Bradley Kuhn
Bradley M. Kuhn is the President and Distinguished Technologist at
Software Freedom Conservancy, on the Board of Directors of the Free
Software Foundation (FSF), and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn
began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992,
when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system, and
began contributing to various Free Software projects. He worked during
the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various
companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in
Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by
the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001-2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL
enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the
Affero GPL. Kuhn was appointed President of Software Freedom Conservancy
in April 2006, was Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006-2010, and
has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum
laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an
M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's
Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free
Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source
Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft
licensing. Kuhn has a blog, is on pump.io and co-hosts the audcast, Free
as in Freedom.
Accepted Talks:
At my invited talk at DebConf15, I announced Software Freedom Conservancy's Debian Services agreement with the Debian project. Under the agreement, Conservancy provides some essential services to the Debian project. Most notably, Conservancy accepts copyright assignments and enforcement agreements from Debian contributors, and enforces those copyrights when copyleft licenses are violated. Additionally, Conservancy provides its expertise on licensing issues, project governance, and the like, in an advisory role to the Debian project.
This talk will cover what Conservancy accomplished for Debian under this services agreement, how the agreement is working so far, and what how Conservancy and Debian can work together in the coming year to make even better use of the services provided under the agreement.
Ideally, attendees will come to suggest ideas for what they'd like to see, and after a short presentation, the remaining time will be used for Q&A and discussion.
There is no Free Software project in the world with Debian's commitment to representative governance. Debian has a Constitution, recall and referendum ballot initiatives, and accountable, elected bodies. However, any representative system, no matter how well structured, has its gaps that can be exploited politically.
In this talk, I will first confess how I once used such a gap in the licensing approval process as part of package uploads to successfully reach political aims outside of Debian. I will explain how and why I did it, and why it was possible. While at the time, I was glad the system could be slightly "gamed", in hindsight, I'd like to draw the Debian's community attention this gap open for political opportunists and discuss changes in the political structure to prevent similar political exploitation in future.
Ultimately, Debian ftp-masters fully control, absent a specific General Resolution, interpretation of the DFSG. While, technically speaking, no specific package upload refusal nor approval sets any overarching Debian policy on a particular license, the ftp-masters' decisions do become a de-facto precedence-based system, much like a common-law Court system, since overturning such decisions would typically require a General Resolution in practice.
This talk will explore the socio-political ramifications of the current system of licensing decision-making in Debian, pontificate on ways it can be improved (and why it should be), and seek audience participation on whether the analysis presented is accurate and/or if the outcome of that analysis warrants changes in the existing system.