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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.
I wonder how the campaign donations compare between open source companies and closed source companies?
"Prudence suggests that since it's our money funding the research, we ought to make sure the public gets some return from the endeavor."
That's why it should be BSD licensed.
This will satisfy everyone from RMS to Bill Gates.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Prudence suggests that since it's our money funding the research, we ought to make sure the public gets some return from the endeavor.
Not just flawed, but deeply so. "Our money" funds a lot of things that we don't have direct access too--many things that we SHOULD not have access to. Lets face it, some government software, regardless of who writes it, should not be open sourced.
I, for one, would like to take a ride in a spy plane that I'm sure some of my money went for.
-- yawn. --
I don't understand why it would hurt anyone if the whole world could see the source code : lets stop being greedy, and let the whole world benefit from our work.....
"We want the finest wine known to man-kind"
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
Otherwise I'd be voting against these bastards. Frankly, the government has no business funding research, as the Constitution does not explicitly grant Uncle Sam the right to find research from taxes. But if Uncle Sam is going to trample the Constitution and use taxes to fund research, then the government should have the decency to make the research and its results available to the people paying for it: taxpayers. To do otherwise would be theft.
But what do you expect from politicians, moral rectitude?
I use the GPL on my projects. However, the GPL is not intended to benefit everyone equally. It is intented to give an edge to free software developers. I believe this is a good thing for developers and companies to do of their own free will. I do not, however, think that it is right for our government to exclude proprietary software developers from public works.
The following is a quote from "Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library":
Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it.
Again, let me stress that I use the GPL, I like the GPL, I think more developers should use the GPL. But our government should not provide preferential treatment for one group of software developers over another. We don't like it when congress gives preferential treatment to Disney, and it is not appropriate for us to request preferential treatment over Adobe.
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This is an odd thing, considering that its the Democrats trying to pass this, as something along the lines of the GPL is more of a Democratic licensing scheme. Id expect that the Republicans would be the ones to do something like this in support of big business. Thats too bad, I now know of 4 congressman that I vote against in the upcoming election. The strange thing is that their basis is that the GPL would prevent the adoption of technologies for Federal R&D using GPL'ed code. Now the way I am reading this is more like "We cant use standards that are funded by the Ferderal Govt. that makes use of GPL code to make money". If they dont like the terms, dont use the code. If they dont like the GPL, then they should develop their systems using a proprietary license and not use GPL code. Otherwise, I think the the licensing terms are up to the author of the software, even if it is developed using Federal R&D money... Otherwise Universitys couldnt conduct research on GPL based software... I think this kind of bill is actually more limiting than the GPL could ever be since it is limiting the options of what can be used...
...that the GPL is restrictive. It does make it considerably more difficult for a company to profit from code released as GPL.
However, I definitely think that the code should be public source. But what's wrong with using the LGPL?
Work funded with public monies should be available for all to use. Ideally, all work should be done in the fashion of libraries, rather than a standalone application. This screams for the LGPL to be used.
If work is done under the LGPL, then the libraries can be made public, while companies can make proprietary front-ends that utilize the public libraries. Should bug-fixes, or extensions be made to the library, then the library (and the entire community) benefit.
My main beef with the BSD license, is that once the general library is released to the public, a private company can take the library, and bastardize it however they want (ie: Microsoft & Kerberos). By using the LGPL, the changes must be returned to the public, thus ensuring the public trust.
so that we can all modify
What are you doing on Nov 5th?
The idea of taxing the middle class and the poor to provide code which is then solely exploitable by corporations is a transfer of wealth up the economic ladder. Congress on the whole and particularly in the last 14 years has been working hard on transferring the nation's wealth up the economic ladder. In areas from more much strict bankruptcy law (in many ways the introduction of serfdom to the United States), to the telecommunications act of 1996 (public property being used solely to benefit the wealth with no public gain at all), to more liberal land usage in the west and revisions to farm subsidy (taking public property and transferring it effectively to big agriculture).
Congress is quite correct that the GPL would interfere with this congressional strategy of wealth transfer. Rather the GPL would keep public property in the public domain to be used by the public for the public. IMHO that is a far worthier goal than "increasing the government-private partnership".
if the government pays a non-employee to write code
if the gov. is paying someone to write code, that someone is an employee.
I know damn well that you are going to have problems using my GPL code in a commercial application and then selling it. This means that the GPL is working for me exactly as it was intended. You have absolutely no right at all to profit from code that I wrote. A company exists to make a profit but it has no rights, only the voting public has rights.
Got Code?
Hmmm... I didn't find anything specific about prohibiting the GPL, but the New Democrats' "E-Genda 2002" sounds in line with the info posted at NewsForge. Of course, that could just be a smear campaign by their opponents.
:-)
Relevent links (Apologies in advance for the karma whoring
Adam Smith's Statement on Technology and the New Economy
Press Release for "E-Genda 2002"
New Democrats E-Genda 2002 (full text)
Lister: "Knowledge is Power" -- who said that?
Rimmer: I don't know
voting affects congress similarly to trying to run software on palladium computer:
you ask it to do something, but before it gets done it has to get approved by microsoft and the "content providers"
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
This seems a partisan rant by GPL political activists. Where is the call to "outlaw" the GPL? Where is the justification for putting government code under the GPL, instead of one of the other very similar licenses out there?
It is a reality that many commercial vendors won't touch GPL code. If you're primary goal is to eliminate commercial software, this kind of gambit makes sense. If you want to avoid closing avenues for widespread distribution of software, it doesn't make sense.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Let's look at these points...
1) They use the Internet, by virtue of TCP/IP, as "proof" of their thesis.
Very insightful. If the TCP/IP libraries and utilities from the BSD distribution had been GPL'ed, the technology would never have been integrated into so widely a diverse population of operating systems and utilities. That is, you would not today see Macintosh, Windows, Netware, Solaris and many other systems supporting it. These companies would have had to come up with something different, and more than likely not one of them would interoperate with the other. So we'd still be back in the world of AOL, Prodigy, MSN and Compuserve.
2) They state that you cannot improve OR adopt OR commercialize GPL software.
Do they really? My guess is they said you cannot improve or adopt it for commercialization. Which is true, and is one of the fundamental points of GNU.
3) They state that you cannot integrate GPL'd software with proprietery software.
This is true as well.
4) They say you should keep publicly funded code away from the public sector, so that proprietary interests can make money from the work.
This is pretty much in tune with the Technology Transition legislation passed back in 1980 promoting collaborative work between commercial and research entities. Bayh-Dole and Stevenson-Wydler acts.
Sounds to me like these representatives do understand the GPL and are willing to discuss it in an intelligent manner. I find it curious that the only way the GPL defenders can push their agenda is by distorting the purposes of the GPL. Sounds intellectually dishonest to me.
You make it sound as though the GPL imposes requirements on corporations that it does not impose on natural persons. I find that bizarre, and don't understand where that reading is coming from.
What the GPL would prevent is having someone take a government-contracted GPLed product, slap a gui front end on it (maybe even with a few silly interface pattents), and then sell the result with a do-not-copy, do-not-reverse-engineer license.
I'll grant you, that's an action corporations are more likely to take than individuals, but the corporate discrimination angle you're trying to play up is downright silly.
Frankly, the no GPL rule makes no sense without a similar rule against standard proprietary licenses; government contractors routinely develop code and then incorporate it into their own do-not-reverse-engineer programs. What happens in that case is that the government gets the code and a license to use it wherever they want internally, but they can't release it to non-governmental institutions.
Certainly the public gains less from that arrangement than it does from an identical arrangement that also allows the government to release said code to the public under the GPL.
The article says there is
This is pretty different than "Congress Members Oppose GPL for Govt. Research.' It's much narrower, and the total number of congress members involved is 2. That's 2, as in 2 out of 635. And it's to be applied to the security software only. The headline is much too broad, and therefore misleading. And it's a suggestion that licences be banned only if they "prevent or discourage commercial adoption" of the technologies. Given the way most corporations have shied away from GNU licences, I think you can easily make the case that in practice the GPL discourages commercial applications.There is one primary exception to that - standalone programs or systems. Note, for example, that Linux and GNU emacs are wildly popular, but the various FSF C function libraries were not. The GNU library licence was written because people were shying away from developing with GCC because FSF libc.a was required for gcc usage (I don't think that's true any more). Libc.a was under GPL and that meant applications that were developed with gcc would come under GPL. FSF created the library licence in an attempt to address the issue, but lately they seem to think that it was a mistake. IMHO, they're confusing cause with effect. Those libraries came into wider usage because the GPL didn't apply to software developed that used them, not because they were good libraries (though they are good libraries). But IMHO if they weren't under the library licence, they would not have come into as common a use as you now see.
Let us also note that releasing the code to the public domain does not prevent applying the GPL to it by others! You can grab a copy, hack it up to your hearts content, slap the GPL on it, and go. If your mods make it superior to the unrestricted original and the public thinks the GPL restrictions aren't a problem, cool. If not, well, the market has spoken. IMHO, this proposal will simply prevent the GPL from being applied before the market has spoken.
Feh, enough of that, I'm ranting.
And the US government wants to take away my freedom to murder other people
Not necessarily. In the United States, homicide is a crime at the state level. Only killing a federal employee is a federal crime.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You DID contact the author and discuss your problem, right? There are often ways around these difficulties - offer to license the code non-exclusively for this purpose and pay some $$$, as him/her to release a version under lgpl or some otherwise usable license, etc. If there's more than one author it can be hard, but there are often ways to work this stuff out.
I agree that government funded code should be more widely available than GPL - I have no inherant problem with companies using it to make their own stuff better. After all, they pay taxes too. But the original code must remain free, and allow free derivative works. That's the key point.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The government is funded by taxes. Both citizens and companies pay taxes. Most companies can't use GPL'd code in their products. If they do BSD type licensing, then everybody who pays taxes, including companies, get to use the code. Using the GPL is just not fair to some taxpayers (the companies) while BSD type licencing is fair to all taxpayers.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I read the article, which only served to confuse me further. Are these people saying that software funded with government money should *not* be under the GPL, or are they saying that these people are trying to put an outright ban on the use/making of software by anyone? The story (both here and on NewsForge) seems to be a bit exaggerated, or is it correct? Can someone please clarify what is actually going on? Thanks.
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suwain_2
Around here this may seem like a troll statement, but I do not mean it as so.
I do remember one thing Bill Gates (who I'm not a fan of) said last year, the GPL is a virus. I'm not insinuating that its a bad virus, but nonetheless everything it touches gets changed, and its main purpose is to spread itself around. To me, that sounds like a virus.
The GPL is new. Open source is new. How can we possibly enlist such a license that is as restrictive as it is, that has very little legal experience, and makes all derivatives GPL. I think thats wrong.
The major gist of the GPL is that if you want to use this code, you must make your derivives GPL too. In a government atmoshphere, this is going to do nothing but create unusable code. The government needs a level of secrecy. If the GPL were to be used, you can rule out half of the potential applications off the bat.
The government is here to serve us, and do it as cheaply as possible. If they hire someone to make GPL code, and then later have to re-write the entire thing for use in another application because it cant be open-source (for security, secrecy, whatever reasons) thats costing us money.
The GPL has certain applications, government use is not one of them. If government created code starts getting licensed as GPL, then someone isnt doing their job.
While the arguments for releasing publicly funded software under a PD or BSD license may have a point to some degree, they completely ignore the basic purpose of GPL.
GPL allows the user to make modifications. That's why most people use it, including governments.
Now, if there would be laws prohibiting government workers to writing GPL licensed software, they could not make the modifications, which is the biggest reason why anyone would use GPL software in the first place.
Therefore, by prohibiting writing GPL code, the government would, to some degree, exclude itself from using (and I mean really using) GPL licensed code. Everyone would suffer, except maybe Bad Bill.
Then, you say, government should only use PD or BSD licensed software, right? Not really, it wouldn't work in practice because any sensible subcontractor or other company developing the government-funded software further would certainly re-license it under a proprietary license. The company might even offer the modified version a bit cheaper if they get the copyrights and can re-sell it with big bucks to others. However, by purchasing that new software, which it probably would do since it's "cheaper", the government would lose the freedom to itself modify the code that it wanted to be free in the first place.
Such situations could, of course, be prevented by appropriate contracts with the subcontractors, but I would say it's quite certain that, in practice, such important factors would most certainly be ignored when writing the contracts, just as they are always when buying software from companies. This would probably cause an inevitable privatization of all software originally developed by the government and lead us to a world with only closed-source proprietary software.
One good way to correct the problem would be to make it a law to use only PD or BSD licensed software in goverment, but this would probably make some proprietary software companies even less happy than with GPL.
Hence, it may be best to allow the government agencies publish their software under any Open Source license they choose to be best for their purposes, including the PD non-license, BSD, and GPL.
Not that I'm a US citizen, but this might apply to other governments as well and, after all, the future of GPL licensed Free Software does affect the entire world. It's not just the US government developing software for itself, but many governments in the world do participate in common GPL licensed projects.
GPLed code is a commodity. Anyone can take it and do what they wish with it. The resulting product can then be taken and modified further by anyone else. I can't think of a better way to encourage innovation, creativity and competition. Just look at the large selection of linux vendors as an example of a healthy marketplace.
BSD style licenses allow companies to keep their code secret which creates a mini-monoploy for them. This is good for the company but bad for the free market.
If government is serious about encouraging free, commodity based markets then they should get behind the GPL.
Perhaps the BSD license would be more 'fair' to everybody, but there's a difference between starting up a new government project and contributing enhancements to an existing project.
This law prevents Government agencies from contributing to existing GPL projects. The Government can't just waltz in and say "if you want our enhancements, you have to relicense your code".
So, exactly who is it 'fair' to when you disallow the Government to contribute to, say, Linux or Mozilla, etc.
Maybe various GPL projects should switch to dual licensing. Keep the code GPL'd, but make it available for a (large) fee under a license that allows incorporation into closed-source projects but disallows changes. All GPL'd enhancements become immediately available to the closed-source guys too, but they can't 'embrace and extend'.
It would be quite interesting to find out just how eager the closed-source guys would be to get their hands on the code if they can't use it to exclude others.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
In particular, this sentence
unfairly singles out the GPL and ignores all of the other restrictive licenses- such as anything of the form Copyright 2002 XYZZY Corporation!!
These Congressmen+lobbyists are deliberately mistating the position of the "Open Source Government" initiative (or cherry-picking some more extremist proponents to serve as strawmen).
And they're leaving out an important intellectual-property fact about the standard procedures of software contracting: when you contract for code, unless you explicitly specify something different, both the customer AND the contractor get rights to the code. If the contract was for a compiler program, then the customer gets rights to some binaries, and the contractor still keeps code rights. (This many "consultancy" houses work- they resell the same source code over and over, with small customer-specific modifications each time)
What the public should desire is for us to get some benefit from software development paid for by the government. Today, a federal agency will fund a project, get it installed & maybe working, and then forget about it. The contractor typically searches around for other agencies needing the same functionalities and sells it to them, again. (Taking advantage of the government's poor inventory management to rack up more sales- but that's the customer's fault for not being more organized).
The change I'd like to see is, when the government enters into new software contracts, they ask for a GPL (or at least PD) source code package amoung the deliverables. That way all of the researchers and developers in the government, academia, and the private sector can examine and build on the taxpayer funded work. This doesn't have to be a law, just an executive directive, or mere recommendation. Not only will it encourage "the progress of science and the useful arts", but it will increase bueraucratic transparency and reduce dangerous security flaws.
This says NOTHING about taking away the separate right that every contractor has to reuse their own code. The developing company can maintain their own copyrighted version to use as they wish. But that shouldn't be the ONLY copy of the source code- we paid for it, we'd like to look it over too.
People are arguing over the wrong thing. People are debating about what license an academic scientist chooses to release a new project under. That is a legitimate point and I see things going both ways---personally I will release my data analysis code under a more BSDish Academic Free License license.
But this is NOT at all the real point of the law.
The reality is much more insidious----this law is designed to STOP all government funding of even academic researchers from working on any improvements to Linux, and in fact any GPL software whatsoever.
It is Microsoft's attack on Linux or any other already EXISTING GPL project.
For instance, the NSA secure Linux versions.
This means that a federally funded CS professor (and most are) could not pay any grad student or postdoc to work on improvements to GCC or the Linux kernel, or any number of similar projects.
In reality it means that they could work only on the BSD's which ironically have far less commercial penetration and significance than Linux.
Which is exactly the REAL intent: harm the competition to Windows.
The government can't license its code under the GPL or under BSD. Both of those licensing schemes rely on copyright, and the government is not allowed to copyright its works. They can hire private contractors to write copyrighted works, and in that case, I see nothing wrong with recommending the default use of BSD.
But it's not as simple as that. The real issue is: should the government be allowed to use GPLed code (and make slight modifications to it where necessary)?
For instance, let's say the government really needs a piece of software to calibrate widgets. There's nothing on the market that does exactly what they need, but there is a piece of GPLed software that, with a minimal investment of development time, could be modified to do exactly what the government wants. The alternative is to buy an imperfect, packaged solution for many times the cost.
Should the government be allowed to go with the most appropriate and least expensive solution in this case, or should we allow these Senators to pass some general beaureaucratic measure that prevents people from making appropriate case-by-case decisions? If this law goes through, the government is essentially banned from distributing even the smallest tweaks to GPLed software, and that could very well cost us all money without gaining us a thing.
"Any reason why I should be able to use code that your tax dollars paid for?"
That's not the issue here MS (or at least I suspect it's funded by MS) want all governmentally produced code to be BSD-licensed (so they can release non-free versions).
As for your question (even though it's off-topic):
People from different countries should be able to use each others code. That's just basic cooperation, that's just reduction of work duplication, that's just common sense and fair and just.
Venezuelan goverment developing GPLed programs? German goverment developing Kroupware? Spread it around, cooperate. A more human side of humanity.
Why build unnecessary walls between people?
If I ran a business, and I paid taxes, and I found out that my taxes were going to something that was directly in competition in my product, I'd oppose it too.
It isn't as if the government is actively funding any efforts whose sole purposes are to compete directly with anyone's products (including Microsoft). The government has not formed a software company to compete with anyone -- the government simply solves problems and provides services. The fact that they can sometimes use GPL'd software in doing this and then release the solution for anyone else -- including Microsfot-- to use is an incidental benefit.
Of course, it's a powerful one, and will have an effect on private entities that provide similar solutions and services. But frankly, if a focused private entity can't compete with an organization which incidentally produces a viable solution all in a days work, they shouldn't be in the market in the first place. That's what all that private enterprise efficiency is for, right?
Incidentally, this is how deregulation ought to work. Want a deregulated utility market? Seperate the service delivery network from the gov't utility provider (in order to make sure competitors have equal access to the delivery network). Then wait for the competitors to come. The day the competitors provide better/cheaper service is the day the gov't entity goes out of business.
The day MS can produce something better than NSA secure linux (hah) is the day that the GPL should cease to matter in gov't funded projects. Until then, restricting folks from using the GPL in such projects is as ridiculous as requiring it.
The fact that any product that the government contributes to could be useful -- competetive, even -- in the same space that a commercial product is shouldn't disqualify it from being used and developed.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.