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FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy

FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy

Posted Jul 30, 2012 16:58 UTC (Mon) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
In reply to: FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy by dlang
Parent article: FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy

> As far as many people are concerned, GPLv3 isn't in the same spirit
> as GPLv2

In many cases, that perception is based on a misunderstanding. GPLv3 fixes some "bugs" in GPL2, notably regarding DRM (Stallman was farsighted, but he didn't see that coming when GPL2 was written).

The most popular misunderstanding of GPL3 (even made by Linus) was that you'd *always* have to give up your encryption keys if you published GPL3 software. Actually, all it does is plug the "Tivo" loophole by saying "if you use GPL software, but try to enforce that your hardware only runs a specific signed binary, that's considered cheating, and you must publish the keys required by the hardware".

If you look at the "four freedoms" as the guiding principles, I think GPL3 is definitely in the same spirit as GPL2.


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