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."

Comments

Re:Still a bit wary of one element of the GPL

[Tim C]

While I don't doubt what you say, and don't suppose for a moment that the FSF would ever go rogue, here's a little thought experiment - would it be possible to slightly alter section 9, perhaps over a number of revisions of the GPL, such that eventually the wording allowed for wholesale changes to the licence? As long as each revision is itself similar in spirit, they should be okay, and of course with each passing revision the amount of similarity required would drop.

Not saying they'd ever do this, just wondering if it would be possible.

Re:Who would of thought

[LiquidCoooled]

The GPL is not giving your code away for free.

The GPL is a license to ensure that your code and other code built using it remains open and usable by others.

Just giving the code away for free would allow an evil company to take somebodies hard work and lock it up in an exe shell with a squad of lawyers protecting the source.

Public Domain is noble but not wise.

Re:Stupid question...

[squiggleslash]

Stallman explicitly states that he things that open source should be sold for money.

Well, two nit-picks. One is that RMS probably wouldn't use the word "should". ie there's no obligation to sell free software, he just believes people should have the right, legally and morally, to do so.

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.

What would stop me from purchasing a copy of the software for sale, change a byte or two, call it derivate work, and sell it for a lower price?

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.