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."

Comments

Re:It's 2005, not 1985.

[swillden]

With all due respect, that's completely unproven, and in my opinion, completely untrue.

I recall an interview with the Linux team at IBM where they said they did not think IBM would have contributed code under a BSD license. It was important to IBM that IBM's competitors not be able to use their code in proprietary products. I'm sure there are plenty of other cases where significant contributions to Linux would not have happened if it were under another license.

It's hard to say that the GPL was essential to Linux, but I think it's very clear that the GPL has been helpful to Linux development. It has also enabled a major thrust of IBM's counterattack on SCO, which is perhaps not essential, but very pleasant :-)

Misunderstanding about Apache licenses

[pauljlucas]

From TFA:

We often hear that some 70 percent of web servers use Apache; what we don't hear is that a large fraction of those servers are using a nonfree modified version of Apache, as permitted by the Apache license.

Those servers could equally well use modified versions of Apache even if Apache were under the GPL. The GPL comes into play only if you distribute your modified versions of Apache. If you keep your changes in-house, the whole issue is moot.