Comments on: Which way, open-sourcers?

Software advocate says the latest draft of the GPL license is driving a wedge between the open-source and free-software communities.

[tedk7]

stallman + FSF

"As the community begins choosing sides, will Stallman and the
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.

[avanabs]

Wishful Thinking

Unfortunately, the GPL is very much a force in the software industry, not irrelevant at all, with most commercial software companies prohibiting any GPL/LGPL code what-so-ever in their projects. In some industries, for example financial services where huge highly proprietary projects are developed centrally and distributed world wide to subsidiaries and partners, GPL/LGPL are also prohibited to safeguard valuable intellectual property.

The FSF religeon will indeed fracture the Open Source world...perhaps this is Stallman's true objective?

[katamari]

And he needs a shave.

Just say no to UNIX beards.

[Russell McOrmond]

GPLv3 is pro-privacy, pro-security, pro property-rigthts!

This article contains some of the same myths about the GPLv3 and about "DRM" that some other have.

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.

[rcsteiner]

Most projects will simply stay as is.

Projects which don't use the GPL now (and there are a LOT of them) will continue to not use the GPL in the future, and many projects which use GPL2 will continue to use GPL2.

It's largely a nonissue except to the FSF and the press. :-)

[farbuckle]

Zuck gloats. Real people shrug, move on.

It's funny, really.

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.....

[katamari]

Shave face first....

...worry about open-source licenses second.

[gnuosphere]

Russell McOrmond gets it

Russell says:

"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

GPL is not free

If I am going to freely distribute my source code then I am not going to impose *any* restrictions on what can be done with it. Stallman is a hypocrite.

[gnuosphere]

Freedom != Anarchy

That's like saying my freedom is restricted when I'm told to slow down in a school zone or saying a country is not free if it has laws preventing me from assaulting you.

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.

[mfeather]

GPL is a neccessity

One of the primary goals of the GPL is to keep free/open source code from showing up as intellectual property owned by some major corporation. Without such a license for protection, authors of free/open source code could easily find themselves being sued by large corporations that claim copyright on the very code that they wrote. The right to freely modify & distribute one's own source code is not a given in the highly predatory & litigious corporate world and the GPL is an absolute necessity to help individuals keep the rights to their own work.

[rcsteiner]

Different strokes for different folks.

If you don't want to restrict your code, then don't. As an author, that is your right.

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.

[Tortanick]

Free Hair!

I support UNIX beards, ponytails, heck I'd use code from a man who platted his hair.

Free The Hair!

Besides no matter what anyone says, RMS has a great hair style

[Tortanick]

opps

Sorry clicked the wrong button, that should be a reply to someone else, not the story.

[qwerty75]

The author is wrong in many respects

The future of Open Source is not in the hands of the FSF, nor tied to GPL3.

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.

[indulis1]

A (deliberate?) lack of understanding

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).

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 .