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Guidelines for GPLv3 Process Released
Justin Baugh writes "The Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center have released a document detailing the guidelines and the process that will be used for revising the GNU GPL, and have launched a new website related to the V3 process. It was announced in a press release this morning that the FSF will be releasing the first discussion draft of the new license for comments at the International Public Conference for GPLv3 at MIT on January 16 and 17, 2006."
Some people seem to think that clause allows the FSF to release a license that subverts the original ideal behind the GPL. But the new license must be similar in spirit to the current version according to section 9 of the license.
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No, it doesn't mean GPL'd software can't be used in a weapon. It means avoiding unintended consequences that might stifle the freedom of free software development. You'd still be free to make a Linux controlled guided missile.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
CDDL, MPL, BSD, etc. are not variations of the GPL, some of them are libraries which have more or less the same sprit, but they are still completly different licenses.
No, it means that you need to provide the source code to the possesor of the weapon. I don't get the source to Linux just because the website I visit is running on a machine runing a Linux distro...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Also, in the spirit of freedom, efficiency and 'less government' shouldn't the main goal of editing the GPL be reducing the word count and removing all lawyer speek (if there was any)?
RTFL before you speak of things you do not know. The GPL is extremely brief, and extremely free of legal mumbo-jumbo. Believe it or not, a bit on the skimpy side at times. Not to mention it's a license you can read once, and know what it says a thousand times. Try comparing it to any commercial license, and I don't mean just the infamous MS EULAs. I mean to every license ever touched by a company lawyer. And if you had read the other licenses as well, you'd see they are quite different both from each other and from the GPL...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Maybe you haven't seen a good answer because you haven't read the GPL FAQ?
No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.
The second is that RMS doesn't use the term "open source" to describe "free software". Both are, in practice, loaded terms. Free Software is associated with an ideology RMS himself identifies (and is identified) with strongly. It has baggage in terms of being associated with the right to modify and/or redistribute software you've been given. By comparison, Open Source has baggage too - it's generally associated with the superiority of a development model where anyone can contribute, and the movement to sell this development model to businesses and other professional software developers in the hope it'll encourage the creation of free software. You may feel (and a lot of people would agree with you) that this is a trivial distinction when both, ultimately, refer to software that can be freely modified and redistributed, but RMS is as interested in the baggage as he is the destination, and as such he would distance himself from any comment implying any view of "open source" and what it should be.
Nothing. In fact, you wouldn't even need to modify it. And some people actually fund the development of their Free Software projects by selling copies of their programs with licenses even more liberal than RMS proposes, and do so successfully. OpenBSD uses CD sales as one of a range of funding sources, with grants and gifts from concerned parties who want OpenBSD to provide them with the features they need to be developed. This is actually something the Free Software Foundation used to do with GNU, they'd sell tapes for several hundred dollars containing the latest versions. With the Internet, that became less useful (and not worth several hundred dollars to most people), but for a time it was a good source of funding.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
We need version 3 because a lot of commercial developers are wary of the version 2 license: cleaning up some of the language and making very clear what it means for the future, along with some minor concessions for wary developers, can encourage them to use the software and participate in its development.
We see this now with Novell and their evolution client, and we've seen copyright vagaries with X-windows, SSH, Kerberos, and other technologies in the past. Good clear language with weird exceptions addressed carefully is the hallmark of OSS.
Version 2 leaves significant ambiguity with regard to applications used over a network. If I install fooForums that is GPL, and I modify it then put it on my website, am I distributing a modified GPL work? I'm sure distributing parts of it (the HTML etc). Right now it's not clear if the person modifying the app has any obligation to distribute source.
One of the possibilities for GPLv3 is a clause that would allow authors of network based server side applications to include links in the app to download source, that could not be removed legally under the GPL.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.