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A Year of GPLv3
javipas writes "GPLv3 and LGPLv3 were released one year ago, on 29 June 2007. Palamida, who tracks Open Source projects, has made a study of the current situation of these licenses along with AGPLv3, which was released later, in November. The number of projects that have made the transition to these licenses has grown over the last months, and it seems than AGPLv3 has captured a great interest lately. Black Duck Software, a company that tracks Open Source projects too, has made its own study with similar results, and although GPLv3 and its variants have a good adoption rate, the interviews published on the Palamida site (Stallman, Chris Di Bona) show that the acceptance of GPLv3 has still a long way to walk."
the GPL 3 convinced me to use a BSD-style license for my projects. I want to share the code, not enforce political views I disagree with.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Most GNU projects are hosted on Savannah, many are hosted on GNA!, and many are self-hosted. It would be more accurate to use a service such as Ohloh to track license adoption.
I believe you'd find, when these other data sources are included, the numbers are very different.
No Freedom -1, is the freedom to be a douche, declare that you are rebranding another's project because your parallel project effectively failed and then refuse to talk to anyone that doesn't adhere to your rebranding. And RMS executes it everyday. For some people Free software is about the software. They don't care what TiVo does with it as long as everyone get's the improvements they get to the code, or in other words they get to use the best of breed code. For others it's about using software as a trojan horse to open hardware. They intend to write such good code so that people who would normally release closed hardware will use release open hardware instead to take advantage of the good code. And of course for some it's about both and for some it's about neither. Both opinions are fine to have. But the FSF is mostly about the hardware and RMS will get up in the face of any one who just cares about the software. When really what needs to happen is the FSF needs to change their name to the FHF, openly state their mission of opening hardware, and stop creating division and confusion amoungst two groups of people that should be able to mostly get long.
OK, I can understand wanting to share code but with a BSD style license the people you're sharing your code with are under no obligation to keep sharing it.
And what exactly is wrong with that? Some people want to share software with everyone, even if they are douchebags. So some company doesn't share it, but the original code is still out there. If people prefer the rebranded version and the original dies a slow death, then so what? It's not like people are writing open source for their own ego are they?
Free software is the epitome of free market economics; it's the enforcement of absolute competition ... proprietary software builds upon state protected monopoly rights and, as is becoming quite obvious, has more in common with former soviet style state factories (you _will_ use Vista and you _will_ like it; no alternate providers here), I'd say comments about socialism are weak.
Er, no. The GPL builds upon state protected monopoly rights as well. Otherwise, how could it be enforced?
If your license is anything other than "public domain" then you are, indeed, forcing your wishes upon others backed by the power of the State.
Source is not truly "free" unless everyone is FREE to disregard your wishes completely. Setting rules they must abide by, which the GPL does, makes it NOT free.
An accurate name for source licensed under GPL and similar licenses would be "Communal" -- or "Community" -- or perhaps "Cooperative" if you want to avoid the philosophically accurate association with "Communism". "Free", however, is not. Only public domain source does not rely on the coercive power of the State, and therefore only public domain source can be claimed with intellectual honesty to truly be "free".
I see one big difference: the GPL is a distribution license, but the AGPL is a EULA.
No, AGPL is still purely a grant of rights that are normally reserved to the copyright holder.
The best I can say for it is that it may not be enforceable.
Very funny. Even if you somehow could get a judge to agree with that, you still haven't managed to keep your modifications to yourself.
If you really wanted to keep the source away from the users, I'd think you'd want to look into mechanisms that don't rely on making changes to the software. Something like putting it behind an apache instance with mod_rewrite to redirect the download URL to an error page, or an intelligent firewall that drops the connection when it sees the "fetch source" command, or something similar so that all of your copyright-license-required modifications very clearly follow the license.
Is the GPLv3 even meaningful if the kernel does not change licenses?
The incompatibility of GPLv2 and GPLv3 makes it a little viral. I have a fairly small open source project, but we depend on three libraries that have gone with GPL3. I didn't really want to switch, but if I want to use the latest versions of those libraries, I have no choice.
I suspect that the number of projects going with GPLv3 would be greater if people met their legal obligations.
dan
What you're thinking about is freedom -1: The freedom to take someone else's work for free, modify it, and put onerous restrictions on everyone further along the distribution change.
They have not put any restrictions on the code or the software. Tivo puts a restriction on the hardware. The hardware is beyond the scope of a software license agreement. You can download the code off their website.
I don't think providing the source to the operating system of your media player (or similar) would make DRM impossible. All you need to do is to put the decryption, authentication and video decoding to its own piece of hardware; and I do believe such hardware is available for example for BluRay devices - if it isn't yet, it will be, to drive down the costs. The HDL source used to construct the chip could be fully proprietary.
This way you can still provide the source to the drivers (and the rest), while still keeping the DRM aspect intact. Of course, having such close access to the DRM chip may allow finding bugs in it, but in theory it should be workable..
I don't know if everyone (GPL-people) would be happy with this solution. Does GPL3 have clauses to stop this from happening? Would it just be enough it is possible to play non-DRM-encumbered media with the device? (Or if it doesn't yet, it'd be possible to modify it to do so.)
Because by locking down the device, Tivo/Motorola/Nokia/whoever, keeps me from having a *better* device that I, or more likely, someone else, creates based on the Tivo starting point. It should also be kep in mind that the GPL was never, in its creators' minds, about sharing code, or giving things away, it was about making sure that everybody can do as the please* with the software, the rest of this, is just incidental.
*Pre counter rebuttal, locking down software so that it is unmodifiable and then giving it to someone else, is not doing as you please with your software, its doing as you please with the end users software, if Tivo wants locked down systems in house, good for them, but the moment they sell a box, it isn't theirs anymore.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)