FSF Compliance Lab Addresses GPLv3 Questions

GeekyBodhi writes "Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at FSF's Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab held a public question and answer session in an IRC meeting last night. At the meeting Smith addressed questions regarding various sections of GPLv3 (Linux.com shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) including Section 7 (additional rights), and Section 11 (patents and patent protection), and explained how the incompatibility between GPLv2 and GPLv3 doesn't rule out any interaction between differently licensed programs."

Comments

Re:Like Vista

[raitchison]

Not quite in either case, though it's fair to say that neither have seen the adoption rates that their respective creators expected or wanted. Furthermore a lack of adoption presents a real (though relatively small) threat to each's (is each's a word?) near-monopoly/de-facto standard (Windows in Desktop Operating Systems and GPL in Open Source Licenses)

In the end when the smoke clears I think that both will ultimately succeed (for better or for worse) but you will end up with a slightly larger percentage of Desktops running non-Microsoft operating systems and a slightly larger percentage of open source projects released under a non GPL license.

Re:Is the complexity worth it?

[Ed Avis]

As new threats to freedom are identified, we should try to defend against them. Switching to a new licence is a hassle, but would you rather ignore the problem?

The GPL's goal is to make sure the software is free for all its users (not just free for some of them depending on whether the vendor deigned to give them the needed hardware keys or patent licences). That simple goal has not changed. If the licence text has become more complex, that is because the threats it needs to overcome have become more complex.

As long as you licence your code under 'GPLv3 or later', there won't be a big problem when the next attack on freedom comes and GPLv4 becomes necessary.

Howso?

[einhverfr]

If you distribute GPL v2 software and then sue for patent infrignement while you still are distributing the software, you are violating the authors' copyrights.

Furthermore, under the GPL v3 I can do a lot of things I couldn't under the GPL v2:
1) Release beta versions of software under NDA's provided that the contract also stipulates that they are receiving the software solely for the purpose of providing QA services for me by testing their own software against mine.

2) Use hypervisors and aggregated updates (for components in other VM's) to prevent updated software from doing anything (the software isn't interfered with in any way, but everything that it needs to talk to is missing if you provide your own update!)

3) Use hypervisors and other VMs to create DRM which can't be circumvented by accessing the source code of the kernel (because the decryption/hardware interfaces occur in another VM).

Seems like a lot of work to go to for not a lot more freedom of the end user.....