blog/archives/2012/02zack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/archives/2012/02/zack's home pageikiwiki2012-03-12T12:34:26ZGPL-d Debian software skew (?)http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/02/gpl_d_debian_software_skew/2012-02-19T21:22:06Z2012-02-18T16:33:05Z
<p>At <a href="http://fosdem.org/2012/">FOSDEM</a>, John Sullivan
delivered an interesting talk titled <a href=
"http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/is_copyleft_being_framed">Is
copyleft being framed?</a> to verify alleged claims on the decline
of GPL-d software. (<a href=
"http://info9.net/wiki/fosdem/LegalIssuesDevRoom/Speakers/sullivan_slides.pdf">Slides</a>
are available.) The crux of the talk is the analysis he performed
on the Debian archive to discover the amount of software we
distribute that is covered by GPL, LGPL, or AGPL ("GPL-d" for short
in the remainder).</p>
<p>John's talk steps in an interesting and long running debate (a
recent summary of which is available in this <a href=
"http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/52838-gpl-use-in-debian-on-the-rise-study">
ITWire article</a>). The most interesting part is the discrepancy
among John's results and <a href=
"http://www.blackducksoftware.com/">Blackduck</a>'s, which are
often used to <a href=
"http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-continuing-decline-of-the-gpl/">
argue how the popularity of the GPL license is declining</a>. That
might be the case. Or not. The more analyses we do to find it out,
the better.</p>
<p>The underlying assumption on John's work is that Debian is a
representative sample of the Free Software out there, which I think
is a reasonable assumption. I find the analysis presented in the
talk completely satisfactorily from a purely scientific point of
view. The same cannot be said about Blackduck's result: both their
methods and data are secret, making it impossible to reproduce
their experiments. Highly <em>un</em>scientific.</p>
<p>Still, John's results are surprising: as much as 87 percent of
Lenny's packages and 93 percent of Squeeze's are GPL-d. That seems
<em>a lot</em>. Puzzled about that, John discussed with me the
issue before his talk, in search for pitfalls in his methods or
data. Finding none, I pointed him to the almighty <a href=
"http://dktrkranz.wordpress.com/">DktrKranz</a> for some extra
review; who found nothing either. To stay on the safe side, even
during his talk John called for independent reviews of his results.
<strong>What could be wrong?</strong></p>
<p>The tool used to gather the data is <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=dbnpolicy/policy.git;a=blob;f=tools/license-count;hb=HEAD">
license-count</a> from the <code>debian-policy</code> package.
Input data are the <code>debian/copyright</code> files of all
Debian source packages. If <code>license-count</code> is not
bugged, our <code>debian/copyright</code> files might be. One thing
that occurred to me only a few days ago is the <strong>habit of
declaring a different license for Debian packaging</strong> (the
files under <code>debian/</code>) than the software being packaged
itself. That's a bad habit—because it might cause unwanted license
mixtures via patches that live under <code>debian/</code>—but I've
seen several occurrences of it in the Debian archive. For name and
(self-)shame: I've also been guilty of it in the past, <em>when I
was young™</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Is that reason enough to skew results and overestimate
GPL-d software?</strong> I don't think so, I hope not, but
ultimately… I don't know. It'd be nice to rule out the possibility
entirely. So if anyone is willing to do some sampling of affected
<code>debian/copyright</code> files and propose patches for
<code>license-count</code> to exclude those "false positives",
please shout. (As a bonus point: that would also help to take more
sound decision for the typical use case of
<code>license-count</code>, i.e. deciding when a license should be
added to <code>/usr/share/common-licenses</code>.)</p>
<p>Other independent reviews of the results are equally
welcome.</p>
<p>Note: the above, as well as John's analysis, would be a trivial
exercise if <a href="http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/">DEP-5</a>
were already widely deployed in the Debian archive.</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Update</strong>: add link to John's slides<br />
<strong>Update 19/02/2012</strong>: Russ Allbery, author of
<code>license-count</code>, <a href=
"http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2012-02/002.html">posted</a> a
way more likely cause of data skew in John's analysis: double
counting among the different types of copyleft licenses</p>
mutt-notmuch 0.2http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/02/mutt-notmuch_0.2/2012-02-11T14:15:20Z2012-02-11T14:15:20Z
<p>My <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/">mutt-notmuch
hack</a> seems to be a quite popular way to integrate <a href=
"http://www.mutt.org/">Mutt</a> with <a href=
"http://notmuchmail.org/">notmuch</a>. As a nice consequence, my
(indexed!) inbox attracts patches from mutt-notmuch users eager to
improve it. Collecting some of them, I've just tagged <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/mutt-notmuch/mutt-notmuch/trees/0.2">mutt-notmuch
0.2</a> with the following changes:</p>
<ul>
<li>readline support and query history</li>
<li>support for spaces in mailboxes (use case:
gmail+offlineimap)</li>
<li>a new "tag" action</li>
<li>normalization of <code>=names</code> to support mutt macros
that pass folder names</li>
<li>do not treat <code>+opt</code> as a valid cmdline option (to
ease tagging)</li>
</ul>
<p>Many thanks to Scott Barker, Christine Spang, David Newgas, and
Ryan Kavanagh for the above patches.</p>
<p>While I was at it, I've also moved mutt-notmuch repository
<a href="https://gitorious.org/mutt-notmuch/">to Gitorious</a>. Git
self-hosting is nice, but either you move to something like
gitolite (which I didn't have time to setup and tune ATM) or you're
stuck without merge requests which are quite nice. <small>(Why not
Github? <a href=
"http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html">Because.</a>)</small></p>
<p>If you're using mutt-notmuch you might also be interested in the
discussion of <a href=
"http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.notmuch.general/7310">libnotmuch
support in mutt</a>. I'd love to see that landing in mutt and be
able to throw away mutt-notmuch entirely, but that seems a bit
premature as of yet.</p>
bits from the DPL for January 2012http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/02/bits_from_the_DPL_for_January_2012/2012-03-12T12:34:26Z2012-02-04T13:51:32Z
<p><a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">
Fresh from the oven</a>, monthly report of what I've been working
on as DPL during January 2012.</p>
<hr />
<p>Dear Developers,<br />
here is another monthly report of what happened in DPL-land, this
time for January 2012. There's quite a bit to report about ---
including an insane amount of legal-ish stuff --- so please bear
with me. Or not.</p>
<h1>Legal stuff</h1>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Webmaster heroes have decided to tackle the long standing issues
of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/388141">copyright</a> and
<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/238245">licensing</a> of the Debian
website. I've accepted to help them out in reaching consensus with
license choice and I'm happy to report that we've managed to pick a
DFSG-free license (BSD-ish) for future contributions. Webmasters
will soon contact contributors to re-license old contributions (or
get rid of them), so hopefully will have a DFSG-free website RSN.
Many thanks go to David Prévot for successfully tackling such a can
of worms.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I've sought a second legal advice on the constraints that
trademarks (might) impose on the work-flow of a distro like Debian.
Luckily, it is coherent with one I've sought in the past so I'm now
in condition to wrap up the "trademark vs DFSG" <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/10/msg00028.html">thread
on -project</a> with the missing legal information. Hopefully, I'll
find time to do that sometime next week.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I've restarted <a href=
"http://france.debian.net/pipermail/asso/2012-January/001614.html">discussions</a>
with the Debian France association so that they can become a Debian
Trusted Organization (as per Constitution 9.3). Members of the
board of the association seem to be interested and I'm positive it
could happen fairly soon. The importance of this is that we could
use a back-up association in Europe to hold Debian assets, to
complement the services that FFIS are already offering us.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Thanks to the contributions of Benjamin Mako Hill and SPI
lawyers, I've now what I consider a final draft of a trademark
policy for Debian trademarks. Before proposing it to you, I'm
waiting for some feedback from another umbrella organization for
Free Software projects, that is working on a trademark policy for
all their associated projects. As many Free Software projects are
seeking trademark protection these days, I see benefits in having
uniform (and sane!) policies. I hope to be able to gather the
feedback I still miss this week-end at FOSDEM, and let you know
shortly after that. Once this is done, we'll also be able to
(finally!) relicense all kinds of Debian logos under a DFSG-free
license.</p>
<p>On this front, I've also updated http://www.debian.org/trademark
with the information needed to contact us about trademark usage;
hopefully it'll reduce the burden of answering to such
inquiries.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>With the help of Kenshi Muto, Fumitoshi Ukai, Ishikawa Mutsumi,
Shuzo Hatta, and Yasuhiro Araki we've started the process to move
the Debian trademark in Japan from individuals (who are present or
past members of the Debian JP association) to SPI. That would help
dealing with these matters, as well as ensure that important Debian
assets are held by Debian Trusted Organizations.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I remind you that we've an ongoing complaint with the current
registrant of debian.eu, domain that we believe Debian should
legitimately own. Lawyers at SPI has now formally contacted the
current owner and hopefully we'll be able to solve the issue
amicably in the next months.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Some of the past legal advice I sought for PPA came handy in a
<a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2012/01/msg00589.html">discussion</a>
on the legal risks of running a service like mentors.debian.net,
hopefully addressing part of the issues in turning that into
mentors.debian.org</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Patent policy for the Debian archive is now ready as well and I
also have a patch for the website ready to be merged. I'm just
waiting for the final blessing from SPI (lawyers) to go ahead and
publish it.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Most of the above wouldn't have been possible without the
precious help of folks at <a href=
"http://www.softwarefreedom.org/">SFLC</a> working for SPI and
Debian. Be sure to thank SFLC for what they're doing for us and
many other Free Software projects.</p>
<h1>Coordination</h1>
<p>Nobody stepped up to coordinate the artwork collection for
Wheezy I've <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">
mentioned last month</a>, so I've tried to do a little bit of that
myself. The -publicity team is now preparing the call for artwork
and hopefully we'll send it out RSN. In case you want to help,
there is still a lot of room for that; just show up on the
debian-desktop mailing list.</p>
<h1>Sprints</h1>
<p>A Debian Med sprint has happened in January, and Andreas Tille
has provided a nice and detailed <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-sprints/2012/01/msg00001.html">report
about it</a>. Some more sprints are forthcoming this spring, how
about yours?</p>
<h1>Money</h1>
<ul>
<li>
<p>We got from SPI a prepaid and rechargeable credit card that we
can use for expenses or other kind of guarantees. Many thanks to
Michael Schulteiss, SPI treasurer, for his help with that. Using
it, we've redeemed 10k$ of credits offered to us by Amazon, that
(thanks to ongoing work by Lucas Nussbaum) we're going to use to
make our QA rebuilds independent from the underlying computing
infrastructure.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Thanks to the help of Luca Capello, we advanced quite a bit on
forming the <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Events/DebianEventsBox">Debian Event
Box kit</a> that should make it easier to set up Debian booth at
FOSS events. We bought the machine for it (for about ~755 CHF) and
the box to contain it will soon be on its way as well. If you're at
FOSDEM, tend to the Debian booth to check it out (and possibly help
out with the technical setup).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We've got quite a bit of donations during the December holidays.
I've took the chance to thank donors, discuss what we do with
donations and the <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/01/debian_donations-fu/">status
of publishing periodic Debian budgets</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Pinged by Yves-Alexis Perez, I've now properly documented the
fact that DDs are welcome to apply for hardware sponsoring, in case
the hardware can be used to <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/01/hardware_sponsorship_for_Debian_Developers/">
help</a>/<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/SponsoringGuidelines#Hardware_Guidelines">improve</a>
their Debian work. As <a href=
"http://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1541">suggested by
Yves-Alexis</a>, you can also advocate <em>other</em> DDs for hw
sponsoring.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Given hardware invariably age and that we can afford it, I've
prodded DSA to prepare a general hardware replacement plan for our
machines. Planning will go on this week-end and FOSDEM (thanks to
Martin Zobel-Helas and Faidon Liambotis for their presence here)
and I hope to have an approved machine replacement plan well before
the end of the current DPL term (although I'm usually
optimist...).</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h1>Important stuff going on</h1>
<p>Other important stuff has been going on in various area of the
project in January. I'd like to point your attention to a couple of
things:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>People active on debian-mentors have proposed an <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2012/01/msg00365.html">improved
work-flow</a> to deal with sponsoring/mentoring requests, based on
the usage of a new pseudo package "sponsorship-requests". Thanks to
Ansgar Burchardt, Jakub Wilk, Arno Töll, and Gregor Herrmann for
working on this.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Raphael Hertzog has kickstarted work on <a href=
"http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep2/">DEP-2</a>, as a way to
rationalize the flow of package-related information that
(co-)maintainers get. Discussion about the idea are ongoing on the
debian-qa mailing list.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h1>Miscellanea</h1>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Work has further progressed in reaching out to companies with an
interest in giving support for, and contributing to Debian. Thanks
to Alexander Wirt the <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/650082">technical work</a> is now done and
some sort of governance policy has been decided. Further step for
me is to announce it properly hoping to reach out to as many
interested companies as possible. I hope to finalize that in the
next month. (If you're working for such a company and you happen to
read this, feel free to reach out to me already.)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I've completed an old todo item setting up and <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/TitanpadDebianNet">documenting</a> <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/01/msg00072.html">titanpad.debian.net</a>,
service that has been requested for collaborative work during
various kinds of online events. Help is welcome to help
administering the service (see <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/TitanpadDebianNet">doc</a>).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>SPI has clarified the role of project representatives and, as a
consequence of that, I (as DPL) no longer receive SPI board
discussions addressed to board@spi. That is good not only for the
sanity of my inbox, but also because it puts all projects
affiliated to SPI at the same level of communication within SPI.
Thanks to Robert Brockway for his work on this.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>In the unlikely case you've read thus far, thanks for your
attention! Happy Debian hacking.</p>
<hr />
<p>PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at
<code>master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*</code></p>
fosdem 2012http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/02/fosdem_2012/2012-02-03T13:30:19Z2012-02-03T13:30:19Z
<p>In less then 2 hours I'll leave for the Paris Nord station to
catch a train headed to Bruxelles Midi. Plan of the week-end:
attend and enjoy <a href="http://fosdem.org/2012/">FOSDEM
2012</a>!.</p>
<p>I haven't submitted any talk for this year FOSDEM edition, but
I've been invited (and gladly accepted) to join the <a href=
"http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/contributor_communities">round
table on working with contributor communities</a> on Sunday. I'm
positive it will be a nice occasion to share ideas on how to
structure local user groups around the world.</p>
<p>Beside that, I plan to attend several talks of the <a href=
"http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/crossdistribution_devroom">cross-distribution</a>,
<a href=
"http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/legal_issues_devroom">legal
issues</a> devrooms, hang around the Debian booth, as well as
discuss <em>many</em> topics with people and friends from all over
the Free Software multiverse.</p>
<p>Too bad I'm still recovering from a recent minor health issue; I
won't be able to get the most out of today's <a href=
"http://fosdem.org/2012/beerevent">beer event</a>. But I'll attend
nonetheless, see you there?</p>