FSF Compliance Lab Addresses GPLv3 Questions 127
GeekyBodhi writes "Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at FSF's Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab held a public question and answer session in an IRC meeting last night. At the meeting Smith addressed questions regarding various sections of GPLv3 (Linux.com shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) including Section 7 (additional rights), and Section 11 (patents and patent protection), and explained how the incompatibility between GPLv2 and GPLv3 doesn't rule out any interaction between differently licensed programs."
Re:Like Vista (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite in either case, though it's fair to say that neither have seen the adoption rates that their respective creators expected or wanted. Furthermore a lack of adoption presents a real (though relatively small) threat to each's (is each's a word?) near-monopoly/de-facto standard (Windows in Desktop Operating Systems and GPL in Open Source Licenses)
In the end when the smoke clears I think that both will ultimately succeed (for better or for worse) but you will end up with a slightly larger percentage of Desktops running non-Microsoft operating systems and a slightly larger percentage of open source projects released under a non GPL license.
Re:Is the complexity worth it? - Agreed (Score:3, Informative)
One of the things that really made GPLv2 approachable was it's directness and simplicity. I think it also gave it it's strength.
GPLv3 is one of those lawyer sounding licenses. They try to specify everything (ie, instead of saying all colors, they'll write all colors including red, orange, green, blue and any other generally considered colors not named).
But reading it over, I'm not sure it buys much, and it certainly makes it much harder to understand. And that's a real shame.
And the Tivoization issue is a bit of a red herring I think. Tivo should be required to distribute the software, so others could create a Tivo device themselves. I'm not sure it fits the original principals to force tivo to open their hardware box. It's interesting, by trying to restrict it you get all sorts of ugly side effects.
I'm looking forward to a simple 2-3 page license again in the future.