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Linus Speaks Out On GPLv3
Slagged writes to mention the word that Linus Torvalds isn't a fan of the new GPL draft. News.com has the story, and someone purporting to be Linus is causing a ruckus in the Groklaw thread on the subject. From the News.com article: "Say I'm a hardware manufacturer. I decide I love some particular piece of open-source software, but when I sell my hardware, I want to make sure it runs only one particular version of that software, because that's what I've validated. So I make my hardware check the cryptographic signature of the binary before I run it ... The GPLv3 doesn't seem to allow that, and in fact, most of the GPLv3 changes seem to be explicitly designed exactly to not allow the above kind of use, which I don't think it has any business doing."
I don't think manufacturers have any business preventing me from running my own code on hardware I purchased, at that stage I may as well be using MS Windows.
It's fine to have the hardware validate the software, I don't think anyone can rationally argue against that. What's not fine is to have the hardware refuse to run the software at all. If the user is conscious that the software is modified and therefor unsupported, then the user should have the ability to run any software he chooses.
So, have a cryptographic check alongside a message or error light or something about running in unsupported mode, but don't completely cripple the hardware just because you want to avoid support headaches.
Part of the point of OSS is that anything that you can modify should be modifyable. From the FSF's perspective, a hardware vendor shouldn't be allowed to lock you into using their approved software. You should be able to run whatever software you'd like on the hardware that you paid for. I'm not from the heart of OSS evangalism, but by allowing a hardware vendor to lock you into a certain version of an OSS application, you've closed the source of that app. It can be modified, but not run - and, to me at least, running is the ultimate point of software.
Say I'm a hardware consumer. I decide I love some particular piece of hardware and buy it with my hard earned money. But when I try to run one particular version of open source software customized for me, it doesnt run because the hardware complains it is not validated.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone who reads what Linus posts to linux-kernel will agree that the style of writing and thought in these Groklaw posts is his. So either it is indeed Linus or a very good replica.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Linus is becoming less and less relevant as time goes by. He probably thinks that the entire community is contributing to GNU/Linux because they like him personally. What good does free software do us if we cannot modify it and continue to run the modified code? We already don't own many of the things we buy - proprietary software, music, movies and many other things. Now we won't own (control) the hardware we purchase either?
If GNU/Linux had started 20 years later than it did this wouldn't even be an issue. DRM would've killed it before it even got off the ground. Linus would just be the name of a Peanuts character.
Think damn it, think!
MFG: "The system supports both the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) platforms."
Manufacturers should be able to go out of business in any method they desire.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
http://hotwired.goo.ne.jp/matrix/9709/5_linus.htm
In other words, Linus likes the GPL for the actual reasons that it is a good license, not out of any kind of narrow-minded 'software ideology'.
It will get issued but it won't get widely adopted. RMS has become impatient in this quest for social revolution and now he's decided to wield a bigger club. I don't think many others, who write and widely distribute highly useful software, will pick it up and join him.
Similarly, no hardware vendors are forced to use GPLv3 software. If they don't like it, they can find software with a different license, possibly GPLv2. The key thing is that the hardware vendors are not allowed to violate the license terms chosen by the software author.
For Linux it is completely irrelevant. Despite any opinions Linus might have on the matter, it is effectively impossible to get all of the owners of the copyright of any non-trivial amount of the Linux code to agree to a license change, so Linux will use GPLv2 for most of its code for the forseeable future.
imagine a world where there's an open source electronic voting software package that everybody used... wouldn't you want the voting machine to be able to reject software that wasn't say verified by a voting auditing board and signed?
the same thing could be true of open source ATM software. would you want your ATM to whine like HAL having his memory yanked when malware was loaded onto it, or would you want it to refuse to run?
Just raise the taxes on crack.
By my point of view a benevolent dictator is still a dictator.
We should thank Torvalds to keep the questioning open, otherwise it would be like Christian Church: the Pope speaks, the lambs obey.
The article also makes a very saddening statement: the GPL3 is basically written by the companies behind the FSF. The article cites that HP is pushing to have their own interests protected. Do you really think that other GPL-oriented companies (like IBM or Novell) will just stay and look or they will also try to drive the boat towards their coasts?
After all, FSF made just a favour to many commercial distributions (another case of uninterested philantrophism?), claryfying that if you have to fork a distro, you have to redistribute every single packet by yourself, instead of shipping only the relevant, modified ones like GPL says. GPL is too generalized and vague. You can't have a license that has hundreds of pages of "clarifications" continuosly swapped and rewritten to praise an actor or to damage another. Most of the clarifications are just more ambiguos or simply idiotic. Do you know that by FSF interpretation, subclassing or implementing an interface is considered a derivative work? That's makes impossible to use any object oriented library released over LGPL by the term of the license, they will be as plain and simple GPL licensed code. There's a lot of OOP libraries wrongly placed in the LGPL domain. Do you really think that their author bothered about the implications? They just followed the leader. For not good reason and without a clue. Why LGPL3 talks only about header files and libraries? Open source licenses should be technlogy neutral and C/C++ is not the only language out there. Sure our benevolent dictator may pretend that the other technologies are not there gut they will not fade away. Today IT rarely uses anything compiled aside core OS programs and it's hard to find a place for the delusional aims of a puppet in the hands of other non-Microsoft corporations.
Sure A guru's life is expensive and big corporations makes hefty donations. Let Stallman explain to us mortals why Microsoft has to be destroyed and IBM or HP are valiant partners whose interests are to be protected.
HP advanced pressures to make the GPL3 more friendly towards their PATENTS! The world got upside down or what?
Matteo Anelli
.brain - http://www.dot-brain.com
When you get past the misinformation, errors and outright lies, trusted computing is not as bad as people think it is.
I don't think you realize that "trusted computing" generally means "distrust the USER/OWNER of the computer". I think what everyone is afraid of is losing control of THEIR computer to some government/corporate organization.
And yes, you have a point, it's not as bad as it may appear... if you're the one in control of what trust. Unfortunately, from the talk that's going around, it's likely users won't be in control (ie: hardware vendor ensures that any OS that runs on the box must be signed by some authority, etc.)---I franky cannot see how that benefits anyone but some corporation.
And slowly but surely this technology is getting here. Music players, etc., many of them already restrict their owners. In a few years, it's not unlikely this will happen to PCs.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
What is happening, is that I'm saying that if you want to use *my* software on a DRM platform, *then* you have to hand out the keys or whatever else is needed. Which, for software I write, is exactly what I want. (Of course, I have trouble imagining how it would be relevant for things I write, but that's a different matter -- I don't write media players or kernels or other obvious targets).
As a software *author*, I lose nothing. As a user of other people's software, I lose out only if I'm trying to redistribute their copyrighted work in ways they don't want. And, in that case, too bad for me -- just like it's always been.
This license is about giving authors more choices, not less. And personally, this is an option I like.
The fact is that the GPL protects the "freedoms" of users by actually emancipating the software itself - through the user! A close analogy is the emancipation of slaves: former slave owners lose freedoms they once enjoyed (owning slaves). Arguably, one could view this is a situation where *some* are now less free (because they cannot own slaves anymore).
The same is true with GPLed software: no, you are not as free as someone using MIT or BSD licensed software because you cannot go subterranean with the source code and your changes.
For those poor hardware manufacturers who are lusting after some GPL protected software I can see several options:
1. Forgo the GPLed software and get a closed-source alternative.
2. Contact the owners of the software and see if you can get the software under a more "friendly" license. For the Linux kernel that would be difficult if not impossible.
3. Embrace the GPL and move forward into a net freer world despite, like slave owners, you cannot use GPLed software in a closed system.
Now, arguably, somebody is going to point out that by taking the stance I've just outlined then I'm contributing to pressures to move *some* manufacturers away from using FL/OSS (e.g. GPLed) software. That may be true. But I'll take some loss of gadgets and gizmos, perhaps even large systems, to maintain the freedoms that the GPL and similar licenses try to ensure.
In the end I believe that the pressures to "go free" and to "let tinker" will eventually win out for all, including the manufacturer. Consider Id: do they get calls about user mods based on their game engines? Maybe a few, but the overwhelming positive results of user mods makes it a no-brainer: enable the mods.
As far as entertaining the example from the original post. I wouldn't waste too much mental energy on it. And if the blurb really came from Linus, then here's a message to Linus: get over it, the example you created may be short-term significant, but, if free software eventually is successful, long-term irrelevant.
The FSF's stance is controversial (as exemplified by the GPL 3) because it's about freedom, which for all of human history has been hardly understood.
...while the FSF would probably characterize false freedom as this:
Licenses like BSD/MIT have a view of freedom that is more like anarchy: the "do anything you want" style of so-called freedom (but at least give credit to who wrote the code). This stance doesn't actually create freedom because "anything you want to do" can also include taking freedom away from others. BSD people used to argue that you would still have freedom, only it's with the old code before the proprietary fork, etc. But DRM and other methods of preventing you from modifying and running software is not protected by BSD licensing. So, it is even more true today that BSD-like licensing in actuality has little to do with freedom and more to do with technological research without regard to the sustained openness that made studying that code possible.
Freedom must be preserved and encouraged in order to exist! It is not a spontaneous choice that can be made after neglecting its preservation. Once freedom is gone, once official mechanisms are in place to restrict you, you can't simply make a choice to be free again. When I think of the FSF, I believe they understand freedom as many others have realized throughout history...
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." - Clarence Darrow
"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." -Goethe
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy
"After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement." - Norman Thomas
The more we are tempted by money to deprive others of freedom, the less freedom we all have in the end, and the less it's worth living in such a society even if you're rich. Don't worry about people crying about loss of profitability, etc. History has always shown that there will always be clever people that will find some way to make money, whether people are free or in chains.