Take a look! The new ultra slim credit card-sized FSF membership USB cards have arrived. Of course member number 0 had to be for our founder and president Richard Stallman...

Loaded with gNewSense Live!, they are shipping out to members first thing in January 2009 (production problems have caused us a delay). Each card includes a member user name and member number and on the back displays an extract from the free software definition. We've also included some exciting advocacy tools, like speeches from Richard Stallman and videos about free software. Since the card fits right in your wallet alongside your credit cards, you can take the message of software freedom with you everywhere you go.

Another batch of member cards will be on order soon, so if you haven't done already make sure you're signed up to receive your card in round two (you can check on your membership here.) Brand-new members also receive the bootable membership card automatically, so if you've been thinking about joining, now is a great time!

If you have any questions about the membership cards, just email me.

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.

Dear Mr. Frey,

Your letter about our recent change to the GFDL, which lets operators of some GFDL-covered wiki sites relicense their contents under Creative Commons BY-SA license, raises the important questions of whether this change and the way we made it were proper, and what they imply in regard to trusting the FSF's stewardship of our licenses in the future.

In my judgment and that of the FSF board, this licensing change is fully consistent with our values, our ethics, and our commitments, and should demonstrate that the FSF continues to merit your trust. "Or any later version" licensing enables us to give new permissions that respond to the needs of the community, as well as defend against new threats to users' freedom.

The relicensing option in GFDL 1.3 is fully consistent with the spirit and purpose of the GFDL. It permits certain web sites to switch from the GFDL to another copyleft license, different in some details but similar overall. We did this to allow those sites to make their licenses compatible with other large collections of copylefted material that they want to cooperate with.

The impact of the change is limited because the relicensing option applies to a narrow range of cases: wiki sites such as Wikipedia containing material which does not use certain special features of the GFDL, invariant sections and cover texts, that don't translate into CC-BY-SA.

What we've done is give these wiki sites a time-limited opportunity to relicense to CC-BY-SA the materials that the public has contributed to them. The Wikimedia Foundation has begun a public discussion on whether to switch: Wikipedia contributors can argue for or against the change there. We have no role in that decision; our action was to give Wikipedia the chance to decide.

We did not make this change in haste. The FSF has been talking with the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Software Freedom Law Center for a year to plan this change.

We held these discussions in private for a reason I hope you will approve of: to keep the option limited in applicability and avoid the possibility of wholesale relicensing of other GFDL-covered material. The relicensing option is meant for public collaboration wiki sites only. We did not want to let people relicense other GFDL-covered works by "laundering" them through Wikipedia and similar web sites before the cut-off date.

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

You described our license change as a "breach of trust", but if you look at what we have undertaken to do, you will see we have carried it out.

We have never asserted that we will not change our licenses, or that we will never make changes like this one. Rather, our commitment is that our changes to a license will stick to the spirit of that license, and will uphold the purposes for which we wrote it. That's what we did in with GFDL 1.3, and with the much larger changes in GPLv3, and that's what we'll continue to do.

You are right to call on the FSF to abide by the highest ethical standards. I hope you will come to agree that the GFDL license change demonstrates that we do.

Sincerely,
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation

The Xiph.Org Foundation has announced the release of Theora 1.0. As a patent- and royalty-free video codec, Theora is an excellent choice for artists, producers and developers who want to help make a world in which everyone can safely and easily use free software. Theora has been standardized since 2004 but this mature and stable release is an important milestone.

Upcoming releases of Mozilla Firefox will support Theora natively with the new HTML5 element <video src="file.ogv"></video>, which means that all of the other free software web browsers derived from the Firefox code base, like Iceweasel and GNU IceCat, will be able to do the same.

Congratulations to Xiph.Org on the release! It's great to see it getting easier and easier for people to Play Ogg.