Posted on 10/23/2002 9:27:11 AM PDT by Wisconsin
Wednesday October 23, 2002 - [ 12:47 PM GMT ] Print this Article Topic - Government
An anonymous reader writes: "Leaders of the New Democrat Coalition attempt to outlaw GPL. A call to sign off on explicit rejection of "licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cyber security technologies developed through federal R & D." has been issued by Adam Smith, Congressman for the Ninth District in the State of Washington.
It's already signed off on by Rep. Tom Davis(R-Va), Chairman of Government Reform Subcomittee on Technology, and Rep. Jim Turner (D-TX) Ranking Member of the same committee, with the backing of Rep. Jim Davis (D-FL), and Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI).
It's a note to fellow New Democrats under the guise of protecting commercial interest's right to make money from the fruits of federal R & D, and to sign off on an attached letter to Richard A. Clarke, Chair of the President's Critical Infrastructure.
They are attempting to convince Clarke, Chair of the President's that licensing terms such as "those in the GNU or GPL" are restrictive, preclude innovation, improvement, adoption and establishment of commercial IP rights.
Let's take a look at the highlights:
1) They use the Internet, by virtue of TCP/IP, as "proof" of their thesis. 2) They state that you cannot improve OR adopt OR commercialize GPL software. 3) They state that you cannot integrate GPL'd software with proprietery software. 4) They say you should keep publicly funded code away from the public sector, so that proprietary interests can make money from the work. 5) They equate a lack of understanding of the GPL with valid reasoning against it.
In essence, that non-proprietary interests should not be allowed to use, adopt, improve, or make money from the work. That taxpayers should pay for it twice. And that nobody should be able to stop commercial entities from taking publicly funded code, they will then close off.
Write or fax each of the Congressmen mentioned as supporting this, and let them know they have been given bad information and that categorically anti-opensource and anti-GPL stance will be reflected at voting time:
(Excerpt) Read more at newsvac.newsforge.com ...
Right; the commercial guys can use the code in their products, and so can the open-source guys.
There is nothing to prevent an entity from charging for a commercial app that was basically created via our tax dollars. This breaks the spirit of public domain.
No, the original code is still public-domain, but the derivitive products would be billable.
The GPL corrects that problem.
Not a problem. We all get to use the government code. The closed-source folks are happy because they don't have to expose their source code. The open-source crowd is happy because the government isn't favoring commercialism.
Public-domain is the key.
It's a matter of securing the country's network infrastructure. Obviously the profit-driven commercial software houses are not up to the task, and the government thinks it needs to step in.
If China were to verbatim copy the US Bill of Rights in its constitution but add a stipulation that says you can't use them against the government, would it still be the same? No. Once you change the licensing, it isn't open source anymore.
But that doesn't change the original.
First, I want to say that I agree with you 100%. But, I can think of a situation where it makes sense...
The LAPACK/LINPACK project was started to reduce the cost of DOD/DOE govt contracts. The govt guys realized that there was a lot of duplication of effort by the various defense contractors on things like writing basic math subroutines. It was frustrating for them to pay 8 competing defense contractors for a project, and realize that each developed their own basic math subroutines on the govt nickel.
So they decided to set up a project to develop (and pay for) the subroutines once and make them then freely available to all players. This actually made a lot of sense, and saved the taxpayers money.
LOL! You're right... I'd better get back to work. :-)
The derivative is of a vastly different nature.
No kidding? Well, then this won't surprise you.
So what? It doesn't affect us here in the USA because the original is still in force.
If CIAO releases new guidelines about handling MIME extensions, and provides sample code to go with it, Microsoft grabs a copy, and I grab a copy. Whatever MS does with their copy does not affect my copy and what I do with it.
What's your point?
Except for classified software, like avionics for spy planes, etc., that's the law for all government-funded software. Or, at least it used to be.
The answer to that is very simple and you already know it.
I won't touch the stuff.
You got it. If you don't like the license, don't use it. There is nothing inherent in the GPL that prevents commercial use of GPL software. However, if you want to take GPL'ed software and incorporate it into proprietary software and hide the source, sorry you can't do that. It's theft as we see it.
Exactly. That's the whole point. Note that there are plenty of reasonable exceptions. You are allowed to distribute entire GPL'ed programs in an otherwise proprietary software suite. One example is BitKeeper which distributes GNU diff and GNU patch. Another example is the GPL'ed Linux kernel. Linus has explicitly allowed proprietary, non-GPL'ed modules to be loaded at run-time.
I agree. The BSD license would be good for this sort of thing. With the BSD license, corporations and private citizens could do whatever they wanted to with the source code.
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