Okay, so I'm going to start. So this talk is about GPL enforcement. So I kind of envision that Karen and or Bradley would be in the room and this talk is sort of in some ways conceived as a sort of troll of Karen and Bradley, but I think for various reasons they're not going to be here because they're busy with other very important things. So that's okay, that's actually maybe better for my purposes. This is kind of a talk about GPL enforcement from perspective of some of us lawyers at Red Hat, I should explain I'm a lawyer at Red Hat and we've been talking about this topic among ourselves quite a lot recently and I'll explain a little bit like why this is an interesting topic to us and then like how, so I want to sort of like present sort of very, very rough tentative framework we're thinking about for how we're looking at the question of when is GPL enforcement appropriate? When is litigation appropriate in a GPL enforcement situation? And then if to the extent I have time, I'm going to talk about some related issues that don't quite fit neatly into that idea of a framework and also, so I should also explain this is, so usually when I give talks, they're just like, you know, my own thoughts on things and this is a little bit different because some of the ideas are things that I've sort of developed collectively with some of my colleagues at Red Hat on the legal team and so that's like different from the usual talk I give it but this is not, this is still very much, you know, my own thoughts, my own perspective just influenced by some of the ideas of my colleagues so it's kind of a mixture of my own ideas and my colleagues ideas and it's not, you know, it's not an official Red Hat talk by any means but it definitely grows out of the experience we've had at Red Hat and thinking about this issue. Okay, so why are we even in Red Hat's legal department looking at this topic of GPL enforcement? I mean, so GPL enforcement's always been an important part of what's going on in free software and open source law but it was, you know, to me it was like this topic that was kind of, in a way, minor in nature. I was sort of primarily interested in it by the time I started working at Red Hat. I got interested in it because I noticed that there were Red Hat customers and Red Hat partners that were very, you know, very concerned about the risks of GPL enforcement litigation, perhaps unreasonably concerned and I used to give talks to lawyers where I would really de-emphasize the risk of GPL enforcement in general or open source license enforcement in general, which I think is actually accurate. I think that there really is not a lot of active enforcement of these licenses and that's actually one of the most interesting features of this whole system so I really tried to de-emphasize the risk because I saw that it was hindering to some degree adoption and participation by those companies. In recent years this has become, I think, a more interesting topic so a few things have been happening that sort of make it more interesting. One is that in the U.S. and maybe some other countries as well we're starting to see a bit of an uptick in GPL litigation brought by commercial entities so typically this is kind of a variant of what Bradley Kuhn calls a proprietary relicensing type of situation where you have a company that sort of monopolized a GPL code base and is, for whatever reason, bringing a lawsuit alleging GPL violation, copyright infringement based on GPL violation with some sort of business goal of monetization or what have you. So we saw that in the U.S. with this very complex set of cases associated with Versata and Zimpleware that took place a couple of years ago. What's also happening also in the past few years is so the Software Freedom Conservancy so Karen and Bradley's organization has been, they've been involved with GPL enforcement really from the beginning but I think in the past few years they've kind of taken on a more active or expanded role so Conservancy started the GPL compliance project for Linux developers so they started doing GPL enforcement for Linux kernel copyright holders which is something they hadn't done in the past. Hey Bradley, so that's in a sense, in a political sense, increased the stakes because the kernel is such an important project commercially and it's so pervasive that once Conservancy started doing direct GPL enforcement for kernel copyright holders that was sort of inherently a high profile activity and then of course Conservancy has been funding the Helwig-VVMware lawsuit I guess as part of that GPL compliance project for Linux developers so that was filed a couple of years ago and it was dismissed currently on appeal I believe still on appeal but also I don't know if anyone has heard of, well some of you have heard of Patrick McCarty so what's going on in parallel is to Conservancy's activity and this increased commercial GPL enforcement. There's a Linux kernel developer named Patrick McCarty who over the past couple of years has been bringing a large series of lawsuits in Germany alleging GPL violations and we don't have very good information about this in part because the German civil litigation system is sort of very non-transparent by default and so there's been just this atmosphere of rumor around McCarty's lawsuits but there's been a lot of concern among commercial entities involved in the Linux ecosystem about what McCarty has been doing basically so we don't have reliable information but what some have said is that McCarty is basically adopting a kind of extortionate sort of strategy around bringing litigation in a sense getting companies to agree to these settlements which have penalty clauses and then the penalty clause is triggered by an allegation of a subsequent GPL violation and apparently from what we're told by some who claim to have knowledge about this McCarty has been amassing significant damage awards or settlement awards based on this kind of strategy so the assumption that the motivation of McCarty has been in a sense wealth acquisition rather than compliance per sec or compliance for some sort of social purpose. So the Conservancy and the FSF published last year I think or the year before a set of principles of community oriented GPL enforcement you should look it up. I won't go into them here. Actually I don't think that that Conservancy has actually given public talks about the details of these principles but I think these principles clearly came out of the concern over McCarty and a desire to emphasize the difference between Conservancy's rationale and methodology for bringing GPL enforcement and McCarty's tactics or alleged tactics. So that's the purpose I think, the primary purpose then that the principles will serve. So why is this interesting to Red Hat? One interesting thing is that companies have not really publicly talked about this issue at all. Karen and Bradley talk a lot about GPL enforcement. We don't really see companies publicly willing to talk about this issue. There's a lot of back channel discussion among especially legal representatives of companies about McCarty and so forth but no one from a corporate point of view is really talking about this issue. So we sort of think that it's probably time for a company that's especially involved in a lot of development of GPL licensed open source software to start talking about this. For Red Hat it's particularly significant for a lot of reasons. Red Hat distributes lots of upstream GPL software. Red Hat uses the GPL for a lot of the software it develops. Red Hat has a lot of employees who contribute to GPL licensed projects. Many of these employees I would say are sympathetic to the GPL enforcement being done by the Conservancy. We're certainly aware of that. They're very frustrated by the degree of non-compliance I think that they see. So it's very, for multiple reasons because Red Hat is kind of standing in a lot of these different worlds surrounding the GPL. It's very relevant for us as a topic. So our perspective is, so first, we're going to I think there's been this assumption that companies are just sort of unthinkingly opposed to GPL enforcement. We want to emphasize that there is a place certainly for GPL enforcement and the question is how much enforcement should there be? What tactics should be used? So we actually think that Conservancy's principles are a really good starting point. Conservancy is really the first group to try to articulate what kinds of characteristics legitimate versus illegitimate GPL enforcement should have. So a very good starting point. We think that there's more that can be said about the topic and we sort of see ourselves as starting to think about contributing to a dialogue on this topic that since Conservancy started. So we have a kind of rough, very rough tentative kind of framework that we're discussing about this where we think about what are the objectives of legitimate objectives of GPL enforcement and GPL compliance? And then what are the characteristics that such enforcement should have and then what kinds of tactics are appropriate for that kind of enforcement? Okay, so objective, so for us, if you go to Conservancy's talks on GPL enforcement, I think they'll probably emphasize the traditional conception of what the goals of the GPL are. So maximizing or protecting user freedoms, for example. Our view is kind of different in perspective and we certainly recognize the importance of user freedoms as part of the design of the GPL, what the GPL is designed to do. But from our point of view, the goal that we think we want to achieve from GPL compliance is promoting more collaboration in development. And I don't want this to sound like it's kind of a sort of an old-fashioned type of open source versus free software thing because that's certainly not how I conceive of it. We see social as well as economic benefits to participation in free software projects, including a copy of the projects. And we want to promote both the social and the ethical and the commercial benefits. And the other objective that we have sort of been formulating is this notion of a level playing field among vendors. The GPL is something that attempts to achieve this level playing field and it's actually sort of a subsidiary to the previous one because the level playing field sort of promotes more participation in the system. Okay, so collaboration, so the collaboration goal, you know, so this kind of implies that the goal is not compliance per se or compliance at all costs. GPL compliance should aim to maximize promoting collaboration and participation, including commercial investment and commercial participation. And it should be measured by, you know, the extent to which it achieves that kind of goal. You know, we've been talking a lot about this idea of uncertainty, that the more uncertainty you have surrounding the GPL and GPL compliance and GPL enforcement, the more concerned there is about discouraging participation. So there's a certain point where GPL enforcement activity might be negative in nature because it discourages rather than promotes participation. And the level playing field idea, so the nature of the GPL is this basic rule of copy that distributors can't impose any further restrictions on downstream users. This is something that I think Conservancy actually has emphasized in some of their projects that the shared expectation of the no further restrictions rules creates an incentive to contribute to GPL licensed projects. So we certainly agree with that. And this is, you know, historically this was a big motivation for many companies that got involved in Linux development. The idea that all participants, all corporate participants would be held to the same rules was a big sort of motivator, that they would all be limited in their ability to proprietize, it's called or prevent it from proprietizing the code. So when you have noncompliance, this has the tendency to reduce participation because then you no longer have this shared, the rules are no longer being observed by all participants. So the system is not really working properly when you have some companies out of compliance. So based on those kinds of objectives, we've been thinking about, you know, what are the, I say the lower case P principles, because I don't want to kind of confuse this with the principles that Conservancy and FSF have been talking about. These are more like the characteristics of enforcement that we see as sort of legitimate versus illegitimate or well intended versus not well intended. And so there are four basic principles or characteristics, predictability, enforcement should not be done for gain, for financial gain, and transparency, the importance of transparency and the importance of resolving conflicts of interest surrounding enforcement. So I'll talk about some of these in a little more detail. So predictability is just a very high level kind of characteristic. This is just the idea, you know, I talked about uncertainty. So enforcement should be done in a way that is predictable. It should not be done for what will, you know, be perceived as arbitrary reasons because that the arbitrariness is going to reduce the incentive of companies to be in compliance. And now the idea that enforcement should not be done for financial or personal gain, this is something that Conservancy and the FSF have emphasized. So we totally agree with that as a fundamental principle. So, you know, it's kind of obvious why this is bad. So to do enforcement for personal gain, the way, for example, Patrick McCarty is alleged to be doing. So enforcement that's done for personal gain is going to be, it's going to increase that uncertainty because, you know, why should a company invest in compliance if they just don't, they don't really know, you know, they're trying to play by the rules but they don't know if they're going to be, you know, enforced against for some reason having nothing to do with the goal of furthering compliance for its own sake. This also, you know, enforcement for personal gain just increases cynicism around the whole topic of GPL compliance. So the GPL sort of loses respect because enforcement and compliance is seen as something that is not done for social or ethical reasons but rather for financial gain. And copy left is seen as something that you have to worry about, a cause for concern rather than something that is supposed to benefit the community. And this concern fits in with things I've, you know, talked about in the past about proprietary relicensing about that business model which is now a bit outdated but still to some degree with us. So proprietary relicensing creates, that business model creates incentives for unreasonably aggressive enforcement tactics and what some people would call shake downs and sales tactics and also encourages the companies that operate those kinds of business models to promote very restrictive, unreasonably restrictive interpretations of the GPL. So this is, you know, for many years this was a concern that surrounded MySQL, AB, for example, and other companies that use similar models. So it fits in with what we've said about, you know, what certainly I have talked about in the past about that topic. The transparency value is something that Conservancy and FSF have not really talked about in this context. So we think it's something that's really been missing from discussion of this topic. So you might say that Conservancy has put forward this model in which non-profit organizations, especially charitable ones, or specifically charitable ones, should play a prominent role in license enforcement. That being the case, it becomes very important to have adequate disclosure of donor relationships for those kinds of organizations. We don't really see the kind of disclosure that exists today being adequate and sort of giving us enough of a degree of confidence about the motivations for GPL enforcement. So we think there has to be some pretty high standard for disclosure of funding relationships for entities that are engaged in GPL enforcement as non-profits. Another issue that should be discussed in a transparent way is, you know, just the methodology for deciding if you do go to litigation, why do you pick one company as a target versus another? So if you're suing a given company, what led you to that decision when there are other companies that are engaging in the same kind of violation? Also, this is maybe a fairly controversial point. Thinking about both McCarty and the Helwig-VVMWARE case, we've been really concerned about the sort of by-default secret nature of the German civil litigation system. In this respect, there's a lot of benefits to the German civil procedure system relative to what we have in the United States. One big disadvantage that exists is in the U.S., the facts about litigation are public by default. It's the opposite situation in Germany where when a litigation is going on, it's very difficult to get information about those cases. And this has been, I think, sort of used by, based on what we hear, by Littigan's like, by Patrick McCarty, because the secrecy surrounding the litigation has made it difficult, if not impossible, for companies that are targets or potential targets of his litigation to share information and share strategies and so forth. So the secrecy is very damaging. So all things being equal, non-transparent litigation forums should perhaps be disfavored or there should be a higher burden to justify bringing a lawsuit in a jurisdiction like Germany, or in some way the problem of the non-transparency should be addressed. And also the one thing that Conservancy and FSF do emphasize in the principles is the importance of confidentiality, which is kind of at odds with this emphasis on transparency. So we would say that maybe they're overstating the value of confidentiality. Perhaps we should be having more information disclosed about enforcement cases, including those that have not gone to litigation. And then an issue that has really been ignored almost completely, maybe completely is the issue of conflict of interest. So conflict of interest arise in GPL enforcement and we would say that these should be acknowledged, they should be disclosed and addressed and resolved in some way. So the main concern is this idea of divided loyalties. So if an employee of a company gets involved in GPL enforcement activity, that activity might be in conflict with duties that they have to their employer. Imagine if the GPL enforcement involves some product of the employer or some business partner of the employer or a major customer of the employer. So there are all sorts of possibilities for how an employee getting involved in GPL enforcement could kind of create a conflict of interest in relation to the employee's status as an employee of some company. This doesn't mean that if such conflict exists, the enforcement shouldn't go on or anything like that. It's just that these issues have to be made visible and they have to be resolved in some way. And they could be resolved in a way that would facilitate the enforcement to happen. It's just that this issue has been, as I say, kind of ignored. And I think to the extent that we sort of get close to talking about it, it comes up in a way when we talk about copyright ownership. And that's something that Conservancy talks about a lot. But even if employees have copyright ownership of their work, their contributions to GPL licensed projects, that doesn't eliminate this conflict of interest issue because you can have copyright on code and you could still give rise to a conflict of interest situation if you have an employee who has a duty to an employer or there could be other issues as well. Like maybe you have your business partner and there's some conflict caused by your GPL enforcement activity in relation to your business partnership or various possibilities. One that we've kind of thought about a lot is this employment situation. And then so what tactics are appropriate? Given those kinds of objectives and characteristics of good GPL enforcement, what are the appropriate tactics? So here we say education is very important and litigation should be your last resort. These are also emphasized in the Conservancy and FSF principles, and there's kind of a difference in some of the details we talk about. So we agree with Conservancy that non-compliance is generally a problem of education and awareness, and this can be addressed in many, many cases by working with the non-compliant company to learn about how they can come into compliance.  In talking about education, I would distinguish that from the separate topic of general education initiatives around license compliance, which may have some value themselves, but I think general education around compliance and learning about licensing and so forth and enabling better tools for compliance, that's not really going to address the kinds of GPL non-compliance that I think, for example, Conservancy or the FSF or other GPL license products have to deal with. So it's more the one-on-one education that we're talking about there. And so everyone says that litigation should be a last resort and we certainly agree strongly with that. But I think I would say that we would emphasize it's more than we think Conservancy is doing. So what's wrong with litigation as a solution to GPL non-compliance? So litigation is just a really bad mechanism. It's a bad tool. It's too highly structured. It's very expensive, very time-consuming. The rules differ from locality to locality. So it's just not a well-designed mechanism for achieving compliance in general. It also has the detrimental feature that it is basically a form of shifting power away from developers and towards judges. Judges who in general are not going to be familiar with the technology or the kind of cultural or social background you need to have to understand how the GPL is actually interpreted in the community. The outcome of litigation can be very bad and you can get bad results and this can sometimes be heavily dependent on the knowledge level or skill level of the lawyers on the various sides of the litigation dispute. So litigation tends to increase uncertainty along one dimension. The visibility of litigation, of course, is going to have some effect on making companies very concerned about risk and so forth. My colleague, Scott Peterson, has written this interesting article that kind of relates to this concern about litigation. He says that open-source licenses are shared resources and what he means is that in this system, licenses like the GPL are reused extensively from project to project. That's really something that makes free software and open-source very different from other forms of software licensing. We don't see this in proprietary software licensing. We don't see that reuse of standard license text. The problem with this is that when you have litigation, the effect of one lawsuit brought by one litigant can be very extensive. If the lawsuit results in a particular result, it's as likely that the result's going to be very bad from the perspective of someone concerned about the integrity of interpretation of the GPL as it might be good. There's at least a high risk of really bad result from a kind of community GPL perspective. One of the problems also is that if you get a bad legal result, what do you do then? These licenses are not easy to update. The GPL was updated three times over a period of 25 years. These licenses are not really well designed for frequent updates. You're kind of stuck with a license text and a set of bad legal rulings. The counterargument is that litigation is potentially beneficial because you get more certainty. The problem is that sometimes less certainty is actually more beneficial because of the risk of a bad result. Anytime litigation is contemplated in a GPL enforcement context, you have to consider the likelihood of a bad result based on what the facts and the legal issues are. What kind of follows from this is the most appropriate kind of GPL enforcement case that would be brought to litigation. It would be one where you don't have strong disagreement on the underlying legal interpretive issues and the risk of a really bad result in terms of like GPL interpretation is relatively low. Also, these are going to be cases, so the intransigent aspect is that these will be cases where education is just not going to work. You have a repeat violator. This kind of sounds to me kind of like the busy box cases that were brought several years ago. I think they fit well in this kind of clear and intransigent standard. I'm not so sure that the VMware lawsuit really fits in well with this kind of standard. There's a subtopic here of defense of GPL claims. There have been a few notable cases where companies have been sued based on some legal theory and they've brought a counterclaim or a lawsuit against the company suing them based on an allegation of GPL violation. Three examples that I know of are SCOV-IBM, so SCOV sued IBM many years ago. IBM brought a GPL violation counterclaim against SCOV. Red Hat was sued by a... not a patent troll exactly, but a company that was sort of transitioning from operating entity to patent troll called Twin Peaks, and Red Hat brought a counterclaim based on GPL violation. Another one that didn't involve the GPL is Jacobson versus Katzer, where Katzer sued Jacobson or Jacobson's company alleging patent infringement, and then Jacobson sued Katzer alleging a violation of the artistic license, and this resulted in a helpful legal ruling in the U.S. that open source licenses... suggesting open source licenses can be enforced through copyright law. But notice that the lower court decision in Jacobson v. Katzer went the other way, and so if the appellate court had gone the other way and agreed with the lower court, we would have had one of those really bad cases. And, you know, several years ago, this is what many of us were worried about. So we were kind of lucky with Jacobson v. Katzer. Anyway, so with defensive GPL claims, we think these should be subject to a different kind of standard because they don't really raise the same kinds of concerns that typical GPL enforcement claims and litigation will raise. There isn't the same concern about abuse. There's no real notion of doing this for a financial gain.  This is not a matter of the GPL litigant trying to find targets to sue because the target has already selected itself because the target has brought a lawsuit against the defendant. And these cases, the ones that have occurred in the real world so far, have all involved some kind of legal threat to free software. So patent infringement against free software code base in two of the cases. And then in the case of SCO, a very broad sort of dangerous copyright infringement violation basically. So defensive GPL claims, we think don't raise the same concerns and should be kind of viewed by a kind of lower standard. I think Bradley Kuhn has spoken otherwise. He's kind of criticized Red Hat for having settled with Twin Peaks. But I think that the way litigation works is it kind of motivates you to compromise and settlement. And I think it's kind of, to the extent that Bradley was sort of suggesting that you should sort of fight to the bitter end and make sure that you're going to bring one of these counter claims, make sure that you fight to the very end so that you win. I think that that's just not really a realistic view of how the litigation system works. But again, as I say, the concerns that arise with non-defensive GPL claims don't really arise in that context. So that was sort of the framework, the tentative framework that we've been talking about, very kind of rough as you can see, but you can see that we're sort of building upon the ideas that Conservancy started to talk about and thinking about what is Conservancy overlooking, what are some issues that really need to be brought to the fore when thinking about when GPL enforcement is appropriate or not, when litigation is appropriate or not. There's a few other issues that I've thought about that relate to this a little bit in more or less direct or indirect ways. And I'll just, in the remaining time I have, I will talk about those. So one thing is this, I call this back channels problem. So one of the problems I see in the current state of affairs is that we have different entities that are concerned about GPL enforcement. They aren't all really talking to each other fully. So we have these opportunities for companies to talk to each other about concerns about McCarty and how to think about GPL compliance. But these forums are not really open to all stakeholders in the GPL enforcement world. So I think that we should move away from this tendency to have these closed forums that are not open to everyone and I'd like to see us have a more multilateral kind of dialogue on these issues. And I think not having that multilateralism tends to just escalate the divisiveness that surrounds this whole topic. I also think that some of the rhetoric that I hear from conservancy around GPL enforcement is maybe also problematic in some ways. The rhetoric, which I mean, I've kind of engaged in it myself in this talk a little bit, is kind of aggressive and almost kind of violent in nature. So the very term enforcement is sort of suggestive of force, violent force, and I mean, apart from compliance, I don't have a good alternative phrasing to use. But I think there's something to be said for thinking about rhetoric and I don't want to sound like a tone police, but I think possibly the divisiveness around this whole topic could be improved by thinking more about how the kind of language we use. So Ted Scho has raised an interesting issue of who should really have the authority to enforce when you have a project like the Linux kernel with lots of copyright holders. Is it really appropriate for a representative of a minority of those copyright holders to enforce? This is, I think Ted suggested that maybe Lena should be the one to make the decisions because after all, he ultimately makes decisions for what goes into the Linux kernel. I don't think Lena's interested in doing that. But I do think that when you have a project like the kernel, you have lots of corporate copyright holders as well as individual copyright holders. The corporate copyright holders are stakeholders as well and they ought to have some sort of say in how enforcement gets done. I don't really have a good idea for how that can be done, but I can envision some more multilateral way of dealing with this. When you first had this dev room, we gave this talk about basically saying that it is possible for companies to enforce the GPL without being corrupt. I'm not sure I agree with what he said in that talk entirely because I think that when individual companies bring GPL litigation, it's sort of an inherently suspect, but maybe there's a way of multilaterally addressing the GPL non-compliance problem involving companies. And I think I'll just close on this point that I think one of the concerns we hear about the McCarty lawsuits is that he's alleging very frivolous or questionable interpretations of the GPL that are inconsistent with how I would say we tend to assume the GPL should be interpreted in the community. And so maybe we can address that by having projects do more of an effort than they do today of documenting how they interpret the GPL as applied to the issues that arise in a given project. So maybe we could have the kernel start to put down on paper an attempt to kind of derive some kind of consensus view on, you know, for example, the proprietary kernel module issue or any number of other issues that can arise in GPL enforcement issues or GPL compliance issues in the kernel context. So I don't know if there's time left for questions, but I'm going to end it there. We do have a couple of minutes for questions and I'm going to start. So Richard, you've mentioned a number of things that kind of go beyond Conservancy's principles of GPL enforcement and you've made a pretty strong statement that Red Hat is actively thinking about that. So my question for you is, do you kind of envision that this is a trend? Do you want to be a model? Do you want Red Hat to sort of set the tone that maybe other companies will actively think about this and come up with their own principles of GPL enforcement? Do you think I'm not done? Do you think that we're going to have Oracle principles for GPL enforcement and IBM principles of GPL enforcement, sort of like we had vanity open source licenses back in the day, or alternatively, are you making a call for the community to come together and harmonize around principles for GPL enforcement? Yeah, it's the latter of course. We don't want each company to come up with its own principles. We actually want to have the whole community come together and agree on what those principles should be. So Richard, you talked about it being important in your view, as I understand it, for organizations doing GPL enforcement to provide clarity and transparency in terms of things like who will get sued and to make sure that that decision is not capricious or arbitrary. I can understand the value of that, but surely the difficulty is then that you end up with the whole I don't have to run fast on the line, I just have to run faster than you thing, where every company brings themselves into kind of minimalist compliance just beyond the next worst company in the list according to the principles, such that somebody else will get sued apart from them, and whereas normally you would negotiate with a company saying we would like full compliance, please, they would just say, well, as long as we're doing better than so and so, your principles say you're going to get sued, I don't, yeah, I'll have to think about that. Maybe, Bradley. So I hope I can be adult with two questions since you mentioned me, I think 23 times during a talk. But no photos. Sorry? No photos of you. I was in the back, I could hear the whole thing. So first of all, you claim that the defense of law sued against Twin Peaks meets your lower clayspeed principles. In fact, I think it doesn't on every count. It was not transparent. There was no discussion with the community about what you were doing. It was not predictable because as a complete surprise in the end of that lawsuit, a redhead executive declared that proprietary kernel modules are not required to be under GPL. And I suppose it resolved, yeah, it's in, it's on archive.org. You can read the deposition. I would assume you have. So I'm sort of completely confused about your argument that that, oh, basically, the only lawsuit you said fit your principles is basically red hats one against Twin Peaks. Oh, no, not at all. So maybe I didn't explain this well enough. I'm saying that these defensive counterclaim issues shouldn't be held to the same standard. So to some degree, I guess you're right. The point you're making about transparency, for example, it doesn't meet the same standard of transparency that I'm suggesting should be part of how we think about, you know, GPL enforcement should be done. But I'm saying that's okay because it's a confined issue. It's the defensive, it's because it's defensive in nature and it doesn't raise the same kinds of concerns about abuse and so forth that arise in a non-defensive context. So I probably didn't explain that. So my second question is, you just answered Tom's question saying yes, you want to engage in the process of discussing principles in a way. There has been multiple forms available since the principles were published to do that. I haven't seen you or Red Hat do that instead, we have a surprise talk where you criticize everything about our principles and didn't even tell us you were going to do that. So I'm a little confused like, why you're saying you want to have discussion but you aren't engaging in the forms that exist that are public and transparent to discuss the principles? First of all, my view is that I think it would be a great idea for Red Hat to participate in development of the principles. So evolution of the principles going forward. I don't know if that's my own personal view. I don't know if that's a view of some of my colleagues. But I don't think it's a surprise talk because you are one of the people who voted to have it in the Deborah. I'm sorry, time for one really quick question. Hi. I was wondering if you, how much do you think the SEO lawsuits have done reputational damage to this whole field of GPL, including GPL litigation? And then how much, because it's kind of something I missed in your presentation, what are you going to do to kind of take away that negative feeling that those lawsuits have given to the whole field of legislation enforcement? Well, I don't, I mean, the SEO lawsuits are now kind of really like deeply in the past. I think we've got, so at the time, there was a lot of concern about whether, you know, free software was legally dangerous but that was a long time ago and I think everyone kind of got beyond that. The SEO lawsuits were seen to be ultimately, you know, essentially frivolous in nature and so I don't think that that's an issue anymore. Okay, great. Thank you very much, Richard.


Hey everyone, this is Dan with another episode of my TMV videos. The market has not been doing well since the beginning of this year. However, there is a way to make profit in spite of the bear market. In the last couple months, I bought several batches of the ETF TMV which is up 58% since the beginning of the year. TMV is pegged to the yield of the Treasury Bounds with maturity of 20 years or more. Since interest rates will be going up for the rest of the year, I expect TMV to probably double in the next year. Let's get into the exciting details. I've been sharing some of my trades and some of the news events with my subscribers on Twitter as well as on YouTube. On Twitter, I pretty much have been updating my subscribers every 2 or 3 days or so. For example, on February 23rd, I tweeted that I bought TMV and TQQQ. In fact, after that, I've been selling and buying TQQQ several times already and as well as SQQQ which is the inverse of TQQQQ. In the meanwhile, I sold a portion of the TMV I bought February 23rd for a small profit. For the rest of the shares that I'm still keeping, they are up 38% already. Certainly that's pretty good performance. Then on March 17th, I tweeted that I bought more TMV shares and those shares are up 26% already. On April 13th, I bought more TMV shares then those shares are up 27% already because it was a dip, like an intraday dip on April 23rd. I took the opportunity to buy more TMV shares. So far, I've been very lucky with TMV and it's not all just luck. It has to do with also some of the analysis I did. I published a video about a week ago about TMV. Now this is just an update of that video and I will talk about why I'm so confident that TMV will be a good investment for me in the next few months. If you think this is interesting, I'd like to encourage you to click the like, subscribe and notification button so that you'll be notified when I publish my next video. It'll also encourage me to make more videos like this in the future. In the meanwhile, I'd like to inform you that I'm not a financial advisor. If you want to buy or sell stocks, you should make your own decisions and you should definitely consult with your financial advisors before you do so. Let's continue. We have a lot of interesting things to cover. This is a chart showing the progression of TMV and SPY as well as QQQQ since January 1st of this year. On the chart, you can see that TMV went up by an impressive 58% already whereas SPY actually went down by about 7% year-to-date and QQQ went down by more than 15% year-to-date. Finally the broad market has been bearish but TMV has been shooting up. What is TMV? TMV is an exchange-traded fund is created and supported by the RECSEON and is paid to the 20-plus-year Treasury Bounds. It's supposedly structured to approximate 300% of the performance of the ICEUS Treasury 20-plus-year bound index but ignored 300% because there's ETF leakage which is a very important thing to know about. I will explain more about that later on. The gist of it is that when the 20-year rate goes up, TMV goes up. There's a flip side of TMV or the inverse of TMV which is TMF, another ETF supported by the RECSEON and when TMV goes up then TMF goes down. There's a piece of information that we need to be aware of as we consider interest rates and TMF and TMV. On March 17th, the Federal Reserve Banks announced that they will approve the first interest rate hike in more than 3 years and the Fed on that day raised the Fed funds rate by a quarter of a percentage point. The Fed also announced that they expected to be increasing the interest rate 6 times in the rest of 2022 and the reason why they are increasing interest rates is because they consider the inflation rate to be too high at this point. Actually the inflation rate as of March 1st for all items exceed 8% which is indeed very high and we'll also talk about that in the next few minutes. So far we already talked about TMV, the ETF which I expect to be going up in the next few months then we'll talk about the 20-year Treasury rate, the Fed funds rate and the high inflation as measured by CPI. How are they related to each other? Generally speaking, because of the high inflation that compels the Fed to increase the Fed funds rate in order to control inflation or to bring down inflation. Because the Fed increases the Fed funds rate it causes all the other interest rates to go up including a 20-year Treasury rate and since TMV is designed to mimic the movement of the 20-year Treasury rate or actually 20-year and above then when the 20-year rate goes up TMV goes up. So that's the relationship among these different elements. Let's look at how the CPI, the inflation rate, the Fed funds rate and the 20-year Treasury rate interact with each other over the years. You might say since we're talking about TMV why don't we just plot the line for TMV? The only problem is that TMV has been in existence only since April of 2009. So if you want to plot TMV side by side with these three indicators the line for TMV will start from here which is just a little short line and that's why it's not easy to do a direct comparison between TMV and any one of the three indicators and therefore I'd rather look at these three indicators and see how they interact over the last 60 years and then from there we can see how is the 20-year rate related to TMV and that's how we can tie everything together. Currently, the CPI is at 8.5% if you look back in history the last time the inflation rate was this high was between 1974 and around 1980 to 83 and actually back in the 1960s the inflation rate was pretty low between 1 and 2% like what we had pretty much in the last few years and then it started to creep up when it hit finally around 8.5% inflation rate that was around 1974 so if you look down at that time and because inflation was creeping up the Fed was gradually raising interest rate to try and bring down the inflation rate because the Fed funds rate was increasing the 20-year Treasury rate was also climbing in 1974 when CPI was about 8% 20-year Treasury rate went up to about 7% at that time and then if you look at the Fed's funds rate today it's only 0.33 of a percent but back then the Fed funds rate was already at 10% and that's why a lot of people feel that the Fed is already behind its curve of trying to increase interest rate to control inflation actually a lot of people feel that the Fed should have started raising rate probably more than a year ago and then if you look at the 20-year Treasury rate currently it's only at 3.09% and back then it was already 7% back in the 1970s and 1980s as the Fed continued to increase interest rate to control inflation the Fed funds rate went as high as 21-22% and the 20-year rate went as high as 15.78% it is therefore reasonable to assume that the 20-year rate will go up from the current 3% to at least 6-7% before inflation is brought under control that means the 20-year rate will more than double from today's level that brings us to the next chart just for this year in the beginning of the year the 20-year rate was at 2.05% and as of last Friday market closing the 20-year Treasury rate was 3.09% that means the Treasury rate 20-year Treasury rate increased by 50.73% during the same period TMV went up by 83% so if the 20-year rate is going to increase another 100% from now then it will be very reasonable to assume that TMV will go up maybe 160% or more one thing we need to be aware of is that TMV like many leveraged ETFs has significant leakage what do I mean by leakage for example if you look at the 20-year rate of 2.74% it happened at least 20 times since 2012 for example April 19th 2012 the 20-year was at 2.74 and then March 24th 2017 it was back to 2.74 again and then the more recent occurrence of this rate was April 5th 2022 it was back to 2.74 again in the meanwhile if you look at the value of TMV it started out at $702.10 and then it's been coming down gradually even though the 20-year rate is the same it might go up and down but it continue to hit back to this 2.74 level in the meanwhile TMV has been going down the reason why it's leakage because it costs money and there's cost to buy and sell the financial instruments to support the TMV ETF and that's why typical to a highly leveraged ETF like this there's leakage when I calculate what's the equivalent of annual loss of TMV I turn now for example for this one between April 19th April 26th with the declining value it will be equivalent to the annual loss of 23.5% and then between April 2012 and February 7th 2017 with this decline it will be the equivalent annual loss of 20.8% and if you look down all these lines you can see that the annual loss average out to be about 19 to 20% and that's pretty substantial that means if even if the 20-year rate doesn't move it goes along a straight line flat line from now on you don't want to be holding TMV for the long term because every year you lose 20% of your value however when the 20-year rate is going up as fast as what it's been doing for example just in the matter of four months it already went up 50%. The 20% loss per year basically is more than canceled out by the appreciation or the increase in the 20-year rate or the increase in the value of TMV there's a catch though what if later on for a short period of time or maybe for several months the 20-year rate starts to decline then it's going to hurt if you hold TMV for example during 2019 pretty much overall the 20-year rate was trending downward it went from 2.83% to 2.25% throughout the year the 20-year rate went through a 24% decline and in the same period of time TMV went down by 33% so the decline of TMV was actually faster than the 20-year rate in the meanwhile remember there's an inverse twin of TMV, TMF at you bought TMF on January 2nd 2019 and sold it at the end of the year you would have gained 32.63% and that's why it's important when you are buying or selling TMV that you should your market reverses direction especially the 20-year rate starts going down then you should sell TMV quickly and switch to TMF or just get out of TMV completely and wait for the market to pick back up again and timing is the key when you start buying and selling leveraged ETFs like TMV and TMF and you don't ever want to hold these for several years at a time you want to hold them hopefully during the time you're absolutely sure that it will move in the direction that you think it's going to move and if your prediction is correct you will make a lot of profit but if the reality turns out to be opposite of what you're predicting you can be losing money quickly I need to question you about that again if you like what you've seen so far I'd like to suggest that you click the like subscribe and notification button as usual I welcome your comments questions and suggestions this is about wraps up my video for now I will chat with you again in the next few days in the meanwhile I'd like to wish you the very best of luck with your financial investments