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Tech Writers Spreading FUD About GPLv3
Tookis writes "Tech writers are spreading FUD about GPLv3 because they fear its take up will slow the adoption of Linux, according to this open source writer. "A large number of tech writers — I wouldn't call them journalists and sully my own profession — are fearful that the license will slow adoption of Linux in the workplace. And that would lead to a lessening of their own importance and influence."" So by posting this, am I spreading fud about spreading fud? I think I broke my brain.
Journalism is well beyond being unsullied these days.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Remember, if you are not for GPLv3 then you are for the terrorists, or something...
This is a rumor, not a story. Who are these journalists, and why is it FUD if they opine that GPLv3 is a bad idea?
A large number of tech writers -- I wouldn't call them journalists and sully my own profession
But sullying mine isn't a problem, huh? Technical writer == someone who writes technical documentation, e.g. product manuals. Technical writer != FUD-spreading blogger.
--
hcdejong
(technical writer)
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/ 2007/07/open_source_is_1.html
1 92403106
;-)
In support of TFA: the above Iweek story really takes the cake for "most clueless" author on the subject of the GPL. One can take it as evidence that the GPL3 has become such a buzzword in the community that tech writers feel forced to comment even before they have even the slightest clue what the fuss is all about.
PJ over at groklaw politely stomped the author into the ground as one can see here:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070713
Whle always a fan, I admire her tact here: she did it a lot less painfully than some in comments section of the original article
You, sir, submitter of this "story" are an idiot.
You should have said "tech pundits", not "tech writers". There is an entire profession known as "Technical Writing", sometimes referred to as "tech writing", which has NOTHING to do with self-proclaimed journalists who write about the technical industry.
Get it straight, please. The title of your story shows that you are almost as ignorant as they are.
Anyone who's installed Feisty Fawn side by side with Vista will tell you quickly, that if FOSS is going anywhere, and Ubuntu and Linux in particular, it's on MORE hard drives than less. I've had less problems finding drivers and getting things up and running in Ubuntu on several machines now, and I've been a die hard Windows user for the last decade.
FUD isn't going to do anything when FOSS is rapidly becoming the easier, cheaper, faster, and better choice for John Q. Public.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Seriously?
When you have one of the most influential people in Open Source refuse to accept the license you have written in favour of an incompatible prior version, you have already automatically created a division between idealists and pragmatists, with both technically working on the same codebase.
When your developers can't even decide between them how they want their code used, I can't see any situation where it could help.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
FUD isn't slang for something you don't agree with. The article in question might be awful but the story on /. is even worse. It sounds like it was written by a 12 year old involved in a schoolyard scuffle. Any coherent counter argument would have been better than sounding like a goddamned whiny child. If you fight legitimately bad arguments so stupidly it makes your point of view, no matter how valid, sound childish. The person who submitted this story has done GPLv3 no favours.
For goodness sake people. Troll does not mean "I don't agree with him". "Flamebait" is only flamebait if it's written for no other reason than to upset people. FUD is only FUD if it was intended to spread unfounded Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This article decries critics of GPLv3, dismissing their rants as FUD. The author, however, gives no examples of these critics and offers no evidence for why he considers them to be wrong, nor any ideas of why they would choose to spread their FUD. Besides the terrible writing, formatting and grammar of this article it is needlessly split into two pages, annoyingly prompting you to log in if you want to read the second page. Oddly enough though they will provide you with the full text of the article if you click on the links to print it or view it as a PDF (which, by the way, has even worse formatting than the web formatting).
The Firefox article, while an interesting topic, was really just a regurgitation of a study done by another site rewritten so that it was less informative and more difficult to read. Besides that, it included several obvious typos such as the following:Really, there are countries where IE has not yet reached 20% market share? Are you sure you don't mean Firefox?Ah yes, the beautiful country of Australasia, I hope I can visit it someday!
Not trolling here, just being half serious/half funny--
"...they fear its take up will slow the adoption of Linux..."
I started going to LUG meetings over nine years ago. As much I love Linux, I don't think its rate of adoption could go much slower than it already is.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
In the case of your software (i.e. a Sudoku for mobile phones), the GPLv3 guarantees the user the four freedoms (use, modify, distribute, improve), making it impossible to circumvent the GPLv2 with hardware devices. What could happen in your specific case is that a telco takes your code and starts offering it as for-pay download to their user's mobile phones—only that users cannot share it because there is some sort of hardware lock in place.
If you do not like the GPLv3, chances are you never liked the GPLv2 either. The GPLv3 is not a revolution of the GPL concept, it is just exactly the same ideas adapted to a world where it has become possible to circumvent version 2 by methods unforeseen when it was written. If you are alright with people taking your code and not contributing back, by all means use BSD instead.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Now, IANAL, and there's probably something really basic I'm missing that would prevent this hack from working, but I'll throw it out there as food for thought:
Some universities have a lot of patents and some of them offer free mirrors for things like kernel.org and sourceforge.net projects. It may be that the act of offering a mirror is protected under the DMCA safe harbor, but if copyright license law is as powerful as some GPLv3 proponents claim, it's not even clear that the DMCA safe harbor would override section 10 of the GPL. In any case, some mirrors work by pulling code rather than letting code be pushed, so that seems like an affirmative act of copying the software and then creating and giving copies to the general public, so an entity operating a mirror might be "conveying" under the GPL.
So, for example, if MIT has a patent I want to use, maybe all I have to do is get committer rights to some relevant project, code up something which infringes the patent, get the patch accepted (never mentioning the patent, of course), and it gets distributed to all the mirrors, including MIT's.
I download it from MIT, and voila! I have a license to use that patent inside that program (and apparently inside any GPLed derivatives I make of that program. Being the proprietary sort of guy I am, I wrap the GPL project's code with another completely proprietary program which controls it and lets the GPLed code do the patented dirty work.
I don't know whether this would work or not, but I'm starting to understand why companies are now marketing "open source" license scrubbers.
The FSF is certainly free to do this with the GPL. But while the consequences of just distributing source under v2 might have been intended to convey patents in this same way, a lot of people didn't realize that because the wording there is not as clear, and the remedies don't appear to be as onerous. V3 section 10 seems to make it very clear that if you convey code which implements a patented invention, you cannot sue anybody over using that invention in that code, and that "convey" would cover the act of proactively operating a mirror site.
This should give pause to a lot of people, not just Microsoft. Right now, "everybody knows" that GPL2 is a safe license, in the same category as BSD, well away from the category of any proprietary license, for being able to freely redistribute source code.
Those who assume the same about GPLv3 do so at their own peril, perhaps to their own detriment. It appears that, for an entity with a valuable patent, inadvertently distributing one copy of GPLv3 software could easily be much more costly than inadvertently distributing a few hundred copies of a Microsoft product.
The way universities work, it is unlikely that the legal counsel stays on top of things like kernel.org mirrors, but it seems that anybody with a patent portfolio who is running a free software mirror of any type ought to take a serious look at their policies and at the terms of GPLv3.
Perhaps one valid component of licensing strategy would be to repudiate GPL v3 (and any similar licenses which purport to appropriate your own patents), just like Microsoft has done. That would basically be a public announcement that, if anybody catches you distributing GPL v3 code, please let you know right away because it is not your intention to ever do so and you will stop distributing immediately, and if anybody thinks they're getting one of your patents out of the deal, you plan on fighting it every inch of the way.
When you have one of the most influential people in Open Source refuse to accept the license
/. story: it was utterly wrong and a FUD attempt by InformationWeek. They basically repeated a months-old quote by Linus about an earlier draft as if it was new and still relevant.
In case you mean this recent
Linus is in fact pretty ok with how GPLv3 turned out.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Interesting that you refer to a (cell)phone that a particular user paid for (either cash outright, or by agreeing to a long-term contract for service with a hefty termination fee) as 'their' (referring to the phone company) phone.
That is the whole point of it, the phone, once paid for, belongs to the user, not the phone company. Why shouldnt the user of a phone, which has GPL3 software running on it, have a right to modify that software, and use the modified copy on the same device?
In any case, regardless of your answer to that question, thats the main thing GPL3 does in that respect - it says that the right to modify software includes the right to run the modified software on any device that it was originally distributed on. And that is (one of) the rights that an author choosing to distribute their work under GPL3 wants their users to have. If you, as a software author, dont want to guarantee your users that right, then so be it.
I believe Linus just does not like the part about hardware in the license. He could always take the GPL 3 license and take that part out or whatever he wants to do, but the patent issue worries me for the Linux project. What if people start putting patented code into the kernel and launch a massive legal assault?
My projects are web applications so I decided to switch them over to GPL3 because of better internationalization in the license. I did not want someone from another country nit-picking the GPL2 license for mis-understood translations of the document in a foreign courtroom so I switched the license.
I understand both Linus's and the FSF point of view on controlling the hardware but since that part of the license doesn't effect my projects at all I do not see the point of letting a better worded license go to waste!
I think a lot of projects don't need to care about this hardware issue and hardware companies could always ask the copyright holder for permission anyway. I see a few problems with Linus's thinking.
1) Is it so hard for Motorola for example to just send an email off to the copyright holder.. "Hey mind if you put your stuff in our phone and not let anyone run the modifications? Could you send us that in writing? Thanks!"
2) How do we know these companies (example Motorola) are contributing back what they are putting into their linux smart phone? What is to stop them from giving out the pretend source code before they made modifications and then keeping the real code in house?
If it can happen it will happen and they can just claim thats stuff they wrote that runs on top no one will know any differently.
I don't really agree with anyones point of view on the hardware issue but you have to admit that there are unanswered questions with regard to Linus's thoughts on the matter.
I know many people at many tech shops, and a shocking lot of companies have come out and said to their programmers or other in-house IT staff, that GPLv3 code can not be used for any project of any kind. Why? Because the GPLv3 is restrictive enough that it conflicts with other agreements these companies already have and cannot or will not break. It's simpler for a company to simply ban the stuff outright than it is to analyse the license ramifications on every single little project.
The end result is that GPLv3 code will, eventually, stagnate. Moving code to GPLv3 basically ensures that nobody will use it other than hobbyists. And while that's fine, it may not be what you want to happen. It's almost certainly not the intention of the GPLv3... or maybe it is. With the FSS being so f-ed up in the head lately, who can tell?
Regardless, it's not FUD... It's actually the license. It's unusable as it stands by a great many people, and the end result is that they will find other, less-restrictive, code to use instead.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.