August 2001

Free software and the law, day one.

Attendees at Bruce’s Free Software and the Law Summit.

Things you might not have known that I did not know that I learned about at this summit:

• The GPL contains an explicit grant of rights to any patents you own that might be covered by the code you’re licensing.
• Copyright, patent, and trademark licenses should all be on separate pieces of paper.
• The total global base of software patents is approaching one million.
• It is illegal not only to make but also to use, sell, offer to sell, or import a product which violates a patent.
• Richard Stallman doesn’t wear “T shirts that say words,” because he feels that it’s “undignified.” (Though I’m sure he’d make an exception for the Jacob Berkman shirt).
• Examiners are only given about 10 hours total to review a patent, including iterations with the filer.
• US patents can now be “reexamined” through a little-used process much less costly than litigation.

At lunch I left to fly back home.

American Airlines flight 194 from SFO to BOS.

Coming out of the tunnel onto Storrow Drive.

Joe Shaw taught me to love.

Jacob walking back from 7-11.

Sometimes flash effects can be fun:

Michael Meeks, our knight in shining armor, off to save the world.

Miguel and I were tragically thwarted in our quest for Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity^®:

There are southern banks with longer hours.

Tomorrow is Bruce Perens’s Free Software and the Law summit. And then I go home. Which is good. I miss the guys in Boston.

Alex Graveley, deep in thought.

Toot toot: Wired has some nice things to say about us. And it must be said that our new web site is heaven-sent.

Outside a Chinese food restaurant in Cambridge.

In the back “room” of Herrell’s ice cream store in Harvard Square.

On Monday, in the process of demonstrating for a rapt audience the durability of my cell phone, I dropped it onto concrete from height and broke the keypad. The next morning I went out and got one of those Samsung MP3 phones (the Uproar). It’s pretty neat: 64 megs of flash, 10 hours of playtime without a recharge, and surprisingly excellent sound quality. But I need some Linux software that can load the songs onto it. I found a utility for Mac OS X. Maybe someone wants to port it? .

Hey, Joe updated his web site. And here I thought today couldn’t get any better…

Ben Kahn and a bowl of pretzels, on the 39th floor of the Marriott in San Francisco.

Linux World is smaller and slower than it was in February, but our diligent PR firm has managed to make it even more hectic than usual for me: Ximian is doing twenty-four press interviews in a three-day period, and I’m on at least half of those.

Yeats: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

A busy morning in San Francisco today:

Pink shirt: Steve Shankland of CNET.com. Blue shirt: Ross Levanto, our PR guy.

Meeting with IDG on their roofdeck.

We hung out at Algiers for a while (?!).

And then chilled out with ZDNet…

…who lump us in with IBM and HP .

After all this fun and excitement, I headed down to the Moscone center to check out how the booth setup was going.

JP configuring a demostation amid pre-LWE chaos.

Does anyone know why all my pictures look like ass today?

Ettore hacking, as Reeti and Dan listen to Greg prep everyone for the conference.

Wow, CNet already has a story from this morning’s interview. That Shankland guy can really haul ass.

Word of the day: diminishing.

Another Miguel/Nat last-minute dash to the airplane this morning. A flight that lasts six and a half hours, with a battery that lasts an hour and a half. All of which leaves me wondering: what the hell kind of award did AmericanWay magazine win?

Jacob, Joe, and a suffusion of green.

I know!

Is graffiti?

Why does this remind me of The Far Side so much?

Essential to society.

This truck was parked across the street from my apartment this morning when I was walking home. About five minutes after this shot was taken, a blood-thirsty yuppie horde descended from the local Starbucks and overturned the truck. It was a disgusting scene: dozens of East Coast prep school graduates clad in Versace and Abercombie & Fitch, ravenously lapping the spilt soy byproduct off the pavement and beating each other over the head savagely with Louis Vuitton handbags.

And Ryan says he can’t find any soy milk in Boston.

Rhett Creighton achieves total consciousness.

Found yesterday. While dining at El Pelon, coincidentally.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Last night, we hung out with Ryan for a little while.

Ryan.

It was okay.

Boston city lights.

More fun with low shutter speeds.

You can see Tokomak’s side view mirror in the foreground.

Some of you have complained that my web page lacks what you term “flow,” and what I would simply call a consistent chronological-sequence-of-authorship-to-page-layout bijection. Please allow me to clarify:

1. I will add new days to the top of the page.
2. I will add new entries to the bottom of a given day.

This entry, however, is an exception to that rule.

There will be no more exceptions unless they are clearly denoted as exceptions. I will mark them by saying “This entry is an exception to the chronology rule.” Please note the quotation marks in the preceding sentence. Exceptions will be designated as such without the use of quotation marks.

That is all.

Memorial Drive, on the way to Harvard.

Hmm, 5am.

Shakespeare: “Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.”

Sanitary conditions in San Diego.

The other night, I accidentally walked out of the supermarket with a bag of corn I hadn’t paid for. No one in the store noticed, and I didn’t realize what had happened until I was in the parking lot. And I thought: “I have to go all the way back there to pay for this? Fuck that.” Besides, it was the first time I’d ever stolen anything — accidentally or not — and it was kind of exciting.

Dave with the purloined corn.

And then, about two days later, the clerk at the 7-11 down the street from my apartment stopped me as I strolled carefree out the door, my arms full of Gatorade and Slim Jims, totally oblivious to the fact that I hadn’t paid. So now I’m wondering: how long has this been going on?

“If you wake up at a different time and in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”

I’m glad this guy didn’t catch me.

Awe, Phil is so sweet.

Twenty-seven missed calls on my cell phone when I woke up. The weasels are closing in.

Fitzgerald: “all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”

Larry Ewing, complete with angelic glow.

There was a very serene brouhaha at Ben Kahn’s last night. Behind his apartment and down the fire escape is this enormous open air concrete pit area roofed with tree leaves and enclosed on one side by a chapel. The whole place had this “Ewok village” feeling that isn’t very well captured by the picture above.

User manual included.

Jacob edges ahead.

Jon Perr read my entry from yesterday and said that he heard an NPR broadcast about a web site that features streaming video of female anchors delivering the news while disrobing. Has anyone heard of this place? I couldn’t find it on NPR’s site.

Gerald Britton (and a host of others) pointed me at nakednews.com, and made fun of me for not knowing about it before. Holly’s my favorite.

Listening to the Pixies this morning. Where is my mind?

What does it say about a society’s priorities when the time you spend in meetings on Monday is greater than the total number of hours you spent sleeping over the weekend?

Joe Shaw in the North End.

Any day now, Cafepress and Unamerican will have reconstituted my entire wardrobe.

Last week, I ordered Choke from Amazon. They sent me Mr. Maybe instead. But it’s hard to be angry at amazon. I mean, at least it will be a departure from the homogeneous output of The Chuck Palahniuk Random Novel Generator. Amazon knows best.

My current desktop wallpaper.

Early morning stack of newspapers on Beacon Street.

Ernest Hemingway reading from the manuscript of Islands in the Stream, which was published after he killed himself by firing a shotgun at his head. That has always made me sad. I learned recently that he underwent massive electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic in Florida a couple weeks before his suicide.

Now with spill-proof disability coverage!

Pictures from the Radiohead concert on Tuesday. They wouldn’t let me take my camera into the show, but I got some good shots of people waiting in the line. There’s a very decent article on the band in this month’s paper issue of The New Yorker.

Cafe Pamplona, Cambridge

“Jacob Berkman taught me to love.” Get yours today.

Hunter S. Thompson insists that, in the future, TV news will be delivered by topless women. And on the state of the NASDAQ: Half the people you know will declare Bankruptcy or turn to Prostitution for rent money. That is what they mean by “Crash.”