RMS GPLv3 vs Linus
You have probably already heard about the current round of the celebrity deathmatch: GPL2/Linus Torvals vs. GPL3/RMS,
ehh... sorry... I mean the third round of that stupid little license upgrade FSF is currently pushing. It would be fun to compare coverage from the major geek sites, to see their views:
Here is a typical comment on dotslash:
Rutulian (171771) on Sunday August 06, @10:09AM (#15855073)
The way Linus sees it is from the "developer" viewpoint. The code is still free from this viewpoint, since all modifications are published. You can modify it and run it on a DRM-free machine.
That's the short-sightedness of Linus' argument (the same short-sightedness that let him get trapped by the Bitkeeper fiasco). There are DRM-free machines now, but that doesn't mean there will be in the future. If the media companies have their way, every desktop computer will have a TPM chip in it, and if you want to view things like HD-content, it has to be enabled and running. So a company can take a project, like say mplayer, make a version that plays their video format, decrypting the stream via the TPM hardware, and then sign the binary and then sell it. Congratulations, a company has just saved themselves a couple of years of development time to make a video player to help sell their video files, and you can't modify it at all. If you modify it, it reverts to just plain old mplayer without the ability to use the code that was added. That defeats the purpose of the GPL. Linus really needs to wake up here. Yes, proprietary software has a right to exist, but pretending a company won't take advantage of free software to reduce their development costs (without giving anything back, if they can) is stupid. The GPL allows commercial use of free software as long as you give a fair share back to the community. It is not some fiendish scheme to force all software to be free as some people would say. The GPL as it is has worked fine for the last decade, but now it needs to change or it will no longer serve its purpose.
Now, here is one from osnews:
er wait
By Cloudy (1.73) on 2006-08-05 22:30:44 UTC
Linus says "this process isn't working", and the "refutation" is the people who are responsible for the process, who won't even go formally on record, saying "of course it is"?
You were expecting, what, the chairs of the committees to all stand up and say "we suck"?
As someone who has followed the evolution of the draft and commented on the document, I think that Linus' observation that the only comments that FSF are entertaining are those meant to clarify the language and not those aimed at the intent of the language is pretty accurate.
Now here is a comment from digg:
...ehh... wtf?? the were no comments on this on digg! and the story itself got burried...
now, digg had another article on pretty much the same subject, which got _one_ comment. Hre e it comes:
by atdigg on 8/01/06
+ 2 diggs
Linus wants his software to remain free (remain open sourced)
FSF, with this new GPLv3, want hardware to be free (to allow people to install whatever software they want on it).
I can understand Linus point: if you don't want DRM devices -- don't buy them, even more, develop your own DRM-free devices (just as they did with software) but don't think you can twist manufacturers arm with software provisions that are about what hardware should do or not when it runs that piece of software.
I can see FSF point too, I don't like DRM. People are sheep and will keep buying DRM enabled devices, this will make harder for people to change the software, even if it's "free". It is about freedom, *BUT* it's not about code freedom it's about people freedom to change what runs on the device they bought -- that's a different thing and different fight, I don't think GPL should do the fighting (because it might lose to BSD for example)
So lets see...
- OS-news (where the OS people hang out) puts their bets on Linus.
- dotSlash where fellow zealots used to hang on go with GNU/RMS...
- and Digg, where the new-school zealots are... well, they don't seem to give a flying fuck.
My take? I guess I will follow the camp which has written that famous OS that is currently taking over the world!
That's right, I am switching to GPLv3 because that's what Hurd will use :)
