While reading some FSF Blogs i found a link to a license quiz where you can test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL.. If you want to test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL than try the license quiz.

I remember that i had found this test already some years ago but forgot about it. So i tried it again to see if my licensing knowledge has improved. The last time i did the test i remember that i answered a few questions wrongly but this time everything was correct. Too bad that in a few months we will have a new GPL and LGPL.

I’m back from the SFSCon and the first international FSFE Fellowship Meeting in Bolzano (Italy). For me i can say that it was a great event and it gaves me the opportunity to meet a lot of great people from the Free Software Foundation Europe and around Free Software in general.

The Fellowship Meeting was also the place were a new project of the FSFE was launched, the Freedom Task Force (FTF). A project which works in partnership with gpl-violations.org and offers licensing education, fiduciary services and licence enforcement. For more information follow the link above.

But that’s not enough something more happens. Sun announced to release Java as Free Software under the GPL. Already many people have written about it and so i just want to refer to Georg Greve’s good analysis of the situation. Also Richard Stallman has already reacted really positive:

It will be very good that the Java trap won’t exist anymore, it will be a thing of the past. That kind of problem can still exist in other areas but it won’t exist for Java anymore. The GNU general public licence is the most popular and the most widely used software licence, used for some 70% of all free software packages. The special thing about this licence is that it’s a copyleft licence. That is to say, all versions of the program must carry this licence. So the freedoms that the GNU GPL gives to the users must reach all the users of the program, and that’s the purpose for which I wrote it. To ensure that all users of the software have the freedom that users should have.
I think Sun has, well, with this contribution, have contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. And it shows leadership. It’s an example that I hope others will follow.

And this is the response of Eben Moglen

As Java became one of the most important languages for the expression of ideas about technology of programming in the last decade the question of Java’s freedom, wether it could be use freely and made part of free software projects, has been a crucial question. Sun’s policy of GPL’ing Java, which we are celebrating now, is an extraordinary achievement in returning programming technology to that state of freely available knowledge. Sun has now GPL’ed hardware designs, Sun is GPL’ing Java: that’s an extraordinary vote of confidence in this way of sharing information. And we, in the free software world, are very pleased and very flattered to see Sun taking its own very valuable and very important product and agreeing with us that they will be more advantageous to Sun as well as to the rest of the community if they are shared under these rules.

So i just have to say thank you and congratulations to Sun for this step.

Libpam-poldi allows you to use your Fellowship crypto card to log in your GNU/Linux system.

First check if poldi detects your cardreader: ‘poldi-ctrl -d’. Unfortunately some cardreader doesn’t work with poldi and the existing free driver. For example the cardma4040 needs the non-free driver from Omnikey.

If poldi successfully detected your cardreader you can start to configure poldi. Poldi has a pretty good documentation so i will keep my explanations rather short.

1. Root has to register the new card for poldi:

   poldi-ctrl --register-card --account <your-user-account> --serialno <serialno of your card>

   You can also execute this command without ‘–account <your-user-account>’ but than the user will not be able to install or update his card’s keys.
   The serialno can be found by executing ‘gpg –card-status’ and looking for “Application ID”.

2. Now we have to establish a mapping between the user and the smartcard he owns:

   poldi-ctrl --associate --account <your-user-account> --serialno <serialno of your card>

3. Now you have to write your public key into the appropriate key file (you have to do this within your user account)

    poldi-ctrl --set-key

4. That’s it, now you can test it with ‘poldi-ctrl –test’
5. Now you have to tell pam, that you want to use poldi.
   Therefore you have to edit the files in /etc/pam.d. If, for example, you want to login to kdm with your card, edit the file /etc/pam.d/kdm. Replace the line ‘@include common-auth’ with

   auth    required   pam_poldi.so

   If you want to login unattended, use

   auth    required   pam_poldi.so try-pin=123456 quiet

   And if you want to fallback to regular unix passwords, use

   auth    sufficient pam_poldi.so try-pin=123456 quietauth    required   pam_unix.so nullok_secure

Now you should be able to use your GnuPG smartcard to log in your GNU/Linux system.

You can find a more detailed howto on my personal homepage which will still be available if this blog entry is already forgotten.

The so-called “iPod law” contains reduced fines for file sharing and forced companies to open their DRM specification to enable competition.

The French Constitutional Council has declared this aspects unconstitutional. The justification: The “iPod law” violated the Human Right of constitutional protections of property.

Mr. Menard, a partner at the Lovells law firm and a specialist in “intellectual property” said: “The Constitutional Council effectively highlighted the importance of intellectual property rights,” and added that Apple Computer and other companies could not be forced to share their copy-protection technology without being paid for it.

Does it sound like a joke? But it’s true. For more information read:

- New York Times: Parts of French ‘iPod Law’ Struck Down (English)
- Golem: iTunes-Gesetz verstößt gegen Menschenrechte (German)

UPDATE: Jacques Chirac, president of France, has signed the law and so it become valid. I don’t know if the French Constitutional Council will stop the law but as long as nothing happens the law is legally valid. Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Poland could be the next countries with similar laws. Source (German): The Inquirer DE.

Thanks to Markus from netzpolitik.org i have found this interesting interview with the DefectiveByDesign campaign.

The campaign has received quite a lot of attention in the media. For example the “Bono petition” saw press coverage in more than 115 news papers and news sitest in the USA.

Here a answer from DefectiveByDesign to a probably common question on this topic: “Are those two goals (content protection and consumer protection) compatible with one another?”

DefectiveByDesign: A better word than consumer, to describe me and you, is citizen. So is content protection and the rights of citizens compatible? When we live in a age where all digital works of art and all human knowledge can be transferred at (next to) zero cost, and where the cost of making one more copy is zero. Is it right to be building digital fences and digital handcuffs around this art and knowledge? If, as citizens of a society, we can see the advantages of allowing art and knowledge to flow without impediment, we as citizens will also have reason to find new ways to recompense the artists and knowledge purveyors. In fact, there are more artists working today than ever before, and more of their art is being enjoyed because of technology free from DRM and free of the Big Media gate keepers. The term “Content Protection” is a loaded term, framing the debate with their slant. I would say that this term really describes their attempt to hold back advancing society.

After about seven month of discussion and more than 1000 comments through gplv3.fsf.org/comments/ the FSF has published the second draft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3 and the first draft of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3 which is now designed as a set of permissive exceptions to GPLv3 in accord with section 7. The main changes in the second draft of GPLv3 are clarifications of the DRM section, a reworked license compatibility section and provisions that specifically allow to distribute programs on certain file sharing networks such as BitTorrent. For more details look at http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd2-guide.html

DefectiveByDesign, a FSF campaign to eliminate DRM, has written an open letter to Bono the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2 to take a stand against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The group has focused on Bono because of his social activism and leadership in the music industry. The aim is to collect 10.000 signatures, at which point they will seek an audience with Bono, discuss with him the threats posed by DRM and request that he be the final signer.

Some time ago i have already blogged about a initiative of Canadian musicians against DRM (http://www.musiccreators.ca/). The open letter to Bono could be the first step to achieve something similar in Europe or even worldwide.

You can sign the letter at: http://defectivebydesign.org/petition/bonopetition

As a GNU/Linux user i’m used to have PDF export in almost every program. With Office 2007 Microsoft finally wants to offer this common feature to their users too. But it seems like Adobe doesn’t like this idea. As cnet reported Adobe asked Microsoft to remove the PDF export feature or pay a fee for it.
Brian Jones from Microsoft has published some information, too.

Adobe promotes PDF as an open standard. But if Adobe now starts to sue competitors they can no longer claim that PDF is an open standard.

What does this mean for all the Free Software applications with PDF export and for the exchange of documents in general? If Adobe starts to sue Microsoft, who will be the next victim? It would be a big loss for everyone if we can no loger rely on PDF as an open standard.

April 26th was the “World Intellectual Property Day” (German). Brigitte Zypries, minister of justice of Germany, said “We need a better sense of right and wrong for ‘intellectual property’” and announced that the protection of ‘intellectual property’ will be the main focus when Germany will held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2007.

At the same time Canadian musicians like Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan or Sloan say “Not in Our Names”. The “Canadian Music Creators Coalition” (CMCC) will ensure that lobbyists for major record labels and music publishers are not the only voices heard in debates about Canada’s copyright laws and other key cultural policy issues (press release).

The CMCC is united under three key principles:

• Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical
• Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive
• Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists

I think this is a great campaign and i hope musicians from other countries will recognize it and follow the Canadian musicians with similar campaigns.