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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."
Everybody knows those GNU people are a bunch of Commies. :)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
does that mean that the GPL is *NOT* open source? (you can see but you can't touch)?
But... I thought... GPL... open... *HEAD EXPLODES*
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. He couldn't be more wrong. If people don't like the rewrite, they won't use it.
Dog is my co-pilot.
When I saw this article I thought there was some new GPLed DVD R/W drive or something.
Most of us here on slashdot have an opinion on what should be going on in the GPL, but obviously most of us are not lawyers. This is, without a doubt, a legal matter, and this thing needs to be airtight. I wouldn't want this thing to be a true democracy, but hopefully they will be willing to listen to a little input here and there.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Everybody's free to leave that out when applying the license to a new program.
Well, he does have a point. Technical things like this should probably be written by experts on the subject matter rather than being decided by everyone who just happens to have an opinion after they read about it on Slashdot; and for that matter, nobody's being forced to use the license for anything, anyway.
And if you don't like the new GPL... feel free to modify it to your liking. There's already a few pieces of software out there that use a modified GPL v2 (typically, these are projects that are GPL'ed but grant you special permission to link with this or that non-free library even though this would otherwise not be allowed by the GPL), so you could do the same thing here.
And to those who'll reply now and tell me that I can't modify the GPL because the license as such is itself copyrighted to the FSF... I insist that that's irrelevant, as a license is not a creative work but rather a technical description of the terms the author offers you the software under.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
This obsession people seem to have with democracy is silly. Do doctors and nurses in the operating room vote on how to proceed with an operation? Should pilots ask for a vote on how to land a plane?
There are plenty of things democracy is good for, but sometimes you have to leave decisions in the hands of people more qualified than the average person.
Exactly! This needs to be professionally written in such a way that it has a very good chance of standing up in court. To take a vote among a group of legally unqualified geeks will not help achieve this.
And the brethren went away edified.
I for one welcome our GNU GPL overlords.
No, seriously, they are smart people and I trust they will do a good job. In the unlikely event that I don't like what they've written I won't use it for my projects.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The democracy comes when people adopt the new license. I predict it will be draconian, specifying that people who merely interoperate with GPL3 SW will have to publish source code. Just leveraging the market share of GPL software to force other authors to go GPL, regardless of justice, fairness, or any other consideration than Moglen and Stallman's revolutionary fervor.
Which is too bad. A sensible GPL3 that people would adopt would address interop by making only reasonable demands. Just as we got, in addition to GPL, an LGPL, we also need an AGPL for APIs and interfaces. Which require any app that interoperates with an AGPL app to open, publish and document its APIs, and carry the AGPL. That would make AGPL apps virally force developers to open interfaces. The denial of which openness is indefensible, except on the basis of programmers' rights to do anything we want, except when bound by agreement otherwise. API access is even more important than source code access, though it comes along with OSS (except for real, explicit documentation). And API access is the biggest drag on interop, where getting the rest of the source is usually just a bonus.
There's nothing magic about Moglen. He's just the expert who wrote the last GPL(s). There's no reason we can't write a forked "GPL 3.0", which merely requires the AGPL I described, even using those GPLs as the original "source" from which to produce the new version. When it proves more popular than Moglen's GPL 3.0, democracy and open source will have conspired in the market for maximum freedom, as chosen by the free.
--
make install -not war
On the advice of a few dozen people and a couple of lawyers, it was written and released.
Wow, both people and lawyers...
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.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...