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The Death Of The GPL
talk.bmc.com — Opinions on the GPL's viral effect polluted the air as advocates and opponents battled over topics they had no business discussing. If GPL continues down its current path Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation ’s apparent lack of vision will lead to the obvious outcome—the death of the GPL.
GoochSapper- 80 diggs
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- bigtizzle, on 10/11/2007, -3/+0Wrong article. Oops. . .
- annegentle, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I love the term "license pressure" reminiscent of "pricing pressure."
- whurleygrrl, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I agree, it makes perfect sense.
- whurley, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2All credit to Greg Stein at Google. It's his term and I couldn't agree with him more :)
- annegentle, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1"license pressure" (like pricing pressure)
- mmmgood, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6On the contrary, I think the recent Novell mess emphasized the clarity of the FSF's vision and why the GPL is more important than ever.
- whurley, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1But are Novell and Microsoft the right direction to head in? i.e should we be battling them? Or, should we be changing the landscape all together? I have to think that Greg has this one right. Developers will be increasingly asking for more freedom. As they do, the licenses available will have to adopt the views of the individual developers or risk fading away.
- bradmeek, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2good to know.
www.startology.com - williamdyer, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6GPL3 has gotten lots of industry input. While these guys might not like it, there are lots of other commercial developers that do like it a lot. And if it cuts down on patent lawsuits, it helps everyone (except the patent trolls).
- count, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Yes, the GPL restricts what you can do with software covered by it, but it only restricts things to ensure the Freedom of the software. Not letting someone release software covered by the GPL without accompanying source code is a restriction, just like preventing tivoization and patent pacts, but it is necessary to ensure the Freedom of the software.
The direction of the GPL/FSF is in no way leading to the death of the GPL, only to the inevitable Freedom of software covered by it. This guy is only concerned about open source, and does not care about software Freedom such as that preserved by the GPL.- maninblac1, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1The GPL is as restrictive as any closed source licenses with respect to this license.
A real free open source license without restrictions.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
- maninblac1, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1The GPL is as restrictive as any closed source licenses with respect to this license.
- libervisco, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3>> Most people have no actual knowledge of the contents, effects, etc. of the license and build their opinions entirely on hearsay and speculation.
It seems to me that this exactly describes the author of the article. He first says "don't argue about the GPL" and then basically says that most people don't have a clue and then proceeds to "enlighten" us with his own opinions and speculation.
If you ask me, he killed his article at the very beginning and his arguments are just too weak. GPL is losing influence because there are many other FOSS licenses? Come on you can do better than that!
This is plain and simple just some FUD, intentional or not. I know Microsoft would bless this kind of article, but not anyone with a clue. - andyo, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0For me the questions is effectiveness. I am very sympathetic to the FSF's views on software patents and DRM (although I make some distinctions I won'tgo into here) and I believe most free/open source developers takesimilar positions on those issues. The GPL is popular because developers like the FSF policy positions. What I wonder about is whether the problems can be addressed by a license on free software. It may well turn out that the new anti-patent and anti-DRM clauses function just as position statements, and fail to slow the juggernaut. Moglen and Stallman are staking everything on the value of GPL'd software: if music companies and software companies and forces like that come to like GPL'd software more than they like their treasured patents and DRM, we'll win.
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