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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.
Below is what was added to the GPL:
x t
PATCH FOR NO MILITARY USE
This patch restricts the field of endeavour of the Program in such a way that this
license collides with paragraph 6 of the Open Source Definition. Therefore, this
modified version of the GPL is no more OSI compliant.
The Program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm a
ny human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.
This is Asimov's first law of Robotics.
You can find the full text of the license at: http://gpu.sourceforge.net/GPL_license_modified.t
The GPL is only legal to use without change. If you patch it or change the terms, it's violation of the FSF copyright or most likely invalidate the licensing altogether. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. It doesn't matter if you change the middle, end or beginning. Part of the license is the nonchanging of it. This is very important because if everyone added patches, the meaning of the GPL would become diluted. On top of this, the GPL is a freedom giving license, you can't patch away these freedoms by adding restrictions. This causes direct conflict between the license and the modified patch in the begining. This mostly likely causes the entire license to be ruled invalid These people should have written their own darn license. You didn't see Netscape put in a preample modifying it, they made their own.
Ca. 2003, David Wiley at Creative Commons was pushing an idea for a CC license for educational use only. I participated in the discussion on the mailing list, and tried to persuade them that it was a bad idea. AFAIK it never happened. Part of the motivation seems to have been that some people were interested in preventing use by the military.
One of the things I think is wrong with this kind of idea is that it becomes becomes hard to define. For instance, I have some textbooks I've written that are free on the web, and I often hear from homeschoolers who are using them. Does homeschooling count as educational use, and if so, where do you draw the line between educational use and use by just about any individual who wants to learn something? The wording of the GPU license is also going to create problems, for all the same reasons that generated good plots for Asimov's stories involving the laws of robotics.
Another problem with this type of license is that it works against reuse. It balkanizes the world of free information so that you can't use information in new and crative ways.
Anyone can apply any license they want to their own work, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea, or that it's easy to define or enforce the conditions.
Find free books.
He said conflict, not violence. A life without conflict is impossible and a naive dream of pacifists. Witness Gandhi's "Quit India Movement" where bombings and arson were used by supposed pacifists.
does not imply that we should not strive for a world without war.
I suggest that would-be pacifists read the book Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals by Stephen Koch. It tells the story of Soviet controlled German propagandist Willi Münzenberg during the periods of World War one leading up to WW2. One of the most interesting things about the story was the directed use of propaganda against the Western Worlds intellectuals (mostly European at the time with some Americans), particularly with those who spouted the ideology of pacifism. The Soviets understood that propaganda is best used with riding the back of an existing strong zeitgeist and the intellectual current of the time was "peace not war" even to the detriment of protecting one's own people. They also understood that the best propaganda was truthful (and what could be more self-evident than peace being better than war?). So the Soviets, through Münzenberg, started a "peace movement" with the main aim of undermining the morality of Western war efforts. It had a dual purpose too. It both attacked the west and when, so the Soviets thought, they would defeat the west, they would also steamroll over the pacifists who would offer no competition. What am I getting at? Well nothing really, except that a lot of the history of pacifism isn't exactly what it seems.