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. "

Comments

Surprising.

[pyite]

I heard him on Leo Laporte's FLOSS Weekly podcast and was very impressed with his knowledge and was happy the FSF had such good leadership.

Re:Surprising.

[Workaphobia]

He's also an excellent speaker. I particularly like this quote from a DMCA discussion, in reference to the media industry:

> "Now if you leave them alone to buy more congressmen, in this very corrupt time of ours, they will survive for a little while longer but all of this talk is about the technicalities of the adjustment of the terms of their demise. When we want to start talking about something that matters, we would do better to begin from some basic social propositions. Everybody is connected to everybody else, all data that can be shared will be shared: get used to it."

Given his accent, this makes for a very interesting voice-over when combined with electronic music.

So long and thanks for all the fish

[Tatisimo]

Thanks to him and all the other great people who keep making sure we nerds get our software free and hackable. If I could afford it, I'd throw him a farewell party, but I guess I'll confine to a private celebration by myself. Hope it stays that way a long time, regardless of who leads GNU.

RMS, license compatibility, toolchains

[Bruce Perens]

It is true that RMS gives his whole life to his cause. I respect and admire him for doing so, and at the same time I wouldn't want to do that to my life. The load of causes upon FSF is not unusual for any organization that tries to enact social change. Look at some of the environmentalist organizations, for example. There are good parallels there, you might think of RMS as someone fighting against pollution in idea-space.

A license is compatible with another if the terms of both licenses are not mutually exclusive. The BSD/MIT licenses, at least the later ones without the advertising restriction, are GPL compatible because they don't restrict anything that the GPL would permit.

Having the ability to convert one license to another, or having the software available under multiple licenses, is a short-cut to compatibility with those licenses.

We have our own tool-chain, and one that is very portable to new architectures. I think that GPL3 draft 3 would require the disclosure of some data regarding how the toolchain would interface to the hardware of a consumer device in which GPL3 software was embedded, including the instruction set, if that was not already public knowledge.

Bruce

Confused

[Achromatic1978]

Something doesn't sound right. He's leaving, because "draft three" is done? Does that mean that draft three will become GPLv3? Because unless it does, then the process isn't at all complete, and he's leaving for other reasons (not that those reasons have to be inherently bad), but "We've got our third draft revision of a document that we're still working on out the door, so it seems like a perfectly natural time to leave" jars my logic detector.

Re:Thanks

[mrchaotica]

What does that make RMS then, Thomas Paine?