Seminar On Details Of The GPL And Related Licenses

bkuhn writes "Given the recent confusion about LGPL on slashdot, and the concern it raised for those convincing corporate legal departments to adopt to Free Software, perhaps your readers might be interested in FSF's legal seminar on the GPL and related licenses. The first one is in Silicon Valley, and if it is successful, we hope to hold others in the next 8 months in New York City and Tokyo." Since the FSF and the GNU project have long created and fought for software that's shareable, Free, and Not UNIX, what's taught at these seminars will probably differ sharply from what you can hear at next Monday's SCO conference call on the "IBM lawsuit, UNIX Ownership and Copyrights."

Comments

Never could understand

[inode_buddha]

Why there's any confusion myself - it's pretty straightforward to me. OTOH, it's good to see the FSF giving their official explanations, maybe I'll learn something.

Could someone here tell me what's so hard to grasp about the GPL? or LGPL? Not trolling, just wondering. Maybe its just completely different world views or something. *shrugs*

Re:Never could understand

[Arandir]

Was it straightforward to you before you were told by someone else what it means? After all, there is still a great deal of disagreement over what some clauses mean.

Remember the KDE fiasco? The situation was hunky dory, until Redhat came along and issued a white paper saying that KDE was illegal. Then Debian got in on the act, and before you knew it, there was this completely new interpretation of the GPL coming from the FSF. Do you really think that none of the KDE developers read the license? Of course they did!

Then there was the Corel LinuxOS fiasco. They had a "private" beta, and everyone jumped all over them. Do you really think that none of the lawyers at Corel bothered to read the license?

And consider the latest fiasco with Java and the LGPL. People have been using the LGPL with Java for years. Not once did anyone every complain. Then suddenly someone at the FSF offered up a contrary opinion, and all hell broke loose.

Notice I used the word "fiasco" with all of the above examples. That's because the GPL is a complicated and hard to understand document, yet everyone thinks they know what it means. The LGPL is even worse, because everyone thinks it's simpler, when in fact it's more complicated.

Re:Oops, wrong FSF...

[Jason Earl]

If you think that is bad the FSF's Deluxe Software Distribution set costs $5000. Clearly the FSF really means it when they say that it is Free as in Freedom and not Free as in Free Beer. Cheapbytes probably sells the same package for $10 + s/h.

$500 is actually a ridiculously low price for what is offered in the seminar. Heck, the State Bar of California has approved this program for 7 hours of MCLE credit, for crying out loud.

Will they address concerns with the GFDL?

[Bootsy Collins]

Debian has moved a large amount of documentation licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License into the non-free section of its software archive, out of concerns that the GFDL is not free, at least as far as "free" is defined by the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

One issue is essentially with the ability of authors to define "invariant sections" of their documents, the subsequent modification of which would violate the GFDL. This conflicts with the requirement of the DFSG that licensing must allow modifications, and must permit the modifications to be distributed under the same licensing terms as the original, as e.g. the GPL does.

Other people have raised the concern that the GFDL's restrictions on the use of "technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute" -- a restriction that, on the surface, makes sense in that it prevents attempts to limit the freedom others have to read the distributed copies -- could have the unintended consequence of forbidding putting documents covered by the GFDL on devices which are encrypted for personal security.

I'm curious whether FSF folks speaking about licenses plan to discuss this at the seminar(s).

Relax - it's much better than a separate SCO story

[gnuber]

> this just seems like a way to jab at SCO for something completely not on topic.

Chill out. They are probably getting flooded with submissions about the SCO conference call, which is the first "news" out of SCO since the Japan Trip (I don't think their ballyhooed July 9 conference call ever happened). But SCO announcing a Monday conference call is certainly not worth its own story, and there is no point waiting until the next Slashback. So Timothy stuck it in a mildly-related story to stop the submissions and so that people who are interested in the SCO case can follow the link and investigate/comment. Sounds reasonable.

Re:US vs. Iraq - Software Business vs. FSF communi

[caluml]

You know the only weak point in the GPL?

Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

So if they go mad, and make version 3 one that allows anyone to do anything they like without having to release their changes....
Of course, there is a little proviso that says:

The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.

but that wording is very wooly. What does similar in spirit mean?

Re:KISS

[IamTheRealMike]

The BSD license is pretty simple. And it's equally simple to rule out for-profit use of your code, if that's your beef.

No it's not. Various licenses have tried to rule out "for profit" use, but the term is so vague as to be useless. Pico was rewritten to nano so it could have a free license, for reasons like that iirc.

The problem is, where do you draw the line? IF you use the software in a charity, that gets more donations this month than they spend because of efficiencies gained from using your software, is that them making a profit from your work? How about indirect profits?

The complexities of the GPL stem from its attempt to be "viral" and enforce the FSF's philosophy on other people.

I wonder if it's a troll, but am too tired to really care. The GPL is very simple, it's people who make it complex. If you actually read the damn thing, maybe some of the supporting essays as well, instead of relying on random Slashdotters or IRC dudes take on it, you realise that a lot of the things said about it, are simply untrue.

Unfortunately, this tends to cause harm to OSS in general, as many people just slap the GPL on their code because it's a popular "free" license, without really understanding or considering the consequence

Dude, I think implying that the GPL is popular because often extremely smart coders are sheeple is pretty damn rude. Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe most of these people actually know what they're doing, and decided that a copyleft license was the way to go?

And thus, it becomes easier "just to stay away from" lots of OSS code that might otherwise get used in more contexts were the license less murky -- or if another license altogether became popular.

You equate popularity of the code with success. Such thinking led to serious issues with the X consortium, and when considering the total value gained to society, the picture is not so clear aynmore.