LaForge's home page (Posts about conference)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/tags/conference.atom2022-06-21T07:49:57ZHarald WelteNikolaKeynote at Black Duck Korea Open Source Conferencehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20160527-bdoscon/2016-05-27T03:00:00+02:002016-05-27T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>I've been <a class="reference external" href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20160527-bdoscon/">giving a keynote at the Black Duck Korea Open Source
Conference</a>
yesterday, and I'd like to share some thoughts about it.</p>
<p>In terms of the content, I spoke about the fact that the ultimate
goal/wish/intent of free software projects is to receive contributions
and for all of the individual and organizational users to join the
collaborative development process. However, that's just the intent, and
it's not legally required.</p>
<p>Due to GPL enforcement work, a lot of attention has been created over the
past ten years in the corporate legal departments on how to comply with
FOSS license terms, particularly copyleft-style licenses like GPLv2 and
GPLv3. However,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>License compliance ensures the absolute bare legal minimum on engaging
with the Free Software community. While that is legally sufficient, the
community actually wants to have all developers join the collaborative
development process, where the resources for development are
contributed and shared among all developers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So I think if we had more contribution and a more fair distribution of
the work in developing and maintaining the related software, we would
not have to worry so much about legal enforcement of licenses.</p>
<p>However, in the absence of companies being <em>good open source citizens</em>,
pulling out the legal baton is all we can do to at least require them to
share their modifications at the time they ship their products. That
code might not be mergeable, or it might be outdated, so it's value
might be less than we would hope for, but it is a beginning.</p>
<p>Now some people might be critical of me speaking at a Black Duck Korea
event, where Black Duck is a company selling (expensive!) licenses to
proprietary tools for license compliance. Thereby, speaking at such an
event might be seen as an endorsement of Black Duck and/or proprietary
software in general.</p>
<p>Honestly, I don't think so. If you've ever seen a Black Duck Korea
event, then you will notice there is no marketing or sales booth, and
that there is no sales pitch on the conference agenda. Rather, you have
speakers with hands-on experience in license compliance either from a
community point of view, or from a corporate point of view, i.e. how
companies are managing license compliance processes internally.</p>
<p>Thus, the event is not a sales show for proprietary software, but an
event that brings together various people genuinely interested in
license compliance matters. The organizers very clearly understand that
they have to keep that kind of separation. So it's actually more like a
community event, sponsored by a commercial entity - and that in turn is
true for most technology conferences.</p>
<p>So I have no ethical problems with speaking at their event. People who
know me, know that I don't like proprietary software at all for ethical
reasons, and avoid it personally as far as possible. I certainly don't
promote Black Ducks products. I promote license compliance.</p>
<p>Let's look at it like this: If companies building products based on
Free Software think they need software tools to help them with license
compliance, and they don't want to develop such tools together in a
collaborative Free Software project themselves, then that's their
decision to take. To state using words of <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg">Rosa Luxemburg</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Freedom is always the freedom of those who think different</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I may not like that others want to use proprietary software, but if they
think it's good for them, it's their decision to take.</p>Back from netdevconf 1.1 in Sevillehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20160215-netdevconf/2016-02-15T00:00:00+01:002016-02-15T00:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>I've had the pleasure of being invited to <a class="reference external" href="http://www.netdevconf.org/1.1/">netdevconf 1.1</a> in Seville, spain.</p>
<p>After about a decade of absence in the Linux kernel networking
community, it was great to meet lots of former colleagues again, as well
as to see what kind of topics are currently being worked on and under
discussion.</p>
<p>The conference had a really nice spirit to it. I like the fact that it
is run by the community itself. Organized by respected members of the
community. It feels like Linux-Kongress or OLS or UKUUG or many others
felt in the past. There's just something that got lost when the Linux
Foundation took over (or pushed aside) virtually any other Linux kernel
related event on the planet in the past :/ So thanks to Jamal for
starting netdevconf, and thanks to Pablo and his team for running this
particular instance of it.</p>
<p>I never really wanted to leave netfilter and the Linux kernel network
stack behind - but then my problem appears to be that there are simply
way too many things of interest to me, and I had to venture first into
RFID (OpenPCD, OpenPICC), then into smartphone hardware and software
(Openmoko) and finally embark on a journey of applied telecoms
archeology by starting OpenBSC, OsmocomBB and various other Osmocom
projects.</p>
<p>Staying in Linux kernel networking land was simply not an option with a
scope that can only be defined as wide as wanting to implement <em>any
possible protocol on any possible interface of any possible generation
of cellular network</em>.</p>
<p>At times like attending netdevconf I wonder if I made the right choice
back then. Linux kernel networking is a lot of fun and hard challenges,
too - and it is definitely an area that's much more used by many more
organizations and individuals: The code I wrote on netfilter/iptables
is probably running on billions of devices by now. Compare that to the
Osmocom code, which is probably running on a few thousands of devices,
if at all. Working on Open Source telecom protocols is sometimes a
lonely fight. Not that I wouldn't value the entire team of developers
involved in it. to the contrary. But lonely in the context that 99.999%
of that world is a proprietary world, and FOSS cellular infrastructure
is just the 0.001% at the margin of all of that.</p>
<p>One the Linux kernel side, you have virtually every IT company putting in
their weight these days, and properly funded development is not that
hard to come by. In cellular, reasonable funding for anything (compared
to the scope and complexity of the tasks) is rather the exception than
the norm.</p>
<p>But no, I don't have any regrets. It has been an interesting journey and
I probably had the chance to learn many more things than if I had stayed
in TCP/IP-land.</p>
<p>If only each day had 48 hours and I could work both on Osmocom and on
the Linux kernel...</p>