Licence text and fabs

Posted Oct 5, 2006 9:18 UTC (Thu) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]

And you are still missing the larger point as well. This portion of the GPLv3 is a seemingly small but dramatic departure from the spirit of the GPLv2, which explicitly said that it does not attempt to control other works (unless those works being based on GPL-ed code), be that source code, keys or anything else. GPLv2 Section 2 says:

 Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest
 your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to
 exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or
 collective works based on the Program.

this language is gone from the GPLv3, and the DRM language does a first step towards using distribution rights to control other works. Today it is only used to control certain keys. So far I have not seen anyone even try to limit the scope of this new step, it seems the party line of the FSF is that "everything that /we/ think or ever thought would be needed for the 4 freedoms is a fair game". Would you ever sign a contract with that kind of open-ended language in it?

And in what way will you change the bargain next time around? Until today it was in essence source code for source code, and it took 10 years to explain even this simple concept to developers. Tomorrow it's the hardware's keys too in some cases, the day after tomorrow it will be what? Will the GPLv4 say:

 You must ship 10 free samples of hardware and design specifications
 to the FSF headquarters and offer free on-site training and free
 tools for tweakers to be able to make use of their right to tweak.

Will the GPLv4 perhaps include:

 You may only distribute copies of works that are GPL-compatible in their 
 totality. Aggregation with any non-GPL work is prohibited.

is that the plan?

Future contributors will be asking me that, and I have no answer for them, do you have any?