GPLv2 or, at your option, any later version [LWN.net]

GPLv2 or, at your option, any later version

Posted Oct 2, 2006 21:21 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: GPLv2 or, at your option, any later version by mingo
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

Or do you agree with me that the president of the FSF is in a unique legal position (and has the unprecedented legal power) to change the license affecting the contribution dynamics of 350 million lines of code instantly?

Agreed, but I would say that the process instituted to update the GPL is also unprecedented. In 1991 Stallman sat down and wrote the GPLv2 on his own. 15 years later he is runnning an unprecedented consultation process: constant legal counselling by Moglen, FSF support, world-wide consultations, 4 conferences, industry-wide committees, and even a web-wide legal hunt for side effects. Even the opposition (as in Linus Torvalds) has admired how it was set up.

Do you agree with me that such huge power brings with itself a minimal moral obligation to at least /understand/ and adopt to the position of the community that created that codebase, instead of trying to advance his own moral position?

I would say Stallman has understood you quite well, and then consciously rejected your position. It is evident in the "most people don't appreciate freedom" quote that you dislike so much; or in his endless rants about "free software vs open source". If Stallman placed convenience or development process over freedom, then we (as in those who like GPLv3) would be disappointed.

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GPLv2 or, at your option, any later version

Posted Oct 2, 2006 23:46 UTC (Mon) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]

I would say Stallman has understood you quite well, and then consciously rejected your position.

And you think that's fair and morally justified?

Do you now see why such an arbitrary "rejection of a position" combined with "unparalleled legal power" scares most of the kernel developers?

If Linus did that, and if it mattered to enough people, they'd walk away and start another kernel tree.

But there is no real remedy for RMS's behavior, and he acts accordingly.

GPLv2 or, at your option, any later version

Posted Oct 3, 2006 6:43 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

If he accepted your position he would reject mine. Is that morally justified?

Inaction has no special virtue... a failure to act can be just as unethical as an action.

Reasonable people can believe an argument that the FSF is not even acting in this case... but rather clarifying an intended part of the licenses which was always there.

Or, to put a systems analogy on it: You've used a module as a black box without reading the comments and documentation, and now you are aggregated because the new version of the module has had code changes so that it continues provide the intended behavior (as documented) in an environment which has changed.

GPLv2 or, at your option, any later version

Posted Oct 3, 2006 8:34 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Do you now see why such an arbitrary "rejection of a position" combined with "unparalleled legal power" scares most of the kernel developers?

I would not say the rejection was arbitrary. It has been justified repeatedly and since a long time ago by Stallman.

You said above you did not agree with the GNU manifesto but found GPLv2 reasonable; that anti-DRM clauses were out of scope. I think that is just because you have seen one in action (GPLv2) but not the other (GPLv3). Your distrust is justified but, as gmaxwell said above, inaction against a visible threat would not be welcome by most people. Leaving these issues to "markets" would be like trusting Microsoft to open up their protocols.

If Linus did that, and if it mattered to enough people, they'd walk away and start another kernel tree.

I gather from LWN (not an expert by any means) that many people keep parallel trees; e.g. micro-kernel advocates, alternate security framework proponents, and lately yourself. Has it changed Linus' attitude towards these issues?

On the other hand, many people have proposed alternative licenses, even copyleft licenses. You are free to relicense all of your extant code if you want; not in the kernel, but the kernel is not an option for GPLv3 either.