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First Draft of GPL Version 3 Released
njan writes "The first draft of version three of the GNU General Public License was released to the public this afternoon. Major improvements touted in version three include changes designed to mitigate the damage posed by new threats to free software such as software patents. One individual stated about the release: 'It is changes in law, not computer technology, that pose the principal challenges to the free software community. Chief among these changes has been the unwise and ill-considered application of patent law to software. Software patents threaten every free software project, just as they threaten proprietary software and custom software. Any program can be destroyed or crippled by a software patent belonging to someone who has no other connection to the program.'"
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Discussion Draft 1 of Version 3, 16 Jan 2006
THIS IS A DRAFT, NOT A PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public
License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. We,
the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for
most of our software; it applies also to any other program whose
authors commit to using it. (Some Free Software Foundation software
is covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License instead.) You
can apply it to your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you
have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for
this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it
if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it
in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make requirements that forbid
anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you
distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.
Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1)
assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License which
gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.
For the developers' and author's protection, the GPL clearly explains
that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is
modified by someone else and passed on, the GPL ensures that recipients
are told that what they have is not the original, so that any problems
introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors'
reputations.
Some countries have adopted laws prohibiting software that enables users
to escape from Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is fundamentally
incompatible with the purpose of the GPL, which is to protect users'
freedom; therefore, the GPL ensures that the software it covers will
neither be subject to, nor subject other works to, digital restrictions
from which escape is forbidden.
Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. We
wish to avoid the special danger that redistributors of a free program will
individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program
proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL makes it clear that any patent must
be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and
modification follow.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. Definitions.
A "licensed program" means any program or other work distributed under
this License. The "Program" refers to any such program or work, and a
"work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work
under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a
portion of it, either modified or unmodified. Throughout this License, the
term "modification" includes, without limitation, translation and
extension
The phrase "or any later version" is not part of the GPL. Rather it is part of the statement in which you specify that the GPL is the license that you are using. The FSF recommends including this phrase but it isn't required by them or by the GPL. You are perfectly free to specify a particular version of the GPL if you wish to.
*NOT* terms and conditions. This is the style of GNU licenses - preamble describing intent, but not legally binding, then the legally-binding terms .
The Raven
YOu're misreading the legalese. When it says that any GPLed program is not an effective DRM app, it means that by hacking around content protected by a GPL application, you are not breaking the DMCA. Because the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent a protection device, but the GPLed app is not legally a protection device, as per the GPL. It doesn't mean that you can't use encryption, but that its not illegal to reverse engineer an encryption system it uses.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'd like to point out that in a more perfect world, we wouldn't need the GPL v3. What has happened is that the world has become tremendously more complicated since v2. The v3 helps to address some of those issues.
Let's look at some of the issues that make licensing your software more difficult to do properly.
PATENTS. Software patents have gotten out of control. At the time of v2, there was some concern about patents, but now we have had a direct attack on the GPL from the angle of patents trump copyright. What v3 does is spell out what patents mean and how companies can use patents and GPL in peace. It says that you can't distribute software under the GPL if you own a patent that doesn't allow others to distribute the same software. You have to license that patent to allow distribution by others. Isn't this what we want? This is one technical and hairy issue that most people never think about, but needs to be thought about.
DRM. The DRM issue is another viper's nest. What happens if Sony releases software under the GPL to play movies, and then try to protect the movies under DRM legislation? Think especially if Sony takes a GPL software out in the wild, and then adds their own things to it, and then to satisfy the GPL they try to distribute it under the GPL. Are they doing the right thing, even if it is legal? Of course not. If you build or work on a data interpretation program and then license it under the GPL, you can't ask people not to try to understand how your program works or write another program to deal with the same software. The v3 license is explicit about this.
BSD license folks like to pick on the GPL because it is getting so complicated. They forget that the BSD license has its own problems. The GPL is trying to solve those problems. If you don't understand what the problems with the BSD license are, you can't understand what the GPL is intended to do, nor can you be convinced to use it.
Hint about BSD's problems: MS Windows has a good portion of BSD code in the Windows kernel. They spend a great deal of time modifying and adapting the code and then turning around and selling it, without allowing people the same rights they had. I have a co-worker whose job was to work with this code. The folks who wrote the original code get NOTHING in return, except a by-line in the Windows documentation.
Imagine if I took the Linux Kernel, made it better, then turned around and started selling it for profit, without allowing people to see the changes, nor giving them an opportunity to do the same. The GPL forbids this, and it has been a perfect solution up 'til now. The FSF is trying to predict future "attack vectors" and closing them off before they can become a problem, perhaps through future legislation or actions.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Sorry to tell you this, but you answered your last question in the preceding paragraph.
While IANAL, I believe that the word, "privately" is different in legalese from how you're using it. A company can be "private" or "public" depending on whether or not it trades shares publicly. Or, perhaps you're trying to say that your actions within a company aren't "private" because they're not done by one individual for and by themselves. Yet a "private" action can be performed by a company by itself and for itself. It can also be done by an employee of the company for the company. In that regard it is still "privately" done.
This is why there's all the "legalese" in the GPL3. In order to make it usable in the courts it needs to be written in a dialect that will be interpreted the same way by the writer and any legal reader (another lawyer or judge).
If you're finding the license difficult to understand, you have at least a couple of options:
1) Get a lawyer's professional explanation and opinion (of course, this will cost money).
2) Go check out the website and choose what legal opinions you will trust. There's plenty of them available.
Most GPLed software already gives you the option of choosing to use a later version of the GPL, so no relicensing needs to happen.
Linux is a special case. It's explicitly GPL version 2 only, and most of the code has been submitted with that understanding. If Linus wanted to switch to this new version, he'd have to get permission from everybody who's got code in Linux.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The FSF have provided a document explaining the rationale behind the changes in each section of the license.
Before blindly criticizing the wording of a certain section, I suggest reading the rationale behind the changes.
- Does the text in the License do what they intended it to do?
- Do you agree or disagree with what they intended?
- Are the possibly-bad side effects of the text which aren't mentioned in the rationale?
Of course you can still write crypto software under GPL v3. That clause just means that the security measures you've created have no legal protection from circumvention.
In other words, you could write ssh under GPL v3, but it would be legal to crack it. Not necessarily possible, just legal.
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"
I asked Eben Moglen basically this question at the conference today. It isn't GPLv3's intention to treat software delivered as a hosted service as "propagating" or "distributing" the software. (If the service is delivered as a hardware/software bundle, that's something different, but a website hosting a database (or CRM application) isn't considered to be distributing the software.
...meight be more useful: have a look.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
it's just that lots of software is licensed as gpl2 or any later version 'at your option'. it's not a fixed part of gpl2.
for instance the linux kernel is licensed only under gpl2.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Anyway the term intentionally (by it's authors) has no definite semantics (so really couldn't appear in a legal document without definition), and the FSF's expansion of the acronym more accurately describes what the term is usually used to refer to.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
I actually went to the GPLv3 launch, where they went over the license and what the intention of each of the clauses were. (And almost fell asleep, but...)
In order to make the license more "compatible" with other licenses, they added Section 7. Section 7 is a set of additional restrictions that developers may add to the license to ensure they maintain compatibility with other licenses. Section 7d essentially says that you may, optionally, implement a feature that causes a program to distribute its own source code to the end-user. If you decide to do so, you can add a requirement that the feature not be removed. This is optional - the default GPLv3 doesn't include this.
The GPLv3 is still a draft - if you have issues with the license, comment on it! Join the process! The GPLv3 is an open source process (free process?) in and of itself. This is just the first draft, if you have problems with it, get involved and try to get them worked out.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
It doesn't matter that it's not your fault. Unless you're like MIT with a substantial legal staff to scare them off, it'll be too bad for you. The BSD license would be a much better choice.
The MIT license protects against that. See:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
And your copy may be totally irrelevent. See the history of X windows for a great example of how the MIT license totally failed.
Well, I guess I'm not bothered by a lack of consistency this evening. Above, I replied to a post by YesIAmAScript that I'd take Digital Restrictions Management over Digital Rights Management, as a definition of DRM, and the devil take prior usage.
_ trusted.html
Now I'm going to defend prior usage, and go with Trusted Computing over Treacherous Computing. Thanks for saying a bit in it's defense. I've just spent several hours last week having to defend it from some people who bought into a whole lot of FUD. Frustrating, but either that, or the project wouldn't have gotten off the ground...
Then you pop this short post in, and I get a chance for a public FUD-fighting post. Which begins here.
Trusted Computing has been around a lot longer than it's been used as an enabler for DRM, and picked up the Treacherous Computing moniker. It goes well back into the history of government computing, for example. Anyone can probably Google up many OS design articles related to the size of TCBs (Trusted Computing Bases) being too large, etc.
As I'm sure you're aware (but not nearly enough other people are), TC can have some righteous non-government uses. Employers might use it to make sure that home workers connecting by VPN are running a sane environment, etc. That's getting to be an essential technique in protecting some networks. I don't see anything wrong with it, if it's company gear you're using. And there are tons of other uses.
There are some dangers, like there is in using many powerful tools. The trick will be to prevent MS (or other coporations or consortia, but I trust MS the least, given their legal history) from doing some enormous power grab through Palladium-like initiatives. But it's too useful to go away. TPM (Trusted Platform Module) drivers have been in Linux since the 2.6.12 kernel, and more are in development.
There's tons of FUD being propagated about Trusted Computing, such as Cory Doctorow confusing TC and DRM (I get a lot of this) on BoingBoing at http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/31/apple_to_add
But there's some good info as well. There's a good corbet article and wide-ranging discussion at http://lwn.net/Articles/144681
I would urge anyone who isn't familiar with Trusted Computing to spend some quality time with your search engine of choice. TC has important implications, only one of which is as possible DRM enabler.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
You can _always_ make money with GPL programs. Or at least, you can legally try. You could take e.g. gimp, and sell it, provided you comply with the gpl terms: that anyone can take the source code you're distributing and modify it, and sell it themselves if they wish. The thing is, if you do this precise kind of stuff, you might have negative publicity. It is nevertheless your right under the GPL.
More clarifications at the FSF's GPL FAQ's page.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security