Journal einhverfr's Journal: Why the FSF Misses the Point 5
This is intended as a rebuttle to the document at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html. My own thinking, as a FOSS developer, is that the FSF has always been a fairly coercive organization for one which advocates freedom and while their goals are noble I have grown increasingly concerned with their methods. I don't beieve that my criticism amounts to a mere legitimate disagreement over policy-- I actually believe that the FSF continues to move further from their legitimate principles as time goes by.
I would also begin by saying that most of my projects use the GNU GPL v2, though I have contributed code and documentation under BSD licenses in the past as well and have no problem doing so again. I have no plans at the moment to move to the GPL v3 as it does not meet my standards of Freedom in a software license in the current form, nor did the rationale documents behind the various drafts indicate that these new restrictions were made only with careful consideration of the limitations they place on downstream developers.
My problem with the FSF is that they do not maintain a high enough standard for what is considered to be Free Software (though arguably Debian does).
Software Freedom has Value
The four basic freedoms listed at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html are indeed extremely valuable both economically and morally. I don't think that anyone in the FOSS community would suggest otherwise. Basically summarized, they provide the freedom to run the software for any purpose, to adapt it to one's own needs, to modify, and distribute verbatim and modified versions. These freedoms provide moral value by removing restrictive licensing terms with traditional software vendors such as Microsoft. But they also provide economic value by freeing individuals and companies to make the software work better for them than would be otherwise possible. This means more software engineering jobs, more distribution of money, and more productivity for everyone, software engineers or not.
What does it take to only use Free Software? Why is expanding the Commons important?
The "Open Source" movement which RMS dispises has worked tirelessly to expand the intellectual commons surrounding software development. Although RMS suggests rightly that one cannot be Free until one can only use Free software, the only way this can happen and continue to happen is if the commons continue to be expanded. We cannot be Free without this process, and the OSI has done more work than any other group in making this happen.
The FSF, on the other hand, has actually run into problems with other groups which have stronger standards of Freedom than they do (such as Debian). In essence the desire to advocate and, I believe, force people to take their position
Debian vs. the GFDL
The GNU Free Documentation License has an optional term which allows an author to specify portions of the covered work which cannot be modified by downstream distributors. These are called invarient sections and were included so that the FSF could force the distribution of the GNU manifesto with certain other portions of documentation.
Debian automatically lists any GFDL-licensed work with invarient sections as non-Free because one cannot freely edit the entire work. In short, because portions of the work are non-Free, the work as a whole is considered non-Free (which is, IMO, the correct position to take).
Affero GPL: Free or Not?
The Affero GPL is the GNU GPL with an added requirement (endorsed by the FSF) which requires that software accessed over a network must allow for the distribution of its source code through the same session as the interaction.
When addressing the question of whether this is Free or not, I think that we should start with the FSF's 4 basic freedoms.
0) Freedom to run for any use? This seems to be met. But see below.
1) Freedom to modify for one's own needs? I believe not.
For Freedom 1 to mean anything, I believe that it needs to apply equally to business entities as to individuals. The question thus becomes: could a business or individual have any legitimate reason to prevent the distribution of source code as required by the AGPL for use either at home or at one's own place of business. The simple answer is that there could be many reasons for doing this including preventing malicious users from auditing custom changes to code.
For the AGPL restriction to have any teeth, one would also have to consider the question of application-level filtering software that might be put in place between the user and the network service to filter out source code requests. For web services, this could be accomplished using any proxy server. If this is allowed, then the terms of the AGPL are easily circumvented. If not, then Freedom 0 is compromised as well in that the software license would place specific configuration requirements on the software and other components of the network system.
In short, either the AFPL only restricts developer freedom without ensuring any downstream freedom, or it does not ensure freedom of use. I would therefore hesitate to judge whether or not it is a Free software license, but would recommend against using it.
GPL v3 Draft 1: Free or Not?
Rest omitted due to information which I determined later to be inaccurate.
Removed section due to inaccurate information. Sorry.
GPL v3: Free but at what price?
One might argue that the GPL v3 does discriminate against certain fields of endeavor, such as firmware for wireless cards which are by law not supposed to be tampered with by the user. In these fields, it is impossible to meet the requirements of the GPL v3. Thus it arguably fails to meet both Debian's Free Software Guidelines and the OSI's Open Source Definition. In the case of wifi firmware, these laws exist specifically to prevent people from tampering with a public resource (the airwaves) and hurting their neighbors and the general public as a result.
Fields of endeavor... (Score:2)
The problem with drinking Kool-aid (and who distributes Kool-aid without first drinking it th
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However, I have found a few interesting issues with the Affero GPL which could result in the restrictions being nothing more burdens for the developers rather than user guarantees.
Consider the following cases:
UDP-only DNS server using a lot o
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...So a license saying "I grant you the right to do $ACTIVITY, which would otherwise be forbidden by $LAW, but only if $SILLY_CONDITION" is never discriminatory, because the absence of $LAW would make it meaningless? This seems bizarre and i
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...So a license saying "I grant you the right to do $ACTIVITY, which would otherwise be forbidden by $LAW, but only if $SILLY_CONDITION" is never discriminatory, because the absence of $LAW would make it meaningless? This seems bizarre and illogical ("you may redistribute this, which would otherwise be forbidden by copyright, but only for use on Windows systems" would be OK, GFDL with invariant sections would be OK (does OSI disagree with Debian about this?), ...), which makes me think something is being lost in translation. Do you have any pointers on where to look to see this?
I don't disagree with you about this. I just think the OSI position *is* defensible and avoids being overly political. This doesn't mean that it is right. For the rest of this, note that IANAL.
The GPL v3 actually has a number of other potential problems with it that I didn;t think of when I wrote the original post. For example "legal notice" is not defined as it relates to section 7b of the GPL v3. Looking it up in the dictionary suggests that it means that legal information is conveyed to the reader using a legally required format and media. "Reasonable" is not defined either.
In general, I would expect "reasonable" to means something along the lines of "within reason, given the rights, responsibilities, and interests of all parties involved."
This suggests that legal notices may not be strictly limited to code comments. Lines which identify the license to other components but are humanly readible may be covered as well. Thus one could force a GPL v3 program to identify itself to some of its dependencies and render a portion of the code (!) invanriant. While I have a hard time imagining tht this would have practical consequences with regard to the ability to change the operation of the software, it is somewhat disturbing.
Could something like as follows be part of a Legal Notice?
#define LICENCE gpl3+
How about any of the following:
THIS_WORK_IS_LICENSED_UNDER(gpl3+);
#warn THIS_WORK_COMES_WITH_NO_WARRANTY
#define FCC_LICENSE_NUMBER none_granted
Obviously, you could cause the software to spit out warnings as it compiles, force people to dig through deliberately hard to read (but still in the preferred form for editing) C Preprocessor macros, etc. or even make people dig through multiple layers of legal notices in different files to find out how it works, and possibly reduce it to macros that inline assembly language. But when it comes to what the program *does* with this, I don't see how program logic could be restricted through such code-centered legal notices through any language I know of (one could invent such a language however... Hey, that might make a great joke....).
BTW, I did check about Debian. Debian considers the GPL v3 to be "potentially non-Free" for the reason that section 7b legal notices are not sufficiently defined as to make them feel comfortable with a blanket acceptance of the license.
I suspect that such stupidities are inherent in any attempt to regulate the form or use of software to provide OSI / DFSG / FSF definition or similar freedom.
I suppose you are probably right. I actually did find a worse license which had been OSI approved: The OSL which places legal limits on the use of software by pretending that offering network services is a form of distribution. (AGPL v3 draft 2 could still run amok with the OSD because section 13 seems to be predicated on a certain style of network interface-- the problems of which are explained in my other reply.)
I guess I have come to decide that groups as a whole tend to be lousy at protecting Freedom.