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Then it's a good thing the GPL isn't about open-source. ;)

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-software- for-freedom.html

Yeah, let's worry about that new GPL that hasn't even been drafted yet (and a first draft isn't expected until 2007 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/gpl_fsf/)

If you really cared, you'd get your opinion in early: http://www.fsf.org/Members/peterb/gplv3

MSNBC is just regurgitating Reuters.

You should only use free software and avoid unfree software.

Not according to the FSF, who wrote them both...

Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library
The GNU Project has two principal licenses to use for libraries. One is the GNU Library GPL; the other is the ordinary GNU GPL....
Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation. At present, most GNU libraries are covered by the Library GPL, and that means we are using only one of these two strategies, neglecting the other. So we are now seeking more libraries to release under the ordinary GPL.

This will clear up some legalese and speed adoption of OpenOffice.org. Bravo! The LGPL means that perhaps other application can make use of some of the tasty spell check and spreadsheet functionality.

What if the work is not much longer than the license itself?

If a single program is that short, you may as well use a simple all-permissive license for it, rather than the GNU GPL.

Agreed that that's part of it. And, as we slip down that slope where there are hardware- and OS-level mechanisms determining what we can and cannot view, hear and run, let's please thank the heavens and stars for GNU, the FSF and the thousands of players who've given us the ability to circumvent these things.

I personally don't get too up in arms about "some DRM." I think, e.g., FairPlay is pretty fair for consumers. Currently.

I no longer hear (m)any rants about CPU IDs. It's not because it's no longer there - it's because - per the parent post - we're desensitized.

From my PoV, a little governing of our digital Freedoms is acceptable if it means there's incentive for entities to build and offer good services. I thank heavens for the eternal vigilance we're all provided by the likes of GNU and FSF because they're the ones who've made possible the tools that can help us decide for ourselves when others decide to clamp down too tightly (and that threshold will differ for diferent individuals).

Dr. Ioannidis (who is Greek, like me) is right: I read daily public announcements from universities, as well as some scientific papers, and I have found that most of them are unimportant, wrong or simply motivated by financial reasons (some universities must use all their expenses allowance in order to continue receiving government money). Not only scientific papers are wrong (often the result of vanity), but students dislike studying science and technology. Recently RPI President Jackson called for a national strategy to overcome this problem. USA must invest more in science, otherwise rival nations. How would you feel to see a communist Chinese flag on Mars? You can prevent this by persuading your representatives to invest more in science and technology. The first step would be to enact more reasonable copyright and patent laws. Science, like free software benefits from openess, which is now hindered by copyright and patents. Richard M. Stallman has published an article in Nature about this, and you can read it here.

Jonathan Zdziarski makes many claims with nothing to back them up, then draws incorrect conclusions based on those claims.

One of the things I've heard, which doesn't make much sense to me, is the idea of changing the GPL to deal with 'use' rather than 'distribution', which would affect companies like Google and Amazon.

Where did he hear this? The FSF understands that setting conditions for running software is not allowed under US copyright law:

"At a fundamental level, the APSL makes a claim that, if it became accepted, would stretch copyright powers in a dangerous way: it claims to be able to set conditions for simply *running* the software. As I understand it, copyright law in the US does not permit this, except when encryption or a license manager is used to enforce the conditions. It would be terribly ironic if a failed attempt at making a free software license resulted in an extension of the effective range of copyright power."

Zdziarski continues:

The argument seems to be that some people feel building your infrastructure on open source should demand a company release all of their proprietary source code which links to or builds on existing GPL projects.

First off, the GNU GPL was written by the Free Software Foundation with an eye toward software freedom, and it was written well before there was such a thing as the "open source" movement. Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman made it very clear that software freedom, not mere "open"ness, would be the measuring stick by which the GPL3 would be judged a success. Hence, the GPL is properly credited as a free software license. This is important not only to tell the truth about who wrote the GPL and why, but to understand what it says and why. Software freedom is the very thing the open source movement was build to not discuss. To this day, the Open Source Initiative (which coined the term "open source", defined it, and determines which licenses comply with its terms) belittles the FSF in their FAQ as "ideological tub-thumping". Which movement you side with (if either) is your business. But it should be important to be fair to the differences that exist between the movements. One practical difference between the two movements is that free software licenses guarantee private derivatives ("You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way."), OSI-approved licenses do not guarantee private derivatives, hence the FSF's unwillingness to give their imprimateur to the early revisions of the Apple Public Source License.

Second, no American company can legally distribute proprietary derivatives of GPL'd software. If they don't like this, they should write their own software or find something under a license which they can build on and distribute without also distributing their changes.

They argue that the open source community hasn't benefited from companies like Google and Amazon. Well, from a source code perspective that might be somewhat true - but if you take into consideration the fact that we all have a good quality, freely accessible search engine, cheap books, and employment for many local developers (many of whom write open source applications), the benefits seem to balance out the deficiency. Does anybody remember what the world was like before Google? None of us do, primarily because we couldn't find it - we couldn't find much of anything we were looking for on the Internet as a matter of fact, i

One of the problems that arise from the Linux trademark issue, while not a new one, is that if all open source projects enforce trademarks, Red Hat Linux may not be able to include all the wonderful packages we know and love. The complexity of having so many trademark regulations to wade through will slow down the packaging process, and would cause smaller distributions to wither.

For example, the Mozilla trademarks on Firefox caused quite a stir as it was seen to violate the Debian social contract.

If a project is being very strict about a trademark on the name, it violates the trademark to use that name on a modified version of the product. This means that in order to modify the source code, you now have to jump through one of two hoops:

• Relabel the package
• Send your patch to the maintainers, and wait for it find its way through the projects queue and arrive back to you as an official package before you can use it with branding intact.

What I find most interesting about this development, is that the software remains free, but it is becoming less open. In this specific case of Linux, which is not a user-facing piece of software, a trademark will not have a large impact, but if the trend continues, open source will be choking on its own FUD.

There's a whole lot more to GNU than GCC. Kinda important things like glibc, gdb, bash etc. Maybe this list will refresh your addled mind: http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/. Would those things exist if RMS/FSF didn't do it first? Maybe, but maybe not in your lifetime. There's a concept called 'being in the right place at the right time with the right idea' and RMS was there, as well as Linus. Together they helped foster a movement, and both of them should get the credit each is due.

The point of the post was that Linux requires GNU, and not the other way around. The free software movement would have happened without Linus in some form or another. Linus specifically wrote Linux because of the availability of the GNU starting point and the software philosophy that RMS brought into light. Without those Linus may not have ever written the kernel and had a career in something else totally. Oh, I guess you might have come along and been The One, but given your apparent inability to be reasonable and honest, I tend to doubt that.

Anyway, I don't want to rehash what is already going on by dozens of others postings to this article. The reality is that RMS/GNU/FSF was a significant event in the history of computing for the masses, and if your 'firm enough grasp on reality' can't acknowledge that, that's a problem with your personal reality field - it doesn't change objective reality at all.

That's exactly what the LGPL is for.

Derivative of your code will be in LGPL, but code linked to it (as plugins or using it as a library) have no license requirement.

Check it out

What color is the sky in your universe?

Free Software Foundation is also collecting responses on this issue.

Free Software Foundation is also collecting responses on this issue.

macromedia doesn't release for linux

It runs fine on my GNU/Linux system though. The trouble with flash is that there was no free (as in freedom) flash plugin. However, I guess our friends at the FSF can point you to a project that is working on just that.

Please do point us to a recording of this event where RMS argued with Lessig publicly. I would prefer to hear this for myself rather than depend on a recollection so vague we can't even tell what the jist of the argument was about.

It would seem an odd choice to let Lessig sit on the board of directors of the FSF, distribute gratis copies of Lessig's book "Free Culture" to FSF members, and then extend the book offer if Stallman has serious philosophical disagreements with Lessig.

Please do point us to a recording of this event where RMS argued with Lessig publicly. I would prefer to hear this for myself rather than depend on a recollection so vague we can't even tell what the jist of the argument was about.

It would seem an odd choice to let Lessig sit on the board of directors of the FSF, distribute gratis copies of Lessig's book "Free Culture" to FSF members, and then extend the book offer if Stallman has serious philosophical disagreements with Lessig.

Please do point us to a recording of this event where RMS argued with Lessig publicly. I would prefer to hear this for myself rather than depend on a recollection so vague we can't even tell what the jist of the argument was about.

It would seem an odd choice to let Lessig sit on the board of directors of the FSF, distribute gratis copies of Lessig's book "Free Culture" to FSF members, and then extend the book offer if Stallman has serious philosophical disagreements with Lessig.

They do disallow derived works, and it's perfectly obvious why they should.

Except that they don't disallow "derivative" works of the license, they just restrict what changes you can make (if the code was already GPLd) and you can't call the new license "GPL" or mention "GNU": http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #ModifyGPL

You can also add your own exceptions outside of the GPL, as suggested for cases where you have no choice but to link with a nonfree library: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #GPLIncompatibleLibs

They do disallow derived works, and it's perfectly obvious why they should.

Except that they don't disallow "derivative" works of the license, they just restrict what changes you can make (if the code was already GPLd) and you can't call the new license "GPL" or mention "GNU": http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #ModifyGPL

You can also add your own exceptions outside of the GPL, as suggested for cases where you have no choice but to link with a nonfree library: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #GPLIncompatibleLibs

Since we're giving a laundry list of companies that have invented their own licenses to ensure their code can't be used by open source projects under the GPL (most notably Linux), why not mention Apple and their APSL.

After all, the APSL has no advantages over the GPL or the LGPL, except that (from Apple's point of view) it prevents Linux from using the goodies in Darwin (such as the fast-booting Launchd).

http://directory.fsf.org/audio/ogg/

Ogg Vorbis - [The GNU General Public License, Version 2 or later] - 2002-07-22
Free audio format

Basement? Hah. You should be so lucky as to own my property.

Well, the recommended wording reads (emphasis mine):

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This issue is covered in the GPL FAQ.

(ex post facto disclaimer: IANAL)

they are trying to build a license that will not fail when subjected to the next ten years' worth of (currently) unknown attacks.

From what I gathered reading
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/gpl3-backgroun d.html
they seem greatly concerned with the adequacy of the license to international copyright law.

This is very important, as the GPL may not be enforceable on various countries as it is today. I know that, eg, in Brazil, special legal measures had to be taken to allow for the GPL to override (if the license is chosen, of course) the current software law. Previously, there were legal precendents in Brazilian jurisprudence that ended up getting some people fcsked over when their code was stollen and incorporated.

XEmacs is GNU software because it's a modified version of a GNU program. And it is GNU software because the FSF is the copyright holder for most of it (...) This is why the term "GNU XEmacs" is legitimate. (GNU XEmacs ?! Oh, like, GNU/Linux...)
But in another sense it is not GNU software [my quote], because we can't use XEmacs in the GNU system (etc)

With luck, the GPL v3 will clear up the issue of fonts. The issue has been discussed on Slashdot before.Namely, that if I use a GPL font in a document, and subsequently embed that font through a document format (OO's sxw or OpenDocument, pdf, ps, etc), it's unclear as to whether I have the legal ability to do so without declaring the document itself GPL (which isn't really a document license). People sometimes (apparently mistakenly, but IANAL) say that it would force your document to be GPLed, but that's really not the case. You can't be automatically forced to license your work as anything, but you can be guilty of copyright infringement. The issue does also apparently not extend to printed documents and such, since the font itself cannot be copyrighted, only the code (postscript, etc) that generates the font can be.

It's unfortunate that such vagueness persists with the GPL, but it seems to be a trend with copyright issues in general (fair use being the most visible).

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #GPLOutput

The website you view would be the output from the program, not the actual program. Nevertheless this seems like a grey area...

Are you saying the FSF is lying about this?

Oh, fuck off with your "open source" already! Linux is Free Software.

If that is guru level, then what the hell is this?

That's write381KB of compressed automake enabled "Hello, World!" joy!

Tell me, who enforces open source license?

I can't believe you would advacate running a business on stolen sotware. Yeah, software like AutoCAD is expensive, but that is a cost you build into your price. Or are you undercutting a legal business and then letting people Xerox your plans and not pay you for your work?

If you are worried about the cost switch to open source.

http://www.ostg.com/
http://www.fsf.org/

I wish I could think of the link for the Free/Open software donation challenge from about a year ago, posted here.

The CDDL is an OSI-approved open source license. What is your problem with it? It may not be compatible with the GPL but why should it be?
And wait ... very few licenses are GPL-compatible. Are you also blaming the Apache License, the BSD license, the Mozilla Public License and many other open-source licenses, for beeing GPL incomplatible? Are they all evil or something?

The CDDL is an OSI-approved open source license. What is your problem with it? It may not be compatible with the GPL but why should it be?
And wait ... very few licenses are GPL-compatible. Are you also blaming the Apache License, the BSD license, the Mozilla Public License and many other open-source licenses, for beeing GPL incomplatible? Are they all evil or something?

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

Intel have been trying to kill this off ...

Does anyone know where Sharp tells their customer's about the GNU General Public License?

From the software license agreement:

...
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. The Software is protected by copyright laws, international copyright treaties, and other intellectual property laws and treaties. Lineo and its suppliers retain all ownership of, and intellectual property rights (including copyright) in, the Software components and all copies thereof, provided however, that certain components of the Software are components licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 2), which Lineo supports. You may obtain a copy of the GNU General Public License at http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html. Lineo will provide source code for any of the components of the Software licensed under the GNU General Public License. To obtain such source code, email to embedix-support 'at' lineo.com.

In short, yes. Also, it looks like that even though it is a Sharp device, Lineo supplied the software.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#G PLIncompatibleLicenses

After the FSF call for volunteers, GNU Java compiler / VM has come of age. It was reported here, too. RedHat Fedora Core 4 even includes a native version (doesn't depend on JVM, but runs as a "normal" binary) of Eclipse, compiled with GCJ.

Open Source is very well defined, and so is Free Software

A prudent approach, in my opinion, is to assume that you aren't allowed to dual-license contributions if you're the original author

You're entirely right that a lot of licenses should be really MPL-like, definitely not the GPL. This just shows the ignorance regarding the licenses. Law firms, ahoy!
What I meant was that dual-licensing is happening all over! Small projects wanna do it. Large projects do it. MySQL does it. AFAIK, the only big projects that are carefull are OO.org and the FSF. They demmand that you fill a paper form and snail-mail it giving up on your copyright.
I agree that that the prudent approach is that of not assuming you can dual-license, but a lot of people are assuming the contrary, either due to unfairness or ignorance (the hype and noise around GNU, Linux and the GPL).
People need to be conscious about what they're getting into if they contribute to a project. Is it serious? Or are they going to dual-license it and just say "thanks very much for your code", or simply turn it closed-source once they think it's good enough?
My point was that the BSD license levels the playing field for everybody. Either that or the LGPL. Projects like JBoss use the LGPL because they want the reciprocity that it provides. However, the FSF actively plays against the the LGPL and they renamed it to "Lesser GPL." This license is adequate for libraries, though.
I guess we can assume from this discussion that there are a lot more subtleties to licensing than people assume. Knee-jerk reactions defending the GPL just won't cut it.
I prefer the simple, time honoured, tributary to the hacker spirit, court-tested, pro free-software/pro-proprietary approach (the +/+ approach) - the BSD License The other licenses aren't as flexible, or as simple to work with, or as tested.

I see what happened with Mosaic is happening again. RMS is not part of any "open source" movement, and Linux is Free Software. (No prizes for guessing who the "Imposter boy" is).

As the other reply to your post indicates, the Free-Software Foundation doesn't think programmers should have to work for free. Richard Stallman has indicated that no one should be forced to program! Programmers can and should be paid. Selling software is not the problem, it's the fact that the end user (who may have paid for the software or may have received it at no monetary cost) is not free to modify and distribute the program. Having the source code is necessary to exercise these freedoms. The Free/Libre Software movement is all about assuring these freedoms exist, not killing commercial interest in software. You can pay someone to write open source software for you, in which case the programmer gets fed, and your freedoms are maintained.

I understand that some of you may only have heard of the open source movement. I'm grateful that you would consider using the GPL for your projects. However, the GNU General Public License (or GPL) predates the open source movement by many years by the founder of a movement with different goals than the open source movement. Therefore it is not fair or accurate to credit the GPL as an "open source license" merely because the Open Source Initiative (which started the open source movement) placed it on a list of approved licenses.

The GPL was written by Richard Stallman, most notably. Version 1 of the GPL was released in January 1989, and version 2 (the current version) in 1991. So, two major releases of what has come to be the most important and popular free software license were released well before the Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998. The OSI has yet to write a license that compares with the popularity or strength of the GPL.

The GPL speaks repeatedly about software freedom, not "open" anything, and for very good reasons. First, the term "open source" didn't exist when the two revisions of the GPL were written. But even if the OSI existed, the open source movement doesn't want to frame any issue in terms of software freedom because it gets in the way of addressing businesses, their chief audience. Talking about software freedom means talking about something beneficial to users, not addressing more efficient means of connecting cheap programming labor with businesses. Philosophically and historically, the FSF and OSI are not the same, nor are the free software and open source movements. Stallman and Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the FSF, confirm this in every speech they give and virtually every essay they write. The Free Software Foundation has published an essay describing the differences between the two movements and why they see the free software movement as better. To this list of differences I'd add that free software guarantees private derivatives, unlike the open source definition.

The upcoming GPL (version 3) in this regard because it will be the first version of the GPL where anyone from the OSI may have editorial say in. The final word (and framing of the issues surrounding the GPLv3) still comes down to Stallman and Eben Moglen.

Thus, with all of this history, I think it is fair to call the GPL a free software license, not an open source license. The GPL existed well before and independantly of anything to do with the open source movement and does not embody the values of the open source movement. I encourage you all to stop misleading people into giving the OSI and the open source movement an undeserved primacy.

"And why is your project LGPL only? Why can't it be GPL? If you aren't worried about it being closed up, give it to the XViD people and let them use it."

Dude, if the project is LGPL, it can be used in GPLed products. The GPL is strictly *more* restrictive than the LGPL. LGPL programs are inherently dual licensed (i.e. can be redistribute under either the LGPL or the GPL). XViD could bundle his project with theirs now.

The GP is saying that he wants closed source projects to be able to link against his code...that's what using the LGPL (rather than the GPL) means.

In the case of drivers, it's also worth noting that you may not need source. You ship the driver with your project so that people can use it. This saves people from having to download the driver separately. A purely binary redistribution is acceptable in that case. With many drivers, the driver will be free beer to redistribute. You have to pay to make modifications.

Presumably people can still use the XViD driver in this case -- they just need to obtain and install it themselves. This means that casual users won't bother to do so.

This is, in fact, a real cost to using the GPL over a BSD license (or the LGPL). You lose potential users. The FSF acknowledges this in its discussion of when to use the GPL vs. when to use the LGPL. In general, they recommend using the GPL when something is unique (i.e. not available under other licenses). They recommend using the LGPL when something is available under other licenses for exactly this reason: it allows people who would otherwise choose software using a different license to choose the LGPLed version instead. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-not-lgpl .html

My biggest problem with the GPL is the FSF's position that even dynamically linking against a library under GPL is enough to make the resulting code a derivative work (and thus also subject to the GPL). The BSD license affords much more flexibility. The LGPL is also not so encumbered. (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/lgpl.html)

Note also that the FSF's interpretation may not be binding, but it hasn't been tested in court (that I'm aware of, and I recently attended a symposium on this very topic). So, in my mind, it creates an unacceptable exposure for anyone who wants to develop software but not adopt the GPL. The BSD license is substantially safer.

More discussion on this point: http://www.oslawblog.com/2005/01/static-linking-gp l-and-lgpl.html

Fedora Core strikes me as a good balance between Free and current. Sure there is no MP3 playback, but that is because Red Hat long ago decided to keep it's distributions free of any software using licenses that were not Free Software. There are plenty of other media formats that are as good or even better. And there are plenty of places that provide a way to add MP3 support, it's just that the distro has decided to keep the base 100% free. (Which is fine with me, I'd prefer that than starting to rely on some software that gets yanked in a year because it's copyright holders decided to start charging an arm and a leg for it.)

Fedora is also up to date. Here again, the basement dwellers among us can point to XYZ distribution that has bleeding-edge package ABC. But the FC packages alwyas seem to work within the distro. From time to time I'll venture out into one of the alternate repositories or closed-source drivers and I always regret it. The system gets unstable or something else stops working.

Which brings me to my main point, Fedore Core is proving to be a fine distribution for my productivity. I have long lost interest in tweaking and exploring the system deep into the night, now I just need one that I can use for email and web browsing, authoring various documents, develop software, draw, do genealogy, personal finances, etc. I'm not saying FC is perfect, nothing is. But it's usefulness is equal and better than my Windows XP station at work. Every release gets better, and while I want to see continuing advancements in my desktop environment, I also need one that is useful to me now.

Balance is rarely appreciated (I like Honda, too) but it's a sign of both skill and maturity. Keep it up team.

BSD or other GPL-incompatible Free Software developers.

The BSD license (at least the one used nowadays) is GPL-compatible.
In fact, there are parts of KDE licensed under BSD-style licenses.

Here's FSF's list of licenses and their relation to the GPL.

It is the developers I care about understanding this concept, and I think most of them do. If you don't understand the difference between "open source" and "free", I suggest you read the first couple of parapgraphs over at the fsf's website.

As a Mac user, I wouldn't expect you to use the concepts very often - Mac is an inherently proprietary, locked-in platform - both from a hardware and a software perspective. Most Linux users and software developers do understand, which is why the story made it to the front page of Slashdot in the first place.