For some, but even now over a decade after it came out in its final form many people still don't understand it (including people who use or license programs under it). You can often tell how deep people's understanding is by listening intently to their questions and counterarguments—people aren't stupid, but they are sometimes ignorant. Fortunately, there is a well-known cure for ignorance.
Give the new GPL some time to be discussed and eventually we'll get to the same point we are now with GPLv2—a lot of people in the Free Software community understand what it says in large part and they get on with using it (it's the most popular Free Software license). Lawyers will study the new GPL (or so I'm told from the recent New York Times article about it) and a few cases will be tried that involve the new GPL and more people will feel like doing business with it is acceptable.
Finding out that non-lawyers find legalese to be "incomprehensible" is nothing new, just as non-programmers don't understand what programmers and computer technicians are talking about when they throw around terms in common programming parlance. I'm sure most trades have their in-speak that is hard to (shall we say, grok?) for outsiders.
Lots of lawyers are wrong in their legal views and some of them even lose cases.
Lots of basketball players who can perform slam dunks sometimes miss the basket and sometimes lose games. Being an expert doesn't mean you're above being questioned. But you apparently don't even like for people to question whether you're really a lawyer, so you post anonymously, giving us no information to determine if you're actually a lawyer as you claim to be.
Eben Moglen, counsel for the FSF, is also a lawyer who has said repeatedly that "Licenses are not contracts". Perhaps you would take the matter up with him instead. After reading his essays and listening to his talks, I find him to be a far more patient and informative speaker than you appear to be. Then again, he might object to some anonymous nobody claiming to be a lawyer arguing a point with him that he's rehashed so many times.
Pamela Jones, a journalist with a paralegal background who runs Groklaw, has gone on record saying that "The GPL is a license, not a contract" in which she cites Moglen's essay and expands on it a bit. Perhaps you'd rather discuss the matter with her, since she too might be more on your level of expertise.
But I think it's telling that instead of patiently explaining the difference between the terms 'license' and 'contract' you instead chose to take a needlessly confrontational and remarkably uninformative route to point out that most non-lawyers don't understand the terms. It's unfortunate that the/. moderators don't seem to penalize such posts in an attempt to raise the level of discourse here.
Why choose a card (and the requisite set of drivers and/or other software) instead of a box that manages the RAID for you and presents a single drive to the host (like Raidweb boxes)? I don't work for Raidweb, but I know some of their customers and the people I know are satisfied with the devices.
If a home media jukebox drive fails, who will be at home to replace a drive with a cold spare? Do people normally build their card-based systems with fallback power supplies and a hot spare?
It apparently means proprietary software distributors, those who seek to lock up software and make Free Software unavailable to others by DRM and an unshared key, and the like. In short, the people who the Free Software movement hasn't liked for the past 20 years.
The alternative of absolute freedom to do anything one wants all too quickly becomes a power to distribute proprietary derivatives, and thus becomes unsavory for preserving software freedom; just as it has been for the past 20 years too.
One cannot have all possible freedoms. As the FSF has reminded us many times, my freedom to walk down the street in safety conflicts with your freedom to drive anywhere you want. There are times when one must choose which freedoms to secure and which freedoms to trade away.
You hint at unspecified malevolence suggesting that you're actually casting FUD instead of providing analysis of the new GPL or what the Free Software movement has been talking about for two decades now.
Such a filesystem would not ship ready-to-use in Microsoft Windows or MacOS X. Therefore it would not be as convenient for users who are ignorant of a political fight that affects them directly.
If one is going to have to install additional software to avoid patented filesystems, better to use one that already exists (like ext2 or ext3) rather than invent a new one. There is software to do this for Microsoft Windows, perhaps software exists to add support for this in MacOS X as well.
Finally, it's not the cost of the license fee that scares businesses off (so I doubt that adding a quarter to the cost of a memory card will raise eyebrows). I suspect that business managers would rather buy into something and feel like they're on solid ground rather than dealing with something that might place them as the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit later. The problems businesses face with cross-licensing should tell any businessperson that such solid ground is a myth, and buying a license for a patent doesn't necessarily clear the licensee for other patents. But so many businesspeople will buy into it that they end up creating "de facto standards" that are simultaneously technologically inferior and lock the FLOSS users out: widespread support for the encumbered MP3 lossy audio codec instead of the unencumbered Ogg Vorbis lossy audio codec which is most comparable to MP3 in terms of function; FAT16/32 support instead of any version of ext; Apple making yet another lossless audio codec (that has not gained a significant audience, by the way) instead of using FLAC (but I'm sure Apple supporters will further the larger point I'm making by showing how this was done to further lock users in with "features" that make DRM possible, "features" which FLAC lacks).
Are we not to attribute the same behavior to those promoting the exclusive use of Microsoft's file formats? Your attempt at discouraging participation by calling it "activism" and "unilateral" suggests that you simply disagree with the recommended change in behavior to adopt open standards (OpenDocument being one of them) for Massachusetts state-issued work.
RMS actually developed and distributed free software commercially for a while. He did this in the early days of the Free Software Movement. He's one of the original programmers of GNU Emacs and the principal developer of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Today, GCC consultants have waiting lists and charge hundreds of dollars an hour.
As for this "competitive advantage", I think we're quickly discovering that this doesn't exist in the way most people believe it to exist—that by keeping the source code to the program a secret, one can retain some advantage over others. Once someone learns what the program does, other programmers can write suitable replacements that will suffice for most, if not all, of one's needs. Those who find themselves facing a competitor seek government-granted power to preclude competition, hence software patents are all the rage among those organizations wealthy enough to afford them. Thus, this "competitive advantage" sells a myth based on a free market that doesn't really exist for computer software.
Also, most proprietary software distributors aren't making a lot of money. They all want to be Oracle, Apple, or Microsoft, but they can't pull it off. This too puts the lie to the idea that secrecy builds profit. Large organizations like IBM are finding out that returning to services is a more profitable endeavor, and one that doesn't require the monopoly powers the government is all too willing to grant. The advantage here is one we can all implement if we have patience and skill—listening to clients, knowing enough to implement their requests, and talking to them in a way they can understand (particularly with non-technical clients).
One wonders if you would abide by this logic if it were a whistleblower case—a business does something wrong and is able to hide evidence of its wrongdoing by arranging that all the employees with access to evidence are under NDA. The public good is far more important than some strict adherence to "That guy signed an NDA".
Signing over copyright to Sun is only required if one wants their changes to be distributed by Sun in their OOo. If one is comfortable distributing one's own OOo or if one doesn't want to distribute one's changes, there is no need for signing over a copyright.
I don't use OOo for all that much because my work doesn't call for this kind of program. However I do think OOo Writer would be more useful if it could more easily reformat text into paragraphs—something where you could click a button and watch your document's hard-formatted lines become proper paragraphs if the lines were not separated by two or more line breaks (or restrict this paragraph reformatting to a selection).
I don't know why that was moderated as flamebait, it's quite true. One doesn't need the proprietary Flash player at all. One might not even need a Free Software Flash player to be installed either.
The proprietary Flash player will open browser windows, thus bringing you back to pop-up and/or pop-under ads. Combined with the loss of software freedom, this sounds like a detriment that doesn't outweigh the possible advantages.
I see no reason to litter my language with advertisements for what I maintain is a poor product (runs on proprietary software, lacks important features, remarkably expensive, Apple's terms of service with iTunes—what is commonly used with an iPod—change after the purchase).
The Sony-BMG copy prevention threads should teach modern-day/. readers that asking the proprietor what they do with the information they gather is not enough freedom for the user. According to freedom-to-tinker.com, Sony lied about their software saying they didn't track information on the user's usage, then they admitted they did and said this was okay because they didn't do anything with the information that they collected. Sony-BMG and First4Internet's uninstaller doesn't actually uninstall the software that people don't want to run when they put certain music CDs into their Microsoft Windows computers.
It doesn't really matter what the proprietor says the software does because you have no permission to verify their statement, change the software to suit your needs, or distribute the improved software. There are technological and legal restrictions to prohibit all of this. Better to realize that all computer users deserve software freedom, and that all proprietary software, regardless of ostensible purpose, is untrustworthy.
Will the young learn anything about software freedom? Will it be allowed to give GNU a share of the credit? If "Linux[sic] for Young Human Beings" and asking "Do you run Linux[sic]?" is the state of things, it would appear not. How sad that such effort is being put into misinformation by omission as well as aggrandization of a figure that is remarkably hostile to software freedom, and being done in the name of educating the young (precisely the audience that ought to be taught about software freedom, valuing such freedom for its own sake). How ironic that GNU is left out while we benefit so much from GNU licenses (the GNU GPL is the most popular free software license), GCC (still widely used to build a variety of FLOSS programs), and other GNU programs (which are widely distributed with most GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu GNU/Linux derivatives).
The quote is direct from an RMS talk, but I think he stopped himself and restarted part of the sentence. One could look at it this way: "[...] designed to prohibit putting the software into something [...] that refuses to run a modified version [of the program] if the user installs one".
One of RMS' beefs with Debian is that they distribute non-free software in some part of their software archive (I believe it's called the "non-free" repo, sensibly enough). If GPLv3 is deemed to be non-DFSG free, GPLv3 programs can be carried in that repo. If such an event were to occur, I think that we owe it to ourselves and the FSF to read and think through the final GPLv3 before determining whether distributing GPLv3 programs from non-free would be an odd juxtaposition, just desserts, or something else entirely.
I'm fairly certain that it has been RMS' contention for some time that the GPL'd program should be considered "distributed" if another user has control over the program—using it remotely as one might do in a web-based service, for instance, but in comparable ways well before the WWW. It's hard to search audio files for Q&A, particularly when there is no transcript for a lot of RMS' talks, but I think people ask about the (shall I say, "hole"?) in the GPL which effectively allows someone to control a GPL'd program without that control being popularly seen as distribution.
Hence, I'm leery to accept an interpretation which says that this has something to do with the WWW (and doesn't just happen to catch people's eye because of the WWW), or that this should be considered an extension of the GPL rather than a clarification. Like the linking debate, this largely (if not entirely) falls to the courts to interpret copyright law and what it considers to be distribution in this context.
If I happen across some documentation to substantiate this, and if the/. hasn't expired, I'll post again.
The copyright holder has the power to license the program as they choose. If the copyright holder chooses to license it under only GPLv2, nobody else can relicense it under GPLv3. If the copyright holder chooses to license the program under the GPLv2 and includes language that allows recipients to change the license to any subsequent version of the GNU GPL (such as the upcoming GPLv3), then others have the power to distribute their derivatives and copies under the newer GPL.
This has nothing to do with forking a program. It has to do with relicensing (and even then, working within the narrowed confines of allowable licenses set by some other person or organization). Relicensing a program is not forking it and forking a program is merely one excercising their freedom in the free software community.
The worst that can happen is that someone can re-close their derivation of your code if RMS ever loses his mind.
Not nice, but hardly catastrophic.
From the perspective of the FSF, that would be catastrophic. Consider that one of the reasons the GPL was written was not just to give people software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify covered programs) but to make sure the programs remain free as well. If any part of the GPL allowed sublicensing or somehow allowed incorporation into a proprietary program, those freedoms would be lost to users of that derivative work. Software proprietors seek to effect this change through software patents—another reason the GPL is being revised. Variants of the new BSD license allow both sublicensing and say absolutely nothing, not even in an introductory sentence or framing sense, about patents.
What matters here is not whether anyone else shares this view, but to understand the license in the context in which it was written—securing software freedom for all computer users. This focus on a user's software freedom is one of the reasons the FSF doesn't describe making proprietary derivatives as "closing" a program. The Open Source Movement focuses on a programmer's ability to help businesses (chiefly) improve their programs. As the FSF says:
Describing non-free software as "closed" clearly refers to the term "open source". In the Free Software Movement, we want to avoid being confused with the more recent Open Source Movement, so we are careful to avoid usage that would encourage people to lump us in with them. Therefore, we avoid describing non-free software as "closed". We call it "non-free" or "proprietary".
We need new language (ostensibly, language that would appear in version 3) to address what RMS has called "some kind of patent retaliation clause", "something to deal with this case of public use on a server the public connects to", and something that is "designed to prohibit putting the software into something that won't let the user, that refuses to run a modified version if the user installs one". RMS has said that the library exception has been "reworked".
But generally, the GPL will stay the same: "So I hope this shows you that it's all a matter of details here or there. It would be completely wrong to change the major outline of the GPL. And we're not going to.".
All quotes come from RMS' 7 April 2005 talk about the free software movement (approximately 1h40m into the recording).
There's no reason to be scared by what comes out of this process. If GPLv3 isn't to your liking, you can continue to license your programs under GPLv2.
First, Stallman doesn't explicitly state anything in terms of the open source movement. He started the free software movement over a decade before the Open Source Initiative started the open source movement and he explains why he does not agree with the philosophy behind the open source movement.
To answer your question, there's nothing prohibiting you from distributing free software for a fee (any fee), whether it is modified or not. RMS encourages you to do so for as much money as you can because the money you make doing so can be put right back into making and distributing more free software. But there is nothing stopping you from undercutting others by distributing it for less money than they are. You could do this regularly and thus make a business doing this. RMS distributed copies of GNU Emacs and other free software in the early years of the free software movement and that was how he made his living for a while. Today, there are consultancies that work on particular programs (like GCC, where professional GCC hackers have a waiting list of clients, Brad Kuhn told me), and consultancies that focus on hand-holding services (you'd be surprised how many people have computers and don't know how to operate them).
Anyone can support Nessus whether they own the code or not. They can't fix bugs in it, but that's not what support is really about. Support consulting is mostly "help us set this up" or "help us customize this" [...]
If by "own[ing] the code" you mean holding the copyright to the code, your first sentence is quite right—free software allows users the freedom to support the program without holding the copyright to the program. What passes for support is often instruction on how to use a program. Support definately includes fixing bugs in programs, even bugs in software one doesn't hold a copyright to. Real support requires the freedoms to run the program at any time, inspect how the program works, change the program to suit one's needs, and distribute copies of the program (changed or not). Depending on whatever the proprietor lets you customize is just working within the narrow confines of the proprietor, effectively letting the proprietor determine how much you can help yourself and others.
If by free you mean a reference to price, that would be sad. I think you're right—that will almost certainly be the message people use to pitch Firefox. But that message is not unique. Another silly message has been used by the Mozilla Foundation in the past—browser "choice"—when they talk about either Firefox or the Mozilla Suite. This message fails to convince because it is not true.
What separates Firefox (and Mozilla Suite, but nobody is talking about that anymore) from the rest of the popular web browsers is software freedom. Firefox lets users run, inspect, share, and modify the program at any time for any reason. There are many great consequences of software freedom but the freedom itself is what makes the difference and the freedom itself should be celebrated by name. Plenty of proprietary browsers cost the users no money, so being available gratis is no big deal. If all one cares about is price, one has long had the choices of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape Navigator. But if all one cares about is price, before the Mozilla Suite was available, no popular web browser would give the user software freedom.
The following message is still true, so many years after this essay was written:
"Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too."
I think a marketing drive around Firefox would be a perfect time to introduce users to software freedom, and in so doing, tell users why Firefox matters with a message that is unique, true, and compelling. Let's hope that the Mozilla Foundation's commitment to the Open Source movement is not so strong that they're willing to do as that movement advocates and dispense with talking about software freedom by name and championing software freedom for its own sake.
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For some, but even now over a decade after it came out in its final form many people still don't understand it (including people who use or license programs under it). You can often tell how deep people's understanding is by listening intently to their questions and counterarguments—people aren't stupid, but they are sometimes ignorant. Fortunately, there is a well-known cure for ignorance.
Give the new GPL some time to be discussed and eventually we'll get to the same point we are now with GPLv2—a lot of people in the Free Software community understand what it says in large part and they get on with using it (it's the most popular Free Software license). Lawyers will study the new GPL (or so I'm told from the recent New York Times article about it) and a few cases will be tried that involve the new GPL and more people will feel like doing business with it is acceptable.
Finding out that non-lawyers find legalese to be "incomprehensible" is nothing new, just as non-programmers don't understand what programmers and computer technicians are talking about when they throw around terms in common programming parlance. I'm sure most trades have their in-speak that is hard to (shall we say, grok?) for outsiders.
Lots of lawyers are wrong in their legal views and some of them even lose cases. Lots of basketball players who can perform slam dunks sometimes miss the basket and sometimes lose games. Being an expert doesn't mean you're above being questioned. But you apparently don't even like for people to question whether you're really a lawyer, so you post anonymously, giving us no information to determine if you're actually a lawyer as you claim to be.
Eben Moglen, counsel for the FSF, is also a lawyer who has said repeatedly that "Licenses are not contracts". Perhaps you would take the matter up with him instead. After reading his essays and listening to his talks, I find him to be a far more patient and informative speaker than you appear to be. Then again, he might object to some anonymous nobody claiming to be a lawyer arguing a point with him that he's rehashed so many times.
Pamela Jones, a journalist with a paralegal background who runs Groklaw, has gone on record saying that "The GPL is a license, not a contract" in which she cites Moglen's essay and expands on it a bit. Perhaps you'd rather discuss the matter with her, since she too might be more on your level of expertise.
But I think it's telling that instead of patiently explaining the difference between the terms 'license' and 'contract' you instead chose to take a needlessly confrontational and remarkably uninformative route to point out that most non-lawyers don't understand the terms. It's unfortunate that the /. moderators don't seem to penalize such posts in an attempt to raise the level of discourse here.
Why choose a card (and the requisite set of drivers and/or other software) instead of a box that manages the RAID for you and presents a single drive to the host (like Raidweb boxes)? I don't work for Raidweb, but I know some of their customers and the people I know are satisfied with the devices.
If a home media jukebox drive fails, who will be at home to replace a drive with a cold spare? Do people normally build their card-based systems with fallback power supplies and a hot spare?
It apparently means proprietary software distributors, those who seek to lock up software and make Free Software unavailable to others by DRM and an unshared key, and the like. In short, the people who the Free Software movement hasn't liked for the past 20 years.
The alternative of absolute freedom to do anything one wants all too quickly becomes a power to distribute proprietary derivatives, and thus becomes unsavory for preserving software freedom; just as it has been for the past 20 years too.
One cannot have all possible freedoms. As the FSF has reminded us many times, my freedom to walk down the street in safety conflicts with your freedom to drive anywhere you want. There are times when one must choose which freedoms to secure and which freedoms to trade away.
You hint at unspecified malevolence suggesting that you're actually casting FUD instead of providing analysis of the new GPL or what the Free Software movement has been talking about for two decades now.
Such a filesystem would not ship ready-to-use in Microsoft Windows or MacOS X. Therefore it would not be as convenient for users who are ignorant of a political fight that affects them directly.
If one is going to have to install additional software to avoid patented filesystems, better to use one that already exists (like ext2 or ext3) rather than invent a new one. There is software to do this for Microsoft Windows, perhaps software exists to add support for this in MacOS X as well.
Finally, it's not the cost of the license fee that scares businesses off (so I doubt that adding a quarter to the cost of a memory card will raise eyebrows). I suspect that business managers would rather buy into something and feel like they're on solid ground rather than dealing with something that might place them as the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit later. The problems businesses face with cross-licensing should tell any businessperson that such solid ground is a myth, and buying a license for a patent doesn't necessarily clear the licensee for other patents. But so many businesspeople will buy into it that they end up creating "de facto standards" that are simultaneously technologically inferior and lock the FLOSS users out: widespread support for the encumbered MP3 lossy audio codec instead of the unencumbered Ogg Vorbis lossy audio codec which is most comparable to MP3 in terms of function; FAT16/32 support instead of any version of ext; Apple making yet another lossless audio codec (that has not gained a significant audience, by the way) instead of using FLAC (but I'm sure Apple supporters will further the larger point I'm making by showing how this was done to further lock users in with "features" that make DRM possible, "features" which FLAC lacks).
Are we not to attribute the same behavior to those promoting the exclusive use of Microsoft's file formats? Your attempt at discouraging participation by calling it "activism" and "unilateral" suggests that you simply disagree with the recommended change in behavior to adopt open standards (OpenDocument being one of them) for Massachusetts state-issued work.
RMS actually developed and distributed free software commercially for a while. He did this in the early days of the Free Software Movement. He's one of the original programmers of GNU Emacs and the principal developer of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Today, GCC consultants have waiting lists and charge hundreds of dollars an hour.
As for this "competitive advantage", I think we're quickly discovering that this doesn't exist in the way most people believe it to exist—that by keeping the source code to the program a secret, one can retain some advantage over others. Once someone learns what the program does, other programmers can write suitable replacements that will suffice for most, if not all, of one's needs. Those who find themselves facing a competitor seek government-granted power to preclude competition, hence software patents are all the rage among those organizations wealthy enough to afford them. Thus, this "competitive advantage" sells a myth based on a free market that doesn't really exist for computer software.
Also, most proprietary software distributors aren't making a lot of money. They all want to be Oracle, Apple, or Microsoft, but they can't pull it off. This too puts the lie to the idea that secrecy builds profit. Large organizations like IBM are finding out that returning to services is a more profitable endeavor, and one that doesn't require the monopoly powers the government is all too willing to grant. The advantage here is one we can all implement if we have patience and skill—listening to clients, knowing enough to implement their requests, and talking to them in a way they can understand (particularly with non-technical clients).
The whistleblower statues that somehow still result in people being told to release conclusions contrary to their evidence for drugs that later prove to be fatal, or people masking their identity because they know they'll likely lose their job to someone who will remain quiet about shutting down gas refineries and tightening the supply of gas, or being demoted and taken out of the supervisory position that allowed her to see potential fraud and abuse in no-bid contracts worth billions?
A citizen's duty is not to obey the law, so much as it is to do what's ethically defensible. The FSF has some sage advice for you here: "The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.".
One wonders if you would abide by this logic if it were a whistleblower case—a business does something wrong and is able to hide evidence of its wrongdoing by arranging that all the employees with access to evidence are under NDA. The public good is far more important than some strict adherence to "That guy signed an NDA".
Signing over copyright to Sun is only required if one wants their changes to be distributed by Sun in their OOo. If one is comfortable distributing one's own OOo or if one doesn't want to distribute one's changes, there is no need for signing over a copyright.
I don't use OOo for all that much because my work doesn't call for this kind of program. However I do think OOo Writer would be more useful if it could more easily reformat text into paragraphs—something where you could click a button and watch your document's hard-formatted lines become proper paragraphs if the lines were not separated by two or more line breaks (or restrict this paragraph reformatting to a selection).
I don't know why that was moderated as flamebait, it's quite true. One doesn't need the proprietary Flash player at all. One might not even need a Free Software Flash player to be installed either.
The proprietary Flash player will open browser windows, thus bringing you back to pop-up and/or pop-under ads. Combined with the loss of software freedom, this sounds like a detriment that doesn't outweigh the possible advantages.
I see no reason to litter my language with advertisements for what I maintain is a poor product (runs on proprietary software, lacks important features, remarkably expensive, Apple's terms of service with iTunes—what is commonly used with an iPod—change after the purchase).
The Sony-BMG copy prevention threads should teach modern-day /. readers that asking the proprietor what they do with the information they gather is not enough freedom for the user. According to freedom-to-tinker.com, Sony lied about their software saying they didn't track information on the user's usage, then they admitted they did and said this was okay because they didn't do anything with the information that they collected. Sony-BMG and First4Internet's uninstaller doesn't actually uninstall the software that people don't want to run when they put certain music CDs into their Microsoft Windows computers.
It doesn't really matter what the proprietor says the software does because you have no permission to verify their statement, change the software to suit your needs, or distribute the improved software. There are technological and legal restrictions to prohibit all of this. Better to realize that all computer users deserve software freedom, and that all proprietary software, regardless of ostensible purpose, is untrustworthy.
Will the young learn anything about software freedom? Will it be allowed to give GNU a share of the credit? If "Linux[sic] for Young Human Beings" and asking "Do you run Linux[sic]?" is the state of things, it would appear not. How sad that such effort is being put into misinformation by omission as well as aggrandization of a figure that is remarkably hostile to software freedom, and being done in the name of educating the young (precisely the audience that ought to be taught about software freedom, valuing such freedom for its own sake). How ironic that GNU is left out while we benefit so much from GNU licenses (the GNU GPL is the most popular free software license), GCC (still widely used to build a variety of FLOSS programs), and other GNU programs (which are widely distributed with most GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu GNU/Linux derivatives).
The quote is direct from an RMS talk, but I think he stopped himself and restarted part of the sentence. One could look at it this way: "[...] designed to prohibit putting the software into something [...] that refuses to run a modified version [of the program] if the user installs one".
One of RMS' beefs with Debian is that they distribute non-free software in some part of their software archive (I believe it's called the "non-free" repo, sensibly enough). If GPLv3 is deemed to be non-DFSG free, GPLv3 programs can be carried in that repo. If such an event were to occur, I think that we owe it to ourselves and the FSF to read and think through the final GPLv3 before determining whether distributing GPLv3 programs from non-free would be an odd juxtaposition, just desserts, or something else entirely.
I'm fairly certain that it has been RMS' contention for some time that the GPL'd program should be considered "distributed" if another user has control over the program—using it remotely as one might do in a web-based service, for instance, but in comparable ways well before the WWW. It's hard to search audio files for Q&A, particularly when there is no transcript for a lot of RMS' talks, but I think people ask about the (shall I say, "hole"?) in the GPL which effectively allows someone to control a GPL'd program without that control being popularly seen as distribution.
/. hasn't expired, I'll post again.
Hence, I'm leery to accept an interpretation which says that this has something to do with the WWW (and doesn't just happen to catch people's eye because of the WWW), or that this should be considered an extension of the GPL rather than a clarification. Like the linking debate, this largely (if not entirely) falls to the courts to interpret copyright law and what it considers to be distribution in this context.
If I happen across some documentation to substantiate this, and if the
The copyright holder has the power to license the program as they choose. If the copyright holder chooses to license it under only GPLv2, nobody else can relicense it under GPLv3. If the copyright holder chooses to license the program under the GPLv2 and includes language that allows recipients to change the license to any subsequent version of the GNU GPL (such as the upcoming GPLv3), then others have the power to distribute their derivatives and copies under the newer GPL.
This has nothing to do with forking a program. It has to do with relicensing (and even then, working within the narrowed confines of allowable licenses set by some other person or organization). Relicensing a program is not forking it and forking a program is merely one excercising their freedom in the free software community.
From the perspective of the FSF, that would be catastrophic. Consider that one of the reasons the GPL was written was not just to give people software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify covered programs) but to make sure the programs remain free as well. If any part of the GPL allowed sublicensing or somehow allowed incorporation into a proprietary program, those freedoms would be lost to users of that derivative work. Software proprietors seek to effect this change through software patents—another reason the GPL is being revised. Variants of the new BSD license allow both sublicensing and say absolutely nothing, not even in an introductory sentence or framing sense, about patents.
What matters here is not whether anyone else shares this view, but to understand the license in the context in which it was written—securing software freedom for all computer users. This focus on a user's software freedom is one of the reasons the FSF doesn't describe making proprietary derivatives as "closing" a program. The Open Source Movement focuses on a programmer's ability to help businesses (chiefly) improve their programs. As the FSF says:
Nobody at the FSF has the power to make you participate in some way you don't want to. You're reading too much into their words.
There's no force involved. The licensor chose whether to allow the program to be distributed under a future GNU GPL.
We need new language (ostensibly, language that would appear in version 3) to address what RMS has called "some kind of patent retaliation clause", "something to deal with this case of public use on a server the public connects to", and something that is "designed to prohibit putting the software into something that won't let the user, that refuses to run a modified version if the user installs one". RMS has said that the library exception has been "reworked".
But generally, the GPL will stay the same: "So I hope this shows you that it's all a matter of details here or there. It would be completely wrong to change the major outline of the GPL. And we're not going to.".
All quotes come from RMS' 7 April 2005 talk about the free software movement (approximately 1h40m into the recording).
There's no reason to be scared by what comes out of this process. If GPLv3 isn't to your liking, you can continue to license your programs under GPLv2.
First, Stallman doesn't explicitly state anything in terms of the open source movement. He started the free software movement over a decade before the Open Source Initiative started the open source movement and he explains why he does not agree with the philosophy behind the open source movement.
What you're talking about would be better referenced by reading what RMS actually said about distributing free software for a fee.
To answer your question, there's nothing prohibiting you from distributing free software for a fee (any fee), whether it is modified or not. RMS encourages you to do so for as much money as you can because the money you make doing so can be put right back into making and distributing more free software. But there is nothing stopping you from undercutting others by distributing it for less money than they are. You could do this regularly and thus make a business doing this. RMS distributed copies of GNU Emacs and other free software in the early years of the free software movement and that was how he made his living for a while. Today, there are consultancies that work on particular programs (like GCC, where professional GCC hackers have a waiting list of clients, Brad Kuhn told me), and consultancies that focus on hand-holding services (you'd be surprised how many people have computers and don't know how to operate them).
If by "own[ing] the code" you mean holding the copyright to the code, your first sentence is quite right—free software allows users the freedom to support the program without holding the copyright to the program. What passes for support is often instruction on how to use a program. Support definately includes fixing bugs in programs, even bugs in software one doesn't hold a copyright to. Real support requires the freedoms to run the program at any time, inspect how the program works, change the program to suit one's needs, and distribute copies of the program (changed or not). Depending on whatever the proprietor lets you customize is just working within the narrow confines of the proprietor, effectively letting the proprietor determine how much you can help yourself and others.
Free software is commercial software.
Perhaps you meant to say proprietary software instead of "commercial" software.
If by free you mean a reference to price, that would be sad. I think you're right—that will almost certainly be the message people use to pitch Firefox. But that message is not unique. Another silly message has been used by the Mozilla Foundation in the past—browser "choice"—when they talk about either Firefox or the Mozilla Suite. This message fails to convince because it is not true.
What separates Firefox (and Mozilla Suite, but nobody is talking about that anymore) from the rest of the popular web browsers is software freedom. Firefox lets users run, inspect, share, and modify the program at any time for any reason. There are many great consequences of software freedom but the freedom itself is what makes the difference and the freedom itself should be celebrated by name. Plenty of proprietary browsers cost the users no money, so being available gratis is no big deal. If all one cares about is price, one has long had the choices of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape Navigator. But if all one cares about is price, before the Mozilla Suite was available, no popular web browser would give the user software freedom.
The following message is still true, so many years after this essay was written:
I think a marketing drive around Firefox would be a perfect time to introduce users to software freedom, and in so doing, tell users why Firefox matters with a message that is unique, true, and compelling. Let's hope that the Mozilla Foundation's commitment to the Open Source movement is not so strong that they're willing to do as that movement advocates and dispense with talking about software freedom by name and championing software freedom for its own sake.