Hi,
reading the "FSFE Newsletter - October 2016" [1]
We're still not over how cool it was to see so many from our community join the FSFE Summit in September. It was a good experience and we're keen to repeat it. [...]
I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software. The speaker of that talk is head of a company selling non-free software but trying to get associated with Free Software. In the F&Q after the talk the speaker was asked about this (35'50'' into the video) and confirmed that their software is and will not be published under a Free Software license. He also said that he did not think cloud services should at all require Free Software, be it GPL or BSD.
I am quite surprised to see such a talk at an FSFE conference. In particular because the talk was not described as giving a counterpoint to Free Software. It was a straight ad talk and that should have been known to the program committee: For example, the FSFE president was recently guest at one of their dinner events and before that he had asked me about my opinion on that company (I once gave a keynote at one of their events).
A newsletter should not be silent about topics which can at least be called controversial and have been called in as an agenda topic for tomorrow's FSFE general assembly.
Shalom-Salam,
Werner
[1] https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201610.en.html [2] https://conf.qtcon.org/en/qtcon/public/events/581
Hi Werner,
I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software.
There's much more than this missing of course. The evaluation and analysis of the summit isn't completed yet but important aspects such as this where we can adapt our practice to avoid similar situations in the future. In the mentioned talk it was not obvious from the abstract or the discussions beforehand the nature of the talk, which obviously made it more difficult to plan for.
Sincerely Jonas
Hi Werner,
Werner Koch wk@gnupg.org writes:
I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software.
Thank you for pointing out that talk. I was not aware of any problems with it so far. I will watch the recording soon.
The speaker of that talk is head of a company selling non-free software but trying to get associated with Free Software.
There were a couple of speakers from that category at the summit. While that certainly makes me take a closer look and makes me more suspicious, I would not want to exclude these people from giving talks _purely_ because they work in a non-free software job. The talk needs to be about Free Software, though, of course.
In the F&Q after the talk the speaker was asked about this (35'50'' into the video) and confirmed that their software is and will not be published under a Free Software license. He also said that he did not think cloud services should at all require Free Software, be it GPL or BSD.
Ok, this is a serious problem.
It was a straight ad talk and that should have been known to the program committee:
I disagree. I was on the program committee and given the same circumstances, I would approve the talk again. The abstract (the same that is on the QtCon page) has a clear focus on Free Software.
For example, the FSFE president was´ recently guest at one of their dinner events and before that he had asked me about my opinion on that company (I once gave a keynote at one of their events).
I don't know. Perhaps Matthias should have known, but I am really not sure. The description of the talk was good and if Matthias had said something negative about the speaker, the committee would probably still have voted for the talk because of the content it was supposed to have. I think if Matthias used some sort of veto on talks, that would not make anyone happy either.
Again, I was cautious with any suggested talk that came from people working for companies that use and promote a lot of non-free software. Sometimes the talk still sounded very much focussed on what the company does _for_ Free Software or perhaps how the speaker fights for Free Software within the company. I want those talks at a summit, but I agree with you that the talk in question here was a bad choice in hindsight.
Happy hacking! Florian
On Tuesday 11. October 2016 07.43.18 Florian Snow wrote:
Werner Koch wk@gnupg.org writes:
I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software.
Thank you for pointing out that talk. I was not aware of any problems with it so far. I will watch the recording soon.
From the talk page...
"2016 marks the 500th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot, the ‘German Beer Purity Law’."
That already set the alarm bells ringing for me. Not only is this topic tenuously connected with data management standards for public Internet services...
"For this reason we propose a set of Honest Internet Purity Laws to uphold trustworthy and open internet services as a required standard."
...but since it's also something that Norwegian "beer bores" would constantly bring up while justifying the local monoculture of low-quality, mass-market pilsners (until everybody and their dog started making their own microbrews), it shows that we're not all starting out with the same cultural perspective and thus the same receptiveness to the talk's premises. And from this niche cultural reference stretched out over the frame of an analogy, I guess things just get more and more muddled from there.
But returning to the topic, sorry...
The speaker of that talk is head of a company selling non-free software but trying to get associated with Free Software.
There were a couple of speakers from that category at the summit. While that certainly makes me take a closer look and makes me more suspicious, I would not want to exclude these people from giving talks _purely_ because they work in a non-free software job. The talk needs to be about Free Software, though, of course.
It seems like the company offers the Open-XChange product which is GPLv2- licensed, perhaps as part of an "open core" offering. There seem to be other "open core" offerings on the company's site: I doubt that we're talking about any AGPLv3-licensed services where you can get the exact code running those "trustworthy and open" services.
In the F&Q after the talk the speaker was asked about this (35'50'' into the video) and confirmed that their software is and will not be published under a Free Software license. He also said that he did not think cloud services should at all require Free Software, be it GPL or BSD.
Ok, this is a serious problem.
That sounds like "bait and switch" to me.
I'm not a conference enthusiast any more, and talk selection was always something that didn't appeal to me, but browsing conference sites makes me think that vague talk abstracts (or even no actual abstract, "more information soon", stuff indicating an invited speaker, that kind of thing) together with no evidence of additional materials and hardly any peripheral information about the topic just shouldn't be accepted. And any notion of "the big reveal" of some previously unknown project, where you might expect a lack of existing public material, is just annoying: such things hardly ever live up to the hype.
But since I wasn't at the summit/event, please attach as little weight to my opinion as is deemed appropriate.
Paul
Hello,
On 11 Oct 2016, at 22:11, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org mailto:wk@gnupg.org> writes:
I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software.
Thank you for pointing out that talk. I was not aware of any problems with it so far. I will watch the recording soon.
I agree the talk was not what we expected and nothing we should endorse. But I don’t see this being a topic for the newsletter. We need to keep it in mind as “lessons learned” for future summits. Do we already have a process for that?
Best,
Mirko.
On 2016-10-14 14:15, Mirko Boehm - FSFE wrote:
On 11 Oct 2016, at 22:11, Paul Boddie <paul@boddie.org.uk mailto:paul@boddie.org.uk> wrote:
Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org mailto:wk@gnupg.org> writes:
I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software.
Thank you for pointing out that talk. I was not aware of any problems with it so far. I will watch the recording soon.
I agree the talk was not what we expected and nothing we should endorse. But I don’t see this being a topic for the newsletter. We need to keep it in mind as “lessons learned” for future summits. Do we already have a process for that?
I fully agree. A lessons learned process will help us to learn from this kind of events and to find ways to implement more accurate criteria in the future. Even if it will never be possible to completely avoid such events from happening.
A good example for me was a talk by Monty at the SFScon13:
https://www.sfscon.it/talks/free-open-source-software-entrepreneurship/
He was basically advocating for his Business Source Licensing idea and had an animated discussion at the Q&A session with Carlo Piana afterwards.
I learned that even respected FLOSS people not always deliver a talk which is in line with what the organisation team has planned.
Patrick
On Friday 14. October 2016 14.49.35 Patrick Ohnewein wrote:
I fully agree. A lessons learned process will help us to learn from this kind of events and to find ways to implement more accurate criteria in the future. Even if it will never be possible to completely avoid such events from happening.
A good example for me was a talk by Monty at the SFScon13:
https://www.sfscon.it/talks/free-open-source-software-entrepreneurship/
He was basically advocating for his Business Source Licensing idea and had an animated discussion at the Q&A session with Carlo Piana afterwards.
I learned that even respected FLOSS people not always deliver a talk which is in line with what the organisation team has planned.
Well, Widenius managed to cultivate a reputation from selling his business to Sun/Oracle and then demanding that they practically give it straight back to him - by advocating that Oracle permissively license the MySQL code - presumably so that Widenius' new business could incorporate it into his competing product and accompanying proprietary licensing model. (As far as I understand and remember the situation. Clarifications and corrections welcome!)
There are other people who were aligned with Free Software interests at one point in time but who advocate incompatible or hostile interests now, not mentioning any names, but I'm sure people can think of some fairly readily. It just means that "reputation" isn't necessarily a guarantee of suitability: it's the content that matters.
Paul
On 2016-10-14 15:56, Paul Boddie wrote:
There are other people who were aligned with Free Software interests at one point in time but who advocate incompatible or hostile interests now, not mentioning any names, but I'm sure people can think of some fairly readily. It just means that "reputation" isn't necessarily a guarantee of suitability: it's the content that matters.
I agree. The challenge is to predict the content ;-)
Patrick