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GPLv3 - A Primer on Open Warfare in Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tuxes-go-marching-two-by-two-hurrah-hurrah dept.

savio13 writes "A BusinessWeek article about the GPLv3 starts to shed some light on where things are, and what the hold up is in getting the newest version out. They discuss the Stallman vs. Torvalds conflict, issues with DRM, the goal of 'one-stop licensing', and the ever-more-likely possibility that the newest version of the GPL just isn't relevant." From the article: "The impetus to make a profit (and its associated compromises) isn't sitting well with true believers in free software. And the resulting rifts were apparent at last week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco. On one side is Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation. When Stallman says "free" he doesn't mean price, he means freedom. He believes all software should be freely available to be modified by the public. And for him, this is nothing short of a moral fight. On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too. Companies will just vote with their feet."

3 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Stallman vs. Torvalds? by albalbo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While it's pretty early in the process still, it seems a bit unfair to characterise it as "Stallman vs. Torvalds". IIRC, Newsforge tried to contact others who were unhappy with the licence and couldn't find any - the only criticism has been offered by HP saying that the changes on patents still weren't enough for them or something, but that they were happy with the process.

    It sounds like a mountain of a story being made out of a molehill of comments.

    --
    "Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
  2. Underestimating relevance by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think BW underestimates the relevance of the FSF. Yes, Linux uses GPLv2 only. Yes Mozilla uses their own license. But if you look at the basic toolchain that Linux, Mozilla and the like use, the majority of that infrastructure's copyright rests with... the Free Software Foundation. Use GCC to compile? Depend on Bash, flex, bison? They'll be moving to GPLv3. Even something as basic as grep, chances are if you're on a Linux system you use the FSF's version of it.

    It's also going to depend on developers, not companies (unless those companies are also the developers and copyright holders on the programs). I'd note that one of the tipping points for the GPL was when people started to find GPL'd software in commercial products which the code owners themselves were locked out of by lack of source code. I think the same pattern will repeat, with the GPLv3 being RMS-only for a bit and then it'll pick up steam when a few high-profile developers want to modify a neat device and find they're locked out of modifying their own code by DRM.

    That said, it's unlikely the Linux kernel will ever move to GPLv3 regardless of what Linus thinks simply because of the infeasability of contacting every copyright holder. It's been mentioned as a protection: there's so many copyright holders no company (say, Microsoft) could get authorization from all of them to put their release of the Linux kernel under a more restrictive license. The same thing applies to any contemplated change to GPLv3.

  3. law versus license by stites · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One of the problems that we are having with creating GPL3 is that a license is not a very effective way to solve the DRM and software patent problems. DRM and software patents are embedded in the law. When there is a conflict between the law and a license then the law takes precedence. So GPL3 does not have much maneuvering room to solve the problems that DRM and software patents cause Open Source.

    I agree with Richard Stallman's efforts to put clauses in GPL3 to alleviate the DRM and software patent problems. However, I don't have much hope that these clauses will be very effective.

    I think that a much more effective course of action is to try to change the laws on DRM and software patents. I think that we should lobby governments all over the world to abolish software patents. In the case of DRM I think that the DRM copyright protection should be legal but that the DRM laws should not contain clauses making it illegal to create software or hardware which can copy DRM protected material. The act of copying copyrighted material should be illegal but the act of creating a copying machine should be legal.

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    Steve Stites