- MCP server with stdio transport for local use - Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series - 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts - Data loader with in-memory JSON storage 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
469 lines
34 KiB
Plaintext
469 lines
34 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 229
|
|
Title: HPR0229: CopyFight Vol 4 - SFL Podcast
|
|
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0229/hpr0229.mp3
|
|
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:26:42
|
|
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hi, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
|
|
I'm 330, and this is Copy Fight.
|
|
Hi, everybody, I'm going to take this episode of Copy Fight to let you guys know about
|
|
a new podcast called the Software Freedom Law Center podcast.
|
|
It's from the Software Freedom Law Center.
|
|
And I'm going to play it at the end of this little intro here.
|
|
In this episode, they go through how they began at the Software Freedom Law Center and
|
|
a little bit of their background of just, you know, personal stuff.
|
|
It's really just a kind of, let you know about the hosts kind of thing.
|
|
If you guys really dig this, I'll be, I can put more of them into HPR's feed.
|
|
If you don't like them, let me know and I won't do it.
|
|
It is licensed under creative commons, attribution, no derivatives.
|
|
So I will be playing it in its full length.
|
|
I'll just add the file right on to the end of what I'm saying.
|
|
So here is episode zero of the Software Freedom Law Center podcast.
|
|
Hi, I'm Karen Sandler.
|
|
Hello, I'm Bradley Coon.
|
|
And welcome to the zero episode of the Software Freedom Law Show.
|
|
Zero with episode.
|
|
Yeah, that's my fault, isn't it?
|
|
It is. Bradley, why don't you tell us about it?
|
|
Well, you should start everything numbering at zero.
|
|
That's the standard, right?
|
|
I mean, that's what things start at.
|
|
Bradley numbers all of his numbered lists and emails starting with zero rather than one.
|
|
Well, it's the whole number.
|
|
It's the first whole number.
|
|
It's true.
|
|
It's like the zero's law.
|
|
I don't even know.
|
|
Oh, it's the dynamics.
|
|
OK, well, why don't we keep up by explaining why this is the zero with episode?
|
|
Well, it's not just because I like starting numbering at zero, though, that's the primary
|
|
reason I suppose.
|
|
The other reason is that this episode will probably be somewhat, well, first of all,
|
|
everybody's first episode of a podcast is horrible.
|
|
I've listened to every Linux and free software and open source podcast out there.
|
|
And all the first episodes are not very good.
|
|
Bradley is our podcast monitor at SFLC.
|
|
Not a monitor, because it's only my home monitor or something.
|
|
Bradley is the past.
|
|
No, Bradley does the favor of reporting back to us about the important information included
|
|
on podcasts.
|
|
So they said that we don't also listen to them.
|
|
And their first end or zero with episode is always the worst episode.
|
|
So for our zero with episode, what we thought we'd do is just explain what the software
|
|
freedom law center is, what the software freedom conservancy is, and introduce you to
|
|
your hosts, me and Karen.
|
|
And then we'll move on to a much more interesting thing for the first episode.
|
|
So if you already know all about us and our organizations that we're involved with,
|
|
you could probably just skip this whole podcast.
|
|
Or if you just don't like listening to the first episode of any podcast.
|
|
But yeah, I was listening to it.
|
|
It's fun to see you.
|
|
You can give most improved awards.
|
|
You know, because they improve so much by the second episode or first episode depending
|
|
on how you started numbering.
|
|
Actually, the zero with this, the first technically speaking.
|
|
That's true.
|
|
But I like when you use ordinal numbers, there is no zero ordinal number.
|
|
Well, okay.
|
|
So why don't we start out, Bradley, by talking about how the SFLC was founded?
|
|
So it was formed in March 2005.
|
|
And where it came from was a lot of work that I have been doing while it was executive
|
|
director of the Free Software Foundation, along with Evan Moglin and Dan Ravisher,
|
|
who were legal counsel to the FSF at the time.
|
|
We were doing all sorts of interesting legal work for the FSF and for its new project.
|
|
And we felt that it would be really good if that work could be expanded beyond just
|
|
the new project.
|
|
Because there's so much legal work that a free software or open source project needs
|
|
help with.
|
|
There's copyrights, trademarks, governance issues that we'll talk about in a minute.
|
|
Those sorts of things that Evan and Dan really helped the FSF do.
|
|
And we thought it would be good for everybody to get access to that.
|
|
Instead of just projects that are affiliated themselves with the new project and therefore
|
|
the FSF.
|
|
So what Evan did is went out and formed an organization and Dan and I came on as the
|
|
part of the founding team to give those kinds of legal services to all sorts of open source
|
|
and free software projects.
|
|
No matter what license they have.
|
|
That's correct.
|
|
Yeah, we didn't want to make against any particular license.
|
|
Obviously, I'm a big fan of the GPL and I've been associated with the Afero GPL in particular.
|
|
But there's lots of great open source and free software under every license from Afero
|
|
GPL to GPL to LGPL to Apache license to regular ISC and BSD licenses.
|
|
So we wanted to make available these legal services to any project of any kind under any
|
|
license as long as they were two things under an open source and free software license.
|
|
And we're operating in a not-for-profit way of some sort.
|
|
And that was the founding of S.V.L.C. that was in what month of 2005?
|
|
March of 2005.
|
|
Okay, because I joined in October.
|
|
Correct.
|
|
So that was, I guess, six months later.
|
|
Yep.
|
|
And now we are, I guess, we are six lawyers and two admin staff.
|
|
Two admin staff with a total of nine employees.
|
|
Yeah, yeah.
|
|
I'm somewhere halfway in between of a policy person and a lawyer.
|
|
I'm not a lawyer myself, but I'm involved in lots of the legal work that we do in a policy
|
|
sort of role.
|
|
That's right.
|
|
And you're surrounded by lawyers constantly.
|
|
Yeah, you know, it's not a bad thing.
|
|
I mean, I think that the type of issues that come up that we're trying to solve are sometimes
|
|
things that hackers need to be educated about.
|
|
And we're here for them to help them learn about issues of copyright and what license they
|
|
should put their project under.
|
|
And once they've decided on a license, how do they build their copyright structure?
|
|
Do they take assignments?
|
|
Do they each person hold their own copyright?
|
|
How does that interact with employment agreements, those sorts of things?
|
|
Then there's patent issues, of course, which occasionally a project will run into someone
|
|
with an unfriendly patent to free software.
|
|
And we help out and we've done that a number of times.
|
|
And there's trademark issues, which I know you've dealt with quite a bit for some of the
|
|
clients.
|
|
And then just anything else that comes up in the course of doing a free software project
|
|
with legal issues we help with.
|
|
And I'm always really impressed actually with our clients because they are, I think that
|
|
the free software community in particular is so tuned into the legal issues that affect
|
|
them.
|
|
And it's fascinating to me to see just how much they know already and then it's great
|
|
to be there to help them the rest of the way as legal experts.
|
|
Yeah, of course, there's a lot of misinformation and confusing information out there as well.
|
|
It's unfortunate that we have so many people in the community that apply it on legal issues
|
|
who don't really understand.
|
|
And one of the things we hope to do with this podcast is to make the level of legal knowledge
|
|
in open source and free software community at a higher level by giving more education
|
|
and more information.
|
|
That's one of our goals as an organization is to help people understand the legal issues
|
|
that surround open source and free software and make sure that they know what they need
|
|
to know.
|
|
Because there's only a subset that they actually need to be aware of on a day-to-day basis
|
|
to be able to operate.
|
|
And then when they need more detailed stuff, they can of course come to us and get advice.
|
|
And we're always in a situation where we're somewhat limited about what we can talk about
|
|
because most of the work that we do is client-specific work.
|
|
It's all governed by attorney-client privilege and therefore we can't really talk to the public
|
|
about it too much.
|
|
So we thought this would be a good forum to talk about some of the issues that affect
|
|
free and open source software where we won't have to talk about what our clients in particular
|
|
are doing.
|
|
But we can still talk about the issues and provide public education.
|
|
Yeah, it's a really tough challenge for us.
|
|
We like to talk about as much as we can, the work that we do, and most 501-C3 charities
|
|
like ourselves want to get information out there about what they're doing.
|
|
But our first goal and first duty is to the clients who have taken our advice and need
|
|
our confidential advice.
|
|
So we'll do our best to distill some knowledge that we have and to general ways as we also
|
|
have on our resource page if you want to read more about things that we've done.
|
|
You can do that.
|
|
And we'll try to distill some of that knowledge into a nice 30-minute podcast each week.
|
|
And to keep our podcast on track in our zero episode, we should now, I guess we should
|
|
segue and talk about the software freedom conservancy and what it does.
|
|
Yeah, in fact, I mentioned during my list of things we help with as governance issues.
|
|
And it's kind of interesting what happened when we first started getting our first five
|
|
or six clients, mostly you were doing a lot of work to help them do a non-profit to
|
|
get incorporated and started.
|
|
That's right.
|
|
Over and over again, I was dealing with free software projects that needed to incorporate.
|
|
And that was for a number of reasons.
|
|
My favorite reason is actually projects that received Google Summer of Code checks.
|
|
And the developers that received them didn't want to take them personally, mostly because
|
|
the money that they received for Summer of Code, they wanted to devote to the project, but
|
|
also because if they cast it, it would be personal income.
|
|
Yeah, that's a really tough problem.
|
|
You know, when you're a group of developers, most free software developers, they have sort
|
|
of the canonical free software developer, LoaKC, is an independent contractor.
|
|
It does lots of different work for different clients.
|
|
As part of their ability to serve those clients, they're developing this open source and
|
|
free software around what they do.
|
|
So their work on the open source and free software is actually separate from that consulting
|
|
work.
|
|
It's just sort of feeding their ability to do that.
|
|
So when they were working on the project, they want it to be available in sort of a
|
|
not-for-profit way, but most of them don't have an official organization.
|
|
There's just sort of a loosely organized band.
|
|
I think sometimes it's an unincorporated association.
|
|
An unincorporated association.
|
|
What does that mean?
|
|
You say that all the time.
|
|
It's a lot of different state-by-state, so I won't bore our listeners.
|
|
I've done too much detail, but suffice it to say that we were incorporating project after
|
|
project in the same way.
|
|
So we were filing the articles of incorporation.
|
|
We were helping them find the right board of directors.
|
|
Right.
|
|
So each organization needs a whole bunch of people to make a project.
|
|
Right.
|
|
No matter how it was structured originally, no matter how it naturally developed, whether
|
|
there was a lead maintainer or a committee or just a couple of people, no matter how it
|
|
had naturally organized, it would need a board of directors, just like any other organization
|
|
because it was governed by state and federal law.
|
|
Right.
|
|
So you can see by state minimums of how many directors you need on the board.
|
|
Exactly.
|
|
And usually you need, although it's not always required.
|
|
You usually need some sort of president who's going to follow the day-to-day equipment.
|
|
Right.
|
|
Mostly it requires certain officers, but it varies so they're all pretty dependent on require means.
|
|
Right.
|
|
And a lot of people, even some states require them some states, don't as I understand it,
|
|
but a lot of people need a treasure or so many people to track the funds coming in.
|
|
That's right.
|
|
It's required by the state.
|
|
They need that kind of staffing.
|
|
Right.
|
|
And that's actually what we've seen many times is where the officer situation breaks down
|
|
because especially a volunteer treasurer, that is a lot of work, you know, looking after
|
|
the finances of an organization and, you know, keeping all our seats and maintaining all
|
|
the books and making all the annual filings.
|
|
It's just, it's a lot of work.
|
|
And usually the people who are involved in a free software project are there because they
|
|
love to code.
|
|
They want to write the software, not worry about the organization.
|
|
Or write documentation.
|
|
Or write documentation.
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
They're not there.
|
|
They're not there.
|
|
People have become a huge software projects because they're really excited to collect
|
|
receipts.
|
|
Right.
|
|
We do administrative work.
|
|
So what we basically discovered when we incorporate each of these non-profits finding
|
|
the people to do all those jobs made a real challenge for the projects because they had
|
|
to devote resources, basically individuals' time, that would normally go into coding and documentation
|
|
into this administrative work. So what we did was form a separate organization, which is designed
|
|
just to be that infrastructure for any free software project that needs it and applies to join.
|
|
So it's basically an umbrella organization. Exactly. It's called an umbrella organization.
|
|
And it means that projects can join the umbrella without having to change the way that they're
|
|
set up. So instead of having to take the project and find people who want to be directors for
|
|
that project, instead that project can keep whatever management structure that already had,
|
|
whether it was consensus or some other organization, and just join the conservancy.
|
|
And so you often analogize it, so they've become almost like a division of a company.
|
|
Yeah, sort of legally, sort of you can analogize it from like a corporate entity standpoint.
|
|
Yeah, you can say that they're divisions of a company. There's only one board and that's at the
|
|
very top. And we only have to file one tax return and only one annual report. And that takes
|
|
care of all the New York filings, it takes care of all the other stuff. And it also has one
|
|
infrastructure for admin activities, like reimbursing expenses. Of course, that's mostly you brother.
|
|
Actually service the president of this organization. And what we do is we handle the administrative work
|
|
of the financial aspects and all the types of administrative tasks for the projects. They join
|
|
and sign up and they continue on coding. They then have the ability to keep restricted donations
|
|
that come into the software freedom conservancy and they're earmarked as directed for a given
|
|
project. And each project then has a balance within the conservancy of funds that they can
|
|
spend on any activity that's forwarding the 501 c3 mission of conservancy, which is a very
|
|
general mission of advancing open source and free software development. So things like sending
|
|
developers to conferences and getting reimbursements for their expenses while they're at those conferences.
|
|
And also helping projects. Yeah, and then funding the end is setting up conferences. We've
|
|
done a little bit of that and even funding active development work. So in a couple of cases,
|
|
developers are getting funds from the conservancy. So these companies that benefit from the open
|
|
source and free software that has been developed donate back to the conservancy. And then the
|
|
conservancy can pay as a contractor a developer to continue doing some of the work. So that works out
|
|
I think really well for projects that need the infrastructure of a nonprofit organization.
|
|
But don't have all this extra administrative staff to do. And it was really innovative idea
|
|
rather than incorporating a nonprofit for each project that came along to us for help. We needed
|
|
help with these kinds of governance issues. We now can say, well, of course, we've helped a few
|
|
that have a different sort of desire to have their own nonprofit or they simply have enough people
|
|
that they can incorporate themselves or they can join the conservancy. Right. So it saves our time,
|
|
but mostly, most importantly, it saves the time of the projects that join. Yeah, I didn't
|
|
ongoing basis, too, because they don't have to keep up that board of directors and presidents,
|
|
so forth if they don't want to. And of course, they can always spin off out of the conservancy as well.
|
|
Absolutely. And just to be a geeky lawyer here, Bradley and I are both officers of the conservancy,
|
|
but we're also staff members of the SFLC. Yeah, it's a common confusion that people have,
|
|
you know, we form the conservancy basically within a year of forming SFLC. And so a lot of people
|
|
don't understand that they are separate organizations. They're separate boards that don't,
|
|
they're very similar laughing, but they're the majority is they're controlled by completely
|
|
different people. Yeah, the way I think of it is we have two organizations so that we can serve
|
|
the broad spectrum of needs that these projects have. So through the SFLC side, which is,
|
|
which is where the actual employees are, we can service the needs of legal issues and questions
|
|
and being lawyers for open source and free software projects. And then through the conservancy side,
|
|
we can handle the more administrative burden and organizational and governance burden. And by
|
|
having the staff's coordinated so well together, we're able to provide a large spectrum of services
|
|
that open source and free software projects need. And we'll talk a little bit more about all of that
|
|
in the next segment. Yep.
|
|
So hey, Karen, did you notice how noisy that, I guess, siren was during the last segment?
|
|
Oh, it's New York.
|
|
Yes, people should probably be told that we're recording here from our offices,
|
|
the software freedom law centers offices in New York City.
|
|
In Manhattan. Yeah, in the southwest side of Manhattan. So there's this constant,
|
|
you know, it's like it's like that joke in the Space Balls movie about the sirens in Paris,
|
|
how they're always sound, it's like that in New York City too, although they sound different.
|
|
Just constant noise of sirens going off all the time. And you moved here from Boston,
|
|
it's not as loud in Boston. Well, it's not really. I went on work to the Free Software Foundation
|
|
for about six years. I was actually employee in Boston of the Free Software Foundation.
|
|
It's not as loud there. There's an area there where it's not as close to the...
|
|
I've been there. I've been there for a long time, but I'm so done with it.
|
|
It's funny. You know, people think of, in fact, there's a reporter named Hywa Thabray,
|
|
who insists on, when he writes articles about the FSF, he always has the sort of,
|
|
your local org makes good, kind of way of writing about. He writes for the tech page in Boston.
|
|
And he always says Cambridge-based Free Software Foundation. I guess because that's where
|
|
Stalin, the founder of FSF's offices, and their offices actually were in Cambridge in the late
|
|
80s and early 90s, but they're in Boston now. But I think that the feel of Cambridge,
|
|
you know, where, you know, Richard Stalin and Noam Chomsky and MIT and all that stuff is,
|
|
it makes it more fitting with the FSF and the way people think of it.
|
|
So when you became an employee of the FSF, you were volunteering at the FSF first?
|
|
Yeah. Well, yeah, I started volunteering very early on right after college in 1995.
|
|
My story, actually, of how I got into Free Software was, I was working on an AT&T 3B2
|
|
UNIX system, and I didn't like VI. Primarily because there were no, no streams and
|
|
sockets on the system, and there was no job control, so you couldn't hit control Z and get back
|
|
to a shell. So you would have to shell out of VI. So I would-
|
|
And as an aside to our readers, we occasionally have this VI UNIX to be-
|
|
Yeah, you're a VI user. But anyway, I wasn't VI user first, right? And so,
|
|
although we called it VI, which was the thing, I don't know, people think I'm crazy.
|
|
Yeah, I've never heard it called VI until I came to FSF.
|
|
Well, my first job, we all called it VI. I mean, that was what we called it. I was surprised
|
|
when I heard people say VI. Anyway, so I was using VI and would have to shell out to get a
|
|
shell. So I would spend the whole day like working on a file and then shelling out to compile,
|
|
and then I'd open another file, and then I'd have to stack shell VI, shell VI, shell VI all the way
|
|
up because I couldn't suspend anything. And so I'd have to push on my way all the way back out.
|
|
So what I really wanted was an editor that could edit two files at once. And this is 1991,
|
|
so VIM didn't exist. There was no way to edit two files and VI at once in those days.
|
|
So I got EMAX. And the weird thing as some old GleeMAX users will know is that there was this
|
|
big argument about what control H should do. And Stalin believed very strongly control H should
|
|
always be help. Yes, it should always be help, right? But on a lot of terminals, control H is
|
|
backspace. Right. And Stalin thought there should be a delete keen out of backspace. I don't
|
|
really know the deep full details of the backspace versus delete argument, although I know it was
|
|
related to the EMAX fork in some ways. And I, of course, had a terminal with control H being backspace.
|
|
So every time I had backspace, I would get help until I finally figured I had to change it all.
|
|
But if you got help and then you hit certain characters, you'd get things like a copy of the
|
|
GNU manifesto displayed or a copy of the GPL. So in 1991, I first read the GNU manifesto because
|
|
I got it by accident. Could be okay. And I've read the GPL. And I was, I was very clever in a way.
|
|
Yeah. I've always, people I've essentially read that before.
|
|
Exactly. I wonder if the whole thing was about this issue of forcing people to read the documents.
|
|
Stalin intended that with the control H thing. Anyway, but worked on me because I read those things
|
|
and I was sure that free software was the only way to do software from then on, basically.
|
|
So as a big fan of free software and open source and I installed Linux at 0.9 patch level 12 was my
|
|
first kernel in 99 rather. It was in 90 beginning, very, very beginning of 92, 0.99 patch level 12.
|
|
That was my first kernel version. And I installed it using SLS, which was the one that basically
|
|
the first distribution, which eventually became slackware when the SLS guys stopped maintaining it.
|
|
So I've been a fan and user free software since around 1992. And I got involved as a volunteer
|
|
for the FSF in 1996, first doing various website things. And I helped to do the licensing page where
|
|
it has the list of licenses and so forth. I wrote to Stalin said, why isn't there a list of page?
|
|
Yeah, this is a very common thing with the FSF. I wrote to Stalin and said, you really should have
|
|
a list of licenses to explain all the licenses and what they mean. And whether or not they're GPL
|
|
compatible and all this thing. And he said, would you like to do that? And so I ended up doing it.
|
|
So that was the late 90s as I volunteered for the FSF. And I ended up going to graduate school in
|
|
Cincinnati at the University of Cincinnati. So that was like 97 to 2000. And Cincinnati must be
|
|
quieter than New York. Cincinnati is definitely quieter than New York. It's especially the area that I
|
|
was in although there's a lot more cars in Cincinnati than there is in New York and away because
|
|
everybody has a car. I wonder, I would like to know that actually whether there are more cars.
|
|
It feels like there's more cars. You can't go to the grocery store without a car. It's hard.
|
|
Right. Right. So yeah, so I spent a number of years there sort of hiding out. I mean,
|
|
basically I went to grad school because I didn't want to do proprietary software development
|
|
anymore. I hated it or or assistant administration work as I was doing. I just decided I was never
|
|
going to do it again. So I figured I'd go hide in academia and hope that I would never have to do
|
|
proprietary software again. And it ended up working out because I had it. Yeah, I have not. In fact,
|
|
I removed Windows from my computer in 1999 as I had a dual-bus system only to run quicken.
|
|
And then GNU cache got stable enough that I could use that. Good quicken was the last proprietary
|
|
program I used on a regular basis. And I was able to get rid of that and switch to GNU cache.
|
|
So since 2000, I've been fully free software user only. So that's been good.
|
|
And so I got hired by the FSF when I finished my master's degree as a full-time.
|
|
After volunteering. Yeah, after volunteering for a number of years. Actually, I was hired part
|
|
time and I worked for a year part time while I was in Cincinnati and that was hired full-time
|
|
in 2001. And I somehow got promoted from assistant to vice president to executive director,
|
|
which was really weird. Well, what happened was I went to Stalman in the beginning of 2001 and said,
|
|
you know, people aren't taking me seriously when I email them because my title is assistant
|
|
to Richard Stalman. So they don't take me seriously. Okay, so we'll call you the vice president then.
|
|
So then I was the vice president and then, you know, within six months I was the executive director.
|
|
So it's when you're in a small organization, these things happen.
|
|
I actually don't know the answer to this. How many years were you the executive director of the
|
|
five years basically? Oh, okay. So I was in play for about about seven to six and a half,
|
|
you know, maybe seven somewhere in there. Depending on, you know, where you put my employment
|
|
starting at versus volunteer time because I started getting paid very, you know, for a couple
|
|
of hours here and there, I eventually became part time and full-time. Sort of mapping my own timeline
|
|
against that. I guess I was in law school. No, I was I was an engineering school when you were
|
|
volunteer. Right. Your undergraduate degree is in it's in engineering. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah,
|
|
that's I forget that sometimes because I think if you as a lawyer, if you're a park, if you're
|
|
using VI, you know, they can see program in Fortran, right? Fortran was really a Fortran and see.
|
|
That was, you know, most relevant for engineers. So that's what we learned. Well, it depends on
|
|
others. Well, in in 1995, I guess, you know, that that was the case. Yeah, it's sadly still the case
|
|
in so many segments. Well, I don't know if it's sadly. I mean, if so much useful, there's so
|
|
much there's so many useful programs out there in Fortran that, you know, it's going to stay
|
|
relevant for some time. I think it was in Pascal. But then I went to law school. Yeah. So,
|
|
what inspires an engineer to go to law school? What was the, you know, it's interesting. I think,
|
|
I think I just wanted to sort of go to the problem solving for people because before I was in
|
|
this sort of problem solving from first scientific principles. And I was very, very interested in
|
|
people. I ran that, you know, the student council in college. And I was just really curious. So,
|
|
so I went to law school from from that regard. And when I was in law schools, you know,
|
|
Evan Muglin was my professor. So that sort of was my first, my first taste of of of all this.
|
|
Yeah, back when he was, well, he still is obsessed with Pearl, but it was really obsessed with
|
|
Pearl. Oh, yeah. One of the first things that he said to me was, learn Pearl. I actually submitted
|
|
it as one of my essays to him, a choosing your own essay essay, where because we were, we had
|
|
a really strict word limit. So you can only give him a thousand words. So I just, you know, gave him a
|
|
a little thing where he would answer questions saying about what his view was on the issue. And he
|
|
would get the essay that was tailored to him that was exactly a thousand. It was really geeky,
|
|
but it was written in C. And he was like, why are you writing in C? You don't expect from a law
|
|
professor. Well, Evan's issue is he did APL programming for too long as a, as a young man. And now,
|
|
it's the parts of Pearl that are like APL are the only ones he likes. It's, it's often too bad.
|
|
What Larry has this problem as well, to some extent, that there is, there are things about Pearl
|
|
that are very APL focused. You know, I was on my thesis committee as a grad student.
|
|
Oh, I had my thesis was related to Pearl and trying to port it to the job of virtual machine,
|
|
which was a crazy thing to do. But there are reasons. And some other technical podcasts,
|
|
I'll explain what I was doing and why parrot is the future and such things. But that's probably off
|
|
topic for, for, to get on topic. But we're, where are we now? I guess we're talking about our
|
|
histories. Yeah. And so, and so you're, you know, you, you, you have this connection between
|
|
engineering and law that we're going to talk a, actually our next as a preview to our next
|
|
podcast, we're going to talk in detail about that. But, but it sort of brings you back to that
|
|
community of, of scientists and, and, and engineers coming back to, to, we're coming to work for the
|
|
SLC. Yeah, absolutely. Because after law school, I went and became a finance lawyer, where I did a
|
|
lot of securities law, which, which was really interesting. And in fact, did, did use a lot of my
|
|
technical skills because I was working mostly on financing of technical companies. But, um, but it,
|
|
it was much less directly involved. So I was really happy to get back to this. Basically, I,
|
|
I, I guess I just had enough with being a finance lawyer and I'd worked in London and, um,
|
|
New York and a little bit in Hong Kong. And, um, a lot of my clients from Brazil and that was
|
|
pretty fun. But I, at one point, I just realized that, you know, I was spending a lot of time
|
|
working on things I didn't really care very much about. You see, this is why I never ended up
|
|
being a lawyer because, because all of you have that, what, what, what, I think of it as a dark
|
|
period, where, where, I mean, it's the whole structure of the system is very strange because you
|
|
go into this too many, right? You have all this debt that you have to pay off. So you end up having
|
|
to work, uh, basically for, you know, people who I would never want to work for. Um, yeah, it was
|
|
rough at times, but, um, but it was overall, it was, it was pretty fun, especially at the beginning.
|
|
We said one of the, one of the things you told me before about the interesting aspect of what
|
|
you did in securities law is, is making sure that people met the, the regulations of doing
|
|
IPOs and other types of, yeah, I like to say that securities law is the, sort of, the, the best
|
|
place for an idealist to be in a law firm because securities lawyers are, are gatekeeper attorneys,
|
|
they're regulatory lawyers and you have to make your clients disclose to the public,
|
|
whatever is material that you discover. And you have to look at all their documents and you
|
|
have to ask tough questions of the CEOs of the company and, and, and really get that information
|
|
across. And if they won't publish it, then you can't give an opinion and the deal can't get,
|
|
get done. And I've never been in a situation where they wouldn't want the deal done. So they
|
|
disclosed the information and then the, the public was much better off. So it was, in that instance,
|
|
I really liked it a lot, but, um, but it, it certainly wasn't, um, something I could focus,
|
|
you know, much of my life on. Yeah, I mean, but it's impressive that, you know, you and the other
|
|
attorneys that we've, uh, been able to hire here, you know, you've, you've stepped out of that
|
|
law firm world and come to do non-profit work. I think you, you actually wanted to, you
|
|
actually made this decision to leave the law firm and come try to do something non-profit. Yeah,
|
|
that, that was exactly my stated reason for leaving and the partner that I worked with at the
|
|
law firm looked at me quite skeptically when I told him not what I was doing and he said, well,
|
|
I hope it works out for you. But, um, but then shortly after I quit, actually, I heard that Evan
|
|
had started SFLC. I mean, I think he had also heard that I had quit. And, um, and so we got together
|
|
and realized that there was a good place for me here. And it's, it was sort of the, the dream job,
|
|
I probably could never have jumped up at a try. Well, I mean, I think that's, that's part of what
|
|
our organization is trying to do is make, is make legal talent like yours available to
|
|
free software developers be able to get those kinds of, I mean, basically, let, you know,
|
|
going through the law firm structure, you learn so much about how the law works and how to apply
|
|
it to new situations and, and to be able to bring you guys in and, and, and be able to take that
|
|
talent and apply it to the free software world. I mean, that was sort of the dream that Evan had
|
|
for the organization was to be able to do that. And in, in my case, I had a lot of, you know,
|
|
corporate finance experience and that translates really, really well to nonprofit corporate
|
|
and tax. Right. So when I first came to SFLC, that was most of what I was doing was, um, and I,
|
|
you still tend to that. The question of what I do is, is, is advising our, our nonprofit clients about
|
|
how to, either how to organize or how to, how to maintain their operations, how to set up scholarship
|
|
programs and, uh, enter the contracts they need to. And so that's translated really well. And then
|
|
I've been able to do the copyright and trademark, um, you know, and, and, and other related areas of
|
|
law, which are so important to what we do. Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's really, I, it's really excellent
|
|
that we've been able to do this. And I hope that over the next, uh, as long as we keep this podcast
|
|
going, that we're able to help the community understand what we're doing. I mean, I've gotten this
|
|
basic introduction to who we are, who the organizations are. And we're going to hopefully cover a
|
|
topic, uh, every week that is of interest. And we're going to have a guest every week in this segment
|
|
where we've been talking, uh, to each other, sort of interviewing each other. That will be, uh,
|
|
interview every two weeks, uh, with somebody involved in open source and free software, uh, law.
|
|
We have an excellent guest whom I won't spoil by telling you. You're going to find out next,
|
|
next episode, uh, for our first, first guest. And, uh, we're really looking forward to helping the
|
|
community learn more about the legal issues of open source and free software on our software
|
|
freedom law show. And we look forward to seeing you next time. That's it for episode zero of the
|
|
software freedom law show.
|
|
The software freedom law show was produced by Dan Lynch of HalfBakeMedia.com.
|
|
Thank you for listening to HalfBakeMedia.com.
|
|
Thank you for listening to HalfBakeMedia.com.
|