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Torvalds critical of new GPL draft
July 28, 2006 -
GPL 3.0: A bonfire of the vanities?
March 9, 2006
(The GPL 3) no longer works in the "fairness" sense. It's purely a firebrand, and only good for the extremist policies of the FSF. It's no longer a nice balance that a lot of people can accept, and that a lot of companies can stand behind once you explain it to them.
--Linus Torvalds, Linux founder
I told you so.
Earlier this year, I wrote that the General Public License version 3 (GPL 3) would bring the open-source and free-software communities to a critical juncture. While some scoffed, the decision of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to discount the concerns of commercial open-sourcers with the latest draft of GPL 3 threatens to split the community and slow the growth of free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS).
The most compelling software story in the past decade is the rise of FLOSS. Software like Linux, Apache and OpenOffice have injected competition into a largely proprietary industry and spurred development of next-generation software. This success largely hid the divisions between the free and open-source communities, but GPL 3 was written to expose them.
Richard Stallman and the FSF have quietly and sometimes publicly fumed that their software, their philosophy and their names have been subsumed by the broader open-source community. The philosophy of the free-software community is to evangelize a social ideology around the Four Freedoms; the goal of Linus Torvalds, IBM, Red Hat and the open-source community is to build great software and profitable businesses around the open-source licensing model.
Unfortunately for the open-source community, Stallman ultimately controls the future of the GPL, and the commercial success of those companies is not his primary concern. Torvalds' comment cited above certainly reflects the growing tension between the communities, but let's look at what is really changing in this new version.
The most debated new provision--the anti-Digital Rights Management provision--also is the most popular among the Free Software community. While many in the FLOSS community cheer the goal of sticking it to the content industry, this provision is far more expansive and will effectively prevent the use of GPL software in many industries, especially in embedded devices.
With TiVo in mind, the provision includes language that prevents hardware companies from controlling the final implementation of their devices. If you have a cell phone running Linux, for example, it requires that the user of that phone must be able to modify and run all the code on that specific phone. While this sounds like a good thing, the regulators that approve new designs for use in each country would be extremely wary of devices that can be modified at will.
In addition, GPL 3-based software will be completely off the table for medical devices. Government safety and efficacy testing is rigorous and very specific. A device must be tested in the exact configuration it will operate in, and regulators won't take, "Well, we hope it will be this one" as an answer. More importantly, the lawyers would have a field day with "open" devices.
Perhaps most ignored, however, is the effect this policy would have on software where privacy protection is important. For example, the government document creation and management market is a key target for the open-source community. Yet the definition of DRM in the new license would cover key-based access control for tools that create documents as well as music and movies.
Think of it this way: If you can create a GPL DVD player that can play any GPL-created DVD, you can create a document reader that would read any document. And as we've all seen from recent privacy scares, access control, another word for rights management, is a critical part of protecting our privacy.
At this point, there is little if any chance substantive changes will be made to GPL 3 before it is published and the schisms widen. GPL 3 will mark the end of the FLOSS community and the start of separate and distinct free-software and open-source communities. The only question now is what the post-GPL 3 world will look like.
As the community begins choosing sides, will Stallman and the FSF be made irrelevant? Will GPL 3 and its goal of ethical purity fall to the wayside as the open-source community rejects it?
Biography
Jonathan Zuck is president of the Association for Competitive Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group specializing in technology issues. ACT's membership roster has some 3,000 companies including Microsoft.
See more CNET content tagged:
GPL 3, GPL, Free Software Foundation, open-source community, Linus Torvalds
FSF be made irrelevant?"
Are you kidding?
Have you not noticed? They've been irrelevant for years.
Stallman is enough of an extremist so that if he were a big
politician or head of state, Bush would have already declared
him a terrorist.
The FSF religeon will indeed fracture the Open Source world...perhaps this is Stallman's true objective?
If privacy is your concern, then you will want to ensure that your own hardware is under your own control, and not a third party. What the GPLv3 does is protect this fundamental property right for GPL software that is bundled with hardware. In other words, GPLv3 is pro-security and pro-privacy, while what TiVO and those using DRM are doing is anti-security and anti-privacy.
The issue isn't the use of cryptography to protect privacy, but the use of cryptography to attack privacy. The issue isn't the use of cryptography to protect property rights, but the use of cryptography to circumvent property rights.
See: Protecting property rights in a digital world
While the GPL can't protect everyone's privacy and property rights, as governments have shirked their responsibilities in this area, we can as software authors demand that our software not be used to circumvent the privacy, property and other rights of the users of our software.
It's largely a nonissue except to the FSF and the press. :-)
Jonathan Zuck has made a career out of being MSFT's shill.
ACT started up as a MSFT mouthpiece just prior to the beginning of the MSFT antitrust trial. Redmond paid them, they talked, and mainsteam journalists shook their head at how lame ACT's arguments were.
Now, Mr. Zuck gloats over the "split" between Open Source and FSF. So -- who cares? FSF has put forth a license. That's it. It's a proposal.
If developers want to use the "old" GPL v2, fine. If they want v.3, fine again. If the want to used BSD, great. FSF doesn't dictate which open source license anyone can use.
FSF, Linux and all the rest will be around for a long, long time yet -- long after stooges like ACT are gone.....
"If privacy is your concern, then you will want to ensure that your own hardware is under your own control, and not a third party."
Exactly. This article by Zuck is so full of misinformation I respond to it in full here -
http://gnuosphere.blogspot.com/2006/09/gplv3-drm-and-han-solo.html
There is nothing hypocritical in expecting and enforcing some degree of social responsibility directly related to the freedom granted. The restrictions of the GPL are designed with the intent of protecting the freedoms outlined by the GPL - no more, no less. Any lack of such restrictions would be hypocritical. You need to tell this to BSD-like license propagators next time they use this non-sensical argument.
However, RMS is quite open and honest about his position and his desires. His desires might well differ from yours, perhaps radically, but there is no hypocrisy involved.
His main concern seems to be the continued ability for the code he writes to be freely available (and not locked into someone's proprietary project).
Without restrictions such as those placed on code reuse by the GPL, anyone could use the code in a completely closed project and release the binaries for a fee without contributing back to the community from which the original code was taken.
In your case, they could get away with it.
Some developers think that's fine. Some don't. That's why multiple FOSS licenses exist. Use whichever one you think best fits your requirements and preferences.
Free The Hair!
Besides no matter what anyone says, RMS has a great hair style
First of all there are many open source licenses, counting reciprocal and academic there are around 50, and almost all are compatible with each other.
Secondly, no one is required to move to GPL3. I doubt many current projects that are using GPL2 will switch, so this will have zero effect.
People are free to use any license they choose. If people do not adopt GPL3 it will have no negative effect on OSS in general that the GPL specifically.
What are you saying is the same as saying that if some new soda from Coke fails, then Coke or even the soda industry will fail.
- A (deliberate?) lack of understanding
- by indulis1 September 26, 2006 7:10 PM PDT
- There is a big difference between the *ability* to read any document (bad thing, no more privacy) and the *capability* to read any document (good thing, document can be read on any device where user has the key).
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(26 Comments)My understanding is that GPLv3 says that you must give up the rights to control the DRM (i.e. publish your implementation and by implication make the specifications open), not that you have to give up all encryption keys. The source code for how the DRM is implemented would become visible and could be implemented freely on another platform, ruling out vendor "lock-in" of users by a combination of devices and media formats.
This story is carefully-crafted, well-financed FUD .