Tech Writers Spreading FUD About GPLv3 411
Tookis writes "Tech writers are spreading FUD about GPLv3 because they fear its take up will slow the adoption of Linux, according to this open source writer. "A large number of tech writers — I wouldn't call them journalists and sully my own profession — are fearful that the license will slow adoption of Linux in the workplace. And that would lead to a lessening of their own importance and influence."" So by posting this, am I spreading fud about spreading fud? I think I broke my brain.
this is a news story? (Score:5, Insightful)
tech writers (Score:4, Insightful)
You should have said "tech pundits", not "tech writers". There is an entire profession known as "Technical Writing", sometimes referred to as "tech writing", which has NOTHING to do with self-proclaimed journalists who write about the technical industry.
Get it straight, please. The title of your story shows that you are almost as ignorant as they are.
Ludicrous. (Score:5, Insightful)
FUD isn't going to do anything when FOSS is rapidly becoming the easier, cheaper, faster, and better choice for John Q. Public.
What is this crap? (Score:4, Insightful)
questions for the author (Score:4, Insightful)
You spend some time in your article attacking various unnamed tech writers for their work on GPLv3, and hold up Brian Profitt of Linux Magazine, and Eben Moglen, as examples of good writing on the topic.
Can you identify a specific column that you disagree with? Or a specific author? Or at least something more specific than the general doom-and-gloom nonspecific "end of FOSS" warning that you quote?
I am far from expert on GPLv3 (haven't even read it), but it strikes me that a large number of the people concerned about version 3 aren't exactly slouches, unless you're prepared to call Torvalds a hack. I'd like a concrete example of a claim you're trying to debunk.
Oh, and while we're at it: when you're looking down your nose at other tech writers that you deem unworthy of the title "journalist," you should probably start trying to observe some fairly basic journalistic principles yourself. For example: Eben Moglen, whom you correctly identify as having worked for the Free Software Foundation, is a co-author of the GPLv3 draft [internetnews.com] , which doesn't exactly position him as an unbiased observer.
There are reasons for some push-back on GPLv3 (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see both views, and both views make sense given the freedom of the author's to do whatever they please with their code. The GPLv3 makes more sense for me personally, yet others I know think it's potentially highly confining, if 'purist'.
That tech writers think it'll slow down adoption is more of a Microsoft fantasy than reality. That the GPLv3 closes odd loopholes is all the better. I hope that Linus figures out that he actually needs to consider that a GPLv4 needs his input might get him the goals he's seeking. He's going to have to lift his head out of the sand one of these days and help form what he's inadvertenly made (along with Stallman and thousands of others), the most highly viable OS. What was once a ego fantasy is now a reality far beyond anyone's wildest imaginations. There's a maturation point where you're a leader, or a follower of what you've inspired. I hope he picks "leader" and gets off the kernel kick long enough to make corrections suggestions that he can 'lead' with. Simply bashing something (pardon the pun) isn't constructive. It might work in coding, but not when you have to gain consensus.
Re:Strange.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have one of the most influential people in Open Source refuse to accept the license you have written in favour of an incompatible prior version, you have already automatically created a division between idealists and pragmatists, with both technically working on the same codebase.
When your developers can't even decide between them how they want their code used, I can't see any situation where it could help.
Re:It's Us or Them (Score:4, Insightful)
I just don't get the outrage.
Geez. (Score:5, Insightful)
This article decries critics of GPLv3, dismissing their rants as FUD. The author, however, gives no examples of these critics and offers no evidence for why he considers them to be wrong, nor any ideas of why they would choose to spread their FUD. Besides the terrible writing, formatting and grammar of this article it is needlessly split into two pages, annoyingly prompting you to log in if you want to read the second page. Oddly enough though they will provide you with the full text of the article if you click on the links to print it or view it as a PDF (which, by the way, has even worse formatting than the web formatting).
The Firefox article, while an interesting topic, was really just a regurgitation of a study done by another site rewritten so that it was less informative and more difficult to read. Besides that, it included several obvious typos such as the following:Really, there are countries where IE has not yet reached 20% market share? Are you sure you don't mean Firefox?Ah yes, the beautiful country of Australasia, I hope I can visit it someday!
He doesn't accept an EULA-style one either (Score:3, Insightful)
Linus may have the goal to see his baby widespread, RMS, the FSF and the license they use don't need to win a popularity contest. As long as there is "free code" (in the Nelson Mandela sense) the license is doing its job. If people don't want to agree to the ideals, then write your own license. RMS won't say you can't, although it looks like the people against the GPL3 want to control what license you're allowed to write or use.
hypocrites
Re:Personally... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of your software (i.e. a Sudoku for mobile phones [sourceforge.net]), the GPLv3 guarantees the user the four freedoms [gnu.org] (use, modify, distribute, improve), making it impossible to circumvent the GPLv2 with hardware devices. What could happen in your specific case is that a telco takes your code and starts offering it as for-pay download to their user's mobile phones—only that users cannot share it because there is some sort of hardware lock in place.
If you do not like the GPLv3, chances are you never liked the GPLv2 either. The GPLv3 is not a revolution of the GPL concept, it is just exactly the same ideas adapted to a world where it has become possible to circumvent version 2 by methods unforeseen when it was written. If you are alright with people taking your code and not contributing back, by all means use BSD instead.
You are an idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
A question I have about GPL v3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Some universities have a lot of patents and some of them offer free mirrors for things like kernel.org and sourceforge.net projects. It may be that the act of offering a mirror is protected under the DMCA safe harbor, but if copyright license law is as powerful as some GPLv3 proponents claim, it's not even clear that the DMCA safe harbor would override section 10 of the GPL. In any case, some mirrors work by pulling code rather than letting code be pushed, so that seems like an affirmative act of copying the software and then creating and giving copies to the general public, so an entity operating a mirror might be "conveying" under the GPL.
So, for example, if MIT has a patent I want to use, maybe all I have to do is get committer rights to some relevant project, code up something which infringes the patent, get the patch accepted (never mentioning the patent, of course), and it gets distributed to all the mirrors, including MIT's.
I download it from MIT, and voila! I have a license to use that patent inside that program (and apparently inside any GPLed derivatives I make of that program. Being the proprietary sort of guy I am, I wrap the GPL project's code with another completely proprietary program which controls it and lets the GPLed code do the patented dirty work.
I don't know whether this would work or not, but I'm starting to understand why companies are now marketing "open source" license scrubbers.
The FSF is certainly free to do this with the GPL. But while the consequences of just distributing source under v2 might have been intended to convey patents in this same way, a lot of people didn't realize that because the wording there is not as clear, and the remedies don't appear to be as onerous. V3 section 10 seems to make it very clear that if you convey code which implements a patented invention, you cannot sue anybody over using that invention in that code, and that "convey" would cover the act of proactively operating a mirror site.
This should give pause to a lot of people, not just Microsoft. Right now, "everybody knows" that GPL2 is a safe license, in the same category as BSD, well away from the category of any proprietary license, for being able to freely redistribute source code.
Those who assume the same about GPLv3 do so at their own peril, perhaps to their own detriment. It appears that, for an entity with a valuable patent, inadvertently distributing one copy of GPLv3 software could easily be much more costly than inadvertently distributing a few hundred copies of a Microsoft product.
The way universities work, it is unlikely that the legal counsel stays on top of things like kernel.org mirrors, but it seems that anybody with a patent portfolio who is running a free software mirror of any type ought to take a serious look at their policies and at the terms of GPLv3.
Perhaps one valid component of licensing strategy would be to repudiate GPL v3 (and any similar licenses which purport to appropriate your own patents), just like Microsoft has done. That would basically be a public announcement that, if anybody catches you distributing GPL v3 code, please let you know right away because it is not your intention to ever do so and you will stop distributing immediately, and if anybody thinks they're getting one of your patents out of the deal, you plan on fighting it every inch of the way.
Re:It's Us or Them (Score:4, Insightful)
It is trivial, but he does have a point.
Re:Personally... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the whole point of it, the phone, once paid for, belongs to the user, not the phone company. Why shouldnt the user of a phone, which has GPL3 software running on it, have a right to modify that software, and use the modified copy on the same device?
In any case, regardless of your answer to that question, thats the main thing GPL3 does in that respect - it says that the right to modify software includes the right to run the modified software on any device that it was originally distributed on. And that is (one of) the rights that an author choosing to distribute their work under GPL3 wants their users to have. If you, as a software author, dont want to guarantee your users that right, then so be it.
Too Late (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Several ways (Score:5, Insightful)
I know many people at many tech shops, and a shocking lot of companies have come out and said to their programmers or other in-house IT staff, that GPLv3 code can not be used for any project of any kind. Why? Because the GPLv3 is restrictive enough that it conflicts with other agreements these companies already have and cannot or will not break. It's simpler for a company to simply ban the stuff outright than it is to analyse the license ramifications on every single little project.
The end result is that GPLv3 code will, eventually, stagnate. Moving code to GPLv3 basically ensures that nobody will use it other than hobbyists. And while that's fine, it may not be what you want to happen. It's almost certainly not the intention of the GPLv3... or maybe it is. With the FSS being so f-ed up in the head lately, who can tell?
Regardless, it's not FUD... It's actually the license. It's unusable as it stands by a great many people, and the end result is that they will find other, less-restrictive, code to use instead.
Re:I wouldn't worry about sullying your profession (Score:3, Insightful)
This should be front paged! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You are an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
- It was actually meant as a joke.
- The US government is really serious about convincing people that anybody that they don't like is "a terrorist".
- The reason for justify calling someone a terrorist is that it can be used to justify just about any action against that group (and their friends)
.. and even
'collateral damage' like infringing the civil rights of innocent civilians.
... and, yeah, it's all bullshit.
A really good example of 'tagging' someone as evil, is the way that they've been slagging the Chavez government of Venezuela for being a 'un/anti-democratic regime' despite the fact that he has been elected twice (in acceptedly clean elections) -- with a 62.84% majority in his second election, and even put up with a mid-term referendum on whether he should step down (one could only pray that Bush and his cronies would be so kind).Having successfully tagged him as anti-democratic (and pro-terror (??!)), Bush has now taken this as an excuse to do things like impose a military embargo.
So, I think it's a good thing to try and destroy the implication of (now) arbitrary tags like 'terrorist' and 'anti-democratic'.
Re:Several ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's assume that you're right about that (but I have no idea of the particulars of cellphone companies). If so, this would only refer, presumably, to the part of the cellphone software that accesses the network. So that particular part could not be GPL3. So what? They can write that part of the code separately, run it in userspace, under whatever license they want. Even a GPL3 kernel couldn't stop them from doing that.
No single license is suitable for every single project. And, unsurprisingly, we have a multitude of licenses. GPL3 will be just one more of those licenses. Linux distros already have dozens of them.
As for Odd, then, that so many corporations (IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat) would participate in the GPL3 process and then voice approval for it when it was complete. So clearly something is wrong in your reasoning.
Re:What about GNU without Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and in that case you wouldn't call it GNU/Linux. In fact, they don't really call it anything most of the time because most people don't really care about the operating system of their embedded devices as long as it works. The point isn't that Linux can or can't be packaged with other things. The point is that the linux kernel by itself is not an operating system (neither is GNU for that matter).
Linux uses Gnu for the simple reason that Gnu existed, if it didn't exist it wouldn't be very hard to write. A lot of work, yes, but not as difficult as writing an OS kernel, the hurd is there to prove that.
No, I don't think that is true at all. Writing a kernel is hard, but writing a compiler and toolchain isn't easy either. The Hurd has been slow to get off the ground for a lot of reasons. The difficulty of the task is really only one of them.
The Gnu project needs Linux more than Linux needs Gnu.
That's a pretty stupid statement to make. It's like saying strawberry shortcake needs the shortcake more than the strawberries. No, they both need each other equally. You can package Linux with BSD or GNU with Solaris, but very few people do. Most people package GNU with Linux. Seriously, why do people fight this. It's just a name. RMS wants credit for his part in the creation of the modern linux distribution. Why is that so difficult for people to accept?
For the record, I never refer to my operating system as GNU/Linux because it is tedious, and I prefer to just shorten it to Linux. But it is understandable for RMS to request that people refer to it as GNU/Linux. And, if I was ever writing or speaking about it in some sort of official capacity, I would probably extend him that courtesy.