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RMS Condemns "UnitedLinux" per-seat License
dep writes "Likening the practice to Windows, Richard M. Stallman has issued a brief statement condemning the per-seat licensing that it appears will be employed in the "UnitedLinux" core distribution. He calls upon developers to refuse to allow their work to be used by such a distribution."
From the (now /.'d) Linux and Main article: the companies will allow source to be downloaded, but not binaries.
Isn't that what the `emerge united-linux` command will be for?
I guess Gentoo Linux becomes more and more important everyday.
Yep - I've never jumped in on an RMS thread before either, but I hafta agree with him here. It's odd that they've banded together to increase market share, and are now flirting with the licensing concept that kept Caldera from getting any market share in the first place.
I hope RedHat and Mandrake and Slack and (insert you distro here) avoid this like the black plague. It's unfortunate, SuSE is a really nice distro. I hope they don't shoot themselves in the foot here.
JB
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
My take on the article is that RMS is seeing this as Restricting Freedom. Perhaps he's right. Perhaps not. I personally feel he's a loony extremist, who sees the world as Pure Freedom or Total Slavery.
:-) )
Well, having met him a couple of times, I'd say that he's an idealist and difficult to see eye to eye with. But a loony extremist? No - he's way too sussed for that. He's just someone who's been in the business for so long, he's seen way too many people got screwed over on this altar of intellectual property.
However, without more information, I can't tell if the "Per Seat" license covers the 'United Linux' material only, or which. United Linux -needs- to make money. And if a "$50 per seat" license is how they get it, who am I to say its a bad idea. This does not affect me, I don't run any derivative of Linux. (I'm one of those naughty BSD people. boo. hiss.)
Not naughty at all - there's room for everyone. From what I read about United Linux, there won't be a UL "distribution" - it's more like a compliance statement. That is, write an app and it gets certified for any UL compliant distro. So the per-seat stuff will continue to apply to Caldera, but not necessarily to SuSE, or TurboLinux, or whatever.
I've got to say that I too think the per-seat crap is doomed to die. It's exactly what so many IT departments buy into M$'s pool-based licensing system to avoid! They have to employ more expensive people just to chase down the licenses. Screw that.
Personally, I think the whole UL thing is a good idea - but I still see Red Hat dominant a year or two from now (if they can stay in business
--Ng
What you are missing is that the GPL allows (and encourages) selling free software, but it forbids taking away the rights of the recipient to further modify or redistribute the software. Caldera (UnitedLinux, by this philosophy, shows that they are just Caldera; Caldera has always done this) can't get around the GPL so I presume what they are doing is distributing source to all the GPL'd parts of the system and noting your rights in fine print somewhere while adding a few proprietary parts such that the whole integrated product cannot be redistributed and you have to pay a per-seat license. This means you're really just paying the license for a tiny amount of the product and not the whole OS.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
> Okay, so this "per-seat licensing" consists of them not offering the binaries for free download.
If it was, it wouldn’t be per-seat. Per-seat means each potential user has to pay to have the right to use. Even if it’s binaries, GNU GPL software can’t have its use restricted in this way. Distributing GNU GPL’d software under such a condition automatically revokes your rights to use and distribute GNU GPL’d software, thus making such lincensing illegal.
> The source will still be "freely available".
Unless it’s available in a manner compliant with the GNU GPL, that is not enough.
> it's RMS, so the problem must be someone might make money off of software
Don’t put words in anyone’s mouth. RMS doesn’t object to people making money, he (and I) does object to restricting other people’s freedom.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
"Hundreds of thousands of people in the US would be out of work."
Untrue. You would just have to get job using your skills in real problem domains.
The shrinkwrapped office productivity software market is done. Excel and Word haven't gotten significantly better since 1997.
The only interesting shrinkwrapped software nowadays are multimedia (audio, digital video), and web-authoring software. Frankly, these are going to reach a 'good enough' dead-end RSN.
Games are probably the only category of software which still has a long long path of improvement. IMHO, games have been driving much of the increase in desire for computer power (For example, Black & White won't run on my 2.5 year old iMac, but I can still run all the software I need.)
The dirty little secret is that once all you hundreds of thousands of people are out of work of all the GPLd software, there will be jobs waiting for you in Government and Industry. These groups will have a little extra money (because they're not paying the Microsoft Tax) and they'll be willing to hire programmers who can solve problems in their own domain. Imagine the brains that have honed Amazon's transformation of bookselling turned on health care record management, or Pre-fire planning, or Building-department workflow.
And there's also XML. Serious SGML people know the benefit of properly-constructed document. The current wealth of free XML tools will mean that small businesses will be able to apply XML to their knowledge. You think MaryJo in accounting is doing to design an XML invoice schema?
In other words, the job won't be "writing software to sell", it will be "other stuff with software". You see that in the Microsoft Ads already: "1 degree of separation" isn't about how groovy Word is or how easy WindowsXP is, it's all about how custom-made software will solve your business's problems.
My father is a blogger.
If you read the whole GPL, you will find that it says that you cannot distribute it with additional restrictions on the recipient. Which is what one would be doing if they took a copy of GPL'd code, and passed it on with the restriction that the user could only install it on one machine.
So the GPL does make no claims as to running the program, but it also says that you can't redistribute it with additional restrictions.
Where is this per-seat license laid out? I've read a lot of the articles, etc. surrounding this UnitedLinux thing, but nowhere have I seen a per-seat license mentioned by anyone actually involved in the project. What I have seen is a /. post mentioning a somewhat ambiguous phrasing in the UnitedLinux FAQ which could theoretically allow for the possibility that maybe they will use an End User License that is not quite typical of the Free Software Ideal. Nowhere is any specific licensing scheme, per-seat or otherwise, ever laid out, except by the Chicken Littles that have latched onto this ambiguous phrase and determined that the sky is falling. RMS heard the screaming and, without bothering to look up and see if the sky was actually coming down, joined the corus.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, quite the opposite. I know that I would go out of my way to not support a Linux vendor using per-seat licensing, and I think we've already seen that most of the Linux community feels the same. Frankly, after the beating Caldera took for bringing up the idea of a per-seat license, I'd be extremely surprised if anyone even considered such a scheme again, especially Ransom Love (he does give the impression sometimes that he just doesn't get it, though, so who knows).
This per-seat licensing thing is just a totally unsubstantiated rumor! Get over it, people!
There are plenty of other reasons to complain about the project, though. The fact that it's server only seems to me to be monumentally stupid. Linux seems to be doing just fine in the server market, and I don't see how this standardization effort will make much difference in that arena. Linux on the desktop, however, would derive incredible benefit from an innitiative like this. In fact, the lack of an innitiative like this is really the only thing standing in the way of Linux becoming viable on the desktop. If there were a serious effort to standardize for desktop distros, I bet we'd quickly see some of those missing apps being ported to that standard.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Exactly. If I write software, and release it under the GPL, it says alot about MY character and politics. Mainly, I am writing software for the end-user. If that user CHOOSES to pay ANOTHER company a per seat license agreement, why should I interfere? This is alot like sticking my nose where it doesn't belong. Part of the reason that code is given out is because people are supposed to be free - free to modify to suit one's needs, free to choose software based on the strength of its code, and CERTAINLY they should be free to execute that code on ANY platform they wish. Somehow it seems as though Stallman is leaning less towards the free as in speech and focusing more on the free as in beer....
..."United Linux", it will be interesting to hear from Linus on the subject. After all, he holds trademark rights in the name "Linux", as I recall.
-=Maggie Leber=-