being forced to publish their protocols. Which they did end up doing wholeheartedly and much more fully than the EU originally demanded. The EU demanded a certain set. They finally went, you know what? This is actually good for us and they published everything. So the confluence of that created a market for alternative Samba. And there were actually two that got created, well two or three, there's a couple more. They keep popping up and it's interesting to look at what actually happens to them. They would actually advertise, you know, yes, this is all the good bits of Samba, but it's not DPL v3. In fact, one of them, which I found really amusing, was they implemented the documented parts of SMB2 and that company was actually saying, well, if you want to support all the Windows versions, just install Samba as well. And when we get calls that we don't understand, we'll just pass them through to the Samba piece. Which kind of defeats the object as far as I can see. Anyway, so what happened to these guys is very interesting. One of them got quite popular and was giving me headaches at the time. They were like, oh my God, are we about to obsolete? And they sold licenses to a number of our vendors who said, ah, you guys are old, we're going with this new stuff, it's great. What actually turned out to happen was EMC had bought them and there were so many bugs in it that they weren't critical customer data loss bugs that they weren't getting fixed that eventually EMC just said, screw it, we're going to buy the company. So they bought the company to get access to the source code and fixes and have the engineers work on their fixes and they promptly terminated all the support contracts of every other vendor who was using it. So these guys were left completely in the lurch with unsupported software, with no bug fixes coming out. I know the guy who made the decision at EMC and I sent him an email that just had one line that said, thank you for ridding me of this turbulent priest. And many of the other vendors who were using that have since re-adopted Samba and have been participating quite actively, simply because I think they've been shown what can happen if their supplier gets bought out by a hostile vendor. So that was kind of interesting. Yes, it cost us, I think we've kind of recovered along there. So let's go on to the thing that really disturbed him more than anything else. So if you're familiar with the work of a wonderful TV writer in the US called Joss Whedon, he writes these great TV series, he had Firefly, Buffett of Empire Flare, etc. And he came up with this concept of the big bad. The big bad is you fight these lesser enemies, your characters fight these lesser enemies like the Microsoft and the Vell agreement or software patents or whatever along the way. But the end of the season, you have the big bad, which is the main enemy that you have to defeat in order for the TV series to continue. And I think for GPL V3 and us, the big bad is DRM, Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management, as the FSF likes to call it. If you haven't read any of Verne Vingy's sound fiction books, I really suggest you pick them up. There are a couple that are really relevant. This is a quote from A Deepness in the Sky. This should actually make your blood run cold, especially with recent governments in the US. A technological tyranny is one where government approved code must be running on every node in the network with no way to remove it. That's just one executive order away, really. And the other book he wrote that's wonderful that addresses this is a book called Rainbow's End, which again is set in a world where DRM is mandatory. He actually explicitly talks about running the GNU herd as an illegal act that one of the characters does at some point. You get your choice of classic Windows, Mac or Linux, so hey, it's not all bad, but of course it's running on the kernel that contains the code by the Department of Homeland Security, which is the only people who can actually access the hardware. And the reason that it's very disturbing to me is, you know, as people like to say, the computer industry and drug traffickers are the only industries that call their customers users. Well, DRM actually downgrades the user to a renter, which in my mind is even worse. You're even lower. And the trend really seems to be, as far as I can see, is towards as the legacy systems of on-premises servers are going away, is you end up with DRM-infested user devices that you can't change in any way using web APIs to talk to computers that you don't own, clouds essentially, via hostile terms of service. And by hostile terms of service, I mean in terms of service that say anything you put into that cloud is ours and you can't take it back out again. Obviously, terms of service where you can actually get your own data back are better. And these terms of services may arbitrarily change. So, I mean, that's the world that we as engineers appear to be building for society. And I don't think this is a terribly good idea. So, few of the, you're missing the real shouty bit at the bottom. So, I mean, everybody has their own DRM horror story, but I mean, it's appropriate that printer manufacturers are one of them. HP likes Mark having self-destructing ink cartridges that will lie about how much ink they've got so you can't refill them. Tractors and the famous quote from Bob Younger Red Hat, would you buy a car with the hood welded shut about the superiority of Red Hat and open-source software? Well, yes, you are buying cars with the hood welded shut because if the third-party repair shops don't get access to the software to fix them or to diagnose them, then yes, you do have to take it back to the dealer who can decide to change it and revoke your license. You're not buying the tractor, you're getting John Deere claims you receive an implied license for the life of the vehicle. Obviously, DRM in media, wonderful quote from my colleague Ian Hixon about the reason for DRM in media is essentially not to stop the user copying stuff because stuff appears on copied sites all the time. It's to put control over the makers of devices that play. And the most shameful thing, of course, is the W3C standardizing DRM in web protocols. That is an act of vandalism, I think, that will cause untold damage going forward. So, oh, thank you. Yay! Yes, that's shame on them. That is just outrageous and, yeah, terrible. So, how does GPRV3 help? Not much, really. A little. So, here's the interesting thing. I know of several products, I'm not going to name them. The requirement of using code in those products that was GPRV3 caused the companies to default from DRM closed to be able to open them up to vendor modification. Now, I'm pretty sure if they were able to choose alternatives to that GPRV3 software under a different license or GPRV2 or whatever, those devices would be locked down fully DRM's unable to be modified by the user. So, you end up with a developer mode switch simply because that GPRV3 software exists and is needed on the device. So, you know, as a free software advocate and from a free software perspective, GPRV2 isn't good enough. It doesn't prevent the lock down of a user device. And I really don't want people to have lock down user devices. It's too easy for lawyers at companies to say, well, allowing the user to modify its risky, let's not do it, even though we're using GPRV3 code, let's just lock it all down. And one of the things that we can help with is to try and educate vendors about the value of having open user communities. And the best examples for this, I can see, excuse me, are the routers, the DDWRT and others that are fully open because of the lawsuits brought by, I think it was the FSF in the early days. And the other one is, I think this was from the actions by Conservancy. I'm not 100% sure on that. But allowing the Sammy Goh TV community where you actually have a user community that allows you to replace the firmware on your TV, which is, I mean, a great thing. I haven't done that, but. So how do we, so going from the shouty parts to try and be a little more positive, this was what it was supposed to be about in the first place. How do we in the SAMBA team actually try and work with vendors and get them over their lawyers who are sort of like, you know, you're making, you're removing my comfortable GPL V2 pair of shoes and making me wear these new hobnail boots. I don't like them, this GPLV3 stuff. So what we do is obviously we have to find out about them. They have to reach out to us. We have to communicate. But when they do that, we try and reach out. One of the first things I will do is offer to have a conference call or bring Conservancy lawyers to talk with their lawyers about helping them to achieve the goals that they want by using the software. So, you know, we'll offer them legal help to interpret GPLV3. I will usually offer them technical help to help them architect their products because a lot of these vendors, you know, at least for SAMBA, an SMB server, SMB2, even Active Directory, it's a commodity. Very easy to get. You have a bike from Microsoft. You get it from others. A bike from other vendors. It's a very, very mature market. There's no reason to... There's no value in having a better SMB server than anyone else. Everyone has a good enough SMB server. You can use SAMBA. You can use one of the preposterous ones. We're all good enough. So the value is how do we help them architect their products? If they really want to keep something secret, if they... That's what their commercial value is that they want to have. How can they achieve that while still using SAMBA? Because of course I would prefer that they would use SAMBA because having them in my community makes my community better than having them use fully proprietary software all the way down. So I have actually helped and we have actually made changes inside SAMBA. I know this is kind of heresy in a free software conference. We've actually changed things to make it easier for proprietary vendors to keep code proprietary. If it helps make SAMBA better and helps us structure our code better, I don't think it's a terrible thing to actually do that and help both of us. And the other thing is the day of the amateur programmer turning up and doing something like SAMBA is kind of... We do get some amateur help, but it's much less than we used to when we first started. Although we do try and grow our programmer community that way. The practical fact is a lot of the programmer community now who work on SAMBA, they are paid to do so. And they are working for vendors who are using SAMBA in ever more complicated products. So how do we try and achieve this? Well, firstly I try and get past the help desk and the legal staff and the management and I try and get a relationship going directly with the engineers. Because most engineers, even people working for companies that create lockdown DRM-infested products, don't want to create lockdown DRM-infested products because they're engineers too. And they don't like, you know, if they're creating a lockdown router, they don't like the fact that if they had to buy a router, they don't want it to be locked down either. They want it to work and they want to be able to fix it. So try and get to the engineers, try and work with the engineers. Try and get to them early. The worst thing that can happen is someone to come to you and we have had this happen basically say, oh, I have this product with SAMBA and isn't it great? I want to work with you now and you look at what they've done and they're basically linked proprietary things directly and you're like, ah, great. It's hard to get them to redesign at that point. What we'll do in that case is we'll not normally invoke GPL violations on them. We'll work with them. We'll say, look, right now you have what you have, but this is how you really need to change this code to be GPL compliant and we'll help them do that. And then of course, we encourage them to upstream their code changes. And we have actually a great success rate with that. We are very upfront with them about what they can do and what we'd like them to do in order to make SAMBA better. And if they want to design things that's convenient for them and it also makes SAMBA better, then I'm happy to help. And in fact, I put a priority on reviewing their code and helping it get upstream. In fact, although I code a lot, a lot of what I'm doing these days is reviewing other people's code changes to SAMBA to essentially keep them happy and contributing because I'm getting more out of that than I can sit and write in a day. So how can you make the Hobnail Boots as a GPL v3 work for your vendors? So don't try and compromise so far that you're essentially giving away everything. And I think Bradley is going to touch on this in his talk later on in his keynote, so I'm looking forward to that. Essentially, you have to stand up loud and proud and you say, I'm a free software developer. I don't like DRM. I don't like the lockdown stuff. I don't really want to help you do that. I will help you use my code, I will help you integrate it with your proprietary stuff, but I'm not going to help you violate the very principles that made me create this code in the first place. I don't want lockdown environments. I don't want to be able to change stuff. Let me help you create a product that does what you need and will still do that. And it's possible. You can have DRM lockdown devices that can be, as I've mentioned before, that can be flipped with a switch into a developer mode. And at that point, you don't necessarily have to support it. You don't have to support the software anymore. You can restrict what it can do on the network, et cetera. The GPLv3 allows for all these things. Most, to my understanding, most corporate lawyers haven't read it other than the fact as, wow, this is much longer than V2. It's more complex. Why don't we just stick with V2 stuff? So don't be too judgmental. If you are working with Hollywood, then DRM is, if you want access to that content, then you're going to have DRM. So be prepared to say, OK, you guys go buy someone else's SMB server or whatever. You just can't use that stuff. That's fine. Just be prepared to walk away, which is always good in end negotiation. And the other thing is, as many people have said here, it's very rare that violators are malicious. Yeah, occasionally. And kind of we all know who they are and where they are. But most violators are just clueless. My favorite one is an audio manufacturer who no source or offering any of their products or whatever. They actually advertise as a selling point. We have a custom Linux based product. And I mean, that kind of disconnect is just gross stupidity. That's not, those guys, they want to make nice audio. They don't really, somebody gave them some software, they put it in, they're advertising it the best they know how. Those guys are not trying to rip people off. They're just dumb. So be nice to them. Be nice to them. Okay, so other things that we've learned over the years, distribute your copyright ownership. We have always preferred individual copyrights to corporate copyright. And that's an interesting case. It works on two, that kind of works on two levels. One, sometimes corporations like that. And originally our first contributions from Microsoft, I think, came about because they thought, I don't, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know whether this is true or not. But they considered that they might be able to get people to work on Samba under personal copyright, which would prevent exposing Microsoft owned patents. Because the people who were doing it were giving us personal copyright and not Microsoft copyright. Maybe. The other thing that smearing out copyright does is it avoids corporate capture. Now, the Linux kernel, I think, it's pretty close to being completely corporate owned. And once that's happened, you know, you see the fuss that happens when essentially corporate developers who are completely tied to their employer don't want to see any enforcement because it's going to damage their job. You don't really get much real enforcement in that case. So the other thing that GPLV3 allowed us to do is it allowed us to open up a little bit and allow some corporate copyright. We do that now. We will allow, we have a certificate of ownership you send in. Once you've done that from a corporate email address, we will accept corporate copyright coming in. One of the reasons for that is actually an interesting, I'll do it very briefly, essentially in the early days of Samba, Trig and I found out about a vendor who was violating the GPL by accident. They had bought a company that was selling an SMB server that they had taken Samba, put it inside a BSD kernel, linked the whole thing together and shipped it. And they were stuck. It was like, well, we're going to ship this product in three weeks. What do we do? The new owners had realized that this was a disaster. So Trig and I essentially, because we were such majority copyright holders, it was known by corporation, we were able to say to them, OK, we'll allow you to do this. And the next release, do it right, which they did. And a third party, who should remain nameless, who was paying for work in Samba, tried to assert corporate ownership over this. And the reason that they gave for doing that was that they wanted to be able to sue other companies, essentially the Red Hat, what Richard was talking about at Red Hat, they wanted to be able to count to sue somebody to stop them from distributing a product. So having large amounts of corporate ownership essentially takes those decisions out of the hands of the individual developer. And I have a great faith in the individual free software developer. Most of them except for someone in Germany, Richard already talked about, seem to be very reasonable people. So using it to expand your community, most users understand why DRM is bad, but they don't really understand what alternatives that they have. Most users go for convenience and they're kind of like, well, you know, it may be DRM's, but it's very easy to use. So you need to educate, and this is why we try to explain to our users why we use DPL v3. Obviously we can only talk to the users on our mailing list. You're a complicated product, so you need a lot of, most people using Samba in a complicated way need to have some interaction with this in order to use it successfully. The guys who just buy someone else's NAS don't really do that. But if someone does buy a NAS and they say, hey, I want to be able to modify this software, you know, for some reason it's not working for them, they want to change it. At least we're, at that point, we're able to explain to them, yes, it's because we chose this license that we were able to give you the freedom to modify this stuff. If we were still on DPL v2, yeah, we could give you the source code, but good luck on changing it on your box. There's nothing you can do, and we have no redress or way of changing that whatsoever. You know, obviously try not to be too judgmental. There's open source developers who basically, especially in the Linux kernel, who seem to have come to the conclusion that the DPL was a bad idea and don't really want to support it anymore. Greg Crow Hartman, who when asked when would you actually enforce, couldn't come up with a very good answer to that. And the other thing I like to point out is that a DPL v3 developer is just a DPL v2 developer who came across a lockdown device. Just like a conservative as a liberal who got mugged. Eventually, DPL v2 only, zealots, are going to run into an ever shrinking world of devices that they can do anything with outside of their employers, and I don't think they're going to like the world that they're hoping to make right now. So, it'd be nice to them when they change their mind. Ah, I kind of screwed up. It was better when I run off my laptop. So, how does DPL v3 make the world a better place? How can you use it to make the world a better place? So, the point, I hope, if you take away one point from this talk, I hope you realize that judicious creation of just small amounts of DPL v3 software can have a big effect on the vendor ecosystem. If those pieces of software are critical enough, important enough, they can lever, they can be the amp that moves the rubber tree plant. They can force things in the positive direction. And is John Sullivan here? So, FSF! Why is GLIB-C not LGPL v3? Yes, I'm talking to you. He knew about it. He knew I was going to shout about this. I told him yesterday. So, your flagship license, all of your software needs to be under this. It is ridiculous that GLIB-C is still under v2 only. I know why they did it. They're frightened. They're frightened of what's happening to GCC with C-Lang. They're frightened of it happening to GLIB-C. And my comment to them is, that's going to happen anyway. The people who don't like GPL who created C-Lang, they're going to do that to GLIB-C whether you realize it or not. So, why not make the world a better place and stand up for the principles that you're supposed to believe in? All right. And with that, bit of shouting. And I noticed John didn't turn up. I don't know where the slides are going to be, but wherever they are, I'll put them. They'll be linked to the FOSTA website on the page for your talk. Thank you very much, Jeremy. We have time for maybe one or two questions. First, to you, then to you. Hi. Thank you for your talk. Just real quick question. On your corporate capture, can you mention a few projects that you think are vulnerable to this? And in addition, do you think that this corporate capture term can apply for non-relicensing sort of conditions? So, for example, if you have a large foundation which has a lot of control, even if it's not going to have the entire copyright ownership? So, I mean, corporate capture can happen in many ways, but what I really mean by corporate capture is the decisions on the project being taken out of the hands of the developers. So, I don't necessarily mean all the copyright owned by corporations or the technical decisions can still be left to developers, but if essentially the direction of the project and how it runs and what it does is not under the control of the people who wrote it, that's essentially the thing I'm trying to argue against. So, which projects and also is Linux one of them or not? Oh, Linux is definitely one of them. I mean, I'm not sure I could name other projects straight off the bat. I'd say that's not one of them. We actually have a very diverse community of people who hate each other mostly. They can't agree on anything. We actually had to go to... Oh, there's one more question. I have a question about one point you did not address at all, which is when we have a system where we have safety issues and so my team is working in the automotive sector, in fact, inside Automotive Great Linux, which is a fully open project, but we still cannot use GPLV3 because this is going to taint the full system of the car. And I think most of the people will understand that we cannot open the software of the car like we can open the software of a router. I'm not so sure that that's true. So, as today, we've been asking the question on how if we could implement a car with a secure boot where we could protect the software, the critical software and have other software running GPLV3 that people could change, which is today not possible. So the end result is all the automotive project I'm aware of and any other critical project like in the industry, they just prevent using GPLV3 because we don't know how to handle that risk. Hang on a minute. You can absolutely do that. So long as you don't use... If you have a system that you think is so critical that nobody should change it, then absolutely you can't be using GPLV3. But if you look at what of the accidents happened in automotive software, Tesla has essentially had accidents. None of that software is free software in any kind. So just by saying I won't use GPLV3 isn't going to protect you from the lawsuits. Okay, we have to wrap up. Thank you so much, Jeremy. I'd like to take this outside. I'd like to take this outside. It's the software itself that matters. Thank you.
 Everybody?  Jeremy Allison.  Hi. Thanks very much for coming to my talk.  We had a little technical difficulties, so the top and bottom of the slides,  maybe a little pruncated, I'm afraid, I'll have to work around that.  So, my name is Jeremy Allison, I'm the co-creator of the Samba Free Software Project.  My day job is working for Google Open Source Programs office,  but I want to make absolutely clear, and the best way of doing this is by doing this.  Sorry. This, sorry.  This is not a Google talk.  I'm going to be saying things here that Google don't agree with.  This is the view of myself and quite possibly the Samba Project.  So, I'm going to be talking about GPOB3. This is not a Google talk.  So, if I see any press center or anything later saying Google engineer says,  A, I shall be really cross and probably shout it out, my boss,  and B, I'll just deny ever having said it as a Google engineer.  I'll, you know, using the latest theory of fake news, I'll just say,  No, I never said that, and who are you going to believe, you know, me or your own lying eyes.  So, yeah, this is a Samba related talk, not Google related.  Bradley asked me to give a talk on how GPL has affected GPO,  moving to GPOB3 has affected Samba.  I already gave a talk a few years ago on why we did it.  I'm going to talk about what the consequences are and what I think  how the GPL is moving to GPOB3 has affected us.  It started off as a nice, fluffy, how to use GPOB3 to get companies to work with you,  kind of, GPOB3 in commerce talk, as you may have seen from the abstract.  It kind of got darker than that as I started to write it.  For some reason I got angrier and angrier, and as you'll see,  more of the anger came out in the talk, possibly, than I intended.  So, just going back, you know, copy left has always been commercial.  The early funding of the Free Software Foundation was Richard selling those big  sun and other tapes and shipping them out.  Interestingly enough, the early days of Samba, one of the first requests we ever had  was from the Australian Defence Establishment,  who insisted on having an invoice sent by Tridge for Samba to them so that they could use it.  So, he carefully made up an invoice for $0 and sent that in.  And apparently their accountants were perfectly happy with that,  so long as they had a piece of paper saying that they had the right to use the software  and they had an invoice and that they had paid it.  I don't know whether they sent him a check back for $0.  The other thing was, when I first moved to SGI, who were doing a Samba-based product,  one of the first things that SGI did at that time was to essentially realise that Red Hat  was making a lot of money and started charging for Samba support contracts  because as my VP said at the time, nobody values what they're getting for free.  So, the idea that copy left is, you know, non-commercial, obviously Red Hat  put that idea to bed a long time ago.  And in fact, you know, I get paid to write GPLv3 software.  So, GPLv2. Everybody loves GPLv2, right?  Is anyone here old enough to remember working with corporate lawyers  who basically accused you of being a communist trying to destroy the software industry  because you were using good old GPLv2?  Yeah, thank you. The licence that now people say,  oh man, that thing's great. I understand that it fits like an old shoe.  I'm just so happy about GPLv2 walking shoes.  At the time that people were lawyers, corporate lawyers were absolutely and utterly terrified of it.  And in fact, the Linux kernel has seemed to have adopted that.  Well, GPLv2 is great. We don't need anything else. Why would you ever change?  Why are you causing trouble?  We were, Samu was one of the earliest adopters of GPLv3.  Well, as you can't see there, the software world is much more complicated now  than it was in 1991 when GPLv2 was published.  And in fact, let me take you back to the years of 2007,  which was when GPLv3 was first getting created.  So there were three issues.  I don't know whether people remember this at the time that were emerging  that made, at least myself and obviously the Free Software Foundation think  that GPLv2 was becoming, was not built to address.  It addressed some of these things, but not fully, not in a way that the FSF felt protected the investments in GPL software that were being made.  So the first one is the Microsoft-Novell agreement.  Anyone remember that?  I quit my job at Nivell over that and ended up at Google. What a shame.  So I suppose that wasn't so bad.  So that, and I'll go into that more in the next slide, essentially that was an attempt to add additional conditions  to violate GPL section seven, to add additional conditions that would contradict the license.  And I just remember when I first saw that agreement, I was actually, I think it was just after FOSDEM  and I was in England visiting my family and one of the Nivell lawyers emailed me this and said,  yeah, maybe you should take a look at this.  Let me know what you think.  And I emailed back saying, why is this not a section seven violation of the GPL?  And the response I got was, thank you for your input.  Please delete the previous email.  So they went ahead with it.  The second threat, more serious, is, of course, software patents.  And the fear at the time was that essentially writing free software would just collapse.  There would be lawsuits on individual developers, projects would be unable to create things.  There were rumblings at the time. There was a file system, Tux 3, I think it was, Tux 2 or Tux 3,  that NetApp started claiming was violating the WAFL patents.  That was publicly abandoned, possibly more due to the temperament of the developer than anything else,  but there were lots of threats coming that patents were going to end the world as we know it.  And of course, the final one was DRM. And the one that bugged me the most, actually, was DRM.  And I just, I grew up in a world where I was able to get access to the source code of many of the devices that I ran.  And if I didn't like them, I could put other software on there.  And the idea of a world where things were completely locked down, you know,  what it essentially ruined the utility of everything I'd learned,  because what use is having the source code if you can't do anything with it?  Yeah, you can learn from it, but if you can't install it or anything, it really is not much use.  And things have only gotten worse since then. I'll go into that in a little while.  So let's talk about the novella agreement.  It was very interesting. It was a patent indemnification pact.  And it was structured as a covenant not to sue.  And essentially what it allowed Microsoft to do was to charge per-seat royalties on any Susie Linux that was being shipped.  And this was seen as, it was the end of the world, it was going to turn GPL software into proprietary software.  And there's actually a wonderful quote from one of the VPs at Red Hat basically saying,  after this agreement in one year's time, Susie will have collapsed.  There will only be Red Hat as the last standing Linux distributor, etc.  Which didn't happen, but yeah, I was nice, wishful thinking.  So what actually did happen?  Well, it didn't really matter.  Because essentially companies violate Section 7 all the time.  And they do add additional conditions.  You can't see the last line which says, I don't have proof of this.  So what happened was they just kept cross-licensing patents.  Under NDA, to companies, TomTom, you name it.  The interesting case was the Barnes and Noble one, because they actually published, I think, one of their proposed agreements.  Because they refused to sign it.  Eventually they did sign, cross-license.  At one point it was $2 billion a year business for Microsoft, which is, you know, I mean, it's not a lot for them.  But it's not quite pocket change either, the funder department, I guess.  And they're still doing that.  But the big thing that changed between the specific Microsoft and Nivell deal is that, and I genuinely believe this,  Microsoft has changed and they now, I wouldn't say they're an open source company,  but they have learned to live with open source and will learn, increasingly learn to use it commercially ongoing.  I remember having a dinner with a Microsoft VP in Mantivew Tidehouse and telling him,  why don't you guys put SQL Server on Linux?  You're crazy. You should have done this years ago.  You know, why won't you do it?  And him holding his head in his hands and saying, the Windows team won't let me.  You know, they were frightened that it was going to take away their monopoly power on Windows.  And now, last year, SQL Server is coming to Windows.  Change has come. Microsoft is no longer the threat to free software.  And it's all about money makes the world go round.  They finally figured out how to make money on open source free software.  And the other thing is, I've actually heard from engineers, because it's always engineers who pass you the real dirt,  that most companies who want to do cross licensing just do so with no thought whatsoever to how this is violating any of the terms.  They just do it. They do it on an NDA. No one ever hears about it.  You know, I have no proof whatsoever.  You know, even nobody will go on record of saying, yes, my company signed an NDA agreement that cross-licensed patents that violated the GPOV2 or 3.  But these things, I believe, happen all the time.  If anyone wants to stand up and say, yes, my company does that, yeah, great.  Feel free to do so. I'd be very happy to talk to you.  So that moves on to the next thing that the GPOV3 was trying to address, which is software patents.  And that's, if you can't see, that's actually a little map of East Texas, the rocket docket.  So Scott Peterson, I don't think he's here, he's getting a lot of good press in these talks.  So my fear was that I was going to get personally sued over violating people's patents because I was writing software and, you know,  I thought if people wanted to stop Sam, maybe they're going to sue me.  Maybe I'm going to lose my house and whatever.  And I remember on a wonderful phone call with Scott Peterson because he and I were both working at HP at the time.  And I said, you don't have to worry, you idiot, you don't have any money.  He said, you're poor. HP has to worry. We've got the money.  So that actually turned out to be absolutely true.  Many people, patent trolls, have sued to become a multi-billion dollar industry,  and they sent it in East Texas, which is a very interesting place.  There's a marvelous American, I think it's This American Life or Planet Money,  they did a wonderful podcast on the company's headquarters in East Texas  that are essentially a post office box inside one big building that are the patent trolls.  Yes, all software has suffered, but it hasn't specifically targeted free software or open source.  I mean, all software sucks, all software violates patents.  Nobody ever looks at patents. They are completely purposeless.  Their original intent was to teach people how to do things.  No one ever looks at patents. Just a quick poll.  Does anyone here whose company has actually ever said to an engineer,  yes, you should look at patents so that we can discover this interesting new thing we can do?  Anyone? Yes, what is it? Really?  They asked you to look at patents. I'm sorry, where do you work? I'm just very curious.  I work in a company called Inakoni Villain.  Inakoni Villain, and they asked you to look to...  They've asked... My God, you guys are not going to be in business long.  Okay, sorry. Yes, another comment.  Actually, my university encouraged me to do this.  Oh, universities don't count. They're crazy.  I mean, they see patents as a profit center.  They encourage me to do the research.  Oh, sure. And they almost certainly want to file so that they can sue other people.  I mean, the university is not quite a non-practising entity, but pretty damn close.  But I'm very surprised. You are the only software company I've ever heard of who's done that,  and good luck to you.  Everyone else, at least in the US, is paranoidly warned.  Never, ever look at this. You will be in severe danger.  The triple bammages, et cetera, are going to kill you if you do this.  All right, so how did the DPL v3 patent provisions cost us in Samba?  Well, so Bradley told me an interesting story.  I knew that Apple were involved in DPL v3 drafting.  I knew the objected to the patent clause, but I didn't know exactly how.  Apparently, what they would do is say, we object to these clauses,  and then when the FSF came back to them and said, oh, okay, what's wrong with the wording?  What would you like us to change? How would you like it to be corrected?  They never replied. So they do say, yes, we object to this.  Well, how do you object to it? Well, we object to it. It's bad.  So what they ended up doing was they pulled Samba, and in fact, they're slowly but surely pulling most DPL software,  v2 or v3. It doesn't really matter for them.  They've created a proprietary SMB2 server and removed Samba for Mac OS X.  They're the only vendor to publicly say, we can't use Samba because it's DPL v3.  In practice, we probably lost some of the vendors.  I'll go into that a little bit more later on.  I can't remember this next slide or not because Fedora doesn't have the open office that allows me to see the next slide in advance.  So it's just a much of a mystery to me as you.  I can't remember what I wrote, but I do go into it further.  So yeah, that was discouraging. We probably lost some code contributions, but not that much.  Most of the Apple code contributions were actually fixing Samba to work on Mac OS.  So yeah, so here's an interesting thing.  The confluence of two things.  Samba moving to DPL v3 and Microsoft losing the EU antitrust case and then being forced to publish their protocols.  Which they did end up doing wholeheartedly and much more fully than the EU originally demanded.  The EU demanded a certain set.  They finally went, you know what? This is actually good for us and they published everything.  So the confluence of that created a market for alternative Samba.  And there were actually two that got created, well two or three, there's a couple more.  They keep popping up and it's interesting to look at what actually happens to them.  They would actually advertise, you know, yes, this is all the good bits of Samba, but it's not DPL v3.  In fact, one of them, which I found really amusing, was they implemented the documented parts of SMB2  and that company was actually saying, well, if you want to support all the Windows versions, just install Samba as well.  And when we get calls that we don't understand, we'll just pass them through to the Samba piece.  Which kind of defeats the object as far as I can see.  Anyway, so what happened to these guys is very interesting.  One of them got quite popular and was giving me headaches at the time.  They were like, oh my God, are we about to obsolete?  And they sold licenses to a number of our vendors who said, ah, you guys are old, we're going with this new stuff, it's great.  What actually turned out to happen was EMC had bought them and there were so many bugs in it that they weren't critical customer data loss bugs  that they weren't getting fixed that eventually EMC just said, screw it, we're going to buy the company.  So they bought the company to get access to the source code and fixes and have the engineers work on their fixes  and they promptly terminated all the support contracts of every other vendor who was using it.  So these guys were left completely in the lurch with unsupported software, with no bug fixes coming out.  I know the guy who made the decision at EMC and I sent him an email that just had one line that said,  thank you for ridding me of this turbulent priest.  And many of the other vendors who were using that have since re-adopted Samba and have been participating quite actively,  simply because I think they've been shown what can happen if their supplier gets bought out by a hostile vendor.  So that was kind of interesting.  Yes, it cost us, I think we've kind of recovered along there.  So let's go on to the thing that really disturbed him more than anything else.  So if you're familiar with the work of a wonderful TV writer in the US called Joss Whedon,  he writes these great TV series, he had Firefly, Buffett of Empire Flare, etc.  And he came up with this concept of the big bad.  The big bad is you fight these lesser enemies, your characters fight these lesser enemies like the Microsoft and the Vell agreement  or software patents or whatever along the way.  But the end of the season, you have the big bad, which is the main enemy that you have to defeat in order for the TV series to continue.  And I think for GPL V3 and us, the big bad is DRM, Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management, as the FSF likes to call it.  If you haven't read any of Verne Vingy's sound fiction books, I really suggest you pick them up.  There are a couple that are really relevant.  This is a quote from A Deepness in the Sky.  This should actually make your blood run cold, especially with recent governments in the US.  A technological tyranny is one where government approved code must be running on every node in the network with no way to remove it.  That's just one executive order away, really.  And the other book he wrote that's wonderful that addresses this is a book called Rainbow's End, which again is set in a world where DRM is mandatory.  He actually explicitly talks about running the GNU herd as an illegal act that one of the characters does at some point.  You get your choice of classic Windows, Mac or Linux, so hey, it's not all bad, but of course it's running on the kernel that contains the code by the Department of Homeland Security,  which is the only people who can actually access the hardware.  And the reason that it's very disturbing to me is, you know, as people like to say, the computer industry and drug traffickers are the only industries that call their customers users.  Well, DRM actually downgrades the user to a renter, which in my mind is even worse.  You're even lower.  And the trend really seems to be, as far as I can see, is towards as the legacy systems of on-premises servers are going away,  is you end up with DRM-infested user devices that you can't change in any way using web APIs to talk to computers that you don't own, clouds essentially, via hostile terms of service.  And by hostile terms of service, I mean in terms of service that say anything you put into that cloud is ours and you can't take it back out again.  Obviously, terms of service where you can actually get your own data back are better.  And these terms of services may arbitrarily change.  So, I mean, that's the world that we as engineers appear to be building for society.  And I don't think this is a terribly good idea.  So, few of the, you're missing the real shouty bit at the bottom.  So, I mean, everybody has their own DRM horror story, but I mean, it's appropriate that printer manufacturers are one of them.  HP likes Mark having self-destructing ink cartridges that will lie about how much ink they've got so you can't refill them.  Tractors and the famous quote from Bob Younger Red Hat, would you buy a car with the hood welded shut about the superiority of Red Hat and open-source software?  Well, yes, you are buying cars with the hood welded shut because if the third-party repair shops don't get access to the software to fix them or to diagnose them,  then yes, you do have to take it back to the dealer who can decide to change it and revoke your license.  You're not buying the tractor, you're getting John Deere claims you receive an implied license for the life of the vehicle.  Obviously, DRM in media, wonderful quote from my colleague Ian Hixon about the reason for DRM in media is essentially not to stop the user copying stuff  because stuff appears on copied sites all the time.  It's to put control over the makers of devices that play.  And the most shameful thing, of course, is the W3C standardizing DRM in web protocols.  That is an act of vandalism, I think, that will cause untold damage going forward.  So, oh, thank you.  Yay!  Yes, that's shame on them.  That is just outrageous and, yeah, terrible.  So, how does GPRV3 help?  Not much, really.  A little.  So, here's the interesting thing.  I know of several products, I'm not going to name them.  The requirement of using code in those products that was GPRV3 caused the companies to default from DRM closed to be able to open them up to vendor modification.  Now, I'm pretty sure if they were able to choose alternatives to that GPRV3 software under a different license or GPRV2 or whatever,  those devices would be locked down fully DRM's unable to be modified by the user.  So, you end up with a developer mode switch simply because that GPRV3 software exists and is needed on the device.  So, you know, as a free software advocate and from a free software perspective, GPRV2 isn't good enough.  It doesn't prevent the lock down of a user device.  And I really don't want people to have lock down user devices.  It's too easy for lawyers at companies to say, well, allowing the user to modify its risky, let's not do it, even though we're using GPRV3 code, let's just lock it all down.  And one of the things that we can help with is to try and educate vendors about the value of having open user communities.  And the best examples for this, I can see, excuse me, are the routers, the DDWRT and others that are fully open because of the lawsuits brought by,  I think it was the FSF in the early days.  And the other one is, I think this was from the actions by Conservancy.  I'm not 100% sure on that.  But allowing the Sammy Goh TV community where you actually have a user community that allows you to replace the firmware on your TV, which is, I mean, a great thing.  I haven't done that, but.  So how do we, so going from the shouty parts to try and be a little more positive, this was what it was supposed to be about in the first place.  How do we in the SAMBA team actually try and work with vendors and get them over their lawyers who are sort of like, you know, you're making, you're removing my comfortable GPL V2 pair of shoes and making me wear these new  hobnail boots.  I don't like them, this GPLV3 stuff.  So what we do is obviously we have to find out about them.  They have to reach out to us.  We have to communicate.  But when they do that, we try and reach out.  One of the first things I will do is offer to have a conference call or bring Conservancy lawyers to talk with their lawyers about helping them to achieve the goals that they want by using the software.  So, you know, we'll offer them legal help to interpret GPLV3.  I will usually offer them technical help to help them architect their products because a lot of these vendors, you know, at least for SAMBA, an SMB server, SMB2, even Active Directory, it's a commodity.  Very easy to get.  You have a bike from Microsoft.  You get it from others.  A bike from other vendors.  It's a very, very mature market.  There's no reason to...  There's no value in having a better SMB server than anyone else.  Everyone has a good enough SMB server.  You can use SAMBA.  You can use one of the preposterous ones.  We're all good enough.  So the value is how do we help them architect their products?  If they really want to keep something secret, if they...  That's what their commercial value is that they want to have.  How can they achieve that while still using SAMBA?  Because of course I would prefer that they would use SAMBA because having them in my community makes my community better than having them use fully proprietary software all the way down.  So I have actually helped and we have actually made changes inside SAMBA.  I know this is kind of heresy in a free software conference.  We've actually changed things to make it easier for proprietary vendors to keep code proprietary.  If it helps make SAMBA better and helps us structure our code better, I don't think it's a terrible thing to actually do that and help both of us.  And the other thing is the day of the amateur programmer turning up and doing something like SAMBA is kind of...  We do get some amateur help, but it's much less than we used to when we first started.  Although we do try and grow our programmer community that way.  The practical fact is a lot of the programmer community now who work on SAMBA, they are paid to do so.  And they are working for vendors who are using SAMBA in ever more complicated products.  So how do we try and achieve this?  Well, firstly I try and get past the help desk and the legal staff and the management and I try and get a relationship going directly with the engineers.  Because most engineers, even people working for companies that create lockdown DRM-infested products, don't want to create lockdown DRM-infested products because they're engineers too.  And they don't like, you know, if they're creating a lockdown router, they don't like the fact that if they had to buy a router, they don't want it to be locked down either.  They want it to work and they want to be able to fix it.  So try and get to the engineers, try and work with the engineers.  Try and get to them early.  The worst thing that can happen is someone to come to you and we have had this happen basically say, oh, I have this product with SAMBA and isn't it great?  I want to work with you now and you look at what they've done and they're basically linked proprietary things directly and you're like, ah, great.  It's hard to get them to redesign at that point. What we'll do in that case is we'll not normally invoke GPL violations on them.  We'll work with them.  We'll say, look, right now you have what you have, but this is how you really need to change this code to be GPL compliant and we'll help them do that.  And then of course, we encourage them to upstream their code changes.  And we have actually a great success rate with that.  We are very upfront with them about what they can do and what we'd like them to do in order to make SAMBA better.  And if they want to design things that's convenient for them and it also makes SAMBA better, then I'm happy to help.  And in fact, I put a priority on reviewing their code and helping it get upstream.  In fact, although I code a lot, a lot of what I'm doing these days is reviewing other people's code changes to SAMBA to essentially keep them happy and contributing because I'm getting more out of that than I can sit and write in a day.  So how can you make the Hobnail Boots as a GPL v3 work for your vendors?  So don't try and compromise so far that you're essentially giving away everything.  And I think Bradley is going to touch on this in his talk later on in his keynote, so I'm looking forward to that.  Essentially, you have to stand up loud and proud and you say, I'm a free software developer.  I don't like DRM.  I don't like the lockdown stuff.  I don't really want to help you do that.  I will help you use my code, I will help you integrate it with your proprietary stuff, but I'm not going to help you violate the very principles that made me create this code in the first place.  I don't want lockdown environments.  I don't want to be able to change stuff.  Let me help you create a product that does what you need and will still do that.  And it's possible.  You can have DRM lockdown devices that can be, as I've mentioned before, that can be flipped with a switch into a developer mode.  And at that point, you don't necessarily have to support it.  You don't have to support the software anymore.  You can restrict what it can do on the network, et cetera.  The GPLv3 allows for all these things.  Most, to my understanding, most corporate lawyers haven't read it other than the fact as, wow, this is much longer than V2.  It's more complex.  Why don't we just stick with V2 stuff?  So don't be too judgmental.  If you are working with Hollywood, then DRM is, if you want access to that content, then you're going to have DRM.  So be prepared to say, OK, you guys go buy someone else's SMB server or whatever.  You just can't use that stuff.  That's fine.  Just be prepared to walk away, which is always good in end negotiation.  And the other thing is, as many people have said here, it's very rare that violators are malicious.  Yeah, occasionally.  And kind of we all know who they are and where they are.  But most violators are just clueless.  My favorite one is an audio manufacturer who no source or offering any of their products or whatever.  They actually advertise as a selling point.  We have a custom Linux based product.  And I mean, that kind of disconnect is just gross stupidity.  That's not, those guys, they want to make nice audio.  They don't really, somebody gave them some software, they put it in, they're advertising it the best they know how.  Those guys are not trying to rip people off.  They're just dumb.  So be nice to them.  Be nice to them.  Okay, so other things that we've learned over the years, distribute your copyright ownership.  We have always preferred individual copyrights to corporate copyright.  And that's an interesting case.  It works on two, that kind of works on two levels.  One, sometimes corporations like that.  And originally our first contributions from Microsoft, I think, came about because they thought, I don't, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know whether this is true or not.  But they considered that they might be able to get people to work on Samba under personal copyright, which would prevent exposing Microsoft owned patents.  Because the people who were doing it were giving us personal copyright and not Microsoft copyright.  Maybe.  The other thing that smearing out copyright does is it avoids corporate capture.  Now, the Linux kernel, I think, it's pretty close to being completely corporate owned.  And once that's happened, you know, you see the fuss that happens when essentially corporate developers who are completely tied to their employer don't want to see any enforcement because it's going to damage their job.  You don't really get much real enforcement in that case.  So the other thing that GPLV3 allowed us to do is it allowed us to open up a little bit and allow some corporate copyright.  We do that now.  We will allow, we have a certificate of ownership you send in.  Once you've done that from a corporate email address, we will accept corporate copyright coming in.  One of the reasons for that is actually an interesting, I'll do it very briefly, essentially in the early days of Samba, Trig and I found out about a vendor who was violating the GPL by accident.  They had bought a company that was selling an SMB server that they had taken Samba, put it inside a BSD kernel, linked the whole thing together and shipped it.  And they were stuck. It was like, well, we're going to ship this product in three weeks. What do we do?  The new owners had realized that this was a disaster.  So Trig and I essentially, because we were such majority copyright holders, it was known by corporation, we were able to say to them, OK, we'll allow you to do this.  And the next release, do it right, which they did.  And a third party, who should remain nameless, who was paying for work in Samba, tried to assert corporate ownership over this.  And the reason that they gave for doing that was that they wanted to be able to sue other companies, essentially the Red Hat, what Richard was talking about at Red Hat,  they wanted to be able to count to sue somebody to stop them from distributing a product.  So having large amounts of corporate ownership essentially takes those decisions out of the hands of the individual developer.  And I have a great faith in the individual free software developer.  Most of them except for someone in Germany, Richard already talked about, seem to be very reasonable people.  So using it to expand your community, most users understand why DRM is bad, but they don't really understand what alternatives that they have.  Most users go for convenience and they're kind of like, well, you know, it may be DRM's, but it's very easy to use.  So you need to educate, and this is why we try to explain to our users why we use DPL v3.  Obviously we can only talk to the users on our mailing list.  You're a complicated product, so you need a lot of, most people using Samba in a complicated way need to have some interaction with this in order to use it successfully.  The guys who just buy someone else's NAS don't really do that.  But if someone does buy a NAS and they say, hey, I want to be able to modify this software, you know, for some reason it's not working for them, they want to change it.  At least we're, at that point, we're able to explain to them, yes, it's because we chose this license that we were able to give you the freedom to modify this stuff.  If we were still on DPL v2, yeah, we could give you the source code, but good luck on changing it on your box.  There's nothing you can do, and we have no redress or way of changing that whatsoever.  You know, obviously try not to be too judgmental.  There's open source developers who basically, especially in the Linux kernel, who seem to have come to the conclusion that the DPL was a bad idea and don't really want to support it anymore.  Greg Crow Hartman, who when asked when would you actually enforce, couldn't come up with a very good answer to that.  And the other thing I like to point out is that a DPL v3 developer is just a DPL v2 developer who came across a lockdown device.  Just like a conservative as a liberal who got mugged. Eventually, DPL v2 only, zealots, are going to run into an ever shrinking world of devices that they can do anything with outside of their employers,  and I don't think they're going to like the world that they're hoping to make right now.  So, it'd be nice to them when they change their mind. Ah, I kind of screwed up. It was better when I run off my laptop.  So, how does DPL v3 make the world a better place? How can you use it to make the world a better place?  So, the point, I hope, if you take away one point from this talk, I hope you realize that judicious creation of just small amounts of DPL v3 software can have a big effect on the vendor ecosystem.  If those pieces of software are critical enough, important enough, they can lever, they can be the amp that moves the rubber tree plant.  They can force things in the positive direction. And is John Sullivan here? So, FSF! Why is GLIB-C not LGPL v3? Yes, I'm talking to you.  He knew about it. He knew I was going to shout about this. I told him yesterday.  So, your flagship license, all of your software needs to be under this. It is ridiculous that GLIB-C is still under v2 only.  I know why they did it. They're frightened. They're frightened of what's happening to GCC with C-Lang. They're frightened of it happening to GLIB-C.  And my comment to them is, that's going to happen anyway. The people who don't like GPL who created C-Lang, they're going to do that to GLIB-C whether you realize it or not.  So, why not make the world a better place and stand up for the principles that you're supposed to believe in?  All right. And with that, bit of shouting. And I noticed John didn't turn up. I don't know where the slides are going to be, but wherever they are, I'll put them.  They'll be linked to the FOSTA website on the page for your talk. Thank you very much, Jeremy. We have time for maybe one or two questions.  First, to you, then to you. Hi. Thank you for your talk. Just real quick question. On your corporate capture, can you mention a few projects that you think are vulnerable to this?  And in addition, do you think that this corporate capture term can apply for non-relicensing sort of conditions? So, for example, if you have a large foundation which has a lot of control, even if it's not going to have the entire copyright ownership?  So, I mean, corporate capture can happen in many ways, but what I really mean by corporate capture is the decisions on the project being taken out of the hands of the developers.  So, I don't necessarily mean all the copyright owned by corporations or the technical decisions can still be left to developers, but if essentially the direction of the project and how it runs and what it does is not under the control of the people who wrote it, that's essentially the thing I'm trying to argue against.  So, which projects and also is Linux one of them or not? Oh, Linux is definitely one of them. I mean, I'm not sure I could name other projects straight off the bat.  I'd say that's not one of them. We actually have a very diverse community of people who hate each other mostly. They can't agree on anything. We actually had to go to... Oh, there's one more question.  I have a question about one point you did not address at all, which is when we have a system where we have safety issues and so my team is working in the automotive sector, in fact, inside Automotive Great Linux, which is a fully open project, but we still cannot use GPLV3 because this is going to taint the full system of the car.  And I think most of the people will understand that we cannot open the software of the car like we can open the software of a router. I'm not so sure that that's true.  So, as today, we've been asking the question on how if we could implement a car with a secure boot where we could protect the software, the critical software and have other software running GPLV3 that people could change, which is today not possible.  So the end result is all the automotive project I'm aware of and any other critical project like in the industry, they just prevent using GPLV3 because we don't know how to handle that risk.  Hang on a minute. You can absolutely do that. So long as you don't use... If you have a system that you think is so critical that nobody should change it, then absolutely you can't be using GPLV3.  But if you look at what of the accidents happened in automotive software, Tesla has essentially had accidents. None of that software is free software in any kind.  So just by saying I won't use GPLV3 isn't going to protect you from the lawsuits.  Okay, we have to wrap up. Thank you so much, Jeremy. I'd like to take this outside.  I'd like to take this outside. It's the software itself that matters. Thank you.
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