The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project

The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project

Posted Sep 6, 2005 21:58 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project by dvdeug
Parent article: The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project

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.

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