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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.
If they are arguing that governement developed software can only be public domain, then fine, but I am not offended by that position.
If they are arguing that governement developed software may be given a proprietary licence but may not be given a GPL licence then I emphatically disagree.
I know that it is the hallmark of /. to be reactionary, but before we inundate these folks with email can we verify the validity of a Anonymous Coward submission of an article at NewsForge that was submitted by an Anonymous Reader?
...even corporations.
The BSD license is the fairest way to handle government code. Corporations are taxpayers too, and should have the same access to this code without having their own code forced open and their business model destroyed.
On the other hand, closing (non-classified) government code benefits no one. As taxpayers, we would be benefited by the availability of such code.
I think Bill Gates would very much like to see the end of the GPL in government code, but don't think he's out to ban OSS - remember, BSD-licensed code was used for implementing TCP/IP originally. MS likes to see government code too, and it is their right, just as it is ours.
As for the issue of non-Americans, you could license it strictly to Americans, but then how would you enforce that license? No country in the world is going to hold up a license which prohibits them from something another nation gets to have....
One thing to think about: not all open-source projects are GPL. I have two open-source projects: one is LGPL, the other is BSD. If all US gov't code were released under the GPL, I couldn't use it for my projects.
Jean-Marc
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I for one am pleased to see this. I work for a company that sells software and have been pissed several times when it has been impossible for me to use software that my tax dollars have gone to pay for because it's trendy for people at universities to GPL everything that breathes.
The most recent example of this was a set of nice Java random variable distribution libraries that I found and wanted to use for some code I was writing. However, they were under the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL which would have allowed me to use library calls), so that meant that even though they were libraries, I couldn't even call them from a commercial product. If they had been in a BSD style license, I could have used them. So I ended up spending some time implementing the ones I needed.
Many people do not seem to realize that when software is protected by the GPL, it is not only 'open source' but it is also prohibiting anyone from using it if they do not also put their software under the GPL. (There are some workarounds - you can always have the GPL code run in a separate process and use IPC/RPC to get results from it and technically not break the GPL, but that can get ugly quick.)
It's fine for someone to make the decision that they want to force people who use their code to use the GPL. BUT - if it is code that was developed with a government grant, to me it seems wrong to use a license that forces a specific use of the code and promotes what is basically a political agenda (force everything to be GPL), instead of using a BSD style license which makes the code truly open. Things paid for by the government should be used to go back to the community at large if at all possible, and the GPL limits the utility of the research performed under government grants.
Where is a good place to find out who funded various Congressmen? With a system like there is in the states it would be nice to find out the 'reasons' that Congresmen support certan ideas.
If someone gets a grant to change the Linux kernel, they can license their changes under both the BSD and the GPL. If a private company gets a grant to write a diet analysis program, they can license it under the BSD, and also integrate the code into their own product.
This is the right thing to do anyway. All government funded development should be made available to the public without restriction.
One thing a lot of people don't seem to realize (or just don't think about often), is that the GPL only applies to code, not the ideas behind the code.
:)
Say, for instance, I want to use the GNU readline library (it's the library that gives the text-interface to a lot of programs the same feel. bash, mysql text interface, and others.. ). It's GPL, not LGPL. But I don't want my program to be GPL'd. What do I do? I rewrite the functionality. There's absolutely no problem with doing this.
By GPLing the code from government sponsored works, it only means you can't copy/paste the code into your non-GPL program. It doesn't mean you can't take the idea behind the code (and even look in the code to get the idea) and then recode the idea.
Basically, anyone complaining about code like this released under the GPL is just lazy and looking to make a quick buck.. do we know any companies like this?
First, let me get out my special padded helmet to protect myself before I get smacked upside the head by some of you.
Our company recently did a website for an organization which was organizing a web broadcast for a governmental organization. So, although we were technically being paid by the organization, we were indirectly being paid by the governmental organization.
But let's remove those distinctions and say the governmental organization themselves had hired us to create the website for them.
Well, our site used software which we had developed in house, at our own expense, prior to being hired. Some of it, however, was developed and coded while hired by them.
Technically, none of the modifcations we made to the software could have worked without the software we had written before.
The question is: if we were required to license this software as Open Source or GPL, would we have had to license *all* of it, including the code that was written prior to the bid?
Also, say that we had had to write the code from scratch. We might have charged less for our work than we could have, thinking, "We can reuse this code and sell it to customers later on."
I think that except in cases where the government is actually purchasing the software outright froma developer, it gets very sticky to say what should and shouldn't be freely developed.
While I agree that there are many cases in which making software open source is a good thing, the truth is if we were required by law to have, say, a section on our website that said, "By the way, here's all the code we've ever written, available for your own use. For free." it is unlikely that we would be able to continue to function as a profitable business. After all, what customer is going to pay for software that is being advertised or described as "free"?
Our tax dollars go to all sorts of projects. For instance, medicines are often developed through the help of government grants. Ever tried to get prescription drugs for free?
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
"They purchased the rights to use the Mosaic code and then gave IE away for free."
I heard this was due to a clause in the contract saying MS had to pay a pecentage of the revenue from IE to Mosaic. I imagine they had dollar signs in their eyes when they wrote that contract and did not imagine the lengths MS would go to screw them.
They found out the hard way.
War is necrophilia.
I don't know what would have happened in the alternate universe that's the subject of this thread, but in our reality MS had little to do with the popularity of the Internet. It was Netscape all the way.
MS believed for a long time that they could create their own network along the same lines as AOL, but since MSN would be bundled with the OS, it would become absolutely dominent. If the Microsoft vision had come true, the Internet as we know it would enjoy the same popularity today as Linux does on the desktop.
Gates even said once that he couldn't understand why anybody would use HTML rather than just serializing Windows API calls.
Once it become clear that the Internet would be the "one true network" Microsoft finally woke up and crushed Netscape.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
If the software relates to national security, then it should be made top secret.
Here's two examples...
1. A goverment contractor builds an encryption system that'll be used to encrypt communications between locations, that should be designed top secret.
2. If DARPA gives a grant to a university to create a better piece of weather modeling software, it should be public domain. Now, if a company goes and takes that software and builds upon it and sells it, fine.
However, I as a citizen of the united states should be able to obtain a copy of the source code, since ultimately, my tax money went to fund the creation of that software.
What it sounds like is that the congress wants to possibly put some regime in place were tax payers money goes to find a project and then that project gets handed off to the highest bidder/(company who gave the most ammount of money to their campaign coffers...)
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
GPL exists because proprietary software exists. If software was not protected by copyright, all software would be public domain and #1.) there would be no proprietary software #2.) there would be no GPL.
The sole purpose of GPL is to turn copyright against itself with the goal of defeating proprietary software. If all software in the world was forced to being GPL, it would be identical to all software being public domain. So, in a sense, the GPL aims diminish or remove the institution of copyright with respect to computer software.
So it's a simple question: Do we want proprietary software or not? If you believe there should be proprietary software in this world, then government funded software should be BSD or public domain. (depending on if the authors want credit.) If you believe proprietary software is unnecessary and damaging to society, government funded software should be GPL until the government agrees to stop recognizing software copyrights.
For my own interests, I would prefer GPL, which is the core of what my business is based upon. I provide complete Open Source consulting services. All software I write is covered by GPL so that my proprietary-minded competitors cannot benefit from my work, while other community-focused businesses can.
Tell me the amount of taxes paid by Microsoft.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
As,
A long time software writer/consultant to the US Government I can assure you that the GPL has already caused me great grief while trying to write software.
Specifically, I'm writing an open-source simulation model which I'd love to make GPL. But, I can't. Why?
Because the minute I make my open-source model GPL those dirty rotton competitors of mine are going to take the code, go straight to the guys I deal with in the government and get that next big contract to "upgrade" the software.
I'm the one inovating here, but I'm a small fish in a big pond. My competitor is a VERY large aircraft manufacturer, guess who.
Do I stand a chance against those guys if I cannot specifically control the code. No!
Keep in mind I have a lot of algorithms that I've created on my own. And sure the government has paid for XYZ project, but they got a good deal because I was able to provide them binaries of my code.
Otherwise, they would have had to pay 10 times the amount they paid me for project XYZ from somebody, see above, that doesn't already have the algorithms.
So, think about it really hard before you write that letter to that congressperson. In a LARGE percentage of cases, when the government contracts for a piece of software they are getting 10 percent new code and 90 percent code that's been invented utilizing somebodies hard earned time.
BSD all the way baybee. There is no logical reason why using government-generated code should obligate one to make one's own code freely available, because we have already paid for it through taxation.
Then there is no problem. Most code produced using government funding is available free for the asking, with no license and no terms, under the Freedom Of Information Act. Why screw things up by adding a license?
Any reason why I should be able to use code that your tax dollars paid for? Maybe I'm British, maybe German, maybe Chinese, maybe North Korean. Maybe I'm Saddam bin Laden. You still want to give me access to "your" source?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I notice you are unwilling to take credit for your words... that is wise.
"False. TCP/IP won on technical reasons not because of the BSD license."
Why do you think this is an either/or proposition? TCP/IP won over something like say NetBEUI or IPX/SPX for technical reasons, but it was widely adopted largely due to licensing arrangements. That made it a win-win scenario, which we all like to see.
"Again false. Commercialization != proprietary."
I never used the term proprietary. The fact is the GPL does prevent companies from making money from selling software. That goes above and beyond the notion of open and proprietary. As has been pointed out before TCP/IP is an open standard, and there are open source implementations of it, and it has been widely commercialized.
I cannot think of a single instance where a GPL'ed piece of software has had nearly the wide adoption of software licensed under BSD. Apache, sendmail, bind, etc. all use BSD style licenses.
"This amounts to a federal subsidy for commercial interests."
You haven't read the Bayh-Dole act, have you? It grants Federal research institutions the rights to license and patent the work they do. One of the other ongoing goals in this realm is to help make research institutions somewhat self-funding through licensing fees.
So it's not a federal subsidy for commercial interests at all.
"If my tax dollars are used in a project by a company that pays no taxes (yet wants rights like a normal citizen) then I demand my fair share of the work."
Which is why I recommend the BSD license at a minimum. Using said license you have just as much access to the software as does the corporations who might wish to utilize it. Using the GPL, the software is only good for end-users, not developers... thus this limits the availability of the technology in the marketplace.
"Sounds to me like you do not understand the GPL and probably are watching it rain outside your office window on One Microsoft Way."
Sounds to me like you've been sniffing to much glue.
Income taxes? $3,684,000,000 [yahoo.com] for the year ended June 30, 2000. Or were you talking about sales and other taxes?
Very very interesting (by the way the figures you give are for 2002, not 2000). MS's total revenue has increased by $6 billion over the last three years, but their tax bill has decreased by over $1.2 billion (i.e. since George W. got into the Whitehouse - I'd be interested to see a breakdown on the taxes to see why). However, net income is down $1.6 billion dollars, despite vastly improved revenue and lower taxes.
No wonder MS is worried about the GPL :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Go here and search for "microsoft" to see why this bill is up. Also, the software industry as a whole has given almost $10,000,000 so far in this election cycle.
Oh yeah, and Microsoft is Smith's #1 contributor with $22,900, more than double the #2 contributor.
$22,900. Is that all it costs to buy a senator these days?