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Congress Members Oppose GPL for Government Research

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.

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.

5 of 670 comments (clear)

  1. LawMeme Rips Apart the Note and Letter by The+Importance+of · · Score: 5, Informative

    LawMeme is dissecting the letter and note line by line.

  2. Re:Public Domain by American+AC+in+Paris · · Score: 5, Informative
    NONONONONONONO. This will *NOT* make RMS happy, but it will make Bill Gates happy...This is exactly the kind of crap that RMS is trying to stop.

    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

  3. Re:Any license, as long as its FREE. by YU+Nicks+NE+Way · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Donations by Verteiron · · Score: 5, Informative

    Try this.

    --
    End of lesson. You may press the button.
  5. Re:Donations by schlach · · Score: 5, Informative
    Did. Thanks for the tip.

    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:

    "Lobbying and giving money to politicians is the best return on an investment in the entire -- in the entire free world."
    -- Carl Mayer, committeeman in Princeton, New Jersey (60 Minutes, 5/12/1996)

    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...