The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project [LWN.net]

The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project

Posted Sep 6, 2005 18:37 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
In reply to: The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project by greve
Parent article: The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project

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?

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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 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.