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Linux Creator Calls GPLv3 Authors 'Hypocrites'
AlexGr writes "We've heard conflicting tales regarding Linus Torvalds' acceptance of GPLv3. InformationWeek reports on comments by Mr. Torvalds that would seem to decide the issue: 'Torvalds said the authors of a new software license expected to be used by thousands of open source programmers are a bunch of hypocrites ... For Torvalds' part, it appears unlikely he'll ever adopt GPLv3 for the Linux kernel. He accused the Free Software Foundation leadership, which includes eccentric, MIT-trained computing whiz Richard Stallman, of injecting their personal morality into the laws governing open source software with the release of GPLv3. "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality," Torvalds wrote.'"
If Linus doesn't like where the GPL is going, he could make his own fork...
Really, I say this mostly for the purpose of humor, but it's true. If there's enough objection to GPLv3 maybe someone will introduce an alternate version based on GPLv2 that allows it to be updated in the future but without the conditions present in v3.
...because only a sith deals in absolutes!
....have my tin hat on and am hiding under the desk to avoid this flamefest.
To steal from John Hodgeman... Anyone who uses the GPLv3 are lepers with tuberculosis.
"He accused the Free Software Foundation leadership, which includes eccentric, MIT-trained computing whiz Richard Stallman, of injecting their personal morality into the laws governing open source software with the release of GPLv3."
Does this mean that Linus didn't understand that the FSF is a organization with specific goals based on the morals of it's members? It's kinda obvious.
"Hey! That's GNU/Hypocrisy to you, buddy, and don't you forget it!"
His point of view represents all of the reasons why I left proprietary software and went with Linux.
Ahem, GNU/Linux.
The kernel can be replaced.
The philosophy, which is 100% wholly accurate, cannot.
We always knew that RMS is a zealot. I ran into him quite a bit in the 1980s. I could tell that then. While one may have thought it was a bit much then, now is it that radical? Companies are putting rootkits into computers in the name of DRM, sponsoring bills that allow copyright holders to hack into your system and destroy YOUR system with immunity -- if they think that you may have violated their copyright.
Is GPL 3 that unreasonable given the behavior of the RIAA and MPAA of recent?
Fight Spammers!
Yeah, I hate it when people hypocritically force their ideas of free software on others. Thank goodness Linus is here to save us from that!
If only CEO types would start doing that (w/o hiding behind an alias, that is)...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Is it because Torvalds disagrees with Stallman's anti-natalism stance, and his pledge not to reproduce?
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Could everybody get back to coding and kiss politics goodbye? WTF is everybody doing these days? It seems like every single programming in the world is now a politician... Long gone are the days where programming was considered a noble art of logics and things were so uncomplicated... Humans are a strange animal, indeed... Instead of producing more, we must complicate things and waste our valuable with egoistic intrigues, politics, strange licence deals, and... oh well...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Who cares what Linus has to say? It's readily apparent that the inevitable consequence will be a shift away from Linux kernel under GPL2 towards Solaris under GPL3.
Linus is a tool. He goes on about how he picked his methodology because of efficiencies, not morality. But the fact of the matter is, other people have spent all this time assisting him because of the morality of the license. If they just wanted open-code efficiency, they would have went with the tried and true BSD license.
Linus doesn't even write code anymore. If not for the perceived morality of having a kernel under the GPL, and the droves of developers who participated for that very reason, he would be a complete non-entity.
Easy enough to mouth off at this point.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality
The problem being laws are in many ways a kind of moral consensus.
If I should ever make as big a contribution as he has I'll get to be just as opinionated and right. For now, the reasoning works out just fine in his head and I can see his point. BTW hopefully this quote wasn't taken out of context.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
Q: Why don't devolopers write their own software liscenses ?
A: Because then they'd have to write their own software.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Every legal system enforces ideas of morality. Why is murder wrong? Why do countries restrict hate speech? Why can't you have sex with your sister? These are all moral concepts enforced through legality.
Maybe Linus is having a bad day. And what exactly does he mean by:
"I think it is okay to control people's hardware, I do it myself"Does Linus sell have a sideline selling PCs? And he uses some DRM to stop users modifying the software he supplies? What?
I was in Beaverton, Oregon on business about a year ago. I was meeting some IBM reps for a demo of system z. Anyway, I was a little early, so I stopped at a McDonalds. I was standing in line and I thought the guy in front of me looked familiar. It was Linus. He ordered a royal with cheese and some fries. He ordered it to go too. I never could figure out why he didn't just go through the drive through.
Reading the article, my main impression was that I'd like to see Linus' quotes in context.
Without seeing the context, in general I would say the core disagreement between RMS and Linus (setting aside the frivolous GNU/Linux naming thing) lies in their respective notions about morality: RMS believes it to be essentially objective, whereas Linus considers it a subjective concern. This seems to be another manifestation of that disagreement.
DNA just wants to be free...
Actually, I believe he still contributes to the kernel, though the article where I read this could be dated.
Did he really say that? I can't believe it. Take away the law as a measure for morality and you take away the measuring stick for trust. Take away the measuring stick for trust and you take away society/civilization/yeseveniPhones.
As a Linux user, morality is always on my mind. In fact the GPL that the Kernel uses is grounded in morality. What gives?
Sigh...I guess he's trying to say "...equate *this kind of hypocritical* morality with legality"...in which case I might agree.
But the fact of the matter is, other people have spent all this time assisting him because of the morality of the license.
In the 90's, I think most of the people worked on Linux due to the unclear legal status of BSD, not some funny "morality" issue.
Without the legal issues, FreeBSD would probably be where Linux is now, perhaps even further, and Linux would never have taken off like that - it would have stayed as a little practice project for the Helsinki University. However, now Linux just has so much momentum with it that it's the focus of most open source efforts.
But what he has a lot of good views and ideas on things. In this case, though, he's being typically difficult. Instead of saying nothing at all on the subject, or just simply stating that the kernel will not be moving to GPLv3, he instead does a ridiculous attack on RMS.
Torvalds is brilliant, and we and RMS all owe him for everything he's done with Linux and in promoting free software (maybe a happy byproduct). But he can still be egotistical and petty. This is life I guess. But it's exactly these kind of statements that are going to worry PHBs and prevent Linux adoption just as much as FUD concerning GPLv3.
I think everyone is going to be watching the Samba team's adoption of GPLv3. At a certain point, it's irrelevant what license the kernel uses and what licenses Torvalds likes personally. Actually it's irrelevant now.
The kernel can be replaced.
;)
then why hasn't Stallman done it?
Buy a license then. Then you can do whatever you want with it, right?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Actually, that's the point. Linus didn't create GNU/linux he created linux (the kernel).
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
At the heart of the GPL is the idea that this work is free - if you're going to add on to this work and then redistribute it, you must make your work free as well. The rest is just details that build on that idea.
The new Tivoization rules are just another extension of this idea. Did the people who wrote the GPL software used in the Tivo desire for it to be used that way? Did they envision DRM and locked down hardware? Of course not. Tivo simply found holes in GPLv2 that let them get away with it, and so the GPLv3 is coming along to try and close up those holes.
...who cares what one person has to say?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/20/223
Go the rant Linus.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How is having sex with your sister morally wrong? Sure, it's socially and biologically unwise, which is why it tends to be prohibited in most cultures, but it's hard to say how it's *morally* wrong assuming you both want to do it and use a condom.
Sounds to me like the parent post is confusing legality with morality!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
RMS stopped writing code years ago... is he a "tool" who is just "mouthing off", too?
Fuck me, that's funny. Listen, I like Solaris, but I don't think any such thing is happening any time soon, let alone is a "readily apparent" "inevitable consequence".
...and also the comments on it. In particular the one that points to http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/20/223 , which shows that the article uses selective quotations to make it overly inflammatory.
Article needs to be modded "troll"...
He's a brilliant engineer, a witty person, but he's an idiot when it comes to freedom related issues and he displays what basically amounts to ignorance about the subject. GPLv3 is nothing more than GPLv2 with some loopholes closed. I often wonder how Linus ended up with GPLv2 in the first place?
The contrast is striking because as an engineer he's brilliant, but he's absolutely lost as a long term thinker in relation to freedoms and morality. He'd make the worst leader in those matters.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I have the freedom to kill you, but you do not have the freedom to do so to me....
Its a double standard,
Now open source software should have the right to limit what you do with the software I write but I am not limited by it.
If I distribute open source software I should be able to sue the users of it??? Isn't that entrapment?
MS seems to have plenty of time to claim and promote that they have IP illegally in linux. And since Linus feels that MS should have the right to sue Linus.... well he asked for it then... And now we know who is in teh position to force MS to cough up the evidence of their claims...
I have yet to hear a good arguement against the GPLv3 that is not a double standard.
Freedom does not mean you have the right to take it away from another, or to do anything that imposes upon the freedom of another.
So what do you do when someone claims open source is not free because they are not allowed to use it and then impose restriction on teh freedoms of others with it?
The non-sequiturof this argument has been used extensively. Perhaps if the wrong doers use it enough they can convince themselves its fair. Oh wait, they already have.
And this is why we have different licensings...... Linus can continue to use GPLv2 and it doesn't mean others have to.
And if someone wants to GPLv3 the Kernal.....they can fork it too. right? Or has linus been only pretending to adhear to the GPL?
See for yourself.
Nothing more to see here than a ripe example of journalistic firestarting. It worked on me - here I am writing this..
How is that relevant? Linus is very consistent in his views. Allowing ppl with different motivations to work on software doesn't mean that he believes what they do and it isn't necessary that everyone believes the same thing when abiding by a legal license.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
The key word in his comment is "equate."
Morality is the basis of legality, and thus they are not equal concepts. Using the law to force a moral position can be a very dangerous thing, and his use of religious analogy is spot on.
One word: Bitkeeper.
How we know is more important than what we know.
wouldn't everyone who has copyrighted code int he linux kernel have to agree to change the license?
But the fact of the matter is, other people have spent all this time assisting him because of the morality of the license. If they just wanted open-code efficiency, they would have went with the tried and true BSD license.
That's not necessarily true. A decent portion of Linux (especially the kernel) has come from some kind of corporate sponsorship. Sometimes companies donate existing code, sometimes they donate funds to projects, and sometimes they hire programmers to work on portions of the projects they want. A lot of companies might prefer the GPL to BSD precisely because they don't want competitors to be able to take their code, make improvements, and keep the improvement to themselves.
In case I'm not being clear, imagine there was no Linux, but Redhat and Novell were still writing operating systems. Redhat is just starting out and really wants to make use of the FOSS community, and so they want to release some of their work to under an open-source license. If they pick a BSD license, Novell then has the legal right to take all of Redhat's hard work, put it into SuSE, and without doing any work on their own, start at the same level as Redhat. Then, Redhat had to pay for development, while Novell didn't. From there, Novell can write their own improvements, sell the result, and never share the improved code with Redhat. With the same amount of investment, Novell would be able to create a superior product by riding off of Redhat's work.
Alternatively, Redhat could choose the GPL. In that case, Novell is still allowed to make use of Redhat's code, but once they do, Redhat is also allowed to make use of SuSE's code. Besides possibly gaining more developer support, it also diminishes the ability of other companies to completely screw Redhat over.
Maybe that's a bad example because it's so theoretical, but I think I have a good point in there somewhere. I think part of the reason the GPL is so successful really is because of its efficiency at forcing people to cooperate and to be generous, and not because of its morality. Companies like Redhat, Novell, Sun, and IBM have made substantially donations of code, workforce, and money, and I don't believe that these donations were driven by morality.
Maybe this will push the development of GNU Hurd
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
Not flaming, trolling, or otherwise... but a sense of perspective is kinda needed as to why BSD didn't catch on as fast or as big.
(OTOH, the BSD license made it easy to incorporate a LOT of stuff from it into Linux, and the results converted to GPL licensing...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Who cares what Linus has to say? It's readily apparent that the inevitable consequence will be a shift away from Linux kernel under GPL2 towards Solaris under GPL3.
Well, that depends on if you see it from a software activist point of view or from a make-a-living point of view. Either how, I think it's neither 'inevitable' nor 'readily apparent' that there'd be a lemming run away from Linux and sorry, that kind of rhetoric really doesn't achieve anything.
Yes, you want to see things your way. This is a given for most, if not all, people - seeing things from their perspective. The trick is to accept that hey, someone else that is not me might also be right, despite a differing view..
> He says something you don't like and you write him off as a "tool" and essentially call him irrelevant. That, my friend, is
> fanaticism.
No, it's an "Ad hominem".
> One of the things Linus seems to realise is that you've got to be a bit pragmatic.
> A pure "everything is open, information cannot be controlled" philosophy might be cool and all, but it turns out not to work in the
> real actual world.
People can put what they want into GPLv3 - if it becomes popular then it will have "worked in the real actual world".
Sorry...I just had to say that...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
What is the problem here?
RMS writes licence named GPLv3 - so what? Nobody is forced to use that license so I don't think there is a problem here. When somebody uses his license it is not his (RMS) fault. It is fault of the entity which choosed this license. Or isn't it?
So basically Linus is yelling that if *I* use f.e. GPLv3 for *my* project it somehow not my fault but RMS?
I don't get it. I must have not understood something since Linus usually speaks quite sane and I belive him.
So again - somebody please explain what is the problem here?
Is GPL version change really such a disaster?
What should I care as Linux user?
> Why is murder wrong?
It takes/destroys something that was not their possession.
The moral question is "Why is slavery illegal?"
> Why do countries restrict hate speech?
It leads to other illegal acts (violence against others and their property).
It has been used to rally people to replace the existing government.
> Why can't you have sex with your sister?
Close relatives breeding is known to cause unusual/fatal mutations. And successive generations of in-breeding reduces survivability of the group as a whole.
Yup, Linus is right. I wouldn't call it a "rant", either - it's a logical exposition of cutting-edge principles.
People will never agree on a personal level. Islamic states will tend to not find it "wrong" to slice off body parts as punishment. But we can make an international treaty that prevents amputation as punishment. You bypass the "right" or "wrong", "OK" or "not OK", and just make a law that says "We agree to not do this". It's pointless to require both parties to agree on a "personal" level, because if you do that, there will never be any agreement in the first place. You bypass the personal level, and just "use _pragmatic_". (for lack of better words).
We're becoming accustomed to this kind of stuff with the war on drugs, for instance - trying to argue that marijuana use (or outright abuse) is less harmuful than alcohol abuse doesn't go very far with people who have "power". It's wrong, but the fact that you point out a truthful point just simply is irrelevant - you're disagreeing with the "whatever", so you might as well be (and perhaps probably are, as far as "they" are concerned) a pothead or a potential pothead which means you are by default wrong. Apply logic like that to a BIOS and you'd never boot anything.
I think Linus hits the nail on the head. It's unfortunate, for instance, that it is difficult to have an OS be "mainstream" (online banking, college courses, etc...) if it's not an Apple or MS. Linux can't cross-license, no matter what. Novell can cross-license, Apple can cross-license - but neither Linux nor BSD can cross-license, because they are not "entities". Apple isn't cross-licensing patents that don't exist in BSD, they are cross-licensing their own patents that they have. Novell isn't cross-licensing patents that don't exist in Linux, they are cross-licensing patents that they have.
Linux, _pure_ Linux, can't crosslicense. Because of this, lots of stuff doesn't "work", out-of-the-box.
We all have hopes, we all have dreams. How we achieve them has a lot to do with our personal morality. Our perseverance, our unwillingness to give up even when others tell us we will fail...
But the facts are the facts, and I am glad there are people like Linus around to remind us of those simple facts of life that we often tend to forget in a world where we are bombarded with nonsense.
Perhaps Sun will really put Solaris under GPL3 knowing Linus wont be able to use the code in his GPL2 kernel? Sun would start gaining developers who are turning to GPL3 themselves while Linux gets left behind. I think one of the earlier sticking points was Sun being afraid that much of what makes Solaris Solaris would be pulled into Linux without Solaris gaining any new ground. With the licensing differences between kernels Solaris wouldn't have to worry about that.
With all due respect to his work, what exactly has he ever done for "linux"? Yes the media often confuses "linux" with the whole of OSS neatly neglecting that OSS not only is much older then the Linux kernel written by Linus but that is also contains software written under a whole set of other licenses (BSD being the most important).
Many people have problems with Richard Stallman, especially americans, because he keeps telling them stuff ain't right and you need to do something about it to make them right. That just ain't right, you can't expect people to ACT on things that are wrong and set them right! That is communism!
The simple fact is that Richard Stallman so far has proven to be correct time and time again. The latest being the whole mess involving Microsoft and Novell/Suse deal.
RS believes that software is/should at its base a basic need. That humanity as a whole will be better for it if basic software (like the linux kernel, but also the countless GPL tools) are available to all, to use and modify.
I personally think he is right, it ain't hard to see that a world in which everyone can just buy and or make their own basic tools based on existing designs without having to worry about who owns what. Do you really want a world in which the philips screw REALLY is the philips screw and for every screw you use you got to pay philips a license and if you create a new screw you could be sueed for trespassing on their invention?
People wonder why MS Vista is so goddman expensive. Why so much money for just an OS. Have any stopped to think to just how many people MS owns money to include their tiny piece of software to make a modern OS works? Just what hope would an individual, or even a non-billion dollar company have off ever licensing all the tools needed to make their own OS? Just imagine what "linux" would be without the GPL. Without Richard Stallman. It would be nothing more then a hobby project by some fin.
Linus Torvald may be many things but he ain't a visionary. He is just a coder and a damn good project manager. A bloody good one and it is possible that without him the GPL would have never ever gotten itself a working kernel and have remained obscure and underused. GPL needs Linus Torvald but Linus torvald needs the GPL.
But if anything this makes Linus the hypocrite, he is the one who wants to use the GPL (to make his kernel of any use whatsoever) without accepting the political ideas behind the GPL. Sad thing, but political ideals, require sacrifices. If you believe in democracy then your first sacrifice must be that you are willing to listen to majority rule for example.
The simple fact is that the notion that software should be available to all, and under the control of all, has enemies.
A somewhat related story, the current mess with internet radio. You don't really think this is about license fees do you? It is about taking control away from the public and making sure only the right people can operate radio stations. There was a time ANYONE could start their own over the air radio station and broadcast whatever they want. Dangerous things, naked titties, different political ideas, non-top-40 music!!!
In a way GPL software is about the same thing, thanks to the efforts of Richard Stallman software has been taken out of the control of the likes of IBM and HP and even the newbie Microsoft and handed to the entire world. Count the number of linux distro's vs commercial OS'es. A sign of fracturing? Wasted resources? Splits in the community?
No, they are a sign of people excersising freedom. You can take GPL (and all the other licenses) software and use it to suit your own needs. Wether that is Gentoo for the needs of the criminally insane or Red Flag for the needs of a ruthless dictatorship, they are essential if you believe that the software you use now and in the future should NOT be totally controlled by the party/state/monopoly.
But there is a price to pay. There is a reason it is Li
How we know is more important than what we know.
That article can create some misunderstandings about what Torvalds actually said and meant. If you want to form your own opinion, read the email discussion thread (it is huge) at http://marc.info/?t=118136815500004&r=36&w=4 and Linus' posts e.g. at http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=118235728513045 &w=4 and http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=118236278730043 &w=4 .
I think Linus' statements make much more sense in context.
For instance, several posters here have responded to "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate 'morality' with 'legality'," by pointing out that all western legal systems represent morality in some way. However that is missing the point, and I think, not what Linus meant. Democratic systems compromise on a *common* idea of how morality should be represented by laws. This is entirely different from religious fanatics or totalitarian states where the moral ideas of an individual or small group is the only acceptable one. The point Linus is making here is that the GPLv3 is used as a vehicle to impose upon others the ideas of a few and regulate what Linus thinks should be a matter of choice.
I agree with Linus point of view: it might be wrong to trust in the choice of users. Maybe users will not do what I wish they would do - not buy DRM protected music etc. Maybe this will lead to a point where Linux needs a program that can play DRM protected media. But still, I think that taking that choice away from future Linux users would be the totalitarian way of trying to achieve things. Personally I would not want that. I hate DRM, software patents, vendor lock it, but as a *NIX user of more than a decade, I do not want Linux (and other open source software) to become the blunt weapon of a few fanatics instead of an inviting and competitive alternative.
There was a choice of about two dozen distributed revision control systems around at the time that Linus decided to go with his mate's proprietary product, Bitkeeper, and there was about twice as many as that after that fiasco came to the head that everyone said it would but Linus was incapable of seeing.
It seems that this is my phrase of the day here, but it depends on if you're looking at it from a software activist point of view or a slightly more pragmatic one. Bitkeeper is good, especially if you understand its strengths. In fact, Bitkeeper is very good. Does this mean that Darcs or Monotone sucks? Naturally not. But I'd definitely say that you can't imply that BK was chosen merely because of personal ties.
(..a footnote, but since when is 'personal ties' a bad thing in the free software movement? Even with those evil, bad, nasty proprietary vendor people..)
The GPL has always been morality first, freedom second.
The terms of GPL are quite stringent, and are designed to encourage/force people to release source code when they might otherwise not. From Stallman's own words, it's clear that this has always been a full frontal attack on the evility (new word) of proprietary code.
The maximum amount of freedom is achieved simply by releasing software into the public domain, not by licensing through the GPL. That Stallman does not encourage this says much about his motivation.
The comment made by Torvalds was made on June 20, three weeks ago. Why suddenly this make news now? It seems there are attempts to use Linus' comments to help push Microsoft's agenda, in light of Microsoft's very recent anti-GPL v3 statements.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
The delivery mechanism is Ad Hominem... I believe that he's referring to the impetus behind it as "fanaticism"
People can put what they want into GPLv3 - if it becomes popular then it will have "worked in the real actual world".(/me looks around at all the Windows installs in the world...)
Cripes, man... don't SAY that!
(IOW, "Hobson's Choice" isn't really a good reason for popularity, y'know?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
All those statements where made in the context of a discussion thread on the Linux kernel mailing list about whether the kernel should be re-licensed under GPLv3. Personally I agree with Linus and if you read the original thread on the mailing list (or part of it), things will make much more sense than what can be gathered from the article.
I find it interesting how there is a group of people who have a huge hardon for the BSD license, and a group of people who have a hardon for GPL, and then everyone else who uses FOSS sits in the middle somewhere.
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?_
I don't agree with RMS's politics. RMS is a nut job. But, I have my fears. I tend to think that if bad and horrible things can happen, they are going to happen. They are going to happen to us. All we can do is do what we can to mitigate the damage.
There are powerful forces out there fanatically dedicated to the destruction of the open source movement. Its not so much I care about the license that, if there is one thing I can do to preserve what Linux is, and the spirit Linux represents one more year. It doesn't matter if Linux survives so long as what Linux represents as a social idea survives.
> Solaris under GPL3
Are you tryin to be funny or just plain DUMB you want slowaris go play in the slow lane an leave Linux alone
Sheeeeeeeesssssssssssshhhh
Karma
The value of his statement is not based on wether you agree or disagree with it; and his relevance is that his statements are often a good launch point for a dialog.
Nice ad-hom, I bet you get invited to all the conversations amongst your friends who have more than a middle-school education for your brilliant insights and clairvoyance.
All you gave was some fanboyisms about solaris 10 and bsd, despite being unable to prove or come up with any sort of an argument for either.
One word: Bitkeeper.
Um, what? I seem to recall hearing that Bitkeeper sped things up quite a bit while it was around, and when things blew up it didn't take that long to replace. And that having such a good replacement was at least partially due to experience from using BK.
Just because things blew up at one point doesn't make the whole thing a net loss.
Linus wants Linux to be free that is why he used the GPL2, if one wants the software to be free one uses GPL2, if one wants the software+ to be free one uses the GPL3.
I think the difference in their views can be seen in their politics. RMS is a liberal for a welfare state, and Linus is more of a libertarian. RMS wants to make choices for all of society, Linus wants to make choices for himself, and doesn't care what other people do as long as they respect the freedoms and restrictions he puts on his creation.
RMS is trying to force his views on the rest of the GPL community. Linus doesn't have to go along, but it would cause alot of trouble if he didn't.
No one is switching to Solaris, because Solaris is dying, if not dead already. The only reason why Sun has opened it up is because they're desperate. Their expensive hardware has been replaced with commodity components, and their expensive OS has been replaced with one that costs nothing to aquire, Linux. Opening Solaris is desperation move, just like Netscape opening Navigator, only OpenSolaris won't get any traction in the Community, because the open source unix kernel niche is already occupied -- by Linux.
Oh, and you forgot to call it GNU/Solaris. Linus is a tool. He goes on about how he picked his methodology because of efficiencies, not morality. But the fact of the matter is, other people have spent all this time assisting him because of the morality of the license. If they just wanted open-code efficiency, they would have went with the tried and true BSD license. You conclusion doesn't follow, since both BSD and GPL provide efficiency by leveraging the Bazaar as ESR called it. Linus decided for whatever reason, that GPL was more efficient. People assisted not because of the "morality" of the license, but because they got something out of it. An improved Unix kernel that ran ubiquitious 386 hardware. They could contribute, so they did. The same would have happned if he chose the BSD license. The GPL Is The One True License(tm) crowd is not, and never has been, the majority of the contributors, nor a majority of the key contributors, to the Linux kernel.
If you want to look for a project that appeals to people that care more about political wankfests than getting real work done, look at HURD, or even FreeBSD, and look where those projects are. What's the install base of HURD? Twelve? Linus doesn't even write code anymore. If not for the perceived morality of having a kernel under the GPL, and the droves of developers who participated for that very reason, he would be a complete non-entity. Yeah, and RMS writes 1500 LOCs a day.
Since when does someones ability to critique a political and legal document hinge on whether some one is actively writing code? It's not like Linus is sitting back and resting on his piles of money. (Like he has any.)
You want to believe that people flocked to Linux because the GPL made it more "moral." Bullshit. People jumped on the Linux bandwaggon, because it was unix that ran on the 386. FreeBSD didn't even exist until 1993, and prior to that 386BSD wasn't even released until 1992. By comparison, Linux was initially released in 1991. It had first mover advantage and an open source license. That's it. So go and spout your historical revision somewhere else, because contrary to what RMS and the FSF mailing lists say, most people don't care about political statements. They just want their code to work. Easy enough to mouth off at this point. Isn't that all RMS does? And even more to the point, what you're doing?
Now run along and file your bug report against the Linux kernel for using bitkeeper, or not calling itself GNU/Linux. The grown-ups have work to do.
Stallman spends time and effort making a new license and even lets other people use it for free. Torvalds, a user of the license, would like to make some modifications to the license for his own purposes, but Stallman, the creator of the license won't let him. For refusing to allow users to make personal modifications, Torvalds likens Stallman to a totalitarian dictator.
And what is the problem with the new license? Well, it seems that users of Tivos would like to make some modifications of their Tivos for their own purposes, but the creator of Tivos won't let them. Torvalds thinks that it's perfectly reasonable for Tivo to forbid users from making modifications to their Tivos for their own purposes, while Stallman likens Tivo to a totalitarian dictator for refusing to allow users to make personal modifications.
Seems they have more in common than the article would have you believe...
Wow, that's a nice rosy memory you have.
BitKeeper was a catastrophe that everyone could see coming except Linus. Binary drivers is the other one.
How we know is more important than what we know.
We have heard about trusted computing. It has many disguises (the beast always does) but one of them is that hardware won't run unsigned code. Very handy, in theory. You wouldn't want just any code by any stranger to run on your own hardware do you? Even if that stranger is you?
Offcourse trusted code is NOTHING MORE then code that has had someone pay for a certificate because we all know only people to be trusted can afford to do that (hint, sony's often mention rootkit could easily have PAYED to be run as a rootkit on a trusted computing platform).
So where would Linus Torvald have gotten the money from to get a certificate to run his newly created kernel on his own computer?
Kinda sounds like the clampdown a free internet radio. Sure, you can still broadcast anything you want, just pay us a small fortune, enough to make sure you are going to need a large enough mainstream audience to be able to pay for it and properly broadcast enough propaganda, ooops sorry, commercials to gather the fees.
Could it be that in a future of trusted computing nobody could afford to launch a piece of software if they were not certain they could re-coup the costs of the certificate? Gosh, wouldn't that in one fell swoop eliminate all this free-software and give certain US interests total control of world-wide IT?
Zealot has a lot of negative overtones. I prefer visionary. Richard Stallman has thought about all this and he has seen two possible futures, one with the GPL and one without. He seeems to think the one with the GPL will be a better one and I agree with him.
Yes, going with him all the way will require sacrifices but frankly I haven't seen him be wrong yet.
It is the whole inconvenient truth thing. No not just global warning and are you thinking about the amount of CO2 your computer is putting out wasting idle cycles while you are reading this?
It is "so you are against the war for oil but you do drive. It is "you wanna be healthy but don't excersise and eat deep-fryed chemicals". It is "you want a democracy but don't want to vote or accept the rule of the majority".
Richard Stallman has many a times written about how he sees the future with and without GPL software.
Linus Torvald has done nothing off that sort, he is a project mananger. One of legendary quality to be sure and his work and effort has been of tremendous importance to OSS as a whole BUT he is that project manager who drives a car, because, well global warming surely can't be all down to him and public transport just doesn't work for a project manager.
Linus Torvald wants to get things done, Richard Stallman wants to create a better world. In the short run the Linus way will get a you an easier to use OS, but RS way tries to make certain that you can actually USE that OS in the future.
It is about flash. The flash player that is. Flash is closed source and therefore does NOT fit well with the GPL. Yet we want our Youtube. Linus is practical and thinks Linux (The desktop) should have Flash even if it is closed source. Great, we can watch youtube.
Richard Stallman says we can't until flash has one way or another been made opensource, BUT that means he is telling us NOT to watch youtube as long as it uses flash. (Remember, there is absolutly no reason whatsoever that youtube couldn't just transmite regular video files which can then be played by any means the user desires.)
The first way gives us what we want NOW but it will also result in a world with yet more flash only sites and no incentive for adobe to open up.
The RS way denies us what we want right now BUT in the hope that in the future we either won't need it (youtube just broadcasting open video formats) or that we can get it on our own terms.
It is not hard to see what would be a better deal, in the long term, and not right now when I got an IM on my AIM with FreeSmilies telling me about this amazing vid!
The point is that that in democracies, morality gets into laws by compromise and a process of agreement on common ground, not by an individual or small group trying to enforce it on everyone else. Linus argues that while the license should make software free it should not limit how it is used and instead give that choice to the users. I think DRM or software patents are a bad thing, but is the GPL the correct vehicle to make these things go away?
That is proven by history.
No argument is possible.
Translated: LALALALALALALALALALALA
"you become what you hate".
It's an amazingly true expression borne out again and again. People in their zeal to defeat an enemy they hate because of what they do, tend to gradually adopt the enemy's tactics. E.g. to "defeat" the soviet union in the cold war we became more totalitarian. To defeat the enemies of freedom, kidnappers and torturers, GWB has asked us to sacrifice civil liberties and set up guantanamo.
THis happens at the personal level too not just in the drama of nations.
One might even suspect Google finds it must sometimes adopt dubious tactics in order to quash what it sees a s Evil.
Stallman appears to be on the same road in his obsession to counter microsofts.
Kafaka's principle is hard to avoid. And when an entity feels threaten, feels it might loose or be seriously damaged it feels the ends justify the means. SOmetimes its' neccessary to stay with ones principles and tough out the assualt, rather than lose those principles.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
help! help! I'm being repressed!
injecting their personal morality into the laws governing open source software with the release of GPLv3
So the FSF can pass laws now? I actually don't think I'm against that...
Or are they just injecting them into their license? How dare they inject their values into their license!
sic transit gloria mundi
First off, GPLv3 is not a software security upgrade - you don't have to use it if you don't want to. ..or am I missing something here?
There is no morality issues here - the real issue here is different definitions of "freedom" - or rather, who/what that freedom is attached to. If I understand correctly, BSD-style license gives freedom to the people, while GPLv3 license gives freedom to the code.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
>One thing I've always wondered is, if the GNU is all about 'open source' and
GNU isn't about Open Source, GNU is about Free Software!
>For instance, I understand that they're trying to promote reciprocal freedom, but *freedom* implies directly that, well, you shouldn't have drastic, overarching restrictions on what people are legally allowed to do with software. The GPL puts a lot of restrictions on what you can't do, and what you're required to do if you even get near it, link to it, or do anything else.
You can say it in one sentence:
The GPL gives you the freedom to do what you want but denies you the power to restrict the freedom of others.
Or:
Your freedom ends where my freedom begins.
Support Free Software! Join FSFE's Fellowship: http://fellowship.fsfe.org
"Nice ad-hom, I bet you get invited to all the conversations amongst your friends who have more than a middle-school education for your brilliant insights and clairvoyance."
Oh, well played. An ad hom in a post complaining about ad hom. Bravo!
While Torvalds is undisputably a great engineer, on some non-technical matters he tends to rely on his engineering reputation to substitute for sound arguments.
One error that Torvalds makes is that he falsely characterizes what the FSF has said in the past about the act of choosing a license.
The FSF believes that such an act is an exercise of power, not of freedom. Thus, just as the FSF can and does exercise power to upgrade the license of GNU software to GPL3, so too would the FSF agree that Torvalds can and does exercise the power to keep the Linux kernel under GPL2.
In order to be hypocritical here, the FSF would have to claim the ability or justification of their choice but deny Torvalds' his. However, they did not do that; they simply see any such choice as an exercise of power and not of freedom. Torvalds' argument relies on people somehow believing that the FSF has claimed something special that he cannot.
Too often, Torvalds just throws out claims, hoping that they will stick. He appears to be decreasingly trustworthy on some non-technical matters.
it isn't a bad goal to fall short of.
Spoken as a Debian user with Nvidia drivers, Doom 3 and such on the hard drive.
I guess the motto is, "I'd rather be a hypocritical idealist than an unprincipled 'realist'".
The thing is, Linus knows exactly what loopholes the GPLv3 is closing, and he doesn't consider them to be bad things. And in a way, he's got a point. Tivo's video-processing code can still be used in other applications, after all. Isn't that free enough? Furthermore, doesn't the GPLv3 prohibit *anybody* from writing GPLv3 code that runs on a Tivo, even if they weren't the ones who locked the hardware down in the first place? I think that, from the point of view of the FSF, the GPLv3 makes a lot of sense. But Linus doesn't seem to feel that a lot of the FSF's problems really *are* problems. It's the GPL vs BSD thing all over again, and the question of how much specific freedom you restrict in order to ensure overall freedom, and just because Linus sees the question a different way doesn't necessarily make him right or wrong.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
I'm going to disagree with you on this one. Having tried to contribute to all three of popular systems in the early nineties (Linux, BSD, and Hurd), Linux was the *only* one where you could easily get any work done. I still remember getting emails from a certain someone (not RMS) telling me to go away because they only wanted experienced people working on the Hurd.
People who have read my posts previously know I'm a huge FSF fan. I'm also a huge RMS fan. But Linus changed the way free software was written. It didn't matter who the hell you were, if your code was good it got submitted. Before Linux you often needed to be in a clique to work on a high profile project.
While RMS envisioned free software development, IMHO Linus was the first to really realize it. He was the first to lead a huge group of people to do amazing things over the internet. Free software owes him a huge amount. The way we work now, the things we take for granted, are in large part inspired by how he ran the Linux kernel project in those early years. Now almost everyone does it that way.
Maybe it's hard to understand how this was a choice of "morals". But quite seriously, after being treated like I was, I wouldn't work on the Hurd nor *-BSD if you paid me to. Linux was the place to be *precisely* because it implemented the moral situation that was ideal for free software development. Everyone was treated as an equal. There was no "secret code". There were no "private" repositories. You could just do your thing. If it was good enough, Linus would roll it into his distribution.
The GPL doesn't enforce morals. It is a legal document after all. But it can set the stage to clear barriers for people working together. Many licenses force people not to work together, even if they want to. They insist on creating classes of users/developers -- some with more rights than others. IMHO, this is the "moral" issue that the FSF is trying to tackle. There's a hell of a lot more to it than just a license. But it's a start.
So while most people didn't sit down and say "Hey, Linus is being more moral", people chose to work on the project simply because it was better. He actually acted in the spirit of license he chose. It was fun/possible to contribute. You didn't feel like a schmuck just for asking for the latest build. And I suspect if this ever changed dramatically in the Linux kernel development, you'd get a lot of people jumping ship.
P.S. You won't find my name amongst the Linux kernel developers. Shortly after started working on things I actually signed an inventions agreement that forbade me from doing free software development. Yes, I sold out. I did that for years and years. Until finally I got sick of treating my customers like shit. I finished my last proprietary gig a week ago and I'm not looking back.
admitedly it may not be *inevitable* but if debian (or $other_distro) was to switch to opensolaris or put an emphasis on on devleoping on solaris then ubuntu would probably go solaris... while to many of the hard-core users that might mean nothing and for server's you might see no difference you might see desktop linux (-cue desktop linux arrival jokes) switch to opensolaris... it may no seem like thats likly atm BUT a while back it was somewhat inconcievable to have high quality software which you could do stuff to etc (FSF/GPL)
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
a bunch of nerds with free time just writing kick-ass cool software. Why is it any damn thing done these days you need a "legal team". Am I the ONLY individual out here who is tired of all this damn overly complex legalese that's clouding up the water?
Hows this for a license..
"We made this, we include the code so you can see how, if you modify it pass it along and give credit to original authors. Use it anyway you want."
"PS. If you break something, law or other wise, thats on your dime."
I mean can't these people find something to argue about that actually matters? Like how to keep people from starving to death, stop poaching, and get a government back that actually works for "the People" and not for "the Big Money"? Just break out the damn rulers already and settle it and move on.
Everyone needs to go somewhere to witness true suffering and have to defend themselves to stay alive so they can get real perspective on what really is important in life. Hint, it's not how some guys in an office are writing some imaginary rules for something that they give away for free.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
I am often amazed when people claim you can't legislate morality...
The only reasonable laws are moral laws. Where laws are nothing but arbitrary, then they are not moral and thus are not just.
What most people mean when they say this is that legislation cannot be used to define morality. In other words, many immoral behaviors (lying, cheating at cards, being mean, being a jerk, etc. etc. etc.) will always be legal. The set of behaviors allowed by law will never be the same as the set of moral behaviors.
You obviously don't grok the BSD license then, because it's not supposed to "protect" against that. What Microsoft did by including the BSD TCP/IP stack in Windows is the intention of those who license under BSD.
So the FSF can pass laws now? I actually don't think I'm against that...
Or are they just injecting them into their license? How dare they inject their values into their license! Last I checked copyright *laws* were still laws and copyright violations - be they claimed by RIAA's restrictive license or FSF's restrictive license - are still covered by said laws. But unlike RIAA , FSF claims to stand for "freedom"
So, his comment simply points out that under the banner of "freedom" a whole bunch of rights have been taken away from end users via GPL3. He is not saying "how dare they" or saying they don't have the right - just pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of taking away rights and freedoms based on religious beliefs and claiming to do it "in the name of freedom".
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Both are sincere in their beliefs. RMS is accused of being idealogical and hard to get along with, however it was perspective and tenacious that created free software and the GPL in the first place.
RMS is the original author of GPL, gcc, bash, glib, emacs and many other important tools. No "normal" person would have had the vision or determination to do what RMS has done. He originally intended to create the compiler, the runtime library, the editor (emacs) and to OS. Only a person that was a little bit "crazy" would have even attempted to do this. The Free software world and the "open source" world are greatly indebted to RMS, no matter how hard to get along with he is, or what people may think of him. The vary characteristics that some people dislike, are exactly the characteristics that made it possible for RMS to achieve what he achieved. Without RMS free software would be nowhere. The GPL was introduced from the start, as being with a certain idealogical intent, the intent of the GPLv3 is in the same spirit as this intent.
It may be this idealogical attitude, together with acceptance of a faulty academic idea called the microkernel, that caused RMS to fail in creating a workable kernel to work with his other software. The HURD is nowhere.
What is called GNU/Linux and sometimes just Linux, is a merger between Linus' kernel and RMS' free software, and much other software.
Linus attitude is pragmatic. He uses the GPL as a tool just has he uses gcc. He is a great programmer and kernel hacker. He had the wit to reject the academic idea of the Microkernel which if adopted could have killed Linux just has it did the Hurd. There is no better person to lead the Linux kernel project.
If the BSDI USL lawsuit had not delayed the BSD project there would have been no Linux. Linus would have joined one of the BSD projects as just another BSD hacker. One of the BSDs would have become the dominant free software OS.
I believe that if this had happened, Microsoft would have destroyed BSD's commercial chances using "embrace and extend". They would have created a BSD/Windows hybrid that would have duplicated BSD's API. This would have happened because BSD lacks the GPL's so called "viral clause" that prevents embrace and extend. The existence of this hybrid would have been used by Microsoft to prevent the suits from even considering a move to free software.
Linus lacks the vision that RMS has. This has caused him to make several blunders such as the Bitkeeper Debacle. However the discipline implicit in the GPLv2 will prevent him from making any fatal mistakes. Were Linus to attempt to go in any totally insane direction, his project will fork. He knows this vary well.
I have given several presentations to Austin Linux Group from this perspective.
Free software history
Lessons of Free Software History
Tanenbaum-Torvalds microkernel vs monolithic kernel Debate
Yes, and the software they distribute is in no way limited. You can take it and run it on your home built PVR box if you want. What TiVo restricted was running someone else's code on their HARDWARE. So why is a software license limiting their choices in regards to their hardware, dummy?
Preventing "evil" by denying someone freedom who has done nothing wrong is evil. It's not "evil" for TiVo to say "our hardware will not run unsigned binaries". It's a business decision. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
No one has answered the really important question on this issue.
I think you are absolutely right... ok maybe i wouldnt go as far as "idiot" but i certainly don't agree with his views... i wish he would put the kernal under GPL3 and just shut up... or we switched to opensolaris... or maaybe i'd just be happy if he just shut up he tends to get on my nerves taking up half thought out views... in many ways it is unfortunate that he has so much infulence by him simply being the project leader of a medium/large *free* software project... while he certainly is a great engineer and their are certainly things we should happily attribute to him - the way FREE SOFTWARE projects colabarate etc but i find the way he has gone from student tinkering with computer to celebraty/influential figure a bit disturbing... the thing most disturbing is that while stallman is consist, does the right things[from his point of view], rarely drops a comment out of place Linus is relativly young inexperienced in legal matters and inconsistant if you think that stallman has been campaning for free software since probably before linus had ever encoutered a computer... it sets you thinking... -- if you respect my point of view... ill respect yours... you flame me... & i'll get firehose ;)
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
That, and (as MSFT later proved head-on w/ their TCP/IP implementations), the classic BSD license really doesn't protect against theft and proprietary lock-down of improvements.
Please explain how it is possible to "steal" BSD-licensed code. The whole *point* of the license is that it allows anyone to take the source code and do whatever they want with it.
There are few things that identify a GPL-zealot more effectively than talking about code being "stolen" because someone else's changes to it were not "shared". It's like making a speech in public and then complaining about how all the people who heard it "stole" from you.
Oooh, sorry. There will be no shift towards OpenSolaris. The fact is serious people don't give a flying shit about what it's licensed under, they care what they can do with the software. GPLv2, while still a piece of shit license, is more open than GPLv3. Nobody but a few nutcase zealots will move from Linux to OpenSolaris because of the licensing.
"Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality," Torvalds wrote.'"
Right, so when do we abolish the laws against murder, rape, etc.?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Every legal system enforces ideas of morality.
Yes, it's immoral to speed. It's immoral to have commercial and residential uses intermingled (zoning laws). All our laws are there to enforce morality. Laws are there to tell people what to do, and the people that make up the government have used that to force people to do what they would like them to do (the morality laws you mention) but morality is not the same for everyone. Are blue laws enforcing morality? Why is it moral to buy the fabric for curtains on Sunday, but not the hardware to hang them? Why is it legal for car dealerships to be open on Sundays, but not if they were also open Saturday? I agree that some laws are based in morality, but the majority of laws now are about control of actions, not right and wrong. There are far more laws concerning land use than violence (mainly because the laws against violence are simple and clear). Enforcing morality may have been the goal long ago, but laws have evolved to something completely separate from morality.
Learn to love Alaska
There is a huge difference between making laws moral and making morality law. The first is what you are talking about, the second is what Linus was talking about.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Have Sun actually announced their intention to license OpenSolaris under GPL 3? I can't find anything definite via the obvious means.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
What do you agree/disagree with in GPL3? I am glad that patent abuse is addressed. However, I never thought Tivo was all that evil. You *could* after all, take their code and use it on your own hardware. We all want our voting machines to run open source software - but such hardware needs to be locked in the same manner as a Tivo. GPL3 software could not be used for an open source voting machine! Fortunately, the application is small enough that alternative licenses could probably be bought/negotiated from copyright holders.
Solaris (and Sun) has probably been declared dead as much as Apple and BSD. In my line of work the commercial UNIX variants (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX) are very much alive (SAN/Database/medium-iron). Perhaps it's the native SAN driver/multipathing/utility stack on Solaris that's my favourite to work with that makes me like the OS. 'course, with ZFS and dtrace and zones in Solaris 10+ there are some nice new features, too.
All in all, everything has its place.
I guess we live in different 'communities'?
man tunefs | grep fish
This is the first time in a long time that there is a real reason to develop HURD.
Wonder if it'll be enough to push it past Duke Nukem Forever stage of development.
The anti-TiVo clause of the GPL3 is to the GPL what the Third Amendment is to the U.S. Constitution.
DIscuss among yourselves, but Linus Torvalds isn't American, and we should not expect him to teach us about political freedom. If there weren't a whole lot of belligerent and ardently patriotic people like me making a stink about points like this, he would be in a gulag for threatening fascist state sponsored companies' operations.
Go back to your framework for hardware drivers Linus. You're out of your league.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
You are pretty sure you understand the intentions of the people who released the BSD code you are so upset is(was...) in Windows and so happy is in Linux. If the intention was that people do what they would with the code, then they wouldn't think of the use in Windows any differently than the use in Linux, as someone in the middle decided to place re or un-strictions on users, rather than passing along the do what you willness.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
not Tivo's. If I can find better alternate use of that hardware package, why should I be prevented from doing so? You are espousing the idea that any PC maker could restrict you to using the OS they want you to run on it.
I believe that if this had happened, Microsoft would have destroyed BSD's commercial chances using "embrace and extend". They would have created a BSD/Windows hybrid that would have duplicated BSD's API. This would have happened because BSD lacks the GPL's so called "viral clause" that prevents embrace and extend. The existence of this hybrid would have been used by Microsoft to prevent the suits from even considering a move to free software.
So... why is there no BSD/Windows hybrid?? Its not like existence of Linux would stop that? And if it were to happened, why would that be so bad? The MacOS/BSD hybrid seems to be doing wonders for Apple. And having Microsoft go that route could have done wonders for both Microsoft and community at large.And while we are on the "what-if" kick, were GPL3 in place years ago, would Linux be anywhere near as popular platform it is today - since as you pointed out many of the currently Linux platforms that GPL3 restricts would simply be BSD or Windows.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
The anti-DRM (or anti "TiVO-ization") provisions only affect equipment that a consumer would reasonably want to modify.
PS: sorry, but Linus is being a wanker on this issue. For one thing, the restraint on moralizing by the GPL has always held that there would never be a provision against, for example, using GPL'd code for military uses or other uses that might well be against the morals of RMS and other FOSS coders. It's not about injecting morals, it's about FREEDOM FOR SOFTWARE. I know, I should have made this a separate post.
This is a good example of why i prefer the BSD style license. No nonsence, no rantings from a madman.
ya, i expect to be modded down, again, over this, but its true. Do you see any fenatical rantings from the bsd side of licensing? Its simple, and it really doesnt stifle growth or increase risk of commercialization of their work like many GPLers fear. if it did, we wouldn't have FreeBSD..
Its a choice, and once you choose GPL and accept others contributions you are pretty much stuck going down the same path.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maintaining the purity of open source is a noble goal, but when immoral operations like MS are in the picture sometimes idealism has to bow to the necessities of the real world.
I'm not too sure about the FSF myself - but I've got to admit that GPL V3 has thrown a monkey wrench in Microsoft's plans. That's a pretty neat trick; not too many people / companies have made them blink before...
I was at the Green Party National Meeting http://www.gp.org/press/pr_2007_07_10.shtml last night where RMS gave a talk and he was asked about the issues with the kernel team. The main thing he had to say is that without GPL3, there could be problems with tivoization, where yes, the source is provided, but modifications are not allowed on the specific hardware thus disallowing improvements that are freely made by the community. You can share the code, but if you fix it or improve it or change it is some way that you like, you can't run it, and so you can not share your work. Me: Maybe that kind of deadending is OK since there are other versions that you can hack, and hey, it is just one set of hardware, but it does defeat the spirit of the GPL and GPL3 covers this issue according to RMS. (I have not read it. I just click accept whenever this kind of thing comes up which is why I'm now a towel boy in the house of the borg. Thanks for letting me go to the meeting Mr. Bill.) So, RMS feels, not surisingly, that the changes in the GPL3 are good for free (as in speech) software and it is regrettable if the kernel group does not go along with it. (Didn't they have input?)s -selling-solar.html
--
Get solar power with no installation cost. Register your home today: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
While the above post never referred to GPLv3 specifically, I think it made a good and interesting point. I will hijack this part for my own purposes
Fundamentally, I think the poster's quote is one of the biggest arguments against the adoption of GPLv3.
GPL version 2 had no restrictions on what hardware was required upon which to run the software. The license merely required that all modifications to the software were contributed back to the original work. It did not care how you used the software, merely how you contributed back to the project.
Version 3, on the other hand, makes statements about how software is used. As far as I can tell, TiVo is one of the most predominant factors in spurring GPLv3. TiVo contributes their software back to the community, as can be seen right here. TiVo, however, runs their software on a DRM'ed box. Anybody can use TiVo's source code modifications in their own hardware projects if they so desire. The software is still just as free as if TiVo decided to run it on a non-DRM'ed box.
The FSF believes you can do anything you want with software except make it non-free This is what the FSF would like people to believe. However, it is inconsistent with what the FSF is actually doing in advocating GPLv3. GPLv2 ensured that all software remained free. The old license fully satisified that software remained "free," not just in price but in the availability of people to choose how to use it.
GPLv3, on the other hand, makes restrictions upon what kind of hardware-software interactions are allowable. Forcing people, corporations, or whomever to use freely available code in a certain way is contradictory to freedom. This is the argument for version 2 of the GPL. It is also the argument against DRM. Strangely enough, it is also the argument against GPLv3.
Enforcing freedom is an oxymoron. This however, is the logical extent of what RMS and people at the FSF are proposing with the adoption of GPLv3, forcing people to run their software on certain hardware. In the words of the poster, the FSF acting exactly like proprietary vendors in limiting the scope of their software to what they "specifically authorize you to do."
the classic BSD license really doesn't protect
You obviously don't grok the BSD license then, because it's not supposed to "protect" against that.
The second line doesn't follow. He is right that the BSD license doesn't protect, regardless of the fact that it's not supposed to.
Like it or not, I think there were many, many capable programmers out there whose imaginations were captured by the share and share alike principle. I always wonder what would have happened without Linus, or RMS-- would this group of people naturally end up organizing around a similar leader/project?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Human interactions have evolved to a point where one must become a control freak to be free.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I have heard so many times, in so many different arguments, that you can't/shouldn't legislate morality. The reality is, all law is based on morality. Anyone that uses the argument that you shouldn't make a rule or law based on some principal of morality is simply trying to sell an incompatible principal of morality that he or she doesn't want a rule or law to forbid.
Laws forbidding murder are based on the moral principal that human life is precious and that, in most circumstances, killing is wrong. Whatever you may think of religion, it is religious principles and the morality that springs from them that are the cornerstone of virtually all the world's jurisprudence.
The FSF is most certainly promoting a certain paradigm of morality. There is, however, nothing wrong with this. What is truly evil, is for someone else to come along and label them religious fanatics for promoting their morality, while doing them same thing himself. Linus is arguing moral principals - which is fine. I have no problem with his coming out and saying "there is nothing wrong with TiVo-ization". I don't agree, but there is nothing wrong with that point of view. What is absolutely reprehensible is the way he makes personal attacks out of his arguments.
If there is some party in this debate who is acting like a totalitarian state (with his constant statements of "go write your own OS if you don't like what I'm doing"), it seems to me to be Linus that fits the bill best.
Meanwhile somewhere in a basement all the BSD developers are rolling on the floor laughing at these bunch of guys discussing for the licensing issues...
Everyone exept Theo, as he is trying to start a discussion within the BSD guys.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
If the GPL v3 actually stopped "trusted computing", there would actually be some point to its anti-Tivoization clause. However, it doesn't, because it only applies to a "User Product". "A "User Product" is either (1) a "consumer product", which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling."
So the actual GPL v3 message is:
"Sure, computer manufacturers, you can lock down all the servers and corporate/government/education desktops you sell so they can only run versions of Free Software you specifically authorize, allowing you to simultaneously serve the GNU/Linux market and deny people freedom. Our license doesn't affect that at all. We don't care if the eventual result of the combination of our deliberate loophole, the home desktop dominance of Windows, and pressure from Microsoft, is that every general-purpose computer sold worldwide can only run manufacturer-authorized software. That's not important enough to worry about. No, what we want to make sure is that every time somebody calls the TiVo support line about a bug, the TiVo people have to ask the user if he's using an unauthorized version of the software. That's the important thing!"
There are only two possible interpretations of the anti-Tivoization clause. Either the writers were utterly incompetent, or they were motivated by nothing but malice toward TiVo. Because it doesn't do shit for Free Software.
In your BSD example, you are essentially stating that 'evildude' (I suppose that'd be 'selfishbastard' after a nick change?) took over the channel of 'developer1' and 'developer2' and essentially removed their control over it. That's not what BSD is.
/join #closed /join #closed /join #closed :D /part /part /join #GPLv2 :D :D :DD :DDD :o /join #GPLv2 .. meaning that, sure, I'll give them the code, and they're free to change it as they wish. But without my DRM key, there's not a whole lot they can do with it :D
Here's a slightly more accurate version... as far as one can every distill the crap down to a pseudo IRC log
** now talking in #BSD
Hey look! I have this channel here, want to help me with it?
Sure!
sets mode +o developer2
entered the channel
Hi dude, I've got this cool channel here, want to try helping?
Sure!
sets mode +o selfishbastard
(...2 seconds pass...)
* @selfishbastard thinks this is pretty neat and wonders if he could do the same thing
selfishbastard:
dude, did you just fork our channel?
hell yeah
developer1:
developer2:
** now talking in #closed
sweet! Mind if we get control as well?
as a matter of fact, I do..
oh.. well that's okay
developer1:
ass. knew we should've gone with GPL...
developer2:
** now talking in #BSD
man, that sucked.
why? That's what the BSD allows - he's free to keep his stuff closed
yeah, but that means that all those kick-ass things he's doing there aren't coming back to us
so? more power to them
and less power to us.
how so? if you want to add the functionality, you're more than welcome to do so yourself
wtf. you're an idiot
look, if you disagree with it, you're more than welcome to create your own fork and relicense it under the GPL. Then if somebody forks from that, (and they release it, yadda yadda), they'll have to make their changes available.
fine. I will.
developer2:
** now talking in #GPLv2
there we go.
* @developer2 adds some kick-ass features not in the BSD or closed version
* @developer2 sets mode +milt #GPLv2
** now talking in #BSD
woot. Check it out!
niiiiiiice
are you going to add his stuff?
can't... he licensed it all under the GPL. If I included any of it, all of our stuff would become GPL as well.
yowza. So if I then took it from you.. or if I took it straight from him.. I would have to make all my changes public as well?
That's the GPL for ya
* @selfishbastard thinks those changes from developer2 look mighty fine tho'
Well, you're free to implement them on your own
bah, too much work...
* @selfishbastard combs over the GPLv2 license
oooh...
@selfishbastard:
** now talking in #GPLv2
wtf do you think YOU're doing here?
* @selfishbastard just grins
** now talking in #BSD
lol... come watch this in #closed
** now talking in #closed
* @selfishbastard sets mode +miltk DRM
whoa hey.. you just took his features. That's GPL man - now all your stuff will have to be out in the open. Not that I mind in principle, but it's not like I'll benefit from it.
ahh, you missed the crucial difference.. I put the stuff that makes things happen behind a DRM key.
huh..
that's.. sneaky.. pretty sure that goes against the spirit of the GPL
tough shitski for him.. the letter of the license applies, not the spirit
I think I'll just sit here quietly.. I'm not sure what to think of this
** now talking in #GP
Lawyers have made it so no money can change hands without them getting a cut, no law can be made unless they control every jot and tittle of it. Anything that is a threat to the Lawyers stranglehold on the political system must be killed or imprisoned. More Lawyers = less freedom. Lawyers are the only real a threat to your personal well being and liberty.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/20/223
I like what you say, but GPL is like a one way trap, or a black hole. Once you enter it, you are sucked into it forever.
I can understand both opinions here, including Linus's frustrations. I think he feels like he's slipping into a one way trap and loosing his control.
Stallman, really bugs me in some ways. He reminds me of the Prophet Mohammad too much. I stand can't him getting the credit for so many other peoples hard work. With his name at the top of the FSF. Juck, so cheesy!
That's why I prefer BSD.
Come to think of it, after reading all this. A simple BSD style licence with a patent clause would be great in these current times. There is no evidence to say we need a GPL licence for open source projects to succeed. I think most programmers don't understand it properly and are just being sucked into it.
Simple is much more elegant and to the precise point.
The solution must be simple.
Thank you for posting that. What's really unfortunate here is that the incendiary language in the Information Week article quotes Linus out of context thereby reinforcing divisions in the free and open source software community without helping to address what are important concerns.
The FOSS community, as Linus implicitly argues, is a coalition of people with different agendas, whether those are developing quality software, making money, or increasing freedom. We work with each other because we all benefit, even though we may not all agree. We do need to discuss our divisions - moral, political, etc. We don't need to create pointless division by demonizing Linus, RMS, or anyone else.
Now I don't agree with Linus's position on GPL3. It seems to me that Linus's reasining is based on an idealized conception of individual freedom that fails to take into account the practical limitations on that freedom and the context in which choices are made. I believe his conclusions are very wrong, and some of his argument is badly worded (I'm not certain whether he's being very aggressive or just unclear) - but much of what is quoted in the article and Slashdot summary is taken out of context and deliberately used to dramatize the situation. In particular, Linus does not call RMS & co. totalitarians or fanatics. He quite rightly uses that characterization for anyone who equates morality with the law. If you ask me, it's a strawman argument. It's that argument we need to dismiss, not Linus
Anything that is written so that it can be compiled with gcc is free software.
if (C=gcc) prepend GPLv4
recurse
Massa Bill says "Recurses! Foiled Again!"
Come to think of it, Mac OS X came from BSD not Linux. Not from GPL Linux.
What we really need now is some competition in the market place as well as some open source.
I would really love to buy a copy of Mac OS X for my PC, why can't some company do something like this. If Linux was really free and could be used as a base, it would make it easier.
Then, that would give Microsoft a harder time wouldn't it, they would have to compete more.
Then if people used this OS, it's similarities would then benefit its original open source base. Instead of software written entirely for the NT/Windows platform.
We need more commercial freedom and need to promote the spread of Unix style software.
I find it silly to compare his kids with himself - the comparison (in the context of http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/20/223) clearly does not make sense.
Then he starts ranting GPLv2 not being about "morals" although he himself considers anything written to Linux kernel ("thinking about Linux") must be GPLv2 but ported drivers (e.g. from Windows) does not need to be.
Sour, said the fox ...
We Hate Them; We hate Assholes, Corporate Scum, and M$.
Where The Fuck have you Been? (unless you're one of the above)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
The GPL is a balance between the freedom of the people who make/distribute software and those who use it. The GPLv3 attempts to address certain inequities that have arisen over the past few years which have upset this balance. These inequities threaten our freedom as users of the software (things like DRM) and also threaten to allow big companies to marginalize Linux and other GPL'd software (things like the Novell-MS, Linspire-MS deals... etc).
You can rest assured that RMS and the FSF has taken these into account when considering the changes for GPLv3. Linus' focus seems to be very pro-business. He seems to believe that whatever is good for businesses using Linux is good for Linux. In doing so he either doesn't care or, indeed, isn't aware of these issues. They are a threat to the future efficacy of Linux in the marketplace.
I, personally, believe that the GPLv3 is a step in the right direction and that, if Linus wants to preserve Linux for the future, then he'll move the kernel to it.
Sincerely, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
hypocrisy, hypocrite : "Hypocrisy is the act of condemning another person, where the stated basis for the criticism is the breach of a rule which also applies to the critic. Though hypocrisy is frequently invoked as an accusation in debates, a few theorists have studied the utility of hypocrisy, and in some cases have suggested that the conflicts manifested as hypocrisy are a necessary or even beneficial part of human behavior and society. "
RMS & co. created the GPL for furthering the cause of software freeedom. Linus Torvalds & co., of their own volition, and without any coercion, adopted the GPL v2. 15 years later, it is found that a few black sheep.. er: so-called commercial 'users' of GPL are acting against software freedom, and RMS & co. release a new version to prevent further erosion of software freedom.
Instead of engaging in a meaningful dialogue with the creators of GPL, Linus chooses to abuse them, and ignores their continued noble efforts. Thereby becoming the perfect example of a hypocrite.
Options: The following flags may be used with hypocrisy, or hypocrite:
-t tivo: The act of using the fruits of other's efforts, but acting against the spirit and intent of the creators.
-w windows: Calling the customer's desktop "My Computer", without actually providing ownership of the software for which customer has paid money. This option is deprecated with the "-v vista" option.
-l linus: The act of lecturing others while not believing them oneself or practising said virtu... ATZ - No carrier.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Why shouldn't both hardware and software creators have the same privileges?
Yes, and the software they distribute is in no way limited.
Except for the freedom of being able to run a modified version on the hardware it came with. Taking freedom away from the owner.
If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere.
If TiVo doesn't like the software license they can take their business elsewhere. Their choice.
Preventing "evil" by denying someone freedom who has done nothing wrong is evil.
You're a zealot. GPLv3 is merely fighting fire with fire.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
You misspelled abandoned as "free".
"We would still be thankful for RMS though. "
Thank you, Richard!
Thank you, Richard!
Thank you, Richard!
Thank you, Richard!
Thank you, Richard!
Thank you, Richard!
Thank you, Richard!
Thank you, Richard! And happy birthday!
Someone stop me before I download non-free code! You might make a better point by linking to code that's been modified and used in proprietary software. But then - you probably can't. And that's the point.
If I'm not mistaken, you have to choose to buy a Tivo. If you buy one knowing it has that limitation, then you chose to give up that "freedom".
I think NOT requiring signed binaries on a consumer box would be insane.
(n/t)
If it did, we'd be in trouble, because both Intel and AMD have patent's on their processors.
Rather, they simply require that let the user do as they please with the software. (And only the software, you're free to disallow the user from modding the hardware, or even other parts of the sftware that aren't under the GPL).
It would, for example, be perfectly allowed to DRM the heck out of a file server black box, as long as you made it so that the DRM ignores Samba, and lets the *end user* mod that.
As soon as Tivo hands me a bill of sale, it is not theirs anymore, it is mine, not Tivo's. I do think that the GPLv3 should have a exception clause that lets people use modded code on DRMed hardware internally though. If Tivo/motorola/apple wants to hamper themselves (or use it as a security feature, DRM seems to some interesting applications that way), there should be no restriction on that.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
> Sure, the GPL is viral. I don't think anyone really denies that.
I do. The "GPL is viral" meme was invented by GPL-haters as a replacement for real arguments, and spread by trolls and useful idiots.
The GPL encourages people to volunteer their own software under similar terms, by offering them something valuable in return. A virus (biological or computer) is extremely poor analogy for that, except for the strong negative connotations. Which is the only reason it was invented.
His basic argument hinges on the FACT that it is his choice to continue to use GPL v2. Saying otherwise that he "should" use GPL3 in the name of "freedom" is hypocritical. Agreed.
I personally choose GPLv3 for my future code but I am "free" to "chose" what I believe to be the best license, and so is He.
Worst I can say about Linus remarks are. Maybe words like "Hypocritical Morons" are unhelpful. But again it is clearly an opinion (He did state it as a fact).
Far worse is the Slashdot headline stating "Linux creator calls GPL Authors Hypocrites" Completely untrue.
Made me click though.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
There's not a heck of a lot of GNU in OpenSolaris - most of the stuff needed to bring up the OS (e.g. compilers) was developed by Sun or other System V contributors - unlike Linux that needed the GNU userland.A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate 'morality' with 'legality,
The GPL v3 is a license, not a law. You aren't forced to use GPL v3 software, you do so voluntarily. If you don't like the license, don't use it or software that ships under it. Therefore, talking about "totalitarianism" and "legality" is factually wrong: those terms simply don't apply to the GPL.
As for the relationship between morality and legality, you're a bit out of touch with reality. For better or for worse, morality is a guiding principle of a lot of legislation in every Western democracy. You may prefer a totally utilitarian approach to legislation (and I may too, for that matter), but that's not the way real life works. So, even your erroneous objection is baseless.
And the GPL v3 itself, well, Stallman may talk about "morality", but the license itself is about economics: it prevents people from taking free software without giving back to the community. And in order to achieve that, it contains a number of pragmatic updates to the GPL v2. To me, the fact that the Linux kernel does not enjoy the additional legal protection of the GPL v3 constitutes a significant legal risk. And that's not religion, that's business.
-- Joren
GPL version 2 had no restrictions on what hardware was required upon which to run the software.
Neither does GPL v3. You can run it on your patented, stolen hardware all you like.
Where the GPL v3 imposes conditions is when you distribute hardware with GPL v3 software, or when you offer services based on GPL v3 software. Those conditions are quite analogous to the GPL v2: when you do so, you must ensure that your users retain the ability to get the source code and modify it.
Forcing people, corporations, or whomever to use freely available code in a certain way is contradictory to freedom.
People can use GPL v3 code in any way they like; the GPL v3 simply requires them to extend the same rights to their users of the software.
Sure, the GPL is viral. I don't think anyone really denies that.
The GPL isn't "viral"; it doesn't "infect" code or spread. All it does is ensure that derivative works of the software fall under the same license as the software itself. That's the same scope most commercial licenses have: they tell you what you can and cannot do with derivative works. The difference is that the GPL lets you do more with derivative works than, say, Windows or OS X.
What does that fact do to your theory?
Not to mention, as has already been pointed out, if software must run on voting machines, the question of who is receiving the software is the key. Unless we are talking about some crazy who wants to send citizens voting applets over the internet, receiving the code is not part of the process of voting on such a machine.
9-15 June
16-20 June
That's the meat of it, although the thread continues until it's just one FSFer talking to himself on 1 July.
I used to believe in the reputation that Linus was short tempered (and maybe he is), but you really need to read the whole thread to see what sort of dumbasses he has to put up with.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
...that they used the phrase "Linux creator" in the title. The whole thread would've been lost on me if they hadn't, because I'd have never recognized the name "Torvalds".
Aberrant phone behavior can damage an operator's network. The low-level software and hardware that controls phone behavior is locked down to the best of the manufacturer's ability to prevent malicious or buggy software from causing denial of service. DRM-like mechanisms are used to sign software to give it privileges and some privileges are considered so sensitive that they will never be given to the ordinary phone customer who asks for them.
This simply won't change, so GPLv3 software will miss out on a big market. Linux with GPLv3 would miss out on a market that is far, far bigger than the PC one (at least in terms of numbers).
Stallman and his crowd are stuck in a computer-centric point of view and the world is moving on.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Ok, one common theme here being argued is in regard to the DRM issues with v3.
I tend to agree with Linus and others that benefit from the OSS world that all DRM is not bad, and by restricting its use when needed is arrogant and foolish.
DRM actually creates new markets and new products along with new distribution models for existing products.
Sure there are evils of DRM, but they are not the 'norm'. And even in the context of audio where it has been used in an evil fashion, you can also find examples of companies that use it responsibly to create a new market. Look at audible.com, does anyone honestly think that authors would allow audio downloads of their books if it wasn't protected? Audible.com and the market it has created for online books didn't exist before audible.com and now is a credible market place for authors. And yet DRM with Audible is used fairly light and responsibly.
So can we just be so stupid to assume that the GPL is right with v3? Honestly to dictate what I can and cannnot do based on what they think is right is the exact OPPOSITE of what OSS was all about, and what the GPL was supposed to protect and now tries to dictate.
So sure I agree a lot of DRM issues are bad, but there are viable business models that could be created out of good DRM concepts, and by limiting any OSS developers from moving into these models is downright going to hurt OSS and put off more people that it will drive people to OSS.
"And that's the point."
Information wants to be free. Cute. Sure - you can find some entities who will play nice and opt to release BSD code changes. Kudos to them. But that doesn't mean all (or even many) of them will. For example, we know Microsoft uses Open Source code in some products. Their SFU product uses both GPL and BSD code. You can download the GPL code they've used - not the BSD code. And again, shenanigans with phrases and links aside, that's the point. They've taken BSD code and made it "non-free".
What a juicy analogy!
Let's say I hear you make a speech. Afterwards, I tell a friend about it, interspersed with many snide comments. If your speech where licensed under the GPL, I'd have to write down everything you said and make it available.
And if I wrote it in an undecipherable code, I'd be breaking the GPL 3.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
As I understand it, the whole reason RMS got into the GPL thing was because he wanted the freedom/ability to fix a buggy printer driver. What use would that freedom be, if the printer refused to acknowledge the commands because the code wasn't signed ?
What is the point of Tivo releasing their code to the community, if, once modified, that code can no longer be used on the Tivo hardware ?
If they wanted to lock the hardware down to running specific approved code only, then they shouldn't use GPL'd code in the first place. I can understand that they would not want to support modified code, but surely the hardware can report if there have been any third party modifications to the software, and thereby give them a get out clause to avoid responsibilty for damage/malfunction caused by such code.
<Bad Analogy>
Imagine if your car was running badly, so you adjusted the fuel/air mixture to correct a misfire, BUT the car then refused to run because the adjustment wasn't made by an approved technician.
</Bad Analogy>
Can you imagine the outcry if Dell, having sold machines preloaded with linux, used hardware signing to ensure that only their version of linux ran on it, and modifications were impossible ? What if there was a bug in the kernel that affected disk access ? You would have to wait for them to issue a patch before you could use your own hardware. How is that different from proprietary software now ?
<Mr Anderson>I want my rights, I want my phone call !
<Agent Smith>What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak ?
It's foolish to say the FSF equates morality with legality. No one argues more strenuously that many legal licensing schemes are immoral.
What this is actually revealing, is that true freedom issues from the author's right (which is the moral base of copyright). To wit: under the *current* copyright regime, anyone who doesn't like the terms of GPL can simply define their own licensing terms. It is the author's right, as recognized by the legal structure of copyright, that makes that possible and gives it legal force; copyright is a "copy right", not a copy DUTY, and it can be waived by the author.
Take away author's right -- as you do, as Stallman and his ilk would, given the chance, and as GPLv3 does more than ever -- and that option is gone. That's the nasty truth which socialists have been dodging since 1793 -- liberty is an attribute and a social condition of the individual, and consists in his freedom to set his own terms, and to freely accept or reject the terms of others.
No author's right, no copyright, and no GPL. No software at all, for the most part, for while your sort posture loudly about how glorious things would be without copyright, most authors would simply stop writing software, for there would be no point -- and those who do write it, probably won't bother to share it.
Not only would I prefer a passionate dictator to a cynical one, but I'd probably stand a better chance at unseating the former than the latter.
> (IOW, "Hobson's Choice" isn't really a good reason for popularity, y'know?)
Well, you could try to convince people that they're better off not using GPLv3 if you like...
What TiVo restricted was running someone else's code on their HARDWARE.
But once you buy it from them, it is no longer theirs. It becomes yours. And they are still limiting you.
No, it's about freedom for USERS of software. A small difference, yet it's the crux of the argument. "Freedom for software" describes the BSD license better than it does the GPL, and would allow things like TiVo.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
However, it doesn't, because it only applies to a "User Product". "A "User Product" is either (1) a "consumer product", which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling."
Yeah, and as far as I can tell, the only reason they added that clause was to try and placate Linus's whinging about it. It did, for about 5 seconds, but it seems like he's back again. I hope they remove it so that the clause applies to all hardware as before. If Linus doesn't like it, he's just gonna have to be left behind, because it seems quite reasonable to me. The GPL is about the freedom to hack software, not to do what-the-hell-you-want with software. Big difference.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
My point? Global quotes such as yours applied to specific situations make no sense. They can be easily reversed.I agree. If you don't like the GPLv3 don't use software released under it. Such arguments are also difficult because they're not always practical, or the aim to perfect a situation is too high.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
..what about the Belgians?
Microsoft may become a hardware company, in which case they have an incentive to use the opensource software. In such a case they may close the software - but they have little incentive to. Anyone will be allowed to redistribute their software and create compatible hardware.
Not only that, but competing hardware companies that do open their source will be more successful than Microsoft at developing software, because they will get contributions back from the community.
The conclusion is:
Morals, though, are not that arbitrary goal, but an intermediate set of goals, serving as a means for the arbitrary goal.
The arbitrary goal, in this case is one of a few (different people have different such goals):
- Maximizing personal happiness
- Maximizing humans' happiness
- Maximizing all living creatures happiness, with more emphasis on animals closer to humans (Vegeterians hold these morals).
So, the question if something is right/good or wrong/bad, is simply a question of whether it helps achieve the ultimate, arbitrary goal.In the case of RMS, he believes that to maximize humans' happiness, one needs to make sure those humans that use software have those freedoms. By creating a license that helps achieve that goal, he is acting in accordance with these morals.
Thanks; you just made me a new sig!
(However, if you want to use it instead, I'll be happy to put back my old one: "DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'")
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When alleged technical journalists have to resort to lies and distortions you begin to suspect their motives. In a long and involved response to another poster Torvalds actually said:
davecb5620@gmail.com
Yeah. What Linus actually is saying here is that he doesn't want the law to change, but rather that it stays as it is, because he seems to believe that, even tough he doesn't murder people, he shouldn't take from others the "freedom" to murder people. Or rather, he doesn't want people to tell others that they may not murder in their house and they should go elsewhere - after all, the GPL is just a license, not the law. Of course, if he does dislike the GPL so much, one has to ask why he didn't simply use BSD.
Anyway, if laws were not to enforce what is ethically correct, what for would they be? Either they would be doing nothing, or they would be enforcing what is ethically wrong. Of course, one can have differing conceptions as to what is right and what is wrong, but those in any case serve as the basis to what is law, which is not so much about enforcement but rather codifying it to have a standard for society instead of letting have everyone his own, for otherwise people would do things, well, commonly held as being bad. Thus, one rather should address the ethical preconceptions at the foundation than just the fact that laws are individual ethics made into those of the whole society.
In Soviet Russia, government controls corporations.
In Capitalist America, corporations control government.
Unfortunately one of the community successes of the Linux kernel is based on Torvald's refusal of any sophisticated code. If he could not understand it most probably 90% of the Linux kernel community also would not understand it. It would make the learning curve for the community developers too steep.
You get more code running by 99% of unqualified developers than with 1% of the qualified ones, also due to the fact those 99% of them enjoys it as they are still learning it.
After read the context, all I see is just childist EGO fights
The whole law/moral discussion is pathetic (Law is just coded morality). That's the faiblest point of open source, egotical/inmadure behaviour.
What's in a sig?
Linus gets a big boost from calling RMS a fanatic... quite frankly I'm not sure if he does it because he actually believes it or because fomenting dissent within the community makes him more popular.
Honestly, I find the infighting between RMS and Linus to be boring and beneath notice. If Linus wants to continue to expose the Linux kernel to the legal risks caused by the flaws in GPLv2, then that is entirely up to him. I, however, am free to switch to another open source OS, like the upcoming Open Solaris or, indeed, help with one which will be GPLv3, namely... GNU-Hurd.
Linus needs to seriously get a grip and stop believing his own press.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
The restrictions only apply to redistribution of said software with or without modifications. If we allow people to use a firearm, we bestow upon them rights. If we require them to use firearms or purchase them, it is not a right, but a requirement. Requirements on the usage of freedom make something inherent un-free. It really depends on who you are talking about
Your analogy stinks as bad as your understanding of the GPL.
Just abolishing copyright would not be enough. Even without it there is nothing to compel somebody to release source code. Just becomes a trade secret then.
I have a better idea, lets go back in time and retroactively erase all FOSS ideas originally promoted by one person.
Off I go!
OK, I'm back... but what is this "FOSS" we were talking about? Is that anything like BSD? I'm excited though, this year could be the year of BSD on the desktop!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
No I wasn't trolling. I was being 100% honest. I run 3 OS's, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Kubuntu Linux. No matter what GUI I pick to use on Linux it just doesn't match up to the other two. KDE and GNome are both pure crap. The ONLY thing you get from them is "software freedom" but you know that and $0.99 will buy me a hamburger at McDonalds.
The most important thing here is when I was a kid I was interested in technology for the TECHNOLOGY. I wanted the latest and the greatest and you know what? I STILL do. Never has software freedom factored into that. It may have more than a bit to do with the fact that most open source software isn't innovative but is instead merely trying to copy and replicate functionality that already exists in a proprietary form. For example did open source come up with multi-touch? Has it come up with Time Machine? What about iPhoto? Has open source come up things like Expose and the Dock or Fast User Switching? Bleh. If you want software freedom you pick open source. If you want new and exciting features as soon as they come out then you go proprietary.
We all only have a limited amount of time on this earth and I don't want to spend it waiting years for open source equivalents to catch up to whats already available in the proprietary world. I work and expect to be paid so I don't have a problem with programmers who expect to be paid so I don't have the religious hatred of proprietary software that RMS and folks who follow him have. In return for my money I get the new stuff NOW. You on the other hand have to wait.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
You actually made a good point, but I don't understand why you did it AC. OpenSolaris is a great kernal, with amazing technologies, cleaner code, and better debugging support, very stable ABI interface. The only big hole right now in its adoption is the lesser number of device drivers.
That is changing too with folks like OSS coming forward and providing their drivers into OpenSolaris.
Also, I don't understand why you're waiting for Solaris to go gplv3. CDDL is basically GPL-the viral clause.
Holding back participating, due to the this viral clause, has never made sense to me.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Of course, this is completely overlooking that Microsoft has had a UNIX license for decades because of Xenix. If Wikipedia is correct, Miscrosoft did borrow code from BSD for Xenix. Of course, that statement isn't sourced...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
in the name of freedom, while you're at the same time trying to argue that I don't have the 'freedom' to make my own choice" are "hypocritical."
Had to read the whole article to see how Linus is calling the FSF hypocrites. Obviously the FSF is more concerned about the freedom of the end users than the freedom of the Developers. I could just as easily call Linus a hypocrite, b/c if he was so concerned about freedom he wouldn't be using GPL but would instead be using BSD. His comment about equating morality with legality is also rather rediculous... where does he think all laws come from? They're not randomly generated. The same guiding forces that create one's morals/ethics are then used to create laws. The laws of a society tend to be an amalgam of the ethics/morals of those in charge. How else could it be?
"One major danger that GPLv3 will block is tivoization. Tivoization means computers (called "appliances") contain GPL-covered software that you can't change, because the appliance shuts down if it detects modified software. The usual motive for tivoization is that the software has features the manufacturer thinks lots of people won't like. The manufacturers of these computers take advantage of the freedom that free software provides, but they don't let you do likewise."
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html
The mission of the FSF is to enrich the way users interact with the software they use via the guarantee of "Four" principle Freedoms that not only underpin but inspire a global community of F/OSS software developers and users, a large proportion of whom would never have chosen to participate or contribute without this guarantee. Tivo found a clever way to bypass Freedom One and thus exploit this community via a clever application of DRM, saving itself millions of dollars in proprietary software development & licensing costs in the process. Revising the GPL to prevent further such abuses of this community is therefore not only a natural response but an obligation of the FSF as understood by its constituency.
Linus may be brilliant but he simply misunderstands this, and he would be delusional to think his operating system could have achieved the momentum it has under any subset of these four freedoms.
BSD-type licenses would have never created the fertile ground where Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva and Canonical now thrive.
If you can remember the balkanization of the Unix OS, it's quite obvious each BSD vendor would have made their modifications and kept them for themselves, creating a bunch of increasingly incompatible operating systems and kernels not unlike what existed before the GPL-powered Linux ecosystem. The GPL is what ties them together and what makes egoistical corporations cooperate in a civilized fashion.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
"No one is switching to Solaris, because Solaris is dying, if not dead already. The only reason why Sun has opened it up is because they're desperate. Their expensive hardware has been replaced with commodity components, and their expensive OS has been replaced with one that costs nothing to aquire, Linux"
;-)
I am not sure how you got that impression, but Solaris is still a very interesting choice in operating systems. ZFS is amazing and it handles heavy loads much, much better than Linux does. And, in case you haven't noticed, Sun sells both SPARC and x86 systems these days and the Niagara-based servers are incredibly effective in several throughput scenarios.
"You conclusion doesn't follow, since both BSD and GPL provide efficiency by leveraging the Bazaar as ESR called it."
Right. That's why there is so much going on in BSD-based systems and so little going around GPL-based ones. BSD creates a perverse incentive for corporations to take someone's code and run (Microsoft, remember?) while GPL does not allow that. Don't get confused about how good the hearts of Red Hat and Novell are - they are not. They are only kept honest _because_ of GPL.
"Yeah, and RMS writes 1500 LOCs a day."
I gather that, as a true LISP hacker, RMS can achieve much more per LOC than Linus ever will.
"Isn't that all RMS does? And even more to the point, what you're doing?"
Personal attacks won't bring us a healthy discussion.
"Now run along and file your bug report against the Linux kernel for using bitkeeper"
They run Git now. Oh... And, BTW, Git is GPL.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Every legal system enforces ideas of morality. Why is murder wrong? Why do countries restrict hate speech? Why can't you have sex with your sister? These are all moral concepts enforced through legality.
You're right, but these examples actually refer to moral consensus, a set of moral principles shared by majority. What Linus referred to was moral principles of the individual, enforced to the majority in the form of a law by that same powerful individual.
Maybe Linus is having a bad day. And what exactly does he mean by:
"I think it is okay to control people's hardware, I do it myself"Does Linus sell have a sideline selling PCs? And he uses some DRM to stop users modifying the software he supplies? What?
The article is bad for not referring to the actual Linus' post on LKML. In that post Linus was talking about putting Linux on his kids computers and prohibiting them (the kids, a.k.a users) to update the software on their own. He says that, as a legal guardian of his kids, he has the right to do so, and that he effectively controls the hardware.
The FSF may be hypocritical, but that gives them more intellectual credit than they're due. They've mentally walled off software as an island of communism. That's very nice and pretty and all, but the hive mentality cannot succeed surrounded by the world of tech. The world of tech is antithetical to the hive utopia. Tech is a young free market like gold-mining in the 1800s and oil wildcatting in the 1900s. As long as the FSF's vision is nice and pretty and makes everybody want to hold hands and sing Kumbaya around the campfire, it will be tolerated. As they start costing real businesses significant amounts of money, they will become more and more marginalized. If they accept marginalization well enough, they may not be crushed like a bug.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
I seriously thought about posting the name, but I decided against it. I realized that after 15 years I still was carrying a grudge, and that's not good. Second, I don't believe the person is working on the Hurd any longer. But if you really want to know, it's not hard to find out. The person in question was rather infamous for being abrupt with people. I think it's past time for me to let it go and to just assume that the person had poor people skills.
If you ask me, that is complete bullshit. In the specific case, Linus is not conveying software to his children. Not even in a TiVo way: the computer end up being his. He can take it away if the kids don't want to do homework, or brush teeth. It ends up being private use, wich GPLv3 permits him to do whatever he wants.
Reading that makes me feel that either he doesn't understand the license or is using subtle falacies to pursuit an agenda(hello mister obvious).
When people make statements that are obviously wrong but stated politely, must we still be polite in return? Okay, I'll try.
First, you are wrong when you state that one could take Tivo's code, modify it, and use the modified software on one's own hardware. When one purchases a Tivo DVR, that device now belongs to the purchaser, not to the seller, and not to the manufacturer. The DRM hardware prevents the new owner from running his choice of operating systems and applications on his own Tivo DVR device. Thus your first statement is obviously and flatly false.
Now if Tivo were only leasing out their devices, the way the cable and satellite companies are currently doing, that would be a different story. In that case, the hardware would continue to be owned by the vendor, and only the vendor would be entitled to hack their devices. But Tivo is selling devices to the public, and the purchase should convey full rights to the new owner.
Second, you are wrong when you state that software licensed under the GPL3 could not be used in voting machines. Since the election boards are not selling voting machines to individual voters, and since a voter does not own the voting machines in question (other than in the 'we the people' kind of way), the voters would not have the right to modify the software on the machines, nor would they be entitled to receive any modified source code or crypto keys needed to enable it. The local election board, or the state institution responsible for acquiring and maintaining the voting machines, would be the entity entitled to source code, crypto keys, and any other items necessary to make it possible to install and run modified software on the voting machines that they own. These rights would not convey to every Tom, Dick, and Harriet that walks in off the street to cast their ballot.
So, as I said before, Wrong and Wrong. But thanks for trying!
Cheers!
P.S. And what's up with the '+5 Insightful' rating for the parent? Sheesh.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
Yeah, good help us that linux actually has support for modern GPUs.
I guess the world would be a better way if great mufti RMS would outlaw IP other than GPL and you could use your geforce only on windows and OSX.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I totally share your opinion of richard stallman.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
There are rumors that Steve Jobs is is possession of a reality distortion device. And I think you got an overdose.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
That cracks me up. Let's try again in compsci terms: "Linus uses a greedy algorithm; RMS does not". Linus's method is fine when the best solution right now turns out to be OK in the long run, but produces decidedly suboptimal results when it ends up heading down a blind alley.
For example, BitKeeper. Yes, people will argue that by using BitKeeper for a little while, kernel development advanced more than it would have otherwise. Alternatively, you could equally argue that it prevented a lot of people from getting involved who otherwise might have, and since its replacement ("git") was originally written in four days, it seems that it was a wholly unnecessary departure.
Linus is a sharp guy, and his decisions usually make since - at least for the very near short term. In the long haul, though, I'd go with RMS every time. He simply has a much better track record at making accurate distant predictions. In my opinion, that makes RMS the more pragmatic of the two.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As a coder, I much prefer the share-alike concept behind the GPL to the give-away concept behind BSD. Apparently so do a lot of other people.
But if TiVo wants to use BSD code instead of GPL code, they are free to make that choice.
Its not just Apple. Oracle, Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Lotus, Novell.....etc have all come up with things that the open source world has only been able to copy. Replication not innovation is the modus operandi for Free Software.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I have to completely side with Linus, and furthermore I think we should start referring to the party leader that made GPLv3 as Richard Stalin.
Maybe ian murdock left at just the right time? All the gnu tools ect and "linux" apps running
on suns kernel base that would be gplv3. And maybe seeing debian move away from the linux kernel too to use suns gplv3 kernel instead. (if debain goes so does ubuntu????) Hey then we will have a zfs:)
Great, I'm very happy for you, and your purpose for hanging around on Slashdot trolling threads about one Free software license vs another is what, exactly?
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Yeah, that's like saying "If Microsoft locks down Vista too much, no problem, we can move to Linux, just as we moved from Win2k to WinXP."
It may be a noble goal (and maybe not), but think about the sheer magnitude of what you're suggesting. Xorg was a fork of XFree, and note that none of the independent X projects (other than XFree) have ever managed to produce an X server that anyone uses. Even Apple's X11, I believe, uses XFree code.
OpenSolaris, if it goes GPLv3, may not use any GPLv2 code which has the clause Linux's GPLv2 does (this version and no later). This means that every single driver that has ever been written for Linux must be rewritten, from scratch, for OpenSolaris. That's a fucking HUGE project, even if you got every single Linux kernel developer to cooperate -- and I'm guessing at least 90% of them would tell you to fuck off, and go back to hacking on Linux.
It'd probably be far easier (again, if you can get enough people to cooperate) to simply send a mass-request to LKML for permission to release everyone's source as GPLv3, and slice out and rewrite only the parts for which you can't contact the original author, or the original author says "no". But the amount of time it would take to do that probably explains how little Linus understands GPLv3 -- he probably never really bothers, given that it just ain't gonna happen for Linux, no matter how good it is.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That is an excellent point. That also means that companies like Tivo can use GPLv3 software by simply changing their business model from *selling* DVRs to *renting* them. I have always suggested this for all kinds of DRM just for the sake of basic honesty. You can't actually "buy" DRMed media or hardware, since you never actually have control of it. You are only paying for the privilege of using it in the ways prescribed by the true owner. With any other type of product, this would be called a rental, not a sale.
So I think I disagree with posters ranting about how "anti-corporate" GLP3 is. It just forces companies to tell the truth about their product - not to stop making it. There will always be a place for locked hardware. Voting machines and movie projectors at the theater do not allow you to modify them - but no one pretends you can buy them in the first place. You pay (cash or taxes) for the experience. "Buying" a HDVD player is like renting a low end projector for restricted use in your home, since it is controlled by the manufacturer. They shouldn't be allowed to call it a sale.
Renting Tivos and HDVD players could also give the manufacturer additional legal protection. (IANAL.) With purchased media, defeating DRM for personal backups or format shifting is arguably fair use (as much as RIAA is working to change that). That is *not* the case for rented media or equipment. Any attempt to bypass the technical restrictions is clearly a breach of contract.
To bring enlightenment to the unwashed masses.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I agree, and I've written a sig which, if people would read and understand, might end this whole debate right here.
I don't restrict your freedom to do whatever you want, so long as it's not with my code.
You want my code? You play by my rules.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Harvard, actually, not "MIT-trained".
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Why do you think the GPLv2-licensed kernel puts ANY RESTRICTIONS on GPLv3 licensed applications? There's no relationship between them.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"Inheritive" is a better term for GPL-class licenses. After all, everybody would like an inheritance, wouldn't they?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Linus doesn't even write code anymore.
You're correct. Git is the product of the Morris worm which, contrary to popular opinion, was never completely shut down. It has grown along with the Internet, and, being 19 years old now, has just finished its freshman year at MIT.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
If Linus really believes that it's okay to take Linux kernel code and lock it down with DRM so that recipients, even with source, are unable to install their bug fixes or enhancements, then he should have used the BSD license from the start. To release code under GPL v2, and then whine about GPL v3, which has the same intent but merely closes a couple of loopholes and makes a few technical improvements, is certainly hypocritical.
Virus may have negative connotation, but it also has a definition that the GPL fits fairly well.
If somebody created a biological virus that immunized people against AIDS by infecting skin cells, reproducing, entering the bloodstream and spreadying throughout the body until it reached the lymph nodes and other other relevant areas, then modifying the immune system to make it immune, would it be any less of a virus? Sure, people with this would be encouraged to spread it, it would be a good thing, but it still meets the definition of a virus. The GPL (but not the LGPL) behaves very much like this.
In fact, the difference between GPL and LGPL is the viral clause. LGPL code must remain free and be distributed in source form with anything that contains it, but it can be comiled into proprietary modules. GPL code CANNOT! If I wrote a faster or safer or whatever version of printf and licensed it under the GPL, any source code using that method would need to be entirely licensed under the GPL! Insert one handy method, and it affects everything. Now imagine what it's like for things like LAME, one fo the best MP3 encoders available... and widely used even outside the free software world, because it is LGPL code and people don't need to make their entire ripping program or whatever open source just to use a really good free encoder.
Please explain to me how you think the GPL is not viral? You're free to use an alternate term if you like, provided it is at least as accurate in terms of definition.
I have no objection to the GPL (v2, I'm a bit less comfortable about v3) and in fact use it myself, but I'm thinking of switching to the LGPL because, while I would like more people to open their source code, as long as people keep MY code open and contribute back any and all changes they make to it, I don't really feel I should restrict what they do with the rest of their code even if it uses something I wrote.
(Mind you, AFAIK nobody is using any of my code in anything like that anyhow, but that could change.)
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You said it yourself: the anti-TiVo-ization clause is there for consumers. However, the voters aren't the consumers of a voting machine; the users, but not the buyers. The buyers are the government entites that set up and oversee voting. Governments are run by politicians, the very people who have the most desire to control the outcome of elections. So, under GPLv3, some official would receive the voting machines, including all of the (carefully examined for fairness and security) source code, and the ability to install their own patches to the code on the machine and have it run. Do you honestly not see why this is a problem? Heck they woudln't even be in violation of the GPL for doing it in secret and vnever releasing the patches, so long as they only did it to the machines they bought for themselves (as you pointed out, the voters never even temporarily own the machines, so it's not redistribution).
I personally think voting machines are actually a pretty good idea - so long as they ship with a hard-coded and completely UN-patchable software verifier. They should even release the code for the verifier, to make sure it is fair and secure - where secure means that there is NO way to get unauthorized modifications to the code to run on the machine. Obviously, this flies in the face of the GPLv3. Sometimes, trusted computing is a good thing.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
How else does one describe a position opposed to theft and getting ripped off? In some ways, the GPLv3 looks to me like a good riposte for the whole DRM ugliness -- essentially, companies using DRM and the DMCA are trying to dictate what we can do with their product after we buy it, and the GPLv3 is doing the same thing back to the companies, only they don't have to lay down any money to use GPL software.
"You're seriously trying to tell me I can't do what I want with my own property that I already bought from you? Fine then, I'll dictate what you can't do with the code you got from me. Tit for tat."
Decry it as "moral" all you like, but from where I sit, it sure looks like the FSF folks are going to bat to try to make sure this game is at least halfway fair, in the midst of blatant and avowed skullduggery by the corporate team. Which side are you rooting for?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
No worries, I thought for a while that I had plagiarized your sig unconsciously. Seems apt though.
I don't understand what you are talking about. Maybe you've never had to take a test requiring you to understand the implied right to privacy in the US Constitution. It isn't simple, and unless you're American (or just wish you were) I wouldn't assume you know it. Linus Torvalds isn't American, and by corrolary, I tend to assume he doesn't either. Actually his rant against the particular GPL3 feature is empirical evidence that he doesn't understand how that works. I may be wrong, but as a rule of thumb people who haven't studied an issue shouldn't be regarded as an expert opinion on the issue. Linus can make the best framework for hardware drivers, but he knows little about guaranteeing privacy. I wouldn't expect you to know why Linus Torvalds would be motivated to rant thus, but GPL3 threatens his world by threatening to take forward versions of GCC. Can you compile Linux on commerical compilers? Yes. Does Linus want to be under their (say Intel's for example) thumb? No. What will he do? Probably like he did with his source code management foible: end up founding yet another project that Linux kernel development requires. GCC is harder than Linux. He doesn't want to have to do the work.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Gandhi, Mandela or Aung San Su Yi did not become an imperialist, a racist supremacist or genocidial maniac respectively.
Neither is Stallman & Co becoming an unethical monopoly.
What really irks me is that the EFF are not putting a gun in anybody's head, but there are people *still* spreading this nonsense that somehow people are forced into their licensing regime.
It is tremendously easy folks, they just have to use legalese so the principles have to stand in a court of law if needed, but if you do not want to be inconvenienced by the GPL simply create your product in your own, write a license that you like, and stop whining about not being able to use the work of other people as you see fit.
Dead easy, but the skulls of some people seem to be of a thickness that defies comprehension.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But, RMS is a fanatic.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Which is why Apple used a BSD operating system for OSX (or whatever is called) and MS used BSD licensed stuff to build ther TCP/IP stack (because they were so out of hack about the Internet that they did not have time to design their own implementation).
And so on and so forth.
You talk about innovation, but clearly you only care about bells and whistles, when it comes to basic infrastructure things like Perl, Python and basic services like DNS, and sendmail have their roots firmly in the Open side of things.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Morality and religion are not the same thing.
You can be a moral person without the need to support any religion.
Your straw man (please point us out the citation where we can see Stallman declaring himself a moral or religious leader) is quite badly made that it inspires pity on his maker frankly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Welcome to the XXIst century, glad to see you are rediscovering Philosophy and Ethics.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That you fail completely to see why abortion is right.
Or even infaticide (which abortion isn't by the way)>
Without the context we can't possibly know if such actions are moral or not. You need a moral framework or context in order to decide if an action is moral or not.
The moral framework you use may be based on religion, but it may be based in any social conventions you care to mention (in ancient societies that could not feed all the members of a tribe, perhaps infaticide guaranteed the survival of most members of the tribe since the infant was not viable anyway. Harsh? Yes. Moral? In such a context, maybe).
It is moral absolutists with Ayatollic views of the world that make a mess of what a moral concept is (because the artificial religious construct is that is something goes against the organized religion, it must be amoral, which any person with little tiny bit of logic can see how flawed a concept this is, given the thusends of different religions there are).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Even their own.
The way Hitler explained why the Aryan nation had to ally itself with Japan is so contrived that any person not devoided of any basic sense of logic know that they were making all up.
Their "moral" rules were demonstrably false (like attributing all the problems of Germany to the Jews), they imposed their "morals" by fear and intimidation, not by any logical arguing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
To bend over and ask for more?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Any programmer that does not understand the political consequences of writing software nowadays should not be writing a single line of code.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
he clearly got all entangled there, but kind of made the point: with BSD licensing we get nothing back.
That is all great and good, but such licensing simply is not conducive to development that benefits all the parties involved.
With BSD you work, you give for free and get nothing. If you are OK with that all the power to you, but there are people out there that want something in return. The GPL provides exactly that.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What people are talking about is how some perceive the FSF as pushing a set of moral values by means of the legal framework that sustains copyright.
We are not talking about whose person or group is more "moral" or "nicer", after all Linux and the Hurd are GPLed software.
What you are describing is how different groups of people behaving differently. That is very interesting for sure, but has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What the GPL 3 is trying to address ia a purely technical issue.
The day provisions of the kind you are mentioning find their way on the GPl then we know it would be dead and new arrangemtns would need to be made.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
News at 11.
Sir, you have no idea what you are talking about.
There are many applications in many different industries for which Linux does not scale (unless you are Google and have to build a grid OS from scratch to use those "cheap" Linux boxes), with Solaris your machines grow with your solution with little or no changes whatsoever. With Linux that is an impossibility in many cases.
Linux is great, is the best thing that has happened to the computer industry in the last 10 years, but from that it does not follow that it is the only good technology out there.
Solaris 10 is technologically superior in many different levels, and unlike previously, now Sun is backing the OS to run on x386 architecture (which they did not do when Linux was starting. Big mistake but that seems to have been corrected). Sun will go as far as to support their boxes running Linux if so you wish, but in many situations a Sparc machines with SOlaris is he right tool for the job
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But the matter of fact is that Stallman has done the sane thing and protected the software with the help of lawyers, so his opinions are there for all to see in black and white and sanctioned by a lawyers.
Linus built on top of that legal basis and in many occasions has declared he does not care at all about the matters of freedom. I really fail to see how somebody uninformed about the legal implications of writing software would be a suitable leader in matters of freedom and copyright.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Tivo benefits from software they did not write in its entirety, they release it and then block software with changes from running. So in other words they screw the end user by means of hardware contraptions. They are curtailing end user's freedoms.
It is perfectly legitimate t force them to play fair or to ask them to write their own stuff frankly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Once you modify stuff in the public domain you acquire rights over the modified product.
So clearly public domain releases are completely unsuitable if you want to preserve full access to new modifications of new contributors.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
People seem to be wary of somebody with principles and willing to achieve them by all practical means at his disposal.
That is not how a nutjob behaves, Stallman is coherent and consistent. You may not agree with his politics, but that does not make him nut job.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Because people are falling over themselves to work interminable hours, give their work for free, just for somebody else to reap the benefits and not giving anything back in exchange.
I may be willing to be charitable with a poor sod, but with corporations and conglomerates? Well, I am not that charitable. Or stupid.
BSDs ar a micro minority for a reason: contributors know they would not benefit in anyway by releasing their code with this license. GPL is the perfect license in a capitalist society, where greed is the best lubricant to facilitate progress.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Give us some examples of those wonderful DRM induced markets please.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Now tell us, which choercive tool is Stallman using to force you to accept FSF's licensing scheme when you write your own software?
If you are talking about other people's software, there is nothing to discuss really, it is other people's software and they can do as they wish with it.
But about yours, how are you being forced to to anything at all?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So is Linus... also, simply because RMS is a fanatic, that doesn't make him wrong. ;)
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
But trying to force his ideological views on other through the use of what is supposed to be a license for software freedom does make him wrong.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
What most people forget is that Free Software is a balance between the rights of the creator and the user. Anything that disturbs that balance needs to be dealt with. Both patents and DRM represent things that disturb the rights of the users in favor of the creators.
RMS is not trying to force his personal beliefs on people. You don't have to change to the GPLv3, no one does. Linus, on the other hand, is coming out and engaging in name calling. I've seen more and more of this from Linus over the past few years. I don't see him as any better than RMS, in fact, I see him as worse. To me he seems like the kind of person who, if you don't agree with him, he'll freely and publically call you names. That doesn't seem to me to be the approach of an intelligent or reasonable person. It seems to be to be the approach of someone who's ego has gotten a little too big for his own good. Not one of the reasons Linus has yet given for his dislike of the GPLv3 has made a great deal of sense from my point of view. Linus seems unable or, possibly, unwilling to engage in a debate about this pertaining to the facts of the matter. Instead he would rather distract people from the real issues by calling RMS a fanatic and calling anyone that adopts the GPLv3 hippocrites.
I don't live my life to please others. My project and many others are in the process of adopting the GPLv3. If Linus thinks I'm a hippocrite or that others are, because of it... then so be it. I think his rationale is completely wrong.
He states that the GPLv3 will make it difficult for business' to use GPL'd software. This is, in fact, correct. The GPLv3 will make it more difficult for companies to restrict the rights of their users (people like you and me). The GPL was meant to protect against this type of thing. As the world evolved, the GPLv2 became inadequate due to the simple fact that many of the technologies and problems which exist now did not exist when it was drafted. It therefore, has legal holes it in nowadays that one could drive a truck through. The GPLv3 was meant to address the shortcomings and, in some cases, the lack of clarity of the GPLv2. It protects the users better and is clearer on what is and is not distribution.
If Linus wants to play name calling games, that's just fine. If, however, he wants to actually discuss the facts, he and the rest of his sycophantic followers should engage the FSF in a debate.. or, at least, they should have been more of a part of the drafting of the GPLv3 than they were... certainly... if you don't put your 2 cents into something, especially when you're invited to do so (GPLv3 comments were open to the public and, indeed, Eben Moglen publically asked the Linux contributors to participate)... then, in my opinion, you have no cause to complain when the process is finish.
Linus and his ilk had their chance to say something and they remained silent. Why should they be listened to now?
Sincerely, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep