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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.
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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!
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.
Most companies can't use GPL'd code in their products.
No.
Only if they want to keep the code extensions secret and if they want to distribute to others can they not use the GPL.
There is absolutely no problem with companies using GPL'd code in their products if they freely disclose their modified source code.
Alternatively, they can keep the code extensions secret and use the modified code internally as much as they like.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
What are companies?
Do companies share the same rights as citizens?
Aren't companies solely a bunch of people combined by a collective goal?
In a democracy, the goverment is not a company which has to serve it's clients. It is a representation of the people. Such a goverment has no obligation to companies, only to the majority of the people.
This is often a common goal, but not necessarily one.
Where does the money come from anyway?
Would it be wrong, to say it comes from the people?
> Most companies can't use GPL'd code in their products.
This may be true. But most companies still can use GPLed code for their products.
Most companies don't earn money by writing code, they earn it by using code.
Now, considering that it is about contract work, it begs the question, isn't that relatively specialised software anyway?
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Ok, so this guy is barking up the wrong tree, because many of these companies don't have to pay a cent in taxes, but his reasoning is still sound.
A BSD-like license is a better license for governmental projects, because it does give everybody the same rights to the code which was developed with public funds.
The GPL on the other hand makes certain restrictions which would be difficult for both the governmental entity and all redistributors to follow.
Say for example, that a government entity contracts a piece of software for counting ducks. And they provide it to all of the state entities for their fish and game departments to use in developing their own duck counting system. In turn, the states take the duck counting code, modify it for their own uses, and provide the binaries for the various agencies and private groups within the state that cares about duck populations. You now have the original code that the government provided, and you have 50 different versions of the code from the states. What are the odds that somewhere down the line, one of those states will forget (or be unwilling) to publish the code, or unintentially break one of the other provisions of the GPL?
With a BSD like license, this isn't a problem. The government can provide the code to the states, and they can modify the code to their choosing, but are under no obligations regarding the code.
In both cases, the goal of distributing government contracted code is fullfiled, but only the BSD provides a way for all citizens to be able to use the code without restrictions.
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There are four issues at stake here, and I'm sure Microsoft's lobbiests will try to confuse them, so let's not help.
1. What license should government funded projects use: the answer is, of course, the same as has always been the case: none. Government funded development is by default Public Domain and always should be!
2. Should government dollars be spent (ala NSA extensions to Linux security) to modify GPLed software? Answer: yes, but only where it makes sense. The way MS wants this argument to go is this: Gov$$ should not go to GPLed programs; NSA cannot update Linux (as an example); Linux cannot be made secure to NSA specs; Govt cannot use Linux. The (I hope) obvious solution is that the NSA can make mods to GPLed software, just as they have been known to make mods to proprietary software. The diffs are, of course, theirs. They wrote the code, they own it. If they feel that it's not a matter of national security, they can release the code diffs (without context, of course) as Public Domain, just as schools used to release UNIX security and bugfix diffs. The derived product will, of course, be under the GPL. No problems here. (see #4 for why this is a bit of a red herring argument)
3. Should Govt be allowed to use open source software and specifically GPLed software. Yes, certainly. There is no more restriction on GPLed software than proprietary software. In fact, since you're not allowed to distribute mods to proprietary software at all, it's much more open. If the government chooses to use BSD or GNU/Hurd or Linux or whatever, they certainly should. Integration should be opened for the normal RFP/bidding process, of course. Proprietary software must be able to compete in the market fairly, but so must free/open software!
4. Here comes the really ugly one: should govt. be allowed to modify software. Yep, that's what Microsoft really wants to ask. They want the govt to not be able to code, and thus be totally dependant on software companies. Bottom line: this is why open source software exists. Choice, period.
This is a non-argument if you apply sufficient logic, folks. Don't let yourself get lead into a license debate when what's really going on is MS trying to strong-arm congress into disallowing open source software in government.