Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft [LWN.net]

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 28, 2014 2:15 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft by khim
Parent article: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

> But GPLv3 became a land-grab attempt and this gave clear signal to the industry

If the GPLv2 had the GPLv3 terms would it be the same situation we're in now, or was the act of adding the terms to all projects which used '+' the problem?

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Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 28, 2014 2:55 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think people would be avoiding GPL as much as they are, but I also don't think that it would be nearly as popular as GPLv2 was, and how much of the GPLv3 popularity is holdover from GPLv2 by people who don't know/care about the differences is hard to say.

I think the problem is a combination of both the terms and the change

on the one hand, if GPLv2 had the GPLv3 terms, I don't think it would have been as popular

but the fact that the terms changed in a way that many people consider very significant has also made it so that people don't trust the FSF to not make other changes in the future that could cause them even more problems, so they are much more paranoid about trusting GPLv3/GPLv3+ code than if the terms had been there from the start

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 28, 2014 13:37 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

It's true that a number of people probably didn't know what to think about the eventual result of the rather long and rather democratic GPLv3 drafting process, and as a result of that uncertainty, fuelled by punditry about the supposedly disastrous consequences on adoption by "the industry" by people who should know better, some people adopted the "footprint in wet concrete" approach to licensing and insisted on "GPLv2 only" for their stuff.

It's a shame, though, that these people didn't appreciate that some of the additional measures in GPLv3 - thinking of the strengthening of patent litigation protection - were becoming the norm even in permissive licences, whilst other things - thinking of access to the four freedoms in "consumer devices" - may already be governed by the GPLv2, although bkuhn can probably say more about these things (as I believe he mentioned the latter in particular at one point).

If anything can be said about attitudes towards the GPL, perhaps it can be concluded that the "look the other way" mentality about various edge cases in GPLv2 couldn't be sustained with GPLv3 applied to works, and those benefiting from that mentality were obviously upset as a result. But I hardly think that selective enforcement of licences and discretionary grey areas of licensing are a sustainable way of delivering Free Software to wider society: there's always the risk that someone will get away with something undesirable (making patents a "kill switch" for licensing conditions, for example) and then use some ill-advised discretion by a project to legitimise doing so, without exception and without limit, for all Free Software.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 29, 2014 1:31 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

It wasn't a case of 'misunderstandings by people who should know better', it was a case of fundamental disagreement over what the requirements should be.

The anti-tivo clause is a perfect example. Linus stated that requiring that the code for the device be provided is good, requiring that you be given enough info to modify the software on the device was over the line.

that's not a misunderstanding of terms, that's a different requirement.

If you look at the angst that people have about secure boot and how some features need to be disabled or else the key will be revoked it seems very reasonable for companies who are building devices to be very worried about what the content providers would do to them if they gave out the info that let hackers modify the software on their devices to ignore any restrictions that are built in to the software.

you may not like that, but either it's a reasonable thing to do or this entire secure boot brouhaha is meaningless.

The FSF got a lot of feedback opposing this policy, but they decided that it was important enough to include even with all the opposition from opensource developers. And then they made it very clear that if this didn't end up with the result they wanted, they would make further changes going forward as they thought best.

this is the "I have changed the deal, and I will change it again if I want" attitude that many people saw that pushed them away from GPLv3