Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL

jskelly writes "Sun Micro President Jonathan Schwartz attacked the GPL at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco yesterday.Other than the same old arguments (you can't make it proprietary later) he adds that it imposes on developing nations "a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world" -- but fails to mention that the converse is also true: the wealthiest nation in the world is similarly, under the GPL, forced to "disgorge all its IP back to the developing nations" as well. Duh!"

Comments

Re:Ha!

[ShieldW0lf]

I think he's referring to the fact that the US was pretty much the number one copyright offender in the world when they got started. The British were flipping and the Americans just flipped them off. It was only when the US started having significant developments of their own that they started to care about "IP"

Re:Release src only if publically release binary

[GigsVT]

but we do when for nearly all private, multi-$000 sales.

Then you are violating the GPL. You can't sell it without distributing it, unless you have them using it on your servers somehow and never sent them any binaries. (i.e. the whole dot-bomb application service provider business model)

Re:I don't see how that's possible

[srleffler]

The fact that the sale is 'private' isn't the point. The issue is that you're only obligated to give the source to the people to whom you give/sell binaries. If you give the binaries to five customers, you have to release the source to those five customers. If you release the binaries to whoever wants them, you have to do likewise with the source. Simple.

As others have pointed out, the customers receiving the binaries and source are free to redistribute them, and probably cannot be constrained from doing so by any non-disclosure agreement..

Please stop giving credit to the wrong movement.

[jbn-o]

The ZDNet article headline reads "Sun criticizes popular open-source license". Calling the GNU General Public License an "open-source" license is ahistorical and gives credit to the wrong movement, hiding the name of the real author of the license and the name of the movement for which the license was written.

By calling the GPL an "open source" license, the open source movement is allowed to grab credit for a trivial bit of work: constructing a set of rules which allow the GPL to be given the Open Source Initiative's imprimateur. This is nothing compared to writing the GPL and starting the free software movement.

The GPL was written many years before the OSI started. Nobody who would form the OSI wrote the GPL. The GPL was written by the FSF (most notably, RMS, who gets far too little credit for his work here on Slashdot). The OSI has dismissed software freedom for a message which does not preserve user's software freedoms (for instance, the open source definition does not guarantee a user's privacy--the OSI approved the early revisions of the Apple Public Source License which required publication and notification of a central authority upon changing APSL-covered software in most instances. The FSF did not give its imprimateur to the APSL v1.x revisions, holding out until Apple changed the license in what would become the v2.x revisions.).

Let's give credit where credit is due. I think just as RMS tells us (repeatedly) that GCC is a free software program, not an open source program because it misstates the authorship and reason why the program was written (RMS was the initial author of GCC which he wrote to provide software freedom for GNU), we ought to give the author and intentions of the GPL proper mention by calling it a free software license. That cannot be done by calling it an open source license.