The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project

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.