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Eben Moglen Leaving the FSF
An anonymous reader writes "Eben Moglen, general counsel and board member of the FSF and chairman of the SFLC, has announced on his blog that he will be resigning from his leadership position with the FSF now that GPLv3 draft 3 is out the door. "
It should be noted that he's leaving the FSF board to devote more time to the SFLC. Which means, less Eben in FSF but he's still going to be a strong contributor to the legal protections and mitigation of risk of software developers and projects who participate in Open Source Software.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Eben Moglen was the single most influential law school professor I ever had. I have never looked at the world the same since taking his classes.
Depends. If the copyright holder of one of those codes gives you permission to move their code under the other license (or if they do it themselves, say by you paying them to do so), then there is no problem.
If you are not a copyright holder or if the body of code you want to move over is the culmination of many copyright holders, then with both Apache and GPL there is no problem you merging the codes as long as it is for your own use.
You cannot merge the two codes and release the resultant as you have no right unless the way that you do it adheres to both licenses. Compatible licenses would allow you to merge code from two differently licensed projects without violating the terms of either.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
I'm not sure it happened to him. I think RMS's mindset and attitudes are a result of the truly monumental task he took on when GNU got started. It takes a very radical outlook and mentality to push a project like that forward. It's made him a very effective force even today, even if it does make him (apparently) intractible on some issues and (from what I've heard) difficult to talk to. He does have a sense of humor, though. He sent me a pretty cool email the last time I had a little fun at his expense.
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Two licenses are compatible if a licensee can fulfil the conditions of both licenses simultaneously. Another way of saying this is that two licenses are compatible if the requirements of one are a subset of the other. For example the BSD is compatible with the GPL, because it is possible to fulfill the conditions of both simultaneously, since all the BSD requires is a subset of the requirements of the GPL. So it is possible to legally use BSD code and GPL code in the same work.
That depends on how much work would be involved and what requirements the other license makes.
There's no point to reïmplementing something already available under the (modern) BSD license, for instance. This should be fairly obvious.
On the other hand, code available only under the old BSD license should probably all be reïmplemented entirely. The advertising clause may not look like much at first glance, but when you consider how many thousands of different copyrights might apply to a single commercial distribution, you can see what a nightmare that clause could become in time.
On the third hand, consider the Sun license. It's not compatible with the GPL v2, because the GPL has a requirement that no further conditions may be added, and the Sun license has patent provisions that the GPL doesn't. This makes it legally impossible to use code under these two licenses together - they are incompatible. BUT, aside from the fact of incompatibility, there's nothing wrong with Suns license. The FSF had already stated they wanted to add similar patent provisions in the future, and a similar clause would probably have been in the GPL v2 had software patents been an issue when it was written. So in this case, making the GPL v3 compatible with Suns license might not be a bad idea at all - the details of wording may be a pain to work out, but the patent requirement itself is not onerous, to the contrary, it or something very much like it is a desirable addition anyway.
No, of course not. Your paraphrase is not what the license says. The actual wording has been reviewed and revised very carefully. The DRM section doesn't say anything resembling what you wrote.
To paraphrase, you can't use Free Software to build a system and then use the DMCA to forbid modification of that system. That's it.
There are no sections of the license that say anything more than vaguely resembling what you wrote. The definition of "Corresponding Source" for instance says:
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
For some very nice informative talks, and good insight into the capabilities of Mr Moglen, check out some of these videos. I especially like the google tech talk lecture.
According to his blog entry, he's hoping that either draft 3 will become GPLv3 or at least with very little modification.
The current headline sucks. As stated in TFA, Eben Moglen is only leaving the FSF board of directors. Of course, his role of general counsel to the FSF, which long preceded the director role, will continue.