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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."
It protects your work from being used in a tivo, but not creating a tivo. If the kernel went GPLv3 on the other hand, you'd have a big problem making any kind of tivo as
...the tivo makers would switch to using BSD, or something else with a license that doesn't infringe freedom 2 (freedom to redistribute).
> No matter how good you think the intentions you have are. If *insert corporation
> here* wants your code they can take it and use it to create restrictions for the user.
Well, duh! The point is that I don't care. If they take my code and put restrictions on it, I still don't care: no matter what happens, I still have my code. Anyone who wants to get my code can still get my code. What they can't get is the *insert corporation here*'s code that they added to my code, and the one very important point the GPL camp misses is that only a communist would lay claim to that code. The corporation wrote it, it's theirs. They can keep it, or sell it, or give it away. But it is immoral for me to force them to give it away. I can do what I want with my free software; I have no right to dictate others what to do with the code they write, even if it is using my code that they legally obtained from me. When I release free software, it's free software. Period. No friggin' GPL strings attached.
That's what Stallman would have you believe. The dirty (not so) secret is that Stallman hates DRM, almost as much, if not more, than he hates proprietary software.
Tivo released all the improvements they made to the software they used. What they did was prevent users being able to modify software on the Tivo, and pass it off as a Tivo. GPLv3 tries to make it so that a user can modify a system, and be able to pass it off as the original. It makes DRM impossible. This is not something "unintended". I daresay, RMS designed the GPLv3 to do this. To make it impossible to use GPLv3 software in DRM applications.
Your right to "hack" with the source code has been abolished.
No it hasn't. You can do whatever you please with the source. Their hardware just has the right to not accept it. Surely you l33t GPL devs could go build an identical system that doesn't require verification, right?
Oh, wait. The FSF doesn't give a shit about free software. They just want to tell people what they can do with their hardware.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
This is what free software is all about. It's not about trying to stop people from making money, it's about making cool stuff available so that people can have better lives.
Er, you couldn't be more wrong. FREE software is about FREEDOM. Having the "cool stuff" may be a frequent by-product of free software, but that is definitely not a main goal---on the other hand, if you are talking "open source", yes, they try to emphasize that aspect of free software so that the businesses will be more receptive of free software, but free software proper is all about freedom.
And whether to stop tivoization or not really comes down to: Should you have the freedom to restrict other people's freedom?
If your answer is "yes" to that, I hope you don't reproduce.
P.S. And, of course, free software does respect people's right to pursue happiness and makes no exclusion of commercialization of free software---as long as it does not infringe on others' freedom.
I'd *really* like to see all you GPL addicts try to run a small firm selling embedded software/instrumentation/whatever that's GPLed - and having to give all your code to the competition.
Oh, wait, you don't want yo do that. You only want the service model where you work for someone else. You dream of being the salary men (web devs notwithstanding - not all software is a web app).
The GPL model is utterly useless in areas where hardware and software go together.
You are clueless. You no think. Get off the intertubes.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Just go read the GPL FAQ, you double nigger.
Ernest Park: ... Do you have any comments on the GPLv3 site and the progress that we've been maintaining?
Richard Stallman: In general, I'm rather unhappy with Palamida, both for terminology (it generally uses the term "open source", which stands for values I disagree with) ...
(refuses to answer question)
Ernest Park: would you mind providing a comment less vague and subjective, focused more on the community acceptance and success of the GPLv3 family of licenses?
Richard Stallman: The free software movement is not merely personal. It is a political movement like the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, etc.
(in other words, no)
What an asshat! Not only does he refuse to respond to the interview, because the interviewer uses the term "open source" (the term used by the majority of people working on GPL and other similar licenses) he also manages to compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr.
It's interesting that he thinks he's leading a "political movement" that no one in the US congress has ever heard of, and that most people who have simply refer to as open source software, and doesn't see as a political movement at all, but a development methodology.
Does anyone really care about the GPL? Free as in beer, free as in money, free as in I don't give a flying turd. Free as in let's pretend like software is somehow a noble thing that is an inalienable right in the 21st century. Yawn. I've had to navigate my way around the GPL while coding custom software solutions. And truth be told, I'd rather just pay a licensing fee rather than jump through those hoops. How about, free as in this won't be an absolute pain in the ass to deal with?