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

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