I just posted about what the kernel guys really want. They are saying some other non-substantive things, but most of these are either solvable or just plain wrong.
- Virtually everything they are saying about license proliferation is wrong, except for the obvious statement that license proliferation is bad. We’re all agreed on that. GPL v3 increases compatibility with other licenses (apache license would now be compatible, for example, helping solve all the hoops beagle has to jump through currently to use lucene), so gpl v3 helps this problem, not hurts it. They are working hard to make even more licenses compatible, if they can- lots of people are looking at making eclipse license and gplv3 compat, for example.
- Similarly, allowing GPL to add and remove clauses in an orderly way would actually reduce fragmentation, not increase it as they claim. Sure, you’d get lots of GPL variants- but many other licenses would quickly die away as they became GPL variants (LGPL, for example, will do just this), so the net number of licenses actively being used in new could should stay the same. And if there are 100 licenses, and 90% of them share 95% of their language, we’re way better off than the current situation- where we have 100 licenses, which mostly agree on shared goals, but which share no language and hence are hard to make work with each other. [The shared language things matter- if I find code under a GPL variant, it is a lot easier to convince someone to add or subtract one clause than it is to convince them to change from, say, MPL to GPL (any version.)]
- They criticize the wording of the patent provision- but some very, very large patent patent portfolio owners have had large teams of lawyers participate in this process, and they’ve been willing to work with the draft. So it seems likely that the patent clause is not nearly as hosed as they think it is. The real thing to watch here is IBM- they are both the biggest contributors to the kernel, and the largest holder of patents in the world. So if they remain involved, then there is a pretty good chance that they think that the patent clause is (at least) salvageable.
- They completely ignore the many small and real problems that have been solved- the license is now more likely to be upheld by international courts and has a clearer definition of linking, for example.
- Their complaints about the DRM language are… well, maybe FUD is a little strong, but saying ‘people were confused at the first draft, so we should give up altogether’ is pretty irritating. They should either say flat out ‘we disagree philosophically with the DRM clause’ (which is fine, and honest) or they should work with those who are working hard to clean up the language by giving specific complaints.
- c’mon, guys- when you say ‘politics’ we all know you mean ‘how we define ‘freedom”, or some variant thereof. Quit playing the linguistic game of calling it ‘politics’.
- [Later edit: I totally forgot, of course, the most serious disingenousness- the belief that the FSF wasn’t political, and is now political. C’mon. The FSF has been political from day one, guys- everything they are doing now would have been pretty damn predictable from the first day RMS heard about DRM, and the first day someone asked ‘what about this patent?’ on an FSF mailing list. To claim that this is now betraying the trust of people is really pretty silly. Is it in disagreement with what most kernel FLOSS contributors believe? Quite possibly. Is it in disagreement with what the FSF has been advocating for more than a decade? No, not at all. C’mon.]
So yeah… again, a shorter, sweeter, more straightforward declaration discussion would have been preferable. They’ve got a strong core point- people disagree about what the core freedoms are. They don’t need to surround it with groundless claims to substantiate it.
Engaging Positively on GPL v3″, which in turn has many more links of interest, including to Luis Villa’s blog, whose writings I’ve taken a shine to as quickly as I did Moody’s work. There is: “what the kernel guys got wrong,” “What the kernel guys are and aren’t (and really should be) saying about GPL v3,” and “what fsf got wrong.” I see that Luis is attending law school, and with any luck we’ll have another legal freedom fighter to work alongside
still too imbalanced against large portfolio holders, for example. But the track record to date shows that the goal is reachable if everyone engages positively. Which of course raises the question: if I can see that, if others like Luis, Dalibor and Mark can see it, why can’t the kernel developers see it? Update: One more post on the subject from Luis, What FSF Got Wrong, has an extremely interesting comment from an OSDL employee that says “The kernel developers did not directly particpate in the
with *everything* Luis says, but close to it. As a result, it would seem redundant for me to rehash this for you; just about everything I’d say on the subject has been said already. My major concern, for instance, has already highlighted by Mark in a comment on Luis’ blog. For those that haven’t been following along at home, Simon will get you caught up in his piece exhorting the different sides to engage positively with one another. While I applaud the sentiment – I’m all about rational discourse – I
developpers due to the upcoming release of the GPL v3 and the refuse of most developpers, including Linus Torvalds, to use it. It seems that there are many things both camps got wrong (you can read more on Luis Villa’s blog, here, here and here). FOSS licensing starts to be a mess. Here we have 2 groups with radically different reasons to use the same license. I think that most of it comes to down to interpretation and intent. Linus chose the GPLv2 at the time because it was the one
one would turn melodramatic when I read the phrase “the Balkanisation of the entire Open Source Universe” in that piece. Kudos to Luis for separating the content from the rest in his blogs and hitting the nails on the heads regarding the concerns and mistakes of kernel developers and those of the FSF. At least judging by reactions of people on those licensing committees, like Luis, or Simon, the FSF is far from being the manipulative, scheming masterminds of the
with *everything* Luis says, but close to it. As a result, it would seem redundant for me to rehash this for you; just about everything I’d say on the subject has been said already. My major concern, for instance, has already highlighted by Mark in a comment on Luis’ blog. For those that haven’t been following along at home, Simon will get you caught up in his piece exhorting the different sides to engage positively with one another. While I applaud the sentiment – I’m all about rational discourse – I
Linux embarcado e GPLv3 GPLv3 pode matar o software livre, aviso dos desenvolvedores do Linux Forking GNU/Linux Engajando positivamente na GPLv3 O que os caras do Kernel estão (e não estão) falando sobre a GPLv3 O que os caras do Kernel entenderam errado o que a FSF entendeu errado (por bruno) Tags: FSFGNUGPLLinuxOpensource [IMG]
still too imbalanced against large portfolio holders, for example. But the track record to date shows that the goal is reachable if everyone engages positively. Which of course raises the question: if I can see that, if others like Luis, Dalibor and Mark can see it, why can’t the kernel developers see it?
Luis Villa’s Blog » what the kernel guys got wrong 4 hours ago wearehugh : Luis Villa’s Blog » what the kernel guys got wrong Tags : gpl3 licensing # copy
thanks for the insightful post luis
it has certainly helped me understand some aspects of the fracas going on
Oddly, we have that situation now, and so many of us are stuck hating the result: The very-many headed hydra of the MPL. Every time it’s rebranded, it becomes a new license, because it defines waaaaay too much in the license text itself. (This is why the CDDL is a good thing.)
Haven’t fully come to an opinion about the rest of it, but thought I would mention an existing problem that may point to future problems with the Choose Your Own Adventure GPL.
The right comparison is not the MPL, IMHO, but what Totem/RB and gstreamer have done- a nice, simple addition to the GPL. Not perfect, no, but a lot easier to jump back and forth between that and regular GPL than between some crazy custom license and anything else.
Remember, IBM has an interesting history in this area. They (and Lenovo) have taken stances that include endorsing products but not selling them. Look at their announcement about the new T60p ThinkPad and SUSE Linux Enteprise Desktop… you have to buy the software from Novell, and they will provide drivers and support it. It seems that they don’t want to be distributing the software themselves.
Luis, it is becoming very clear to me how good the v3 is. It is very disappointing to have so many kernel devs rate it so negatively. It is almost eerie. Hope there will be a movement coming to bring some light to what is best.
PZB: sure; IBM and the rest could easily walk away. (I think, in fact, that if a GPL v2.1 were put out by some other entity, they would not just walk but run away.) But I’m guessing that (particularly on the patent clause) they see value in it- they don’t want another SCO any more than you or I do, and v3 makes a solid attempt to block such a thing.
I think the document is pretty badly framed memorandum of misunderstandings, and you hit them quite well.
I’m very amused that kernel devs, who are stuck with GPLv2 as it is, as they can’t relicense code written by dead contributors retroacticely, continue to take their time to bash the FSF and the drafting process of a license they won’t be able to use anyway, no matter what’s in it. In the finest tradition of benevolent dictators, Linus even arranged for a ‘referendum’ to confirm that he’s right, and the ones he opposes are truly evil.
The melodrama of it all is very funny, from Linus’ anti-FSF rants on groklaw, to this rallying of troops. BitKeeper debacle, here we come again.
I’m not sure they are really stuck with gplv2. If mozilla could do it (including rewriting where necessary) they could do it. The real difficulty would be agreeing on a new license, and it appears that maybe we’re seeing here that they can get on the same page with regards to licensing. And to be fair, they have the right to say ‘we think this is bad for free software’- no one else is doing it, and I’m sure they aren’t the only ones who feel that way.
It is amusing that if anyone has a hidden political agenda, it is clearly the kernel devs, and not the FSF, whose agenda has been crystal clear from day one.
First of all I want to thank Luis for taking the time and energy to summarize and explain the various issues so well.
Just wanted to comment on this comment from Jeff Waugh:
It looks like the GPLv3 process is explicitly trying to prevent making the same mistakes that were made with the MPL (and derivatives like the CDDL). What those licenses got wrong was that the “optional parts” could conflict with each other and the main license text (for example in the CDDL you can select different choices of venue which can conflict with each other making it impossible to combine code from different variants of the CDDL). The extensions allowed to the GPLv3 have been very carefully chosen to make some existing free licenses compatible (finally!) and so people can create larger works combining any combination of any of the optional clauses.
Just responded at http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/gpl_v3_progress (couldn’t trackback, got a 403, sorry). Reading the kernel guys’ statement is like reading a reaction to draft 1, and I note that many of their arguments seem remarkably similar to ones I have heard from certain corporations in another context.
Mark: CDDL fixed a whole load of issues with MPL. One member of the team thought parameterising choice of law and venue would be smart too, but it’s clearly not, I want to find a way to fix that. I think a key here is to look on what are genuinely good-faith efforts to make things better in exactly that way. That’s how I am regarding GPL v3, certainly.
“from the first day RMS heard about DRM”?
Heard about? He all but predicted it. Perhaps he failed to anticipate, in this glorious 21st century, corporate enthusiasm for an idea so “defective by design,” and consumer apathy towards it.
“the belief that the FSF wasn’t political, and is now political”
I think their point is that GPL v2 is a great, balanced license regardless of where you stand on their politics, but GPL v3 is only good if you agree with FSF political goals.
But that’s bogus. We all believe, in retrospect, that v2’s political goals are reasonable, because in the 80s RMS had the balls (the batshit insanity?) to stand up and say ‘this growing proprietarization is immoral.’ Just because in 2006 that is no longer considered political doesn’t mean it isn’t political.
‘this growing proprietarization is immoral.’
One does not (and did not in 1991) need to agree with _any_part_ of this statement to think that GPL v2 is a great license. Read Linus’ “tit-for-tat” discussion on Groklaw.
Sorry, GPLv3 might be made more compatible with more licenses, but in itself the ability to add clauses will fragment GPLv3 itself.
Excellent article Luis – you have hit the nail on the head.
The Linux kernel devs don’t want to re-license the kernel to GPL v3 as they know that the big corporate interest in the kernel will probably abandon input into the Linux kernel. And that means that they’ll be out of work, and have a loss of income. These guys are putting their income and big business before the ideals of the FSF and the GPL. OK, If Linus doesn’t like the GPL, or the FSF’s politics, then he shouldn’t have used the GPL. Period. Maybe he should have used the BSD, and had his baby raped by corporate interest (without any returns to the code I might add), and then he’d see how good the GPL is (and how much better GPL v3 is) and how well it has protected his kernel baby, so that it could grow into a big project, and make him some nice money and fame out of it.
I called Linus a ‘shill’ on Groklaw, and sadly had my comments removed by PJ because a few people got all upset about it, but in reality, that’s all he is. Nothing more, and nothing less. I call a spade a spade.
Cheers,
Dave
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