In terms of software, "free software" and "open-source software" are the same (or they're two sets with 99.99% overlap).
The philosophies, however, are different.
The free software philosophy is that the freedom to help yourself and to cooperate with others as a community are freedoms everyone should have.
"Open source" was launched to rename "free software" to hide this ethical line of thinking - because it mightn't go down well with companies who want to publish a little bit of free software while still publishing most of their software as non-free software.
The the goal of the "open source" campaign is to hide the free software movement. Naturally, the goal of the free software movement is the exact opposite - they want people to support the free software movement.
It's strange that people talk about "the rift" and then link to emails from Januaray while ignoring that since GPLv3 was released last month there've been no rants from Linus.
meanwhile, the evidence is missing
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It's worth noting that the linked to article actually contains nothing about GCC developers complaining about GPLv3.
WTF - claim of fork has no substance
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GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I just read the linked-to email and found no mention of grumbling developers talking about forks.
On what grounds did Slashdot say this is true???
Patent protection + internationalisation = good
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GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
C'mon. v3 gives more patent protection to developers and it is written in more internationalised language. It's hard to see what people could complain about in terms of GCC.
I think the funniest part is when the tech media starts publishing most of their articles on the "weblogs" section of their site. Like InformationWeek's 2 recent lamentable and much trashed articles about GPLv3.
Microsoft made a deal with Novell so that Novell will give a copy of GNU/Linux to anyone with a Microsoft voucher. After this deal, Microsoft recommended Novell's GNU/Linux distribution and distributed those vouchers to anyone who wanted one.
So they are basically contracting Novell to distribute GNU/Linux on their behalf. In legal terms, they're "procuring the distribution of" GPL'd software, and that's covered by copyright.
I think it's clear that Microsoft and Novell are together distributing GPL'd software, and the GPLv3 project's team of lawyers are convinced that Microsoft is indeed distributing GPL'd software.
Currently we have many patents and 10% are solid and 90% are shakey.
Only one valid patent is needed to kill a project.
The worrisome patent holders all have hundreds or thousands of patents.
Weeding out the shakey ones doesn't get us very far. It leaves us still restricted, and it leaves the patent holders in a less shakey position.
Here's how patents work: MS thinks of an arbitrary way to do X, and then they patent 20 techniques related to this arbitrary technology. In this situation, there is rarely any prior art since the technique that MS is using isn't necessarily very smart - they could have chosen it simply because no one else does anything similar/compatible.
The plan is for the final GPLv3 to be published on June 29th, so comments should be submitted now so that there is still some time for them to be discussed and acted on.
For an explanation on the changes and the motivations of the current draft, see:
Correct. Further, GPLs v2 and v3 have clear statements saying that it's ok to sell covered software.
Enabling businesses to be built up around free software is essential for the progress of the free software movement. Our licences just have to ensure that those companies cannot harm the movement (neither intentionally nor under pressure from MS).
So if you distribute the software, you can't hide the source, and you can't sue the users for patent infringement, and you can't put it on a device that is set up to allow you to continue to modify without also giving the recipient that freedom. (Boo-hoo, you lose the "freedom" to screw others.)
And in the other direction, there is a warranty disclaimer so that distributing the software doesn't put people's business at risk.
As is typical of this type of FUD article, the author talks nothing about the actual content of the licence, and instead just gives baseless summaries and gossipy predictions.
In the tivo situation, GPLv3 ensures that everyone is free to modify the software and to run modified versions instead of the default version. This would allow Tivo users to remove the spyware that's in the default software. A Good Thing, IMO.
If we have an application with round buttons and they turn out to be patented, we just make ours square. That's ok because having round buttons is not the purpose of the application. But if we have an application whose purpose is to read and edit MS Word documents, and a patent says we are not allowed to do that, then that application is kaput.
Here are some good explanations of how the patent problem plays out and what we can and can't do about it: http://fsfe.org/transcripts#patents.
I don't see the justification for that sort of pessimism. Of course they'll fight back as we continue to eat their lunch. That doesn't mean we haven't eaten anything or that we should stop eating now.
Slashdot Mirror
v2 is still the 2nd best licence in the world.
OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Java, Qt, Quake, etc. all chose Stallman's licences when they were releasing their code. Not bad, IMO.
He's still the maintainer of Emacs.
In his programming hey-day, he wrote GCC, GDB, half of GNU Make, and some other packages.
Know anyone else who's written a compiler which today builds 4Gb software archives?
In terms of software, "free software" and "open-source software" are the same (or they're two sets with 99.99% overlap).
The philosophies, however, are different.
The free software philosophy is that the freedom to help yourself and to cooperate with others as a community are freedoms everyone should have.
"Open source" was launched to rename "free software" to hide this ethical line of thinking - because it mightn't go down well with companies who want to publish a little bit of free software while still publishing most of their software as non-free software.
The the goal of the "open source" campaign is to hide the free software movement. Naturally, the goal of the free software movement is the exact opposite - they want people to support the free software movement.
This wouldn't be a change. Linus already used and advertised BitKeeper, which was completely proprietary software.
Relicensing the Linux kernel quite possible, if they want to.
The free software movement already has many working kernels. Getting Hurd working is not the most important thing RMS could work on.
His job is to make sure that the free software movement will last - make sure people value it and protect it.
Here's a transcript of one of his talks, and there's more where that came from.
As big as GCC? I'll need Wikipedia's help just to know what Webkit is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkit
It's strange that people talk about "the rift" and then link to emails from Januaray while ignoring that since GPLv3 was released last month there've been no rants from Linus.
It's worth noting that the linked to article actually contains nothing about GCC developers complaining about GPLv3.
I just read the linked-to email and found no mention of grumbling developers talking about forks.
On what grounds did Slashdot say this is true???
C'mon. v3 gives more patent protection to developers and it is written in more internationalised language. It's hard to see what people could complain about in terms of GCC.
I think the funniest part is when the tech media starts publishing most of their articles on the "weblogs" section of their site. Like InformationWeek's 2 recent lamentable and much trashed articles about GPLv3.
He started his story with "now that GPLv3 is out" and then cited emails from before GPLv3 was out. He set the standard, and he failed his standard.
And now InformationWeek have replied with a badly executed straw man:
InformationWeek published an old mail claiming that it was "latest" post-GPLv3 news.
The BBC have published an article by FSFE also explaining the general problems of MS's non-open OOXML format (and proprietary formats in general).
You think MS will go to court to set a precedent to *shrink* the scope of copyright?
Microsoft made a deal with Novell so that Novell will give a copy of
GNU/Linux to anyone with a Microsoft voucher. After this deal, Microsoft
recommended Novell's GNU/Linux distribution and distributed those vouchers
to anyone who wanted one.
So they are basically contracting Novell to distribute GNU/Linux on their
behalf. In legal terms, they're "procuring the distribution of" GPL'd
software, and that's covered by copyright.
I think it's clear that Microsoft and Novell are together distributing GPL'd
software, and the GPLv3 project's team of lawyers are convinced that
Microsoft is indeed distributing GPL'd software.
Weeding out the shakey ones doesn't get us very far. It leaves us still restricted, and it leaves the patent holders in a less shakey position.
Here's how patents work: MS thinks of an arbitrary way to do X, and then they patent 20 techniques related to this arbitrary technology. In this situation, there is rarely any prior art since the technique that MS is using isn't necessarily very smart - they could have chosen it simply because no one else does anything similar/compatible.
If anyone has comments about discussion draft 4, make them asap. Here's the page where you can see the draft and where you can add your comments:
t ranscript
http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-4.html
The plan is for the final GPLv3 to be published on June 29th, so comments should be submitted now so that there is still some time for them to be discussed and acted on.
For an explanation on the changes and the motivations of the current draft, see:
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/brussels-rms-
Correct. Further, GPLs v2 and v3 have clear statements saying that it's ok to sell covered software.
t ranscript
Enabling businesses to be built up around free software is essential for the progress of the free software movement. Our licences just have to ensure that those companies cannot harm the movement (neither intentionally nor under pressure from MS).
So if you distribute the software, you can't hide the source, and you can't sue the users for patent infringement, and you can't put it on a device that is set up to allow you to continue to modify without also giving the recipient that freedom. (Boo-hoo, you lose the "freedom" to screw others.)
And in the other direction, there is a warranty disclaimer so that distributing the software doesn't put people's business at risk.
Here's a summary of what's new in GPLv3:
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/brussels-rms-
As is typical of this type of FUD article, the author talks nothing about the actual content of the licence, and instead just gives baseless summaries and gossipy predictions.
In the tivo situation, GPLv3 ensures that everyone is free to modify the software and to run modified versions instead of the default version. This would allow Tivo users to remove the spyware that's in the default software. A Good Thing, IMO.
t ranscript#tivoisation
More info here: http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/brussels-rms-
Only when doing so it necessary in order for the GPL to do it's job.
That can work sometimes, but not always.
If we have an application with round buttons and they turn out to be patented, we just make ours square. That's ok because having round buttons is not the purpose of the application. But if we have an application whose purpose is to read and edit MS Word documents, and a patent says we are not allowed to do that, then that application is kaput.
Here are some good explanations of how the patent problem plays out and what we can and can't do about it: http://fsfe.org/transcripts#patents.
I don't see the justification for that sort of pessimism. Of course they'll fight back as we continue to eat their lunch. That doesn't mean we haven't eaten anything or that we should stop eating now.
Would it have killed them to link to the actual draft and documents? Here are the links: