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Posted on 10/23/2006 9:07:01 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Well. That would be a shame. [/sarcasm]
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Steve Jobs is looking pretty smart.
Open Solaris could benefit, but the biggest beneficiaries I see if Linux stumbles are the BSD people. The BSD license is much, much less restrictive. Basically, you can do whatever the hell you want with the code; you don't even have to make your changes public. You can make proprietary products with it. The only stipulation is that you give the original code writers credit when branching off. That's it.
Probabally correct. Apple has shown BSD is more than up to the task.. Still I dont think 'linux will stumble' if anything this will finally get the albatross (stallman) off the neck of Linux. In the event of a split all of the code license under gpl2 will stay 2 and improvements can be applied by anyone.
Lyons again I see, talking about that which he knows just enough to be dangerous. OTOH, while there are numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations in this article, he at least he gets across the state of the open source community, which is that there are a lot of people who don't agree with Stallman's fanaticism.
"Lyons again I see, talking about that which he knows just enough to be dangerous."
Utter BS. Dan has been covering Stallman and his antics for 20 years.
Stallman's agenda is so cracked that you need long exposure to it in order to intuit what he's up to.
Dan's nailed him to the wall on this one.
If Stallman wants to publish a new license, he is certainly free to do so, but he doesn't have the power to make other people use it.
I share his concern about DRM. I think it's not good for consumers. However, license restrictions is not the way to deal with this. Personally, I agree with Linus' more pragmatic stance to Stallmans.
Title should be forking gnu *not* Toppling linux. There would be a bunch of forks and I would guess a good deal of GPL3 stuff would die on the vine..
I care about how DRM is implemented, the concept itself is fine. So long as I can buy a CD and be allowed to rip it so I can listen on my mp3 player im all good. So long as I can copy a DVD for backup Im good. Its when DRM starts to interfere with fair use that I get upset. The problem with stallman, like most extremest, is they cant see the difference between a technology and how someone might abuse it.
Fork gnu sounds a bit rude.
Agreed. You said it better than I did.
Another problem I have with DRM is that perpetual copyright will pretty much destroy older works, because in just a few years, nothing will be able to read it.
And he's gotten the facts wrong or misrepresented issues so many times it's pathetic. Let's take a few:
"They would be forbidden from using Linux software to block users from infringing on copyright and intellectual-property rights "
That is incorrect. The GPL3 states that software can't be modified with DRM to the extent that it prevents a user from using the software anywhere, anyway he wants. Not all Linux software is GPL, therefore this statement is rediculous. The new terms apply equally to GPL3 software running on Windows.
In addition, the main thrust of the DRM clause is to prevent the "TiVoization" of GPL software. The TiVo scheme is that its hardware requires a digitally signed version of Linux before it will allow the OS to run. So Stallman is mad that people can't modify the installation of Linux that's on a TiVo and still have it work on a TiVo (the bastard actually wants to control hardware now). However, note that doing so doesn't infringe TiVo's copyright (you did buy the hardware, didn't you?). It's more like buying a Linux system from Dell and installing your own legal copy of Linux on it.
"and they would be barred from suing over alleged patent infringements related to Linux."
True. But then all of the better open source licenses, including Sun's, require patent grants. Stallman is just finally getting with the times, since the GPL2 was written when software patents weren't so common. So this is not a proper basis for a rant against Stallman.
"There he grew furious that companies wouldn't let him tinker with the code in their products. A Xerox laser printer was a key culprit"
Again, technically true. But he fails to mention that until then people in his position were pretty much free to tinker with all software. Stallman got mad because this new "closed-source" software that came along wouldn't let him fix the bugs and make enhancements himself -- he had to wait for the vendor.
"Stallman and his allies hacked away for nearly a decade but couldn't get GNU to work. In 1991 Torvalds, then an unknown college kid in Finland, produced in six months what Stallman's team had failed to build in years"
This might be a valid comparison if they were trying to do the same thing, but they weren't. The fact is that the envisioned GNU kernel was a far more complicated feat to pull off, given that they wanted a true microkernel architecture. Linux has a monolithic kernel, which is a lot easier to write. But most people reading this article won't know that.
"Torvalds posted this tiny 230-kilobyte file containing 10,000 lines of code to a public server, dubbing it "Linux" and inviting anyone to use it."
Wrong. Linus Torvalds did not come up with the name. He wanted to call it "Freax," but his friend Ari Lemmke who ran the FTP server Linux was first posted on named the folder for the project "Linux," and the name caught.
"In recent years Stallman and the FSF have been cracking down on big Linux users, enforcing terms of the existing license (GPLv2, for version 2) and demanding that the big tech outfits crack open their proprietary code whenever they inserted lines from Linux. Cisco and TiVo have been targets;"
Cisco (actually, a contractor for Linksys before the buy) used Linux and then put in their modifications and utilities. So did TiVo. He makes it sound like they used a few lines of Linux in their larger product, which is wrong -- it's the other way around.
"Cisco caved in to Stallman's demands rather than endure months of abuse from his noisy worldwide cult of online jihadists."
True, but generally those who are caught red-handed engaging in copyright infringement tend to settle rather than go to court. Would he take this tone with Microsoft chasing after an OEM that's been shipping systems loaded with free copies of Windows? Microsoft does this all the time, and rightly so. Where's the outrage?
BTW, they did not have to give up any code. They could have ripped Linux out of their systems, recalled all products using Linux, and paid some money. That probably would have cost more than what their code cost to produce, thus their decision.
Stallman's agenda is so cracked
You'll get no disagreement from me, or from a lot of open source advocates.
The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and copyright by a cast of thousands, beginning with Linus Torvalds. That part is not at any risk from Stallman's antics. His new license simply doesn't apply to the Linux kernel, and there is nothing he can do about it. Linus and all the top kernel maintainers have stated clearly and with certainty that they are not moving off the GPLv2 license.
But a great swath of user code, including the critical gcc compiler, and most of the classic Unix utilities, is under Free Software Foundation, Inc. (FSF) copyright. The FSF can re-release that code under any license it chooses, and can decide to accept any future changes only under some other license, such as GPLv3 instead of GPLv2.
There are currently over 5,000 such GNU software packages, as listed at FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory. These packages are critical to all BSD and Linux based systems, including Mac OS X.
FSF owns this code. Programmers cannot currently get any changes into the main line of code development for this software unless they hand over Copyright to FSF.
What programmers can do is to fork all this code, before -any- GPLv3 only changes are made to it, and continue to use, modify, and distribute it, under the GPLv2 license terms granted everyone. The major distributions, such as Red Hat, SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu, could seal the success of such a fork, by refusing to pick up GPLv3 code.
If that happened, the FSF would cease to be an active player. They would continue to hold copyright on this code in perpetuity. But almost no one would send them any more changes, and they would be out of the loop, both in terms of license affect, and in terms of code maintenance.
Thats the Rub, Linus, Red Hat, Novell, and IBM have far more power than Stalman does and this is perhaps the nutballs last gasp. If RedHat, Novell, and IBM said no to the GPLv3 and Linus backed them with the kernel the fork would keep the GPL2 going. The sad thing is stallman is going to obsolete him self (more than he already is) over nothing but DRM and Tivo.
I personally dont like what Tivo did but hey, its their hardware!
Actually it's yours -- you bought it. Or is everything licensed now?
But I am on Linus' side. That's a hardware issue, and Stallman has no business butting in with his software license. Absolutely nothing prevents us from downloading the TiVo software and modifying it to put on a different box, so IMHO the terms of the GPL (letter and spirit) are fulfilled.
The point is that if they do this, the projects will fork if the licence is whacked.
I agree with the rest of your post. FSF is going to screw themselves if they insist on putting out a license that the vast majority of programmers/companies can't support.
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