Eight common misunderstandings about GPLv3 (IT Manager's Journal)

[Posted May 11, 2007 by ris]

IT Manager's Journal attempts to clarify GPLv3. "To separate the confusions and half-truths from the reality, we went to the source: members of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) such as compliance engineer Brett Smith, founder Richard Stallman, and executive director Peter Brown; and the Software Freedom Law Center's Richard Fontana, who is one of the main drafters of the new license. Taken together, their comments help to create a clearer picture of the goals behind GPLv3 and the final form that the license will probably take."

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Eight common misunderstandings about GPLv3 (IT Manager's Journal)

Posted May 13, 2007 19:18 UTC (Sun) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

"" GPLv3 is extending its concern beyond software and attempting to control business practices ""

i belive this statement is misplaced. The truth is that business practices are trying to circumvent OSS software practice in order to control it.

I belive what is crucial now is to take some distance from particular interests to have an absolute cristal view.

1. Patents in OSS should be available free of charge to everybody

"" the Novell-Microsoft deal is that Microsoft's payment of a royalty to redistribute Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft's protection only for Novell customers in the event of any patent dispute are circumventions of the intent of GPLv2 ""

True. But what would MS do if most of OSS repositorys hopefully in v3, would state *exactly*, that any patent covered code in those repositorys must free of charge to anyone ?

MS cant object ! To Novell it would be same, right ?

2. DRM protection should have the *mandatory* ability of being turn off, if implemented on OSS, at user discreption, keys or no keys available would not matter.

I mean, keys or no keys i dont want those gentlemans business,but in name of fredoom i will defend their right to implement those keys, only i dont want the products for those keys not even if covered in gold. So i must be able to bypass it.

Where does all this tryes to control businesses, is a statement prone to insult from my part.