Who is responsible for proliferation of DRM?

Posted Sep 23, 2006 0:00 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

I reread the document one more time, and I think I started to understand the position against GPLv3.

A simple question, who is responsible for proliferation of DRM?

Surely it is not hardware vendors who AFAIK would love not to put DRM in most cases but are required by marked realities. Rather, it is end-users who buy DRM-ed media and do not care about their freedom.

So GPLv3 in the current form tries to protect the freedom of those who do not care about it while removing the ability to use GPL-ed software by engineers who hate DRM but forced to put the thing in their boxes by careless end users.

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Who is responsible for proliferation of DRM?

Posted Sep 23, 2006 0:41 UTC (Sat) by Felix_the_Mac (guest, #32242) [Link] (8 responses)

Yes, I think you are correct.
The DRM clause specifically protects the end user (by placing restrictions on allowable use on the device manufacturer).

This clause will not mean that companies no longer sell devices containing DRM merely that those devices will not run GPL v3 software.

Who is responsible for proliferation of DRM?

Posted Sep 23, 2006 3:09 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (7 responses)

GPLv3 does not restrict "allowable use on the device manufacturer". It only places conditions (restrictions on the form) on distribution. The manufacture can use and modify the software as they wish, and after they give it to me, I can use it and modify it as I wish. Each of us has the four freedoms.

About device manufacturers not using our code, well, if their goal is to restrict us, then they would be using our code against us - so preventing our work from being turned against us is good.

Who is responsible for proliferation of DRM?

Posted Sep 23, 2006 9:14 UTC (Sat) by Felix_the_Mac (guest, #32242) [Link] (6 responses)

"About device manufacturers not using our code, well, if their goal is to restrict us, then they would be using our code against us - so preventing our work from being turned against us is good."

I think you have to look at the costs and benefits:

+ Your work cannot be used against you

- Manufacturers of phones, media players, DVRs, consoles will stop using Linux. Maybe also voting machines, hospital equipment, nuclear power station equipment. Any area where the maufacturer believes that it is preferable that the user not be able to modify the running software.

- Any useful input they may have had (such as improvements for embedded devices, real time operation) will not arise.

- The GPL community is fractured between GPL2 and GPL3. Distributions have to drop packages from one side or the other.

- The GPL ecosystem grinds to a halt

There'll be no halt

Posted Sep 23, 2006 12:50 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (5 responses)

There will be no big split. GPLv3 will lose compatibility with "v2 only" software (which there is very little of, Linux being the only big example), but it will gain compatibility with all the Apache licensed software, plus eclipse licenses software and some other free software licences. This heals splits.

We might lose the contributions of a handful of DRM-or-bust projects, but we were never dependent on them anyway. Their contributions aren't enough to tempt us to give up the 23 year idea of share and share alike, I can do what I want with the software and you can do what you want with it.

Free software is written by hundreds of thousands of people who are empowered to do so because the licence ensures they are free to do so. Development will never grind to a halt, and the most important thing we have to do to keep the development system working is to always ensure that everyone is free to become a developer and to do what they want with the software (and when they pass it along, the must pass it on with the same freedoms for the next person).

There'll be no halt

Posted Sep 23, 2006 13:13 UTC (Sat) by Felix_the_Mac (guest, #32242) [Link] (2 responses)

"There will be no big split. GPLv3 will lose compatibility with "v2 only" software (which there is very little of, Linux being the only big example)"

Isn't this a show-stopper if the kernel is not going to move to the current draft v3?
How do you build a distribution if everything except the kernel is GPL v3?

If that is the case, then I think the best solution is for the major sticking points of v3 to be dropped (DRM & patents??) and the useful work including increasing compatibility with other licenses, including the LGPL, clarification of meaning and changes for the purpose of internationalisation to go ahead.

This has the possible effect of reducing license proliferation and invigorating the OSS ecosystem rather than the reverse.

There'll be no halt

Posted Sep 23, 2006 13:30 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

A distribution is an aggregation of software packages, not a combined work (using copyright law definitions). The software packages are not necessarily linked. An aggregation of packages doesn't require compatible licences (this is why Apache HTTP server and GNU/Linux can be shipped on the same CD).

GPLv2 section 2 says this is ok, and so does GPLv3 in section 5 ("...Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.").

Copying code from Linux into GPLv3'd packages or vice versa is a separate issue, and there _are_ some potential issues there, but there are solutions to those too. Dual licensing is one obvious one (and this can be done without dual licensing the whole kernel), licence exceptions is another. Or, of course, the best solution would be if consensus could be formed on supporiting GPLv3 (some changes could be made to GPLv3, but protecting the four freedoms to use, study+modify, redistributed, and publish modifications are not up for compromise - but the methods for how to do this in the face of DRM and patents are up for debate and suggestions are really welcome at gplv3.fsf.org).

There'll be no halt

Posted Sep 24, 2006 1:46 UTC (Sun) by grahammm (guest, #773) [Link]

No it would not be a show stopper. There is no connection between the kernel licence and the application licences. Otherwise it would not be possible to run GPL licensed applications on proprietary, non free, operating systems, nor to run closed source applications on free operating systems.

There'll be no halt

Posted Oct 14, 2006 18:50 UTC (Sat) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link] (1 responses)

"Free software is written by hundreds of thousands of people" - where do you get that estimate from? A few thousand, I would guess, maybe 20,000 or a little more. Debian has roughly 1000 members, I remember a figure a while back that the kernel had a few hundred serious contributors.

Unless, of course, you count every person registered on Source Forge. This maybe technically speaking correct then, but quite misleading, as even Debian ships only small fraction of this software and most people are quite happy with the free software shipped.

If you have a sound number, I'd definitly be interested.

There'll be no halt

Posted Oct 14, 2006 18:57 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

KDE alone has nearly a thousand committers, so, yes there will easily be
hundreds of thousands of developers working on free software projects even
if you discount the sourceforge projects that never progressed beyond an
initial idea. This world of ours is _big_.