Ciarán's free software notes

From 17h20 until 19h00 I was standing outside the building of the EU vs. MS anti-trust case hearing, talking to Sean Daly. Sean was previously a journalist and recently moved to Brussels. He contacted me to lend a hand with the PR side of the MS anti-trust case. There were 15 or so other press people also hanging around.

Someone comes out. It's Brad Smith, Microsoft's lawyer. He's smiling and talking about the great dialogue that was missing until now, and the great breakthrough that has happened, and how finally the requirements on them have been clarified.

What's all that about? Well, Microsoft face fines of up to 2 million euro per day which can be back dated to last December. To avoid paying them, I guess they'll argue that their non-compliance was all down to a little communication problem, and now that's fixed. Water under the bridge. I don't know if they'll get away with that.

Myself and Sean were waiting for FSFE's lawyer, Carlo Piana. When he came out, we helped put him talking to some journalists, then waited until that was finished and we took him aside to record an interview. That should appear on Groklaw.net soon. (update: it's there now)

Before going to the anti-trust venue, I had been working on FSFE's response to the European Commission's questionnaire "On the patent system of Europe". It's been approved, marked up, emailed, and hand-posted, and is now also online: fsfeurope.org/projects/swpat/fsfe-patstrat-response.pdf .

I went back to the office, updated FSFE's GPLv3 webpages, contacted the FSF India main mailing list to pass on info about GPLv3, and discussed the GPLv3 consultation process with a lawyer in the Philippines, helped Sean with the transcript of the interview, informed Carlo, sent some emails about the GPLv3 process and the international GPLv3 conference to be held in Europe later this year.

People ask me what my average day is. It's not always like this - there are days when I answer email all day long, but there's no average day. It's 08h40, I've been working for just over 23 hours. Saturday could be a day off :-)

UPDATE: Groklaw now has the Carlo Piana interview.

I've made and put online a transcript of the recent presentation by RMS about GPLv3:

• http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/torino-rms-transcript.en.html

After making the previous one, I thought I wouldn't do it again, but they seem more important now than I had realised.

Quite a number of people sent thanking emails, which is nice, particularly those who speak English as a second language seem to like the text transcripts.

Wason Liwlompaisan translated the last transcript into Thai!

A number of mainstream news sites picked it up, and maybe some offline ones did too.

The last one also made slashdot and other community sites.

So far this latest transcript has only been online for 4 hours and it's already on LWN, and on Groklaw.

I was already aware that it would be useful because text can be indexed by websearch engines, and it can be grepped and searched by people, and read by people who can't hear, but the interest from the news sites has been a surprise.

Twelve months is a long consultation process, but it's important that everybody hears about it and therefore has a chance to take a look and make any comments they have. The changes being proposed are quite comprehensible, so spreading the information that makes the process accessible is an important thing to do. More texts are available on the GPLv3 wiki's page for reusable texts.

Update: it's also on Newsforge, and LXer, and the groklaw story drew 498 comments.