The Free Software Foundation's Statement On Canonical's Updated Licensing Terms

New submitter donaldrobertson writes: After two years of negotiations, Canonical has updated the intellectual property rights policy for Ubuntu Linux to address a disagreement over how the software is licensed. The FSF announcement reads in part: "In July 2013, the FSF, after receiving numerous complaints from the free software community, brought serious problems with the policy to Canonical's attention. Since then, on behalf of the FSF, the GNU Project, and a coalition of other concerned free software activists, we have engaged in many conversations with Canonical's management and legal team proposing and analyzing significant revisions of the overall text. We have worked closely throughout this process with the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides their expert analysis in a statement published today." Richard Stallman thinks there are still other issues to address saying: "While the FSF acknowledges that the first update emerging from that process solves the most pressing issue with the policy ... the policy remains problematic in ways that prevent us from endorsing it as a model for others."

Comments

Re:Extremist

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Stallmann is an extremist and I am extremely grateful that he does take that part.

Without people willing to be extreme and to pay the price for that, we would have a much smaller outlook on the world. We would lead smaller debates and go for smaller goals. And yes, we probably would applaud canonical for being very explicitly about them granting you the rights you already had before.

The Anti-Stallman Brigade rears its head again

[foreverdisillusioned]

I'm still trying to figure out why Stallman can't be mentioned without a dozen users spewing the same cliched tirades, against a person who... has done what, exactly? Advocates a distro (gnewsense) that virtually nobody uses because it unnecessarily removes free software? Yeah, God damn him. He's ruining everything. Well, except for giving us the license that led to Android being an open source project, instead of being another locked down iOS-ish experience. And for giving us the license that's given desktop and server Linux users to millions upon millions of dollars of corporate-sponsored contributions that would have otherwise been locked down and lost in obscurity (also, absolutely destroying what very well might have been a Microsoft monopoly in the x86 server market before it had a chance to take off) whilst the BSD-based OSX remains locked down and illegal to use if you don't buy overpriced Apple hardware.

But no, the man has some 'extreme' personal views, which he does not try to involuntarily foist on any users anywhere and he occasionally tries to convince companies to voluntarily behave in ways that are healthier for the free software ecosystem, so therefore he must be bashed every time his name is mentioned. Oh, and he expects that people who voluntarily agree to the GPL to abide by its terms.

Goddamn terrorist.

Re:The Anti-Stallman Brigade rears its head again

[silentcoder]

Correct on both counts, and Stallman has publicly agreed with me when I stated that "A duel license is, to the user, no different than a non-copyleft license. The impact on freedom is exactly the same as using the BSD licenses. The user who gets it from you gets freedom, but the user who gets it from a third party may not".
So from his agreement in a public forum when I used that argument, I think we can surmise that he holds the same view. He would not try to stop a dual license anymore than he has tried to stop BSD licenses, he just thinks that copyleft is better.

The really funny thing is that people complain he isn't enough of a pragmatist... which really proves their ignorance. Stallman's ideal world is one where software cannot be copyrighted, and source code distribution is mandatory if you sell binaries. This is repeatedly said in his writings.
But it isn't what he is pushing for, he isn't arguing in courts for that, he isn't sending letters to congress for that. He did not try to pursue a, probably unreachable, ideal - instead he chose a pragmatic solution, the copyleft license, to create a self-perpetuating system that produces free software into the market, forcing non-free software to compete with it.
That will not give him his ideal, it will never eradicate non-free software, but it did make the world a lot better than it would have otherwise been. He also wrote the LGPL - which violates his own cherished ideals even further, because pragmatically - it was better to have it and let proprietory software run on GNU than to NOT have it and have people avoid GNU altogether because they can't replace a proprietory tool yet.

The man's history is not of an extremist or an idealist, quite the contrary - it's a history of tactical pragmatism. He does STATE his ideals, but he has never been so blinded by them as to let the perfect be the ENEMY of the good.

Re:Extremist

[foreverdisillusioned]

GNU is nice, but his real contribution was the GPL. Without the GPL, Linux (including servers, x86, and Android) would be nowhere near where it is today. I'd argue even BSD wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today without spillover effects from what the GPL has wrought. In the early days of the GPL, the concept of a corporation giving away source code for free was utterly foreign and many people even argued that it would be legally infeasible for a public corporation to do (responsibility the shareholders, blah blah blah.)

If the GPL didn't exist, corporations would not voluntarily open source ANYTHING for ANY reason and in that 'tragedy of the commons' situation all would suffer (including most IT corporations... except the ones who were already doing well building their own monoliths, e.g. Microsoft.)