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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.
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.
"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...