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Posted Sep 23, 2005 21:53 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to: RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet) by arcticwolf
Parent article: RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet)

The FSF were foresightful in saying "or any later version" in v2. Would that Linus were so, but he professedly doesn't believe in foresight.

In the freedom balance, the GPL weighs users -- particularly those who want to customize software for themselves -- far above original authors. Under the current copyright regime, authors have it all. If they don't like a license, they have unlimited alternatives -- unless they want to draw on the Free Software commons. But why should a web service get to both draw on the Free Software commons for profit, but not be as obliged as those whose code they used? How is running code on a web site's servers different, in any fundamental way, from running it on a user's machine?

To help focus the question, suppose (in a universe not so distant) the site owners had a choice to download code derived from Free Software to a user's browser, and run it there; or to run the same code on their servers. The user's experience is the same either way. Surely if they downloaded it, the GPL would apply. Not downloading it, they're getting the same benefit, but the user is not extended the same right to improve her experience. Instead, she's obliged to beg the site owner to incorporate her suggestions, or re-implement from scratch. She's not enabled to set up her own service, passing along her own ideas to others.

Every argument against public-performance clauses applies equally well to GPLv2. GPLv2 has been an enormous success, moreso now than in the past. That's despite loud and repeated predictions that BSD would be more popular with businesses, marginalizing GPL, if GPL weren't relaxed some. That didn't happen. What happened was that BSD-licensed code has stagnated, vs. GPL software, because those who chose BSD frequently didn't their give improvements back. That surprised some people, but not me, and not the FSF.

Nowadays, with code running on servers, GPLv2 and BSD are equivalent, and that threatens to flatten GPL development to the (much slower) BSD rate of improvement, and deprive users -- all of us -- of the benefits that were the real purpose of the GPL. How would you feel about making improvements to a GPL program for a company, expecting that you would be able to take your work with you to the next job, and then finding that the company had decided not to let you?

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