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Congress Members Oppose GPL for Government Research
An anonymous reader writes "Rep Jim Davis(D-FL), Tom Davis (R-Va), Ron Kind (D-WI), and Adam Smith (D-WA) are trying to outlaw the gpl. Let's write to them and show them that we didn't elect these guys to screw us over." The issue here isn't the GPL in general, it's specifically what sort of license government-funded research ought to have. Code written directly by Federal government employees has no copyright whatsoever and is therefore roughly equivalent to a BSD-type license; but if the government pays a non-employee to write code, there are no firm requirements or guidelines on how that code ought to be licensed. Prudence suggests that since it's our money funding the research, we ought to make sure the public gets some return from the endeavor.
Obviously they didn't come up with this themselves...so who's lobbying them and putting up soft money for their campaigns.
I can think of one big company who'd stand to gain from this type of legislation...
According to Open Secrets.org Microsoft is the number on contributer to Mr. Smith's Campaign, with $22,900 racked up in bribe^H^H^H^H contributions. He is also the rep in the same district that MS is HQ'd in. You can repeat the exercise for the other signatories on the letter.
LawMeme is dissecting the letter and note line by line.
Well, BSD licensing isn't even on the table: currently contractors get paid by the Feds to write proprietary code which they then sell back to the government - you pay twice for the same code. Any wonder why these businesses think they've got a good deal going and don't want anyone screwing it up?
currently contractors get paid by the Feds to write proprietary code which they then sell back to the government - you pay twice for the same code
I think that's not accurate. All the government contracts I've worked on specifically renounce any government claim to copyright/IP, but also require that Federal projects be allowed unrestricted use of any contract results.
Note that if your contract is 'to provide a bunch of tabulated data' and you write a database to perform that contract, your database does not necessarily have to be provided, so it is possible that, having fulfilled your 'provide data' contract, you take a second contract 'to write a database program' that you've already written.
Okay, let's stop that lie dead in it's tracks.
Code that is written under contract to the Federal Government is the property of the Federal Government. It is not, to paraphrase, sold back to the Government so you pay twice for the same code. That issue has come up on every contract I've worked on. And when the code is owned by the Feds, if they want to re-use it for another Fed project they can. It's their code. It happens a lot.
Have you ever even bothered to look at the list of GPL compatible licenses? And I quote:
Public Domain. Being in the public domain is not a license--rather, it means the material is not copyrighted and no license is needed. Practically speaking, though, if a work is in the public domain, it might as well have an all-permissive non-copyleft free software license. Public domain status is compatible with the GNU GPL.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Priceless! A comment which is demonstrably wrong on two both of the claims it makes and yet which is moderated up.
First, Adam Smith isn't the representative for the district where Corporate HQ lies -- that's Jay Inslee. That said, a great many MS employees do live in Rep. Smith's district, and a number of them do contribute to his campaign.
So what? Well, OpenSecrets associates all contributions from individuals with the employer of the primary wage earner for the individual or its family. That means that if I make a contribution to Jay Inslee (my representative, since I'm from Redmond), it's treated as a contribution from Microsoft. Ignoring the fact that if I wanted to make a donation as a Microsoft employee, I'd donate to MSPAC, not to Jay directly, OpenSecrets treats that as a corporate bribe.
Try this.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I voted for the guy last time around. Maybe I'll have to inform him that I will not do that again if he tries to fit in with representatives who live in Microsoft's pocket.
Excerpt:
"...I am not a lawyer, but I have spoken extensively with lawyers about copyright questions. Presuming that the VistA software is in the public domain, if you combine it with a GPL-covered program you must release the combination *as a whole* under the GPL. Using the VistA code in this way is allowed because public domain status permits practically anything.
However, the specific code that was in the public domain remains in the public domain. In other words, the fact that person A released the VistA code in a GPL-covered combination does not stop person B from using the VistA code in some other way.
You could even extract the VistA code from the GPL-covered combination and use it as public domain material, as long as it really is the unmodified VistA code. If you want to use the VistA code as public domain material, the safest way is to get a copy of the original VistA code, because if people have changed that code since, they don't have to put their changes in the public domain. Still, in principle, the VistA code remains in the public domain even inside the GPL-covered combination.
Another way of putting this is that the GPL is not "contagious". The GPL applies through inclusion, not through contact. It applies to the combination because the combination (given the assumed scenario) includes some code that was released under the GPL. But the VistA code retains its own status, despite being in a combination with the GPL-covered code..."
Draw your own conclusions from this. You can see his response in its entirety here.
-- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
...since it cannot stop open source by its usual monopolistic practices, the best way to attack it is to utilize government (read: bought senators) and what's left of the law. Make it illegal, or at least damn inconvenient to develop under the GPL and the beast will have its back broken.
1. The Davis fellow is *my* congressman and he is strictly "cash and carry". :{)||
2. It is my understanding that any code developed with Fed$$ is either 49/51 (or 50/50?) co-owned by the developer & the Fed, & either can use it as they wish from that point, subject, of course, to any contractual agreements, etc. If contractually allowed, the developer can resell the software. The Fed could conceivably re-use software components (which might be great idea), but generally they are more interested in the product than the parts.
3. There is no program that I know of that might have the capability to catalogue what Uncle Sammy has received and whether it might be of use to any other Fed. Dept, etc. Few areas of the Federal government, civilian or militay, at any given time, have any idea what any other non-affliated part of Uncle Sam has in the way of software or capabilities. Even if they did, it probably wouldn't foster re-use of anything other than the contractor. Might be an interesting area to explore.
Yes, but it's only one-way compatibility. The GPL states that you must release derivative works under the GPL as well, right? So, as soon as the tiniest change is made, you can't re-release a GPLed work to the Public Domain, unless you redo all the effort starting from the PD version.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
Adam Smith: 2002 Politician Profile
Top Contributors:
(1) Microsoft Corp $22,900
which is more than the next two biggest, combined.
Notable quote from front page:
To be fair, if this guy wasn't pushing MS anti-GPL in DC, he wouldn't be doing a very good job of representing his constituency...
Go to the front page and "Search By Individual Donor" on Microsoft. Sort by size of "donation" (I'm quite certain "political donation" is an oxymoron - political investment might be a better term). It's quite informative.
There's an arena in which Free Software performance will never match commercial...
It's never the license that denies you rights. Licenses can only license you rights.
The only truly public license is no copyright.
Dear Congressman Kind,
I recently found out that you sent out a statement opposing the use of GNU-style licenses such as the GPL for Federal software R&D. Your letter indicates to me that you may not be aware of certain aspects of such licenses.
As a WI taxpayer, I wanted to voice my concern to you, that tax-funded software development may be licensed under restrictive proprietary licenses by commercial entities, with the intent to sell products to US taxpayers. This seems wrong to me, as the software development is funded by public means, so it seems that any intellectual property funded by the public should remain property of the public, forever.
Licenses such as the GNU GPL license ensure exactly this. The GPL license would prevent a company from line-for-line replicating federally funded R&D software and repackaging it as *their own* product. This scenario would remove publicly funded intellectual property from the public. Commercial entities are in no way prevented from looking at federal R&D efforts and re-implementing the research for their own commercial products. They are also not prevented from taking a GPL'd product and selling it, at a profit that they determine, to the public. These are all allowed under GPL licensing terms. This latitude is obviously not something that opponents to GPL software, such as Microsoft, want congressmen to know about, of course, but nevertheless, the latitude exists.
The only stipulation the GPL makes is that if a company distributes, in any way shape or form, a product that uses GPL code internally, they must provide the source code to the product using the GPL'd code to anyone requesting it. Within the software engineering field, there are many, many ways to use and interact with code that would allow a product to use GPL'd code without being subject to the GPL's license terms. The main thing the GPL prevents is the outright copying of code and repackaging of that code as one's own. This, in my opinion, is absolutely correct for publicly funded software projects.
You cite TCP/IP as an example against GPL licensing. However, TCP/IP is a protocol definition, not a software project. Most of the operating systems and software that use TCP/IP these days use software that is written under a variety of open and proprietary licenses, with the original code maintaining little or no resemblance to the initial *reference* implementation of TCP/IP. This initial *reference* implementation is the only item covered by the BSD-style license that is credited with allowing TCP/IP to flourish. However, the research papers that explain TCP/IP and allow a software developer to reimplement a 100% compliant TCP/IP system are not restricted in any way. Commercial entities can and have used these papers to create highly optimized TCP/IP systems (see the high-availability servers by IBM, Sun, Microsoft et al.) Had the initial *unoptimized* reference implementation not been licensed under a BSD-style copyright, this would STILL be possible. Had the initial reference implementation been licensed under the GPL, there would be little or no difference to the landscape of the Internet today. If anything, the Internet would have arrived sooner. Commercial entities would certainly not have made any less money.
Let me reiterate one important point: having R&D licensed under the GPL does not in any way shape or form prevent commercial entities from using the research to sell products. This is if they reimplement the results of the research OR if they choose to use the GPL'd code directly. If they choose to use the GPL'd code directly, they must simply honor the request to access the source code of the product using the GPL'd source to anyone requesting it. This does not in any way prevent a company from selling a product, for profit, based on GPL'd code. It is being done today, successfully, by many software development businesses.
By and large, for the vast majority of citizens in the US, having access to the source of a product is worthless. Allowing other developers, to whom the source might have value, to view the source of a product based on GPL'd code will only promote innovation in the high-technology industry.
I urge you to use the Internet and other resources at your disposal to learn more about the possibilities and the *true* limitations of licenses such as the GPL. Please, do not support the use of proprietary licenses, such as those used by Microsoft, to limit the public's access to federally funded R&D and software that is based on publicly funded research and development.
Most respectfully,
Brice D. Ruth
Income taxes? $3,684,000,000 for the year ended June 30, 2000. Or were you talking about sales and other taxes?
The top industries supporting Thomas M. Davis III are:
1 Computer Equipment & Services $40,250
ADAM SMITH (D-WA)
Top Contributors
1 Microsoft Corp $22,900
The other two don't seem to stand out like these two do.
"Aren't companies solely a bunch of people combined by a collective goal?"
Nope...companies are a set of assets owned by the collective shareholders. That includes the services of the people working there, the fixed / var assets, their IP, the brand. The thing is the companies goal is to maximize revenue, all other goals are second class goals.
There's NO unowned company that I know of. If it's not, it's something else.
unfinished: (adj.)
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? And I quote (from your link!):
We classify a license according to certain key questions:
Whether it is compatible with the GNU GPL. (This means you can combine a module which was released under that license with a GPL-covered module to make one larger program.)
So, from the above we see that GPL compatible licenses are licenses for code which permit you to modify that code and redistribute it under the GPL, not licenses that are "equivalent" to the GPL.
You can do whatever the hell you want with public domain code, as it's under even fewer restrictions than code under the BSD license. This obviously includes redistributing it under the GPL. But just as obviously, you can't take GPL'ed code and release it under the public domain.
The original poster is quite right in that promoting public-domain software would make RMS mad and Bill Gates happy.
Actually, a dynamically linked library DOES impose this restriction. The GPL was specifically modified to handle this. Peopel were taking GPL code, and just wrapping it into a library, so they could release their code under a different license. FSF got upset, and GPL was modified.
Actually, I do have to take issue with your last comment. For many years now, the practice of "bundling" checks has been used to make large contributions to candidates that would otherwise be illegal under election statutes and FEClaw. Basically, a political organization has its members write donation checks to candidates or parties and send them on to the PAC in question, who then brings the checks to the beneficiary in question. The end result? One very large donation that technically doesn't violate election law -- and which, on paper, doesn't appear to be coming from a particular PAC.
For polisci geeks, this practice was begun by the feminist PAC EMILY's List -- EMILY standing for Early Money Is Like Yeast (it rises).