On Tuesday, the FSF announced the creation of the global “GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project,” which will help create the next version of the General Public License. The Dutch nonprofit NLnet foundation is donating €150,000 to the cause. The new project is meant to bring together thousands of organizations, software developers and software users to help suggest revisions to the GPL.
Maybe I am cheap, but for me it is complete waste of money, especially when many people in the Third World are stavering. FSF are socialists and bureaucrats of the worst sort, and their lawyers must be enormously expensive. They had better use BSD license as next GPL
Impressive. Let’s count, shall we?
* 1. Maybe I am cheap, but for me it is complete waste of money,
* 2. especially when many people in the Third World are stavering.
* 3. FSF are socialists
* 4. and bureaucrats of the worst sort,
* 5. and their lawyers
* 6. must be enormously expensive.
* 7. They had better use BSD license as next GPL
Wow! If you don’t get venomous replies after that troll, I’ll be stunned!
Somo of you might have read a MSNBC article based on the first version of the Reuters report, which misquotes the FSF on the provisions concerning software patents. Reuters has meanwhile updated the story, which is the version eWeek publishes.
Here’s a statement from Georg Greve [http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2005-September/00519…]:
Hi all,
there seems to be confusion spread about the GPLv3, based on a Reuters article published today and copied to several locations, including MSNBC from where Slashdot grabbed it. Unfortunately in this article Reuters displayed some items of pure speculation as facts and in doing so oversimplified them to the extent that they became false.
The true news is what you can see in this release: We have begun preparing the GPL Version 3 process for real and there will be a long discussion throughout 2006 about the changes made. Since that process will be quite a lot of work, the Free Software Foundations are very happy that Stichting NLnet supports this process and hope that others will do the same.
As to what the GPL version 3 draft will contain: Noone has that information right now, it is all in Richard Stallmans head, who has to gather the ideas and get to work on the draft. Until that draft has been published, everything is pure speculation and your guess is as good as mine.
Reuters picked up strongly on two of the the points which were made before by Eben Moglen in the eweek article and quoted me falsely. They later did some slight improvement in terms of reducing the oversimplification, but still portrayed things in a rather one-sided way, in particular making mere speculation seem fact, while ignoring the true facts.
So the best thing you can do is to ignore that article.
It is FUD and I am deeply sorry for this, for I have been centrally (if falsely) quoted as the contributor of it.
That has been a most unpleasant experience.
Regards,
Georg Greve
FSFE, President
It’s no secret that the FSF is comprised entirely of RMS’s yes-men. They needn’t spend a year and €150,000 in “discussion” — just have RMS draft the document himself and have the others check it over for spelling, grammar, typographical errors, and loopholes before stamping the FSF seal of approval on it.
I know don’t feed the troll but … GPL is so important! It’s the only weapon we got against the evil empire. BSD license is a bit out of this world, far away from reality. If the FSF needs money to work things out, they should get money to work things out. Marketroids pray for some stupid mistake.
roman (now I feel dirty)
But – the RMS and FSF haters will do anything to bag it. It’s amazing how that article got out, misquotes and all, I wonder if Microsoft had anything to do with it (call me a paranoid bastard). Microsoft did a nice media job on IBM’s long lost OS/2 Warp 4, full of FUD and lies, I see no reason why they’d stop there!
Dave
That is the main thing. Do not let too many lawyers get involved.
IMO regarding patents, there should be a clause that any patent held by the author of the software grants a use of that specific patent as part of this licence.
Then GPL software will automatically gain a ‘patent pool’, while patent holders will still have the right to milk their patents with proprietary software.
However even this may stop some authors updating the license of their software from V2 to V3, which IMO is more important.
Maybe they can make the patent provision optional, i.e. leave it up to the project developers. Of course once a project adopted that provision, any fork or derived base would also be required to adopt it as well.
This a la carte strategy could be extended to other controversial issues, like web services. I would hope that they won’t even mention DRM in the new GPL, though. That’s just a bad idea.
Paul G
It is, and will be, optional. As the copyright holder you can include and change any part of the license as you please.