This provides a great new tool that developers can use to raise awareness about the free software license they use for their work, and that users can use to find the software they're looking for. Here I'll go over the technical details of how it works, and then explain how developers can use and benefit from it.

A Way-Too-Brief Overview of RDF

The Resource Description Framework, or RDF for short, is a data model for metadata. You're probably already familiar with metadata from your music library. Many popular audio formats like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC let people store metadata about the song in the file: what the song's title is, who wrote the song, who performed it, and so on. These formats generally have their own specialized method of saving metadata directly inside the audio file. RDF, however, offers a general framework for providing metadata about anything.

Because it's so flexible, RDF doesn't have any built-in vocabulary. By itself, it doesn't know how to say that Beethoven wrote his Symphony No. 9; people who want to use RDF to indicate this have to define a vocabulary that describes the relationship themselves. For a long time, Creative Commons has published such a vocabulary for licenses, and used it to offer RDF metadata for the Creative Commons licenses. This metadata briefly describes what the license allows the licensee to do, and what major conditions it places on a licensee. This is not a complete description—or even a thorough summary—of the license's terms, and it's not intended to be. Instead, it's simply meant to highlight the license terms that people are most likely to care about when they're looking for work that they can incorporate into their own projects.

We've used Creative Commons' vocabulary as much as possible to describe our own licenses. The couple of additional terms we needed have been added to their documentation. Thanks to this, it should be very easy for software that works with Creative Commons' license metadata in some way to also handle ours. It's theoretically possible that some of this software can work with the new GNU license metadata without being changed at all.

How To Take Advantage Of This

If you've published a work under one of the GNU licenses, the easiest way to get the most benefit from this metadata is to put a clear license link on your project's web page. Here's an example of how to do this:

Foobar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html" rel="license">GNU
General Public License</a> as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.

Of course, you should adapt this text as appropriate for your project. There are two key points to bear in mind when you provide the link:

• Make sure you include the rel="license" attribute in your license link. Software that crawls the web looking to associate works with specific licenses looks for a link like this first and foremost. This will ensure that they pair your project with the right license.

• If you want to link to a specific version of one of our licenses, please be sure to use one of our stable license links.

Links like this will set the stage for people to develop tools that use all this metadata to provide useful information to others. In the future, someone who's working on an LGPL-covered library will be able to search for other LGPL-covered code all over the web that can help make the job easier. Or a writer who wants to make documentation for a program will be able to search for a manual published under the FDL that they can use as a starting point. The possibilities are endless, but first we need authors and developers to publish this information. Next time you update your project's web site, make sure it has a license link like this—then you'll be ready when new tools arrive to make use of it.

We just announced that we've settled the lawsuit we filed against Cisco a few months ago. (See this previous blog post for more information about that.) The press release explains the terms we've agreed to, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about what people can draw from this.

Whenever we talk about the work we do to handle violations, we say over and over again that getting compliance with the licenses is always our top priority. The reason this is so important is not only because it provides a goal for us to reach, but also because it gives us a clear guide to choosing our tactics. This is the first time we've had to go to court over a license violation. Before it gets to this point, we always try to work cooperatively with a violator: companies come into compliance faster that way. And when the violator admits that there's been a mistake and demonstrates they want to fix it, we take it as a sign that we can cooperative productively, instead of an opportunity to pounce.

Ideally, we'd prefer to simply not see license violations. That's why the Compliance Lab puts so much effort into educating people about the license, through all sorts of channels like publishing the FAQ and answering questions over e-mail. But if we can't have that, the next best thing would be to have violators cooperate with us to address whatever issues arise. It has been done, and the reason it's possible is because our goals are not opposed to other peoples': we're not out to wreck businesses or make lots of money. We just want compliance. And any company selling free software shouldn't have any problem providing that.

If your company has questions or needs consultation on any free software licensing issues, do what more and more companies are doing: contact the FSF Compliance Lab. We'll be happy to help you work towards good compliance practices.

A few months ago, SGI released a new version of the SGI Free License B. With that change, a lot of code used to provide 3D graphics on GNU/Linux systems was now free software. To make sure that all the code was free software, however, a few developers who worked on code released under a related license, the GLX Public License, needed to grant us permission to release their work under the new terms.

Earlier today I got great news from the X.Org project that they've obtained that permission from all the necessary developers. With that done, all of the code for 3D graphics originally released under one of SGI's licenses is now free software. Pretty soon you'll see this code in free system distributions like gNewSense.

The FSF is very grateful to the X.Org team for recognizing the importance of this issue, tracking these developers down, and getting their permission to relicense the code. We'd also like to give our thanks to the Software Freedom Law Center for their support throughout this process, and again to SGI for taking the first step in this process in freeing this code.

This morning the FSF filed a lawsuit against Cisco, alleging that the company has infringed our copyrights by distributing programs under the GNU GPL and LGPL without respecting the licenses' terms. You've probably seen the press release; if you're especially curious, you might also want to read the complaint. Since we expect a lot of people to be interested in this case, I wanted to take a little time to explain what has happened, and why we're doing this, in plain language.

Back in 2003, we learned that the Linksys WRT54G, a popular wireless router, used a GNU/Linux system in its firmware, but customers weren't receiving all the source code they were entitled to under our licenses. You might remember that case—a lot of developers were interested in it and it was discussed in several different forums.

As we always do in violation cases, we began a process of working with Cisco to help them understand their obligations under our licenses, and how they could come into compliance. Early on it seemed likely that we could resolve the issues without any fuss.

While we were working on that case, though, new reports came in. Other Cisco products were not in full compliance either. We started talking to the company about those as well—and that's how a five-years-running game of Whack-a-Mole began. New issues were regularly discovered before we could finish addressing the old ones.

During this entire time, Cisco has never been in full compliance with our licenses. At first glance, the situation might look good. It's not difficult to find "source code" on the Linksys site. But you only have to dig a little deeper to find the problems. Those source code downloads are often incomplete or out-of-date. Cisco also provides written offers for source, but we regularly hear about requests going unfulfilled.

Despite our best efforts, Cisco seems unwilling to take the steps that are necessary to come into compliance and stay in compliance. We asked them to notify customers about previous violations and inform them about how they can now obtain complete source code; they have refused to do this, along with the other reasonable demands we have made to consider this case settled. The FSF has put in too many hours helping the company fix the numerous mistakes it's made over the years. Cisco needs to take responsibility for its own license compliance.

We've decided that the best way to resolve this situation is to file suit. It's not a decision we take lightly. A lawsuit takes resources that we would rather spend elsewhere. But first and foremost, our mission is to make sure that computer users everywhere have the right to share and change the software that they use. Cisco has been denying its customers the rights guaranteed to them by the GPL and the LGPL, and we must put an end to that.

Yesterday, we made some changes to the Free Software Definition to help clarify a few points that had been confusing for people in the past. Because this definition is the benchmark we use to decide whether or not a license is free, we want it to be as easy as possible for people to understand, and over the years we've regularly made changes to the text that do that. Whether we're updating the definition to respond to confusion brought on by specific issues, or simply explaining an issue more clearly, we want to make sure that the definition is both consistent in its principles and relevant to software users.

In order to help people understand the purpose of these changes, we also added a History section to the document. This section provides a brief summary of every substantial change we've made to the Definition since we started keeping it in CVS back in 2001. We also provide links that show you exactly what text changed. You can even get this information for every change we've ever made. If you want to see how the Free Software Definition has addressed different issues over the years—whether that's because you have questions, want a sort of history lesson, or are just curious—I encourage you to check it out.