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Government-Funded GPL Software
tgw writes "Tom Adelstein has an article in 'Linux Journal' on how a major milestone in US government-funded OSS recently passed - virtually unnoticed." Slashdot has mentioned this company earlier.
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I think that all publicly funded software (except that with a security concern) should be released under the GPL. The people paid to have it made, the people should be the ones to benefit from it.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
or is it inexpressibly sad that this ISN'T a no-brainer? That so many people apparently have no problem with the government taking our tax money and using it to fund projects that never see the light of day? Whatever the government uses my money for, unless releasing it endangers national security, it SHOULD be released for the public to use. We paid for it, after all. And the private sector can undoubtedly come up with applications for it the government didn't think of. Everybody wins.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Govt should fund open source SW, as closed source SW vendors will use their power and money to create laws that will close down OSS. That is really the blind spot of libertarians, free traders, etc--they fail to see to see how the so-called "free maeket" is really just a license to allow wealthy entities (e.g., corporations, etc) to manipulate and control lesser entities (i.e., all the rest of us so-called "humans".) If we want an increasingly high standard of living, then we have to engineer a government that will give it to us. Govt is just a machine. Designing machines has NEVER been easy. There aint no such as a free lunch, and a free market is certainly no free lunch, although it comes pretty close to that for corporations and the wealthy and upper income class.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
The best thing about the GPL is that it's simply not possible for a company to then exploit it without giving some benefit back to the people who paid for it. (And yes, I understand that companies pay taxes too). For example, the GPL prevents small, meaningless changes which simply change protocols without adding value.
Suppose you're a government funded researcher who produces some nice chat software which is placed into the public domain. What can stop AOL, which is a huge and influential company, from making a slight change to that software and then bundling it with AOL 10? If they bundle their new, incompatible chat software, they create a huge user-base without contributing anything. They could then leave it at that, or charge non-AOLers $10 if they want to be able to chat with their customers. You might argue that this is a good thing, but I think it's doubtful. And this approach isn't available to anyone except big SW companies.
Far better to use the GPL. If AOL wants to use the SW they paid for, they can do so. If they want to improve it, they can do that too, but they must distribute their source, so they can't create a huge "incompatibilty-hole" amongst the people who originally paid to produce the software.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The GNU General Public License (GPL) was written years before there was an "open source" movement. Linking together the open source movement with the GPL misstates history and authorship. The language used in the GPL and the freedoms it talks about are not part of the philosophy of the open source movement, they are part of the free software movement which created the free software community we still enjoy today 20 years later. The real author of the GPL is the FSF (most notably, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen). In a post to the GCC mailing list responding to someone who wanted to help the "open source community", RMS said
ESR would similarly miscredit the open source movement when he referred to a number of programs as "open-source" projects even though they were written before that movement existed:
Maybe the authors of the various BSD OSes and the authors of the Linux kernal don't mind being lumped in with that movement, but ESR also includes Emacs which was co-written by RMS, founder of the free software movement. Emacs was most certainly not written with the open source movement in mind nor to benefit those ideals. Emacs was written to benefit the free software movement. RMS has repeatedly stated how he does not want to be lumped in with the open source movement. The FSF provides a concise and informative description of the differences between the two movements which includes RMS asking the reader to know enough about the movements to distinguish between their philosophies.
So what did the open source movement do? The Open Source Initiative placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Open source advocates have contributed to practical projects and endorsed the GPL. I'm sure the free software advocates have no issue with endorsing the GPL and increasing its use. But the reason this license protects ones freedoms to share and modify software so well is not due to anything anyone at the OSI or the open source movement has done. Thus it is not fair for that movement to receive credit for the GPL.
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