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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.

4 of 670 comments (clear)

  1. Those damn republicans... by Prince_Ali · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    ...always working against public interest! Oh... wait...

    Plus thanks to Michael for posting an inflammatory and inaccurate subject. "The government is going to outlaw the GPF! All copies of Linux will be confiscated!"

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    Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
  2. This is what I hate about slashdot by Evil+Adrian · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "News for nerds" -- you know what, if you're going to report the news, you should report in an unbiased fashion. I can't take a news outfit seriously when the reporters interject their two cents into every goddamn article.

    "Oooh, Microsoft is evil, Linux Torvalds is the messiah, everything should be free, we should be allowed to h4x0r whatever we want because breaking and entering in cyberspace doesn't hurt anybody! Go anarchy!"

    It's painfully obvious that the "reporters" here (who somehow get paid to filter all of the crap that puts Linux, GPL, hacking, etc. into positive light and anything that Microsoft creates, or any project that makes money, into a negative light) have an extreme bias, to the point that the news you are getting on this site is basically propaganda for some stupid agenda.

    I can't possibly be the only person that gets annoyed visiting this site, can I??

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    evil adrian
    1. Re:This is what I hate about slashdot by Genus+Marmota · · Score: 0, Offtopic
      "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."

      "Well, don't do that!"

  3. Sweet! by Chibi+Merrow · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    When's the rocket leave? :D

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    Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
    Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them