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The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project
Announcing the GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project (GPLv3) Stichting NLnet donate 150,000 EUR to support GPLv3 activities The Free Software Foundations are proud to announce the creation of the global "GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project". The project will bring together thousands of organisations, software developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in an effort to update the world's most popular Free Software licence. The GPLv3 promises to be one of the largest participatory comments and adoption efforts ever undertaken. The sister organisations in the United States and Europe are also happy to announce a total grant of 150,000 EUR from Stichting NLnet to support this truly-unique project. The global process will be overseen by the Free Software Foundation with support from its legal counsel the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC). Free Software Foundation Europe will be coordinating the European activities closely with both organisations and contributing to the global communication effort. Peter Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation says, "With the release of GPLv3, we aim to increase the international reach of the Free Software movement." To develop this new licence, we will be contacting communities across the globe to ensure their participation in the update of one of the most important social documents of our time." Georg Greve, President of FSF Europe adds, "We are working closely with our sister organisation and the SFLC to make sure GPLv3 will address the overarching and national European issues," and "Europe has a vibrant ecosystem of highly-skilled Free Software developers and small- and medium-sized Free Software enterprises. It will be our goal to strengthen this development and help European governments to build upon it." In announcing the grant to the FSF and FSF Europe, Teus Hagen, chairman of NLnet said, "NLnet's support of the GPL and the Free Software movement, and its desire to see the successful adoption of GPLv3 achieved in the spirit of internationalization, made the funding of this project an important priority for us." Hagen said, "We hope to encourage other grant-making organisations to help fund this unique project". Written by Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, the GNU General Public Licence (``the GPL'') is the Constitution and central licence of the Free Software movement, securing users' rights to freely study, copy, modify, reuse, share and redistribute software. The GPL builds upon the ethical and scientific principle of free, open and collaborative improvement of human knowledge, which was central to the rapid evolution of areas like mathematics, physics, or biology, and adapts it to the area of information technology. By now, the GPL is employed by tens of thousands of software projects, companies and governments around the world, and is supported by large communities of software developers and users who wish to share their work for the benefit of all. The GNU system, the Linux kernel, Samba, MySQL, and many thousands of other GPL'd programs, offer high technological quality as well as political and economic independence and sustainability. GPL'd software runs on or is embedded in devices ranging from mobile phones, PDAs and home networking appliances to mainframes and supercomputing clusters. Independent software developers around the world, as well as every large corporate IT buyer and seller, and a surprisingly large proportion of individual users, interact with the GPL. The current version of the licence, which was written in 1991 and is now 14 years old, has become central to the activities and operation of a large part of all companies and governments and is now in need of review. Stichting NLnet, a non-profit foundation based in The Netherlands, has a mission to stimulate network research and development in the domain of Internet technology. It develops and releases software under the GPL. http://www.nlnet.nl/ For details of the project, please refer to http://www.fsf.org or contact info@fsf.org; European activities will also be presented at http://fsfeurope.org, or via contact to team@fsfeurope.org. About the Free Software Foundations: The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), founded 2001, is a charitable non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate in a digital society. The the Freedoms to use, copy, modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition - allow equal participation in the information age. Creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE. Further information about FSFE's work can be found at http://fsfeurope.org, get active yourself at http://fsfeurope.org/contribute/. The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software - particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants - and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software. Their Web site, located at www.fsf.org, is an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support their work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Their headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA. Free Software Foundations currently exist in the United States, Europe, India and Latin America. All FSFs form a network of sister organisations. -- Joachim Jakobs <jj@office.fsfeurope.org> Media Relations - FSF Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) fixed line: +49 700 - 373387673, Ext.: 4004 mobile: +49-179-6919565 Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom! (http://www.fsfe.org) _______________________________________________ Press-release mailing list Press-release@fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/press-release (Log in to post comments)
The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project Posted Sep 6, 2005 18:04 UTC (Tue) by greve (subscriber, #8385) [Link] 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,
The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project Posted Sep 6, 2005 18:37 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] I wish people would stop misusing FUD; there was nothing of fear, uncertainty, or doubt in that article.
Is there any chance anyone is going to get to comment on GPL v3 before it gets etched in stone and handed down from the mountain, like the GFDL was?
The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project Posted Sep 6, 2005 19:10 UTC (Tue) by greve (subscriber, #8385) [Link] Is there any chance anyone is going to get to comment on GPL v3 before it gets etched in stone and handed down from the mountain, like the GFDL was?Yes. The plan is to have most of 2006 for a globally moderated discussion in which everyone with an interest in the GPL will have the chance to make their point and give their opinion. This will be a difficult process, as outlined by Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen in their GPL Version 3: Background to Adoption document, but the GPL is a very special document. We will let you know once we know more about how exactly this will take place.
The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project Posted Sep 6, 2005 20:56 UTC (Tue) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] FUD has come to mean 'misinformation'.
The meaning of FUD Posted Sep 7, 2005 0:13 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] FUD refers to a very specific marketing strategy used effectively by Microsoft and before them, by IBM. The idea is to frighten customers away from using competing products by spreading fear as to whether the competitor will be able to deliver, follow through, or survive in the competitive market. Alternatively, they try to convince customers that the competitor is not trustworthy.For something to be FUD, it isn't enough that it be misinformation. It has to be an effort to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt. In that sense, there is some real FUD involved in the current discussion, in the sense that a lot of people are loudly claiming that the FSF is going to sell everyone out by putting crazy new stuff in the GPL, so everyone had better start specifying GPL v2 only in their licenses, etc., etc. I believe this is unfair, and that RMS and Eben Moglen are trying to do the right thing. That said, there are genuine reasons to be concerned about whether the FSF "gets it". The number-one sore spot (and Georg, I hope you can convince RMS of this) is the GFDL. It's not just Debian folks who have a problem with it; many key contributors to some of the core GNU projects (such as GCC) strongly object to it, to the point where keeping the manuals current is starting to become a problem (developers not willing to document their work if that documentation will fall under what they consider a non-free license). I suggest that the FSF take the complaints seriously. I understand how strongly RMS feels about getting his message out, and his feeling that others have tried to censor him, so maybe the matter of invariant sections is too big a stumbling block to solve right now. But at least it should be possible to address the other objections that have been raised to the GFDL, for example here, so that documents that lack Invariant Sections, Cover Texts, Acknowledgements, and Dedications would be truly free (a minimal requirement for "free" would be that GFDL material could be included in GPL programs, and that automatically generated documentation, such as produced by Doxygen, would not be a legal nightmare to distribute.
The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project Posted Sep 6, 2005 21:58 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] See Slashdot - even at +4 there is a lot of genuine FUD. Some quotes:RMS has done a lot of good things for the ideas of open source software and free software and such, and has personally given us several excellent pieces of software (like emacs, the King of Editors! :) But he's also sort of a fringe character, and has many kook-like characteristics. Pushing a GPL that doesn't allow the use of the software by certain people will only make his views even less relevant ... If you don't have adoption by the big boys, then you don't have adoption, period. Even Microsoft has both a Mac and Linux department. If you remove their ability to load Linux then you remove their incentive even to attempt interoperability. Later IBM. It was good while it lasted. I guess that will also make developers think a bit. The "normal" GPL allows the user to select eg. GPL version 2 *or at his option a later version*. That is really a recipe for disaster. Who's to say that there will never be a version of GPL that assigns all rights to a commercial entity? Or that drops the requirement to share source code?If "recipe for disaster" is not FUD, I don't know what is. And we see this on a site normally sympathetic to free software.
The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project Posted Sep 6, 2005 22:10 UTC (Tue) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link] ::sigh:: Misinformation? Over-hyped panic? Doomsaying? On /.? Modded up by the /. community? Say it's not so! :) This is why I get my news from reputable news sources -- or better yet, the people involved.
FSF leaders Posted Sep 7, 2005 14:05 UTC (Wed) by fizteh89 (guest, #32316) [Link] I am starting to have strong concerns about mental abilities of theso-called open-source "luminaries" and FSF leaders:
Were fundamentally opposed to DRM. We think its a dead end for society, Greve said, adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general taxation on Internet connections.
Web access could come with a cultural flat fee, he said.
And this is the guy representing FSF in Europe?
Forgive me for strong words, but this is just f****** STUPID !!!
It is just amazing how one crazy guy at MIT can start a whole political
Software development is just a profession, a way to make a living,
Leave me alone to develop software for a living, f****** FSF idiots !
FSF leaders Posted Sep 7, 2005 15:26 UTC (Wed) by greve (subscriber, #8385) [Link] Quoting from my statement made yesterday on this: Unfortunately, when adding a fix for the worst misinformation about patents, the journalist also added more quotes and material to the issue on DRM and "internet taxation". To make clear you know where this comes from and where I stand, let me point out that I did not advocate internet taxation when speaking with the journalist, nor do I think it is a good idea: Indeed I had long fights with people who suggested something like this during the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society. The journalist asked me whether I knew of any alternatives to DRM, to which I said that many people advocate all sorts of different concepts, including cultural flatrates or production on demand models. When asked whether a cultural flatrate could be considered a kind of tax, I said this might be one way of looking at it. I did not endorse any of these models, only said that alternatives to DRM are thinkable and that we should consider them, because I do consider DRM a very bad idea. Like I wrote: The Reuters article is best ignored. It does noone any good to react to things that haven't been said.
The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project Posted Sep 12, 2005 18:45 UTC (Mon) by stockerz (guest, #32415) [Link] I red the article and people reaction and i do not understand why people get so upset.The stuff about internet taxation and DRM is total FUD; so let forget about it and concentrate about the GPL3.
"The idea is that if someone uses software patents against free software, that company or person loses the right to distribute that particular program and use it in their product, he added."
Where did you read that companies that have patents couldn't use opensource softwares anymore???????
If companies (and many do) use opensource softwares to increase their business, the minimum requirement would be not to arm the opensource community. This is just about a legitim need of honesty : we provide you with high quality software and efficient development process. At least, do not bring us to court. This is just a two ways cooperation.
I think this would be a really great way to avoid a patents raids over the opensource community as most of the companies that hold patents also use opensource softwares (IBM, SUN, Philips, NOKIA, Sony....). This would be much more efficient than the opensource patents portfolio. Opensource structure is not made to file patents. We could let this to our "protectors" : those who have huge patents portfolios and that use opensource softwares.
On the other hand, i think the GPL3 should go more on the BSD licence side when it come about letting companies to build commercial products. This would also be a good political moove as many right wings politicians are afraid of the 'free contagion' of FOSS
To sum it up, these two measures would be really good for the community :
High end technologies for the business and the people.
Can we focus? Posted Sep 7, 2005 2:58 UTC (Wed) by echodots (guest, #15103) [Link] Is it possible for us to digress even further from what this open letter was about than now? Maybe we should start commenting on how many times he used the words 'is' or 'the' or something else as frivolously benign as the acronym FUD? This is an interesting letter and deserves at least a little focus from the masses and not from the ADD of the minutely interested.
Damn,
echodots
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