I received a request today in the mail about one of my projects that is available under a free software license. It’s a web template system that I wrote to scratch a personal itch. Its hallmark feature is that it has no features, at least none that contribute to the bloat that’s rampant in Drupal and Joomla and their ilk.

His email was very well-written, asking about some of the specifics of the license, and how he could undertake projects for his clients building upon my framework. After I wrote a detailed reply to him, it seemed like a good idea to post it to my blog, for there are many who’re not particularly clear on how free software licensing works.

I want to use your templating system to build static websites for personal and commercial projects. I don’t have lots of money so I can’t promise much now but later if I will be able to make any money I will happily donate for this project.
[...]
I like open source projects because it is fun to learn how magic happens. I don’t want to use your code without permission because I just personally don’t think it is right thing to do. I have no problem giving you credit for this system but I need your permission to use it for commercial use?

Sincerely,
[redacted]

And my reply:

Hi [redacted],

I’m glad you found the site and my projects interesting and useful, and thanks so much for writing back to let me know!

I think free software is a great way to learn and understand other people’s code, that’s why almost all of my projects are open-source with the license to tinker and play. All I ask in return (via the Creative Commons license) is attribution back to me if you use it in a project. I’ve licensed this as an Attribution-ShareAlike-Noncommercial license, so you’re free to use it as you wish in any personal project as long as it is non-commercial: e.g. for an organization you belong to, or an academic department or program.

Things get a little more interesting when money enters the picture. While I’m not doing this (releasing my software) for the express purpose of making money from it, it does not seem right to me that someone else benefit financially from my work with no benefit to me. So, I politely ask that if you’re planning to use this commercially, you should contact me for a separate license (the code will then be dual-licensed, and you can pick either the paid commercial license, or the default un-paid non-commercial one.)

You don’t have to pay anything right away, and can play with the code as much as you want. But when you bag a client who wants to use a system based on my code, we can talk about royalties. That way, you retain the freedom to examine and modify my code as well as get a paying client, and I do not feel that someone has taken undue advantage of my generosity. This is how the open-source model was intended to work, and the free really refers to freedom, not free as in no-charge.

I’m glad you contacted me to check for permission first, and I got the opportunity to clarify. Often it’s quite tricky, and lots of people have lots of misunderstandings about how free software licenses work.

Regards,
Manas.

The company everybody loves to hate (for good reasons, mostly) is now on a shopping spree, buying Standards Organizations in various countries to get them to vote YES on a proposed vote by the International Standards Organization to accept their binary-in-XML-clothing file format as a standard.

There are numerous good reasons why MSOOXML should not be accepted as an international standard, all nicely summarized in this document from Google, expressing their opposition to the proposal in technical terms, not political.

But the only thing today that maintains Microsoft’s monopoly in the office document market is their use of proprietary locked formats, and they would hate to lose this unfair advantage. So they have been busy manipulating the voting process in Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and Sweden (also here).

These days money can buy anything. Or anyone.

And Microsoft was never big on ethics anyway. Shame on you, Microsoft.

Update: Following coverage in the Swedish media about the Microsoft payola, Microsoft admitted to an email sent to their partners assuring market benefits and reimbursement for joining fees. The Swedish standards organization has now decided to change its decision to ‘abstain’ [PDF] because of the irregularities in the process. Hungary is also set to reconsider its vote.

A complete discussion of all objections to the standardization of MSOOXML is available from GrokDoc. Especially galling is Microsoft’s insistence on declaring the 500-year old Gregorian calendar incorrect and forcing the rest of the world to consider 1900 as a leap year because of an acknowledged bug in Excel.

Lots of you reported timezone errors in my Google Calendar Dashboard Widget. I thought I’d fixed it in 2.0 with some changes to the date parsing code, but it turned out that only worked for certain timezones. So here is another version with solely a timezone bug fix. I believe this should be the end of all troubles, but who knows.

Go forth, download v2.1, and let me know how it goes! If you still encounter any issues, please let me know.

If you’re a programmer, you might appreciate knowing what was wrong: the JavaScript parseInt function expects a radix as its second argument. (Radix is the base to which numbers should be parsed, e.g. decimal, octal or hex.) If you don’t provide a radix, the function guesses a radix based on the string you pass to it. If the number starts with 1-9, then the radix is assumed to be 10; if it’s 01-09, then it’s octal, and 001-009 are parsed as hex. So the timezone parsing was being affected by this for all the 01-09 hours of difference. Long story short, I added the radix explicitly, and things should be OK now.

I subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog, and I find his opinions very thought-provoking, I might add. I especially like his rants on usability and good versus bad experience design.

This morning, I read a post by him about one of “his” books being sold on Amazon. To explain why the “his” is in quotes, here’s what happened: Seth wrote the book in 2005 and licensed it under a specific Creative Commons (CC) license¹. The book was and is still available for free from Seth’s website as an unlocked PDF. A book publisher, who had nothing to do with Seth directly, went ahead and printed the book which is now available for $9.99 at Amazon.com². Seth is now pissed off at someone doing something like this, and is encouraging the readers of his blog not to buy that book.

I think that the publisher’s action is not only within the letter of the law, but also within the intent of the Creative Commons license Seth used. There are more than one CC licenses, and the specific one that Seth chose allowed free copying of the book, as long as authorship was properly attributed. Although there exists a Creative Commons license that disallows commercial usage, Seth chose not to apply that clause (which, by the way, he now considers was a mistake back in 2005.) This leads me to conclude that the publisher was offered those rights by Seth himself.

I can understand Seth’s getting pissed off because someone else was making money off his effort, but at $9.99, I think it nicely covers printing costs and perhaps makes a little profit for the printer³. If I already had the PDF eBook and still wanted a paper copy, I’d be super-willing to pay $9.99 for simply the printing, binding, cover, etc. I see nothing wrong with the printing of the book.

Although I admire Seth’s decision to license his work under a CC license, I feel he is going against the intent of the license by exhorting his readers not to buy a work that was permitted expressly because of that license. If he really wanted to follow the spirit of the Creative Commons, he should have provided a link to the book on Amazon and encouraged his readers to buy a paper copy in addition to the free eBook they might already have downloaded. His current actions undermine the spirit of openness that the original grant of the license had fostered.

1. I also use a Creative Commons license for this website and for all my non-academic writing.
2. I do not know the publisher and I do not earn any money as commission or from Amazon referrals. Just to make it clear, you know.
3. Maybe more. I don’t know much about the printing industry.

In the tradition of writing gadgets for Google Desktop and other Google properties, here’s one more from me: the Google Calendar Widget for Mac OS X Dashboard.

Since my switch to the Mac, I’ve been missing Google Desktop and using Dashboard more and more. And a calendar’s a nice thing to keep an eye on from time to time. So, without much further ado, here’s the gadget, oops, widget!