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There are good reasons for requiring copyright assignment. For the FSF it's reasonable enough since in return for the assignment they promise to license your contribution as free software. Sun are requiring copyright assignment and then planning to incorporate your code into the proprietary StarOffice, which some may see as unfair.

Why demand signed-over ownership?

Same reason FSF demands that ownership is signed over

Would it be better to use the term GNU/Linux

See also
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html

So, when I modify the license so that these people who want to charge me to use my own code can't prevent me from meaningfully modifying my own code on the hardware that I'm paying them for, you want to explain to me how that's unfair? or even inconsistent with the the intent of the GPL?

(I point you now, to freedoms 1 and 3:

• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Trolltech

I recently installed the Free Software version of Qt/Mac on my computer, and was dismayed to find that I had to 'accept' the GPL before it would let me compile and install. This is contrary to the GPLv2 license itself, which states (taken directly from the LICENSE.GPL file included with my download): "5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it." The text of the GPL in the section is very clear, and requiring users to 'accept' the GPL prior to being able to simply install GPL software is completely unnecessary. The Free Software Foundation is very clear on this point: "The license does not require anyone to accept it in order to acquire, install, use, inspect, or even experimentally modify GPL'd software" from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html

Even the FSF doesn't go that far.

At QTopia prices, it very much discourages commercial development for the platform. Furthermore, although QTopia is released under the GPL, nobody other than Troll Tech can actually realistically develop or enhance it--if anybody tried to ship their own version of QTopia, none of the commercial QTopia apps could run on it.

Read this: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

Samba appears to be licensed under GPL not LGPL.

A GPL library means you have to give away your source code.

A LGPL library means you only have to supply the object file of your code which can be linked against an updated version of the library. But you don't have to give away your source code. You do however have to provide any modifications you made to the library itself (as per GPL). This is my understanding correct me if I'm wrong.

So why don't you use the usual trick of specifying GPLv2 or later? That way you don't force anybody into agreeing with the further restrictions of GPLv3 that they don't agree with, but you aren't needlessly incompatible with those people who do choose to use GPLv3.

Er... how does this fall in line with your previous "I'm much more in the BSD camp" sentence? The "GPL is Evil!" is not something that has been uttered only since the GPLv3 but at least since the early 90's when BSD appeared in it's free form. Since you talked about patent protection being something that should be out of scope of a licence I don't think the GPL (v2 or v3) is really the ideal licence for you, but then again you are the one who own your code and I'm sure you know what licence you prefer (perhaps there are probably other reasons for your choosing the GPLv2 that you didn't mention).

Er... how does this fall in line with your previous "I'm much more in the BSD camp" sentence? The "GPL is Evil!" is not something that has been uttered only since the GPLv3 but at least since the early 90's when BSD appeared in it's free form. Since you talked about patent protection being something that should be out of scope of a licence I don't think the GPL (v2 or v3) is really the ideal licence for you, but then again you are the one who own your code and I'm sure you know what licence you prefer (perhaps there are probably other reasons for your choosing the GPLv2 that you didn't mention).

9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.

You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance.

As I understand it, the GPLv3 is actually much more compatible with other Open Source licenses than the GPLv2 was.

I honestly don't know of anything I would consider a downside to the GPLv3. I think it's all around a better license than the GPLv2.

You can already watch youtube with Gnash. Now it just needs to stabilize and be installed by default, making flash a non-issue (at least for what youtube is concerned).

A suggestion: since not everyone may know what sort of paranoia you're referring to in your sig, you might consider adding a link.

I've not used an HP calculator, but I use dc on my laptop, which does arbitrary precision RPN calculations and runs on pretty much any POSIX-like system. If you can't get a dedicated calculator, there are a few hand-held *NIX machines available, and one of those should be able to run dc pretty nicely (just pick one with a decent keyboard).

Given that the software was free to begin with, I am not sure that its a good idea to pursue additional penalties (especially monetarily)

I've heard a lot of arguments against the GPL, but come on, it's not easy or cheap to make your GPL'd source available? That takes the biscuit. All it needs is a tiny bit of paper in the box with your product, or a single file on the disk that says we make our source available at this URL...

Really? Please take the GPL Quiz and tell us what score you got. Hint: it's surprisingly tricky!

You say "Does an admittedly left leaning GPL..." I want to know who "admit[ted]" that the GPL is "left leaning," and when. Don't cite me RMS's opinions on other matters, or the lifestyle of FLOSS users, or any other ad hominem red herrings. Tell me, specifically, whose admission you are referring to.

You know, that is some heap of non-logic you are throwing out there buddy. You would seriously believe that a person's body of thought is somehow isolated from a major portion of his work. That's absurd.

RMS's political philosophy is socialist, in that, he argues that the needs of the consumers so completely outweigh the rights of the producers that the producers of goods have no rights at all. The central thrust of his philosophy is that ownership is bad. That's socialism, and that, by definition, is leftist.

Being a software man, and, by all accounts, a rather intelligent and well thought one, he seeks to stamp his political philosophy into the technology world, before it is too late. To that end, RMS invents the GPL. The GPL is a license based on copyright. But note that he does not believe, per se, in copyright law. He argues, ultimtely, that http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/, that, software should not be "owned" at all, but recognizes that under most western law, that copyright is the means with which to best achieve his end, effectively.

Stallman notes the stock socialist criticism of the soviet union - the communists were bad, and they just wanted it all for themselves. The thing is, a more detailed look at the history of soviet communism would show that many of the communist leaders were really actually rather smart, and genuinely tried to do the right thing, but power corrupts, over time. To some degree, stalin's paranoid period aside, many of the communist constraints on freedom were really, like the GPL gone mad - to protect the workers, we have to have rule, after rule, after rule, to keep it just so. It just doesn't work, and a worse tyranny results. The downfall of any socialist system is that to get the social arrangement you want in even one aspect of it, sooner or later, you have to try to control all of it. It's just the nature of things.

Otherwise, I will file you (and any further arguments you may wish to make) next to people who misuse the word "literally," cannot distinguish between "to" and "too," and believe that quotation marks are used to add emphasis.

Your threat is silly. It's silly that you are offended that I've called the GPL for what it is, an attempt to put a socialist system into software. Note that, I didn't make any moral judgements about it. In all other fields, the "real fields", I think socialism is evil, not because the idea is bad, because, on paper, if it could work, it would have been alright. It's just, its failed everywhere it has been applied. But in software, who knows, maybe it might work. That software can be copied without cost changes things, and its worth it to let things play out, as the experiment of GPL, and following its consequences with non-free software, is really the social experiment of our time, and it should be viewed as a non-catastrophic and above all, peaceful way to study the interactions of radically different ideologies as they compete and coexist. Who knows, maybe from all of this, some new thoughts about a radically new economic system might arise from this interaction, that gives us the benefits of capitalism but that addresses the social concerns that socialism wants to, but can't.

If you claim to have an open mind, the first thing to do is call things what they are, not call them what you want people to believe them to be.

A "User Product" is either (1) a "consumer product", which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling.

He's certainly not using the word in a "loaded" manner.

On the contrary. Since he has described his position as supporting "freedom", he has created the obnoxious situation where anyone who does not agree 100% with the FSF is opposing "freedom".

This is not a theoretical issue; one prominent opponent of "freedom" (so declared by RMS) is Linus Torvalds, whose crime is to not embrace GPLv3 with open arms (he has said that he doesn't mind GPLv3, but won't use it; he has also said that he loved GPLv2).

For someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how to avoid misunderstandings in language, I have to believe that his overbroad use of the term "freedom" is deliberate.

I'm not sure that I care where Microsoft Excel fails and where it doesn't when it comes to discovering the pattern of failure. If I were a Microsoft Excel user I wouldn't be allowed to inspect the program to see what it's really doing with my data, fix the program (no matter how expert a programmer I may be), alter the program (in violation of the license), or help my community by sharing my improved version of Excel. Then there's the hypocrisy of how proprietors (also known as monopolists) are treated compared to free software developers and distributors—knowing that the program fails where it shouldn't would be enough for people to cry foul and either stop using or never start using a free software program that exhibited such a bug. We rarely hear serious discussions of one's software freedom. Instead, we're encouraged to push that discussion aside in favor of exclusively stressing technocratic ends. Not hearing cries of "Dump Microsoft Excel Now!" or something calling for a switch to a free software spreadsheet (like Gnumeric or OpenOffice.org's Calc) is saddening. Please take this opportunity to learn more about software freedom.

It's odd that RMS, who is ordinarily a stickler for proper nomenclature, would insist on using the word "freedom" when he really means "user freedom". I can only imagine that he's perfectly aware of the fact that "freedom" is a loaded term that has a broader meaning than he intends

You need to listen to one of his speeches. Richard always goes on to define just what those freedoms are. He's certainly not using the word in a "loaded" manner.

Sahuaro

Enter license babel. The Creative Commons Attribution License has a provision in section 4(a) that allows an author (here "Alice") of a covered work to disown the work by requiring downstream distributors to delete Alice's copyright notice upon request from Alice. This clause is incompatible with the major GNU licenses (GPL, LGPL, GFDL), which require preservation of upstream copyright notices. So I don't see an easy way to include Creative Commons licensed audiovisual material in, say, a free computer game unless all the code libraries that the game uses are under a permissive license.

The "you need a good lawyer" is needed to interpret what constitutes an "aggregate" under the GPL. Imagine a computer that can execute only a single, monolithic program from a removable flash memory chip: it has just enough of a BIOS to initialize the memory controller, turn the screen on, and verify the checksum of the program on the chip. I take two works: a computer program under one license, and an archive containing images, maps, sound effects, music, and video clips under another incompatible license. Neither work is very useful on its own. If I combine the program and the archive into a single system image in such a way that each of the two works can be independently replaced within the system image, are the two works "combined [] such as to form a larger program" under the GPL's definition of "aggregate"? The GPL FAQ explains that this was left vague on purpose: "This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide."

http://gcc.gnu.org/

Regards,

John

How come an article like this does not contain a link to GNU Radio?

By the way, the whole "instant termination" thing has been laughed out of US court once already. It's simply not legal in the US. You can "cure" a license compliance issue and the copyright holder can't terminate your license because of it.

Here's the affidavit of Eben Moglen. The judge's response was basically "we'll deal with this at trial, but as Progress Software is now *currently* in compliance with the license, they have a license." Which is exactly the opposite of what Moglen was trying to achieve. He was trying to get the license dispute case thrown out and "pure" copyright violation case at trial. For this particular judge, it didn't work.. and it gives anyone who is considering bringing a pure copyright violation case a go some pause I would think.

actually, there is gnuradio, which is a project (including available hardware) that lets people experiment with software radio. there are quite a few interesting things the folks from the project have done.

if anyone's interested, more here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring-gnuradio.html

and a bunch of links on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnuradio

GNU Radio.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

Rationale: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

The word "free" has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of "free software", we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of "free speech", not "free beer".) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.

Software can be both free software (or "open source" as you used) and commericial software at the same time. There is nothing exclusive about either. For examples, see Red Hat, Sun, IBM, and many more.

Looks like I just fed a troll.

Yes, Linux is really important. Open standards are meaningless if a single dominant closed operating system can control and restrict every program that runs on the computer, and this is the direction in which Windows is going. If left unchallenged, it may not even be able to run open soure software, some years from now. Linux is essential in being that challenge.

5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.

c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

7. Additional Terms.

"Additional permissions" are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent that they are valid under applicable law. If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions.

Apache License v2.0 and GPL Compatibility

The Free Software Foundation considers the Apache License, Version 2.0 to be a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GPL.

Despite our best efforts, the FSF has never considered the Apache License to be compatible with GPL version 2, citing the patent termination and indemnification provisions as restrictions not present in the older GPL license. The Apache Software Foundation believes that you should always try to obey the constraints expressed by the copyright holder when redistributing their work.

What you mean to say is that the GPL imposes no restrictions on people for personal use. You are in full compliance with the GPL no matter what you do as a personal user. You can't ignore the GPL--it's the only thing that grants you legal access to the copyrighted material.

I did not author the GP but I would suggest this as an excellent definition. Those pesky wascals also make available a list of free software licenses if you care to evaluate the offerings in that way. (For example, consulting that list will show that things licensed under the FreeBSD licence are, by their definition, free software.)

I did not author the GP but I would suggest this as an excellent definition. Those pesky wascals also make available a list of free software licenses if you care to evaluate the offerings in that way. (For example, consulting that list will show that things licensed under the FreeBSD licence are, by their definition, free software.)

"The GPL is legal agreement between two parties"

No, a copyright license isn't a contract:

"Licenses are not contracts: the work's user is obliged to remain within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, but because she doesn't have any right to act at all except as the license permits."

Eben Moglen. Enforcing the GNU GPL. 2001.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html

Something like that.

If they put the source on a cd and distribute it with the device, or even, put the source ON the device, they'll be in compliance with the license.

Otherwise, they have to supply to anyone they sell the device to a written offer, valid for 3 years, to provide the source code to any third party.. and yeah, putting the source on their server would be a way to do that, but they don't have to.

It's all spelled out here.

http://gcc.gnu.org/

No standard ABI

C++ has had http://www.codesourcery.com/cxx-abi/">a standard ABI for nearly six years now. GCC 3.0 was the first version of g++ to ship with support for the new ABI on IA-64, which was released in June 2001. The first version of GCC to support the cross vendor C++ ABI on other platforms, including IA-32, was GCC 3.2, which was released in April 2003.

A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.

If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program.

I know this is an unpopular position but I just can't stomach the use of Java, especially one that requires the Sun JVM (which is pretty much anything that uses Java)

Back when OpenOffice 2.x was being developed there was some controversy surrounding the Java requirement, then there was an announcement that the problem had been "solved" and that they were going to use GCJ or some other Java compiler. Apparently this never happened (maybe RMS was insisting that they call it "GNU/OpenOffice.org" ;-) ).

Hopefully once Java is finally open sourced there will be other real alternatives to the Sun JVM that don't suck quite as hard in the resource consumption department, until then OpenOffice is not something I'm going to consider.

Word processor?

Sheesh.. nope.. it's ed, bitches!

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Sorry.. I'm easily entertained.

A for-profit company that emphasizes public good over profit? If the organization's goals are not profit-taking then why did they set up a for-profit organization?

More to the point, they've got a great technical lead in there right now to commercialize their mail client some more. But at some point they'll bring in a business manager if they get good market traction with the mail product.

Then mozilla has a for-profit entity that, probably will alter the direction of the mozilla foundation. "Impossible!" you say. Well, take a look at the departments that generate the most donations/research funds at Universities as an example. You can deny it all you want, but money and the accompanying power often has unintended effects.

Support gnuzilla! http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

...Wake me up when you're able to use PCC instead of GCC to do a 'make bzImage'

OK, I agree that it cannot cope with the Linux kernel yet, but I hear they are making very good progres with the Hurd.

If it requires the presence of GNU Readline, it's in violation of section 2 of the GPLv2, then.

However, looking in the manual, it can be compiled without GNU Readline or use NetBSD's libedit, so it's probably safe.

PCC supports almost no GCC extensions (e.g. inline asm, attributes, etc),
That's a good thing. It discourages people from writing non-portable code.

doesn't support C99 fully,
Nor does GCC

Just because you compile with GCC doesn't make your system a GNU system. Otherwise, the Game Boy Advance system would be the GNU/GBA, as Nintendo provided a port of GCC as part of the GBA SDK. (Homebrew developers use a different port of GCC.)

If I had to make a guess as to what deserves a GNU/ prefix, it would have something to do with the userland, which executes even when nothing is being compiled. As far as I can tell, only Linux uses glibc and GNU Coreutils out of the box. FreeBSD has BSD libc and BSD Coreutils.