Bradley Kuhn, the technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) expressed dismay this week after learning that Black Duck Software was granted a patent that covers software methods for detecting and resolving open source software licensing conflicts.

In this special episode, we talk to Bradley M. Kuhn of the FSLC & FSC about software freedom, litigation against open source developers, the future and thread of web services that aren’t open, the AGPL and poker.

RMS Speech: « To make a digital society worthy of being included in, we must overcome six menaces to freedom: surveillance, censorship, restricted data formats, proprietary software, software as a service, and the War on Sharing. »

Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software. Many consider him one of the most influential voices in the worldwide FLOSS community. Kuhn, formerly the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, took some time recently to catch us up on his latest work.

Some successful open-source companies are using a dual-licensing scheme. In short, software is released both through an open source version (e.g. licensed under the GNU GPL) and through a proprietary license usually reserved to paying customers.

Proprietary giant is licensing open source to its partners. What is going on?

"No matter how glib and sarcastic the proprietor, proprietary software denies users the freedoms to inspect, share, and modify the program. Users of Adobe’s proprietary Creative Suite software recently discovered that the program communicates over the network with a machine apparently owned by Omniture, a company that tracks web usage..."

I care about the licensing of the software I use, not because of some philosophical principle, but because I got sick and tired of having the thumbscrews put on me by proprietary software companies.

Two new items which shed light on the pains of proprietary software, which is as rigid as a microchip