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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?
let's gpl congress so that we can all modify the code and prevent all the stupid laws that get passed!
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
"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.
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
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...
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?
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.
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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...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.
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".
Our great Wisconsin representative Ron Kind is a aol user RonKind2002@aol.com . This makes it obvious that somebody is targeting the most ignorant.
Got Code?
...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....
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.
"The government is going to outlaw the GPF! All copies of Linux will be confiscated!"
Moron. Outlawing the GPF would get rid of Windows.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
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.