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, but wrong. There was only one other person involved. James Gosling (one of the co-inventors of Java, btw) forked off a branch of Emacs and sold it as Unipress Emacs. In response, Stallman threw away the entire Emacs code base, invented the GPL and rewrote it from scratch. That was actually a good thing, because in the process he used a full-fledged Lisp interpreter as the engine instead of the half-baked Mocklisp in Unipress Emacs.
XEmacs is another Emacs fork, however we have kept XEmacs GPL (we have to). He hates us anyway. XEmacs has also had a fork. For awhile, a variation of XEmacs called InfoDock was sold as a commercial product, still under the GPL with full source code available.
It was with great joy, by the way, the day I removed Mocklisp support from XEmacs.
If it is pure public domain, then anyone can take a copy, stick any copyright they wish on it and claim they wrote it, legally.
The GPL isn't virus-like, it's totally a virus. That's the way it was designed.
Now the LGPL, if it can be applied to non-libraries might be a good bet for gov't financed software.
It can, but what does it matter? You can distribute GPL'ed programs with other proprietary software. The GPL "infection" stops at whole program boundaries, it does not extend to a suite of other software.
$ locate COPYING | grep '/COPYING$' | wc -l
417
I have 417 copies of it on this machine, comrade. How many copies do you have?
[root@Cherie root]# locate COPYING | grep '/COPYING$' | wc -l
135
Uhmmm, wonder who bought his vote?????
Funny that's what MS was saying about IE. Now they have a different story.
Seems to me that if those government workers are using the work of people who released their source as GPL they have to issue it as GPL or not at all. MS does not let you use their code work it over and release it so others can use it as they please, why should Open Source have to do it? This is stealing.
Wrong. It is their software (that of the original authors). If the government does not want to release it as open source then let them reinvent the wheel. Why should MS get the benefit of our tax dollars while stealing the work of the GPL authors? Don't they have enough money already? Will MS give their code to the goverment and allow the new changed code to be released as public domain? You bet they will not.
Wrong, it is no different than proprietary software. If you release it with changes, the original author's license still applies. Some people can rework MS software, but they cannot use it as their own or sell it as their own. Same thing.
And when is MS going to give away their software to the goverment to change it and release it as public domain?
....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.
3 Guesses as to which corporation; and the first two don't count.
? It is different. Consider this example. Let's say I take a proprietary library developed by my company for internal use copy it to my home computer and develop an application and imbed that library in it and distribute binaries. That's theft and recognized as such in any court of law. On the other hand, let's say I develop an application that uses the readline library (it's GPL not LGPL). I am required to make the rest of the application GPL if I wish to distribute it. Do you see the difference? The virus is in how the license attaches itself to other code.
One more difference. Let's say I want to distribute a CD ROM of various programs. If I take a proprietary internal use only program from work and put it on the CD, that's also theft. On the other hand, if I stick an XEmacs binary on it, Nothing Happens. That's legal usage of the GPL. The GPL only attaches itself to code linked into a program. There's nothing wrong with distributing a GPL'ed program in the same collection as a proprietary program and the GPL does not apply to the proprietary program.
No I see no difference. It is theft either way. Just because people who release stuff as GPL do not want payment it does not mean that using their code does not carry a price. People who release stuff as GPL want to see their software improved and freely available, people who make proprietary software want money, royalties, etc. To GPL people the improvements are the royalty they want instead of money.
I don't know what you are talking about. Nowhere does this article talk about 'govt workers using the work of people who released their source as GPL'. It is talking about original, government-funded software.
Everyone knows that you can't incorporate GPL code into your program, and then release it under a different (or no) license. In fact, that's exactly why I oppose government-funded software having this GPL virus attached.
You seem to have some fixation on the idea that govt-funded software is all derived from GPL software. I've got news for you... Good software can be written without incorporating GPL'd software. Even if it couldn't, the article isn't about that anyway.
As for govt-funded software's ownership. I've written quite a bit of it, and I can tell you that I don't own it. The govt owns it, and they can do whatever the hell they want with it. I have no right to slap any type of license on it.
But if they did decide to release the software, it would only be proper if it was released as public domain software so that any company/school/cult could use it.If it's GPL, then only cults could use it. ;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.