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Business Week article on GPL's potential weaknesse
Swampfox writes "This should technically be under GNU, though the article is entitled Linux May Be Running On Some Spindly Legal Legs. It's not a bad article, though, and it basically points out that since the GPL has *yet* to be really tested in court against a well-heeled and motivated opponent (hmm...can anyone think of a well-heeled and motivated opponent of Linux that might be on the horizon?) that it might eventually be an Achilles' heel that could weaken the movement.
" Hopefully, this is one of the areas that the FSF will continue to champion and support-and it's a 501(c)(3), so make a contribution to them. The article also talks about the fact that RMS is going to be revising the GPL later on this year.
This is one case where the FSF was able to negotiate a solution without without going to court.
Note that the FSF can and will change the GPL to adapt to whatever happens. If a weakness is found it will be fixed. Free Software authors will simply change the wording to say "version X of the GPL or later".
The only way to really break things is to subvert the FSF. That's why I like the fact that RMS seems like such a zealot sometimes. He's certainly more extreme than me, but I will always use the GPL because I trust him to stick to his principles and defend free software. Extremists have their place, especially when fighting for principles.
Of course, even subverting the FSF won't have many long-term effects, since the real strength is in the community of coders. As long as enough people adhere to the idea of free software it will continue to exist.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I suppose that somewhere in some GPL code is the line:
int i = 0;
Does the GPL apply if I look at that line in a GPL'd program and then type it verbatim into another non-GPL program? The definition of "portion" needs to be more definitive.
...that the corporate shrink-wrap licenses have _also_ never been seriously challenged in a court of law by a well-heeled and motivated opponent.
Microsoft is standing on just as spindly a set of legal legs as is Linux...
I spoke to the reporter for about an hour on this story, and am not too surprised at how it turned out. I think he's missing some major points.
The basic premise, I think, is faulty - that because the GPL hasn't been tested in court, that the status of GPL software is somehow shaky. I think the reverse is actually true, that the free software community is so healthy and is so good at dispute resolution that it has been unnecessary to call in the lawyers.
Think of how many heated technical disputes there have been - should KGI be in the kernel? The Egcs split from Gcc. Gnome vs. KDE. Even the ncurses debacle. All of these have been handled without legal action, and some have been resolved quite nicely (way to go, Gnu compiler folks!).
Now I think it is inevitable that lawyers will come into the fray, especially as there is more and more money in free software. Sooner or later, somebody who's market share is being decimated by free software is going to try to throw a legal monkeywrench into the development process. Other legal threats are also possible.
But the main hypothetical of this article, that a company would flagrantly violate the GPL, seems to me to be outlandish. After all, a snapshot of the code is far from the most valuable part of a vital free software project. It's the knowledge, the community, and the stewardship of keeping the project that's going. Violating the GPL is the surest way of alienating that community and thereby abandoning the benefits from it.
The reporter asked me what I would do if a big company flagrantly violated the GPL of a project I was involved in. My response was that, after making sure that they were in fact in the wrong, and that they had been contacted and turned down the chance to set things right, I wouldn't call a lawyer, I'd post to Slashdot! And I think that would be far more effective. No company wants that kind of bad publicity.
In summary, I think there's something wonderful about the culture of free software that's allowed it to resist the influx of lawyers. I have hope that it can continue to do so.
P.S. I was quoted as "Raph Levien... who develops GIMP". I'm proud to be a part of the large and diverse Gimp development team, but I do want to point out I'm only responsible for a small fraction of the code that's in there.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I could have sworn that I heard somewhere that the GPL was tested: If I recall correctly, NeXT used GCC as their C compiler, and made some changes and modifications, namely enhancing it to compile Objective-C as well as regular C. They then refused to distribute the changes, and the FSF took them to task over it. I believe that it even went to court, but I don't have any documentation for that. I don't suppose that anyone has a URL?
The author of this article didn't seem to do much research. There are several mailing lists and public editorials available on the subject of the GPL - specifically debian-legal and license-discuss.
:)
/must/ redistribute your work under GPL. the LGPL is different - use that if this is your concern. /that/. ie. "Source must be distributed seperately from binary". Nothing in the GPL prohibits this.. it simply requires it be available publicily should it be requested.
My gripe is the same with most postings on linux - the reporters need to do research - ie look before you leap. It's not like we're hiding all this information from you - we make everything public, source included!
On the article's points:
- "Portions" The GPL makes this quite clear. ANY amount of source you pull from a GPL'd program, and you
- "watering down" of the GPL further down the chain. Regardless of how many programs "down the chain" reuse the code.. it must be made available with all the provisions of the GPL intact. Other licenses may not be so restrictive, but this one is. Of course, nothing prevents you from making a more specific license and redistributing your code under
--
The way the GPL functions in the corporate environment is fairly subtle, actually. When develoeprs set out on a new project and they consider basing it on GPL (or LGPL) software, they generally discuss the pros and cons of open sourcing their enhancements carefully. If open sourcing doesn't make business sense, they usually simply won't bother with GPL software. If they do go with GPL software, they license itself serves as something that keeps the source release process on track; without the GPL, the tendency would be to procrastinate with source releases. But in that context, the GPL is not a legal sledgehammer, but a merely a nudge, albeit an important one, to encourage companies to follow through at release time on the commitment to open source they made when starting the project.
Now, let's say that Microsoft deliberately tried to ignore the GPL. So what? Are they going to ship "MS Linux" with a bunch of proprietary APIs and no source code? People use Linux because it's open source, because it's small and simple, and because it has standard APIs; if Microsoft shipped a proprietary version, they'd be missing the whole point.
Misappropriating Linux source code would only make sense for companies that are so strapped for resources and programmers that they can't build anything similar themselves. Microsoft suffers from generating too much code, not from generating too little.
Microsoft has the manpower to put together a proprietary Linux-like kernel in a year or two with no impact on any of their other projects. What they lack is the corporate culture and development processes to put together something like Linux, and that's something they can't buy, copy, or license. (Microsoft's corporate culture and development processes are, however, evidently quite successful for their market segment--for now.)
Finally, there are lots of open source software packages released under licenses that allow commercial entities to ship them without providing source. That doesn't seem to have killed those packages either.
I mean, look at this: world domination at hand and nary a lawyer in sight! That will never do. Lawyers are well known for being able to create work for themselves, so now that Linux has grown the esteemed members of the legal profession are looking to charg^H^H^H^H^H apply their legal skills in the service of Linux's friends and enemies. Never mind that nobody asked them in (so far), they are quite capable of inviting themselves.
I guess it's inevitable. Sigh.
The article does make one encouraging note, thought. A company that tries to break GPL is sure to generate enormous hostility on the Net and among computer professionals. This must be hammered into the whatever they use for heads of suits who might get ideas.
Kaa
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Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.