RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 24, 2005 23:37 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (subscriber, #7544) [Link]

It should be illegal to drive while drunk. This means that drinking 6 pints of beer and then driving should be illegal. I would argue that drinking 3 pints and then driving should also be illegal. Then someone comes along and says, "lets take it a bit further, should drinking 50 millilitres of beer and then driving be illegal?" Obviously not. But that doesn't change that drinking 3 pints and driving should still be illegal.

The question is: where's the line?

In terms of protecting freedom, like in terms of intoxication, there is no natural line, but that doesn't mean we shrug our shoulders and walk off. We draw a line. And when the line is to be reconsidered, like in the case of GPLv3, we hold a 12+ month public consultation to find consensus on where the line should be. The result will never please 100% of the people, but it should be acceptable to the vast majority. (Like a healthy democracy.)

Allowing someone vnc access to your box would probably be somewhere on the "doesn't invoke copyleft" side of the line. Allowing the general public to type ImageMagick commands, letting them upload an image and letting them download the output image after processing the commands, would probably be somewhere on the "does invoke copyleft" side.

The legal basis is not about precedent, it's about legislation, and there are two basises. One is called "public performance of a copyrighted work". The other is like section 2c of GPLv2, except extended to include "if the program has a command for downloading it's source code, you cannot remove that command or functionality". That's the gist, I don't know the finer details.