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?