Kade said yesterday morning that we must pay attention to politics both in
good and bad times, for our whole lives.  I agree with that.  I also believe
that every valuable activity of human endeavor is wrought with politics.

Yesterday evening, you heard a number of circumspect and confusing political
messages.  I've been asked about them multiple times in the last 20 hours.  I
hope to give you all some real context to understand what you've heard.

I'll start with one of the statements last night that requires no real
explanation.  Conor Schaefer, when accepting the FSF award last night,
parapharsed a famous quote that that a cantankerous, obstinate an ubiquitous
press preserves the right of the people.  In the larger political structure,
we have such a press, but that press is only burgeoning in Free Software.
The resources for the press in our community is minimal and we should all be
supporting it more.

But in the meantime, opponents of software freedom are extremely active in
taking advantage of the current lack of funding for expensive investigative
journalism.  In the last few years, the politics of Open Source and Free
Software occur in backchannels, and coded messages.  Policy decisions and
initiatives by the major organizations are not held accountable by the
community of individual  Free Software users, and I've historically been
convinced by arguments that "avoiding airing dirty laundry" is somehow
beneficial.  I think it's detrimental, because all of you don't gain an
in-depth understanding and analysis and don't participate in the discussions
about these policies.

I've pointed out that Linux Foundation has a clear policy plan to curtail
enforcement of the GPL.  They do this because they are a trade assocation,
who have for-profit companies members who have a myraid of reasons to oppose
copyleft.  Some are nominally pro-copyleft but fear any actual enforcement of
the GPL because it confuses their customers.  Others, including VMware,
violate the GPL openly and with purpose, in an effort to circumvent the
defenses of copyleft that was created.  Christoph's ongoing lawsuit against
VMware on this matter has truly clarified where LF stands: they don't
actually want VMware to comply or, indeed, any actual work to stop the
growing number of companies who violate GPL on purpose.

These forces that oppose copyleft are more powerful than ever, but they are
not new.  What is relatively new is the consensus among most companies that
Open Source is valuable to them, and specifically that having the option to
sometimes make proprietary modifications and improvements to Open Source is
in their interest.  The creation of non-copylefted kernels to compete with
Linux is not a new effort -- it's been ongoing since the 1990s and as such
the political claim we heard from Eben Moglen yesterday that these
initiatives are somehow a response to GPL enforcement efforts on Linux is not
a cause and effect relationship.

You heard a lot of other things yesterday too, which were circumspect.  You
heard Moglen say that we must make allies with our enemies to advance
software freedom, and you heard RMS reminding us that we cannot forget those
people are enemies.  I actually think the whole analogy is flawed here, and
the confusion is exacerbated by these attempts to carry out our political
discourse by coded messages of this nature.  So I'll be frank where other
speakers yesterday were surreptitious.

SFLC and Professor Moglen in particular have aligned themselves with this
anti-copyleft-enforcement initiative of the Linux Foundation.  Those two
entities are using their substantial resources to stop Conservancy from
enforcing the GPL for Linux and other projects.  I don't think of them as
enemies myself, I think of them as misguided and hypocritical.  But the
bigger problem is not the position they've taken in opposition to the work of
GPL enforcement, but rather the fact that political disagreement happens
purely behind closed doors instead of in the open with democratic input from
our community.

As a start, I would welcome a panel discussion at the conference specifically
between the entities involved -- FSF, Conservancy, SFLC, FSF Europe and Linux
Foundation -- to actually discuss our positions on how to enforce copyleft.
Karen and I at Conservancy think as a public figure entrusted with the
essential job of defending the main strategy for software freedom, and we do
not fear public scrutiny.  By extension, we won't tolerate wealthy
corporations clandestinely pushing efforts to oppose our work without you,
the Free Software activist public, being able to question these actions.
That's why we can't tolerate the polictics occuring via the rumor mill, they
should be transparent.

And, my position has always been transparent.  From my point of view,
copyleft is in peril without active and well-funded GPL enforcement, because
this device, this one, and this one, all run Linux, but if you go buy one,
there won't be source code.  There won't be the ability to modify and improve
it.  Because they are violating GPL.

Our political opponents tell you that if we "get too aggressive" with the
GPL, that no one will adopt it and proprietarized non-copyleft software will
win.  There are no studies to show that's true, there's supposition based on
flawed premseis.  I'm willing to have an honest and transparent debate about policy,