The Random Bit Bucket: Moinak Ghosh's Weblog

Last weekend Eben Moglen was in Bangalore and we able to arrange for him to talk at our Bangalore office on GPLv3, Patents and sundry. It happened due to Balaji Kutty who has friends in FSF India and we could grab a free slot on Eben's schedule. Eben is an interesting and entertaining speaker who would make you laugh at regular intervals. To me personally he also came out as a practical and down to earth person. I was also quite impressed at his technical depth that you don't expect from a lawyer

However he speaks long sentences and you will have to hang on to every word if you want to get what he is talking about. He explained in general about sharing stuff, and the ideas beghind GPLv3. He also illuminated on the Novell-Microsoft thing and the Tivo issues.

He had good things to say about SUN and mentioned that a significant portion of Debian repository (probably 30%) is FOSS code from SUN. Other significant comments he made are below. These are not exact speech transcripts but essentially the words he used in his long sentences:

SUN with it's open innovations in the past and FOSS efforts today is converging on the same direction as the FSF. In fact SUN could, moving forward, in principle be seen as the commercial avatar of the FSF.

SUN's opening of Java and the statement that they are using GPLv2 now and will move to GPLv3 when it is finalized came at a crucial time that provided the support for GPLv3 to move forward. At that time the GPLv3 process was in trouble with most of the participants threating to walk out if their demands were not met. SUN was the only organization who did not threaten, rather held productive discussions on the issues. SUN's statements with OpenJDK helped to bring others in line.

Obviously he lightly pushed for OpenSolaris to be released under GPLv3. He also mentioned that it was SUN who first brought the idea of GPL-ed hardware to the FSF and got them interested via the OpenSPARC project.

Here's a pic of Eben with some of the geeks. Sorry for the low quality, but that's all that the mobile cam could muster. You can see Balaji on the extreme left: