Linus Speaks Out On GPLv3 615
Slagged writes to mention the word that Linus Torvalds isn't a fan of the new GPL draft. News.com has the story, and someone purporting to be Linus is causing a ruckus in the Groklaw thread on the subject. From the News.com article: "Say I'm a hardware manufacturer. I decide I love some particular piece of open-source software, but when I sell my hardware, I want to make sure it runs only one particular version of that software, because that's what I've validated. So I make my hardware check the cryptographic signature of the binary before I run it ... The GPLv3 doesn't seem to allow that, and in fact, most of the GPLv3 changes seem to be explicitly designed exactly to not allow the above kind of use, which I don't think it has any business doing."
Re:Closing OSS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linus is wrong (Score:2, Informative)
Re:GPL v3 will fail (Score:4, Informative)
Further, the entire GNU toolchain will become GPL v3, which is not insignificant. GCC likely will become GPL v3. Based on the comments I've been seeing so far, a lot of other developers feel the same way I do.
Re:Of Course That's the Point (Score:5, Informative)
GPLv2 dictated technical details that affected the next user's right to modify the software. For example, you couldn't link a modified GPL program with a closed source library, since that would hamper the ability to modify the software.
The spirit of the GPL has not changed. The "political goal" is to ensure that all downsteam users that wind up using GPL software have the same rights to modify and distribute the software that earlier users had. That has not changed. It's only closing a loophole that some companies can use to take away those rights without violating the letter of the GPL.
Re:Of Course That's the Point (Score:3, Informative)
If GPL software developers would like to prevent manufacturers from taking away the rights of users to modify and redistribute the software, they they should use GPLv3. I suspect many will. Some won't. Notably, Linux will never be GPLv3, it can't be even if Linus wanted it to be. There's too much GPLv2 only code in it.
Linus shouldn't act like something has changed. The core value of the GPL has always been that you must not restrict the rights of the people you distribute GPL software to.
It's part of the reason BSD is a fractured mess that nearly no one uses, and Linux is so huge. With GPL you aren't going to be competing against heavily forked proprietary versions that blow the open source version out of the water (see pspice/cadence if you need an example). If Linux had been under a license that allowed forks that users can't modify or redistribute, it would be no better than the BSD license.
Re:Linus is wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Of Course That's the Point (Score:4, Informative)
The Open Source movement makes the case that source code leads to many eyes reducing bugs, stronger communities, and do other things that might be appealing to a business. Free Software on the other hand, according to Stallman and his GPL and FSF, has always been about ensuring the four freedoms for the software end user [gnu.org]. If you or Linus are not interested in these four freedoms, political or philosophical as they may be, then you should not license your software under the GPL "version 2 or any later version". Read up on it; make your choice. But don't complain when the FSF attempts to modify their license to maintain these freedoms, for the FSF has never claimed to do otherwise.
Re:GPL upgrade (Score:3, Informative)
If you take software licensed under the GPL, and distribute it, you must give your customers access to the source code, and you must allow them to modify the software and distribute it further. With GPL2, a distributor could create a situation where you have the source code and modified it, but the modified source code cannot possibly work. For example, if you bought a computer running Linux, and the bootloader takes a checksum and only runs the system if the OS software has the right checksum, then your right to modify the software has become purely theoretical: You can make modified versions as much as you like, but they won't work.
That is _one_ change with GPL3: Again, the customer must have the right to modify the software, but you also have to give him the capability to make it run. So the distributor is not allowed anymore to give you purely theoretical rights, that you cannot use in practice.
Or lets say Microsoft takes an open source music player and modifies it to play music with DRM. They distribute the software under the GPL with source code. However, as soon as you make the slightest change to the source code, the compiled code stops playing DRM'd music. In theory, you have the right to modify the software, in practice that right is useless because the modified software doesn't work the way it should. That would be legal with GPL 2, but not with GPL 3.
Linus' first comment deleted, reposted (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Of Course That's the Point (Score:4, Informative)
Ahem. GPLv2 2c:
Re:Linus is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
No, you can fork the GPL, you just can't call it the GNU GPL and can't include the preamble without permission. That seems pretty reasonable. You wouldn't want a bunch of incompatible licenses all called the GNU GPL.
Re:Of Course That's the Point (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linus is wrong (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You are wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Yup. GPLv3 is just plain dumb. It "addresses" a non-existent problem. People have a choice between DRM and non-DRM platforms and software. They can and do vote with their wallets.
Yes, but currently Free Software authors are subsidising the development of platforms that takes their Free code and locks it up so that it can't be modified or replaced. A lot of Free Software authors don't like this because it defeats the whole point of Free Software. That is the problem that it solves.
If there is no Free competition... (Score:3, Informative)
What should I buy instead if all the close substitutes of the hardware are equally locked-in?
O RLY? Both GNU GPL v2 and this GPL v3 draft make an exception for libraries distributed with the OS. Heck, I run GCC on top of Windows.
"Fuck" isn't the only 4-letter word. There is also "FPGA".
Copyright fragmentation is already covered. For software to carry the GNU® mark, its copyright must be assigned to Free Software Foundation Inc.
Re:Linus is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
That's not entirely accurate. Once glibc is licensed under "GPL Version 3 or later" nothing licensed under only GPL version 2 can be distributed as a binary staticly linked with glibc.
Canadians protecting IT property rights! (Score:2, Informative)
If you are a Canadian you can help send this message to parliament by signing our Petition to protect Information Technology property rights [digital-copyright.ca].
Today I posted an article to the website of CLUE: The Canadian Association for Open Source, titled "Whose hardware is it anyway?" [cluecan.ca] (Copy on the Digital Copyright Canada forum [digital-copyright.ca]).
Re:Of Course That's the Point (Score:3, Informative)
No, they didn't. They shipped the machines with EFI and without a BIOS compatibility layer, because they did not need to run any BIOS-dependent code. This precluded running Windows, because Windows is not yet fully EFI compatible. Some Free kernels which already had IA64 support were quickly ported, since they already had EFI code that just needed to be copied from one branch to another. Windows wasn't, because Microsoft don't want Apple to be in a strong position as a hardware manufacturer. Finally, Apple realised that people wanted to run Windows on their Macs and shipped a firmware update that contained the BIOS compatibility layer. At no point did Apple actively try to prevent people from running whatever they wanted on their machines.
Running OS X on a non-Mac is a completely different, but irrelevant, story.
Re:Linus is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, well... I didn't know RMS (or the FSF or the SPI for that matter) were pushing governments so only choice to license the software you wrote was the GPLv3. It's good to know, thanks!
For the hardware manufacturers: they can ALWAYS use non-GPLv3 based software, don't they?
For the software developers: they can ALWAYS develop software and distribute it under a non-GPLv3 software, don't they?
So what's exactly what RMS is trying to force down our throats?
Re:You are wrong (Score:3, Informative)
The printer example is now obsolete, and has been since the advent of the PC.
Back in the bad old DOS days, you had the following options:
- intercept the output of the driver via a tsr
- modify the driver in-memory
- save the output to a file for post-processing
- replace the driver with one you wrote (not that big a deal in the days of dos).
That was when printers were a lot more expensive than today. A good dot-matrix could easily set you back $500, a daisy-wheel even more.As for today's situation, again, the printer is a poor analogy. Say, for example, that there's a software mod that would allow you to double your output resolution, and you'd like to take advantage of that, but you can't, because your printer is "locked out" from mods.
Has your printer all of a sudden become "less" than what it was before? No. It still does everything it could, just as your old copy of WordPerfect is still as functional as the day you bought it a decade ago (and still spanks Word).
But you made your choice, when you bought the printer, to accept the limitations that came with it, unless you were fraudulently misled as to its upgradeability - and that (fraud) is an issue that the GPLv3 doesn't address. There's nothing preventing another manufacturer seeing the hole that his/her competitor is digging for itself, and offering a similar product without that limitation, and letting the market decide.
Its the same as the ongoing battle with ink-jet manufacturers. They sell the printer dirt cheap, then rape you over the refills (hello, HP). Or, you can say "screw this" and pay more initially for a different manufacturer's inkjet, and less for the refills. Or do like I did, and say, "a pox on both your houses", and buy a laser.
The markets are "efficient enough" that the GPLv2 can do the job.