GPL 3.0 Rewrite Drive Is No Democracy

linumax writes "Users will be free to comment on the upcoming complex and technical draft versions of the GNU General Public License 3.0 in an easy way, according to Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. However, Moglen said Wednesday, speaking at the Open Source Business Conference here, the rewrite of the GPL is not an election and there will be no voting on its clauses. In a session entitled GPL 3.0: Directions, Implications, Casualties, Moglen said that when GPL 2.0 was promulgated some 14 years ago, very few people cared about it. On the advice of a few dozen people and a couple of lawyers, it was written and released. "That was a fine system then. It is not a fine system now. I expect the process around GPL 3.0, when it begins in some 60 to 90 days' time, to collect a great deal of comment from people on the draft documents... ", He said."

Comments

Compatibility is key...

[hagbard5235]

It would be nice if a balance could be struck between the ideals of the GPL (which I don't oppose) and some other licenses. For example, it would be nice to see compatibility with the Eclipse Public License (which the FSF doesn't seem to think poorly of, it just happens to be incompatible). Please note, I'm *NOT* seeking an FSF sell out of their ideals here, I ascribe to them myself in my private Open Source contributions, but rather consideration of how not to have the GPL be an impediment to projects that don't violate those ideals, but happen to be using other licenses.

the Zealots are at ZDNet.

[twitter]

This poster pointed to the original interview with RMS and detailed the mistakes in the Zdnet article:

The proposed change would thwart removal of a button to download software that an author put in, not make a download button manditory. This interesting and mild idea is being considered carefully to avoid problems it might cause if abused by contributors.

There's more, but it's not worth the trouble to detail. That last Slashdot story was just more BS from another Wintel rag.

If you have a real objection to a real proposed change, let's hear it.

Re:Why would it be a democracy?

[AuMatar]

AGain, you confiuse govenrnment and economic systems. Government is about how you enact laws. Economic systems is about who owns property and how its distributed. A democracy can very easily be a communism- they just have to vote to be one. In fact, its the most natural form of a communism, since in a communism everyone is supposed to have equal ownership- equal votes. Thus the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is similar to the "tyranny of the masses" normally caused by pure democracies.

Democracy most notably does NOT mean free, in any sense of the word. Its quite possible to have a democracy where you vote to take away freedom (or even the life) of certain groups or certain people. In fact, the first democracy, Athens, did just that on a regular basis. It was called the lottery. Thats the major problem wiht pure democracies- 50%+1 wins, even if it screws over a sizable minority. Its one of the reasomns why the US is a republic instead.

Re:Wait wait wait...

[Bruce Perens]

The text of the GPL is constrained to be the same everywhere, so that we don't get a million GPL flavors that aren't compatible with each other and increase the combinatorial problem, as happened with the Mozilla licenses. There must be more than a dozen Mozilla license variants now. They breed like tribbles, and are just as annoying.

Bruce

The fight is over the GPL3 *NAME*

[aphor]

There are (for the purpose of this post) innumerable possible licenses out there. Only one of them will be called GPL3.0, but if you don't like the one arbitrarily named GPL3.0 you are perfectly free to use one of the others. Keep using GPL2.0, for instance. The democracy in the GPL3.0 is VOLUNTARY ADOPTION. This license will not be foisted on anyone.

The real problem is that lots of people may dislike GPL3.0, and they will likely go with plan B, which may not be the same license as everyone else. Then we will all have to read the fine print again. Of course, upon rejection of the GPL3.0 license, these same dissenters can (and probably will) wish they had an acceptible GPL, which provides the perfect motivation for a GPL3.1 fork. We all have to choose between the LGPL and the GPL as things stand, because there was a bifurcation in the types of GPL software, their users and their respective licensing needs. It isn't clear whether this situation is more or less dangerous than the debate that led to the LGPL. The implied message is clear: "GPL3.0 may not be any good."

The expression that GPL3.0 might be bad is meaningless because it doesn't exist yet. Communicating this to a mass audience is FUD. The purpose is to stir up demand for participation in the GPL3.0 drafting process, which will complicate it, and slow it down, and sacrifice the quality of the final product (even if only the timeliness). If there was real reason for concern, people would already be embroiled in an Internet wide debate on what needs to be fixed with the GPL. Maybe that is already happening, and it's just the people most qualified and or interested that are participating in the debate, at a quiet level compared to Slashdot controversy. If I wanted to derail those people, the best tool at my disposal is to try and discredit them and force them to spend their valuable time defending themselves and their work from angry mobs of mouth-breathers who refuse to Google the issue themselves.

Here's a hint: if you ever get a feeling of righteous indignation, you're playing the victim, and you're ignoring your real opportunity to do something positive.