GPL 3 As Bonfire of the Vanities

morganew writes "Jonathan Zuck has written a CNET Op-ed stating that the GPL 3 is about returning the flock to the faith, and is reminiscent of Savonarola's 'Bonfire of the Vanities', urging true believers to burn things that took their eyes off God. From Article: 'The commercial humanists such as Lawrence Lessig with his Creative Commons initiative have turned away from the Old Testament, and the GPL 3.0 license is a call to the faithful to reject these vanities'. Given the reaction by Linus Torvalds and nearly all the OSS business community to the GPL 3, are we going to see a break in the church?"

Comments

Re:Full Disclosure

[qwijibo]

You believe so strongly that you've developed a stigmata in your eyes?

Re:Here's what you did say

[eno2001]

OK you fucking cowards. POINT to exactly where he said that the writer's opinions were invalid because of who was paying him. You CAN'T, because the original poster DIDN'T say that. He simply warned people to consider where the opinion was coming from. Anyone who doesn't want to consider the source is either a fucking worthless idiot who deserves the screwing he's getting in his asshole or supports the agenda being espoused.

Re:Full Disclosure

[WoodstockJeff]

I think any time you start using religious parallels to describe the open source movement, you are hurting that movement in the eyes of business.

Then you need to keep RMS out of the picture. And some others. Because FOSS has any number of people who do treat it as a religious experience and calling. RMS is "chief evangelist" for his vision of software. Lessig has his vision. Others have different visions, or different degrees of the same vision. And all think the others are working against the greater good, because they "miss the point" of the "perfect vision".

The fact that GPL requires a lawyer to describe what you can and can not do with software is scary enough for businesses. "If we compile our proprietary software with gcc, do we now have to distribute the source?" "If we include the GPL'd drivers for the left-handed USB Framis, are we compelled to release our source, or just the driver's source code?" Businesses do not like confusion. The government gives us all that we can stand, so adding in an obscure, vision-inspired license doesn't make us comfortable.

Re:Full Disclosure

[Zeinfeld]

It's not ad-hominem to point out that someone may have been paid to hold a certain opinion

That's not quite it. Literally the argument is 'X argues Y, X is a bad person, therefore Y is false.'

That is not quite the same as saying 'argues Y, X is a bad person, therefore we cannot conclude the truthfulness of Y on this evidence alone'.

In this particular case there is plenty of independent evidence to suggest that GPL3 is likely to mark a fracture between the 'Free software' movement and the 'Open source' movement.

Where the article gets it wrong is the implication that GPL3 marks a major revision of the viral nature of the GPL. That has been there since day one, if you don't understand that GPL is viral then you have not been listening to RMS. He has made it clear on numerous occasions that his intent in framing the GPL was to poison the well. It is less clear that he actually succeeded in achieving that goal.

Having been harangued by RMS in person on this point for some considerable time over our decision to put the CERN Web libraries, intellectual property etc. into the public domain rather than attempt a more restrictive license I can assure you that preventing commercial exploitation of any kind is one of his goals. At the time RMS was refusing to even use the Web, in part because we refused to pay homage to his precious ideals.

What GPL3 is likely to become though is the point at which folk in the open source movement realize 1) quite how radical the politics behind GPL are, 2) that they do not need to jump to attention because RMS demands that they should, 3) less restrictive licenses such as Apache and BSD may well fit their objectives better.

I certainly think that the open source movement can do a lot better if it has the courage to insist on its own ideals rather than allow itself to be dictated to. In particular license terms for open software should themselves be the result of an open and collaborative consultation process.