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The FSF, GPLv3 and DRM

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the preaching-to-the-choir dept.

whats-life-without-gpl writes "FSF has a thing against DRM. This article tries to explain why RMS isn't a DRM (Note that NewsForge is also owned by OSTG) fan and how GPLv3 is gearing up to protect against it. "

1 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I fear a repeat of the Bison fiasco... by Chops · · Score: 4, Informative
    Bison (GNU's version of YACC) used to have the restriction that the output of Bison, since it was a large amount of code, was GPL. As a result, nobody used Bison except for GCC, because the liscence was untenible.

    Correction: Bison used to have the restriction that the output of Bison was GPL, because nobody (including the FSF) had noticed that that was true. As soon as somebody did (in 1996 or so), the FSF put in a special exception and life went on pretty much as normal.

    I fear that GPLv3, by trying to force RMS's notion of "Liberty" more strongly (anti-DRM provisions, anti-closed-hardware provisions) will be a repeat: GPLv3 based software will only be used by the real FSF zealots. Everyone else will avoid it.

    Yes, the popularity of Bison has certainly suffered a staggering defeat; the Debian popularity contest, to pick a random example, shows it slightly less popular than X Windows, but slightly more popular than the ftp client. Doubtless we should heed your example and run screaming from the GPLv3 lest we, like it, and like Bison, become...

    (shudder)

    unpopular.

    Nice use of the word "zealot" to describe harmless nerds who like to share their software, also.