New 'No Military Use' GPL For GPU

Tina Gasperson writes "GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a 'no military use' modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The developers told Newsforge why they did it, with commentary from OSI and FSF." Newsforge is also owned by OSTG, Slashdot's parent company.

Comments

Re:Richard Stallman sort-of agrees

[SWroclawski]

No, he doesn't. He actually mentiones military use as something he says that the GPL must support, since we want the best software working for our military, we'd hope they'd use GNU. He says this specificallly in a GPL3 talk.

What he says there is that the license may be legally valid.

The person whose saying he agrees with their goals is the OSI person, Russ Nelson, not RMS.

Free Software must be Free Software for any use. It's a similar argument against commercial use, it's morally unacceptable to prevent anyone from using the software, commercially or militarily, or used in a classroom or by an individual.

the elephant in the room

[sammy baby]

"As a pacifist, I sympathize with their goals," says Russ Nelson, president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "People who feel strongly about war will sometimes take actions which they realize are ineffectual, but make it clear that they are not willing to take action which directly supports war."

That he sympathizes with their goals is probably why he fails to mention something blindingly obvious: that the new "modified" license doesn't qualify as open source, according to the OSI's own definition:

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

Rationale: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.

Re:Psssh.

[Stanistani]

>It wasn't the holocaust that finally justified us going to war, it was the intercepted memo sent to Mexico offering them Texas...

Dude, that was World War One - google Zimmerman Telegram...