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RMS Previews GPL3 Terms
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent interview, ESR shocked a lot of people when he said,
'We don't need the GPL anymore.' Federico Biancuzzi contacted RMS, founder of the Free Software Movement and initial developer of the GNU system, to talk about the past, the present, and the future of the GNU GPL. Among other things, they discussed the new clauses of the upcoming GPL version 3."
Nothing in the GPLv3 is remotely decided. People keep throwing ideas out there to see which fly, some may, most won't.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Only one feature. The previous paragraph from TFA:
Some companies, such as Google, use code covered by GPL to offer their services through the Web. Do you plan to extend GPL 3 copyleft to request code publication in this case too, considering this behavior like a product distribution?
Running a program in a public server is not distribution; it is public use. We're looking at an approach where programs used in this way will have to include a command for the user to download the source for the version that is running.
But this will not apply to all GPL-covered programs, only to programs that already contain such a command. Thus, this change would have no effect on existing software, but developers could activate it in the future.
So the "such a command" phrase in the paragraph you quoted does not mean "any command". It refers to a specific command to allow source download of a web-app. It doesn't say whether this command would have to still exist if you didn't use your modification as a web-app.
I'm not sure I like that kind of clause, but it is very different than what you said. You statement made me worry that RMS would do something as foolish as mandate an unchanging feature set and interface, but that isn't true.
The enemies of Democracy are
Federico Biancuzzi is just plainly incompetent on the subject of software licenses. See his old interview to RMS to see how often RMS must clarify basic issues to him, and misuderstands Biancuzzi's dumb questions. I'm not going to read TFA this time.
I'd say around June 1991
Talk about hiding in a cave ;) Version 2 was released in June 1991. Version 1 was released in February 1989.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Someone submitting code licensed under GPLv3 to a GPLv2 project would be just as unlikely as someone submitting GPL'd code to a BSDL project, or vice-versa.
I think the more likely "problem" scenario is where a developer on a GPLv2 project wishes to borrow code from a GPLv3 project. However, very few projects are GPLv2... most of them use RMS' recommended language and are therefore best described as GPLv2+, where the '+' means that the code can be released under any later GPL version.
Let me see if I can enumerate the possible scenarios and describe the effect of each.
That looks bad, but in practice I doubt it will be. Very few projects are GPLv2, and probably even fewer will be GPLv3. The only major project I know of under GPLv2 is the Linux kernel, and it is sufficiently important that it's unlikely to be hampered by the inability to pull in GPLv3[+] code. If a feature is generally desirable in Linux, someone will invest the effort to re-implement it for Linux. In most cases that really has to be done anyway, for technical reasons.
I think that if GPLv3 adds enough value to be compelling, most projects will end up migrating to it. Those, like Linux, that can't will simply continue onward with GPLv2. They may wish they had the GPLv3, though, if the FSF can find some language that handles the patent issue well.
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Fetchmail is/was a fairly useful program. And his two famous essays, "Cathedral and Bazaar" and "Homesteading the Noosphere" are reasonably interesting (not entirely accurate, but also not entirely without some reasonable analysis). But 1998 was the last time ESR did ANYTHING even remotely of public interest.
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Violating the GPL is wrong because it attacks the freedom of other people, which is immoral. Pirating music is illegal, but for no good reason, so is not immoral. Therefore, the former gets bashed while the latter is ignored or even encouraged. This is hypocritical only if you subscribe to the world view that "illegal is always wrong and legal is always right", but I expect that many of the posters you refer to do not.
sigs are hazardous to your health
If they hadn't required an NDA, he would have happily fixed the problem, given the fix to anyone who asked, and moved on with his life. However, the NDA and copyright prevented him from doing so.
Except that an NDA has nothing to do with copyright, it's a private contract. Even if they hadn't required an NDA, he still couldn't redistribute his derivative work without permission of the copyright holder. And if there were no such thing as copyright they would have been more, not less, likely to require an NDA.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
If you acknowledge that the GNU project wrote more of your 'Linux' distro than Linus did, it's GLAMP.
Really? insert software company here is free to ask you for money in return for using their software (with no redistribution). Is that not legally enforceable? The GPL2 is not a usage license, but there is nothing much to prevent a new licence (GPL3) from being one. What right would you have to have and use even one copy of the software without either purchasing the software, or obtaining it under license? I wouldn't consider any license that had such a clause to be particularly free, but I don't see how it could fail to be enforceable.
I can't think of any circumstance that would induce me to run a kernel I didn't build myself.
How about the circumstance in which all kernels except the one approved by your ISP will fail to get an IP address?
And like a lot of security-oriented systems, it's not that secure if you have physical acccess to the machine.
Try telling that to anybody who has tried to crack the most recent DirecTV access cards.