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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. "
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.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Eventually the all-consuming nature of that kind of job is going to wear you down. Getting out before it breaks you into a thousand pieces and then remakes you into a twisted version of yourself you barely recognize seems like a pretty good idea to me.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
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
I've heard him speak at a few of the FSF Associate Member meetings, and I've even had conversation over dinner with him on one occasion, where he was telling the rest of us about the fledgling SFLC project. Just listening to him made me want to start law school (at Columbia, of course).
I'm convinced he's working with a larger percentage of his brain than the rest of us.
Creating the SFLC was a brilliant move, as was the drafting of the GPLv3.
Best of luck, Eben!
From all us geeks out there, thanks for taking so much time out of your day job as a Professor to run the GPLv3 process.
See you in a decade for GPLv4!!
My little Linux and tech blog
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.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
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.
Someone said Moglen is the Thomas Jefferson of the information age, and I'm inclined to agree.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
...this new effort to "reorganize time" he's embarking on. Maybe he could go back and make GPLv2 contain the same text as v3!
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
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
Bruce Perens.
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.
No {bash} I was only kidding {OW}, it was a {UGH} joke! Stop hitting me!
:-)
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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.
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.
Someone said Moglen is the Thomas Jefferson of the information age, and I'm inclined to agree.
So does that mean Theo de Raadt is the Aaron Burr?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.