Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:24 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF by zoobab
Parent article: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

The new pope will hold the keys to 'upgrading' the GPL licence on a lot of copyleft code out there, via the "or any later version" language. It matters a lot who gets that power.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:38 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (5 responses)

Eh... I see where you're coming from, but GPLv3 caused a pretty massive rift in the FOSS community. Depending on who you ask, this is either because they added terms that have nothing to do with copyleft, or because some people don't care about end user freedom.

Regardless of how you feel about it, another "upgrade" might well convince a large subset of the Open Source side to take their collective ball and go home the way Linux already did ("You may use this software under version 2 [or 3] of the GPL... and *no* later version."). That would arguably make the FSF even more ineffectual than it already is.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:48 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

That people might then stop using the updated licence, and the FSF be abandoned by all, doesn't change the fact that there is already a tonne of GPL software of there licensed under "or any later version" terms, which the FSF can change to anything they want.

Other copyleft organisations and luminaries have become "captured" by corporate interests, to some degree. The danger is the FSF is too. Which would be not just sad, but potentially very bad, for Free Software, given the licence control it has over much of the already-published GPL software.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 17:10 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> Which would be not just sad, but potentially very bad, for Free Software, given the licence control it has over much of the already-published GPL software.

There's nothing stopping a project changing the licence from "2 or later" to "2 or 3 only". Adding new versions of the GPL requires the consent of all the people who contributed in the past (usually supplied by the "or later" wording). Ditching the "or later" wording and restricting the choice of licence only requires the project team to agree the change to the "COPYING.TXT" file going forward.

Cheers,
Wol

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 17:17 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

That would work for future versions of such a project. It wouldn't unpublish all the code that was already published under "or any later version" terms.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 20:24 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

For quite a while Apple shipped an ancient version of Bash because the more recent ones were GPLv3 only. Eventually, they gave up and switched the default shell to zsh.

Realistically, there are three cases to worry about for any given FOSS project:

The project immediately ditches the "or any later version" language upon GPLv4 being published (or possibly earlier if a Bad Person™ obtains the FSF presidency). In theory, commercial actors could fork the software and put an old version under GPLv4. In practice, if GPLv4 is as toxic and terrible as everyone seems to fear, they won't be able to get (m)any outside contributors and will have to self-fund it. The lack of upstream support is a bitter pill to swallow for any company. Ultimately, this would be somewhat problematic for the community in the short run, but I have a hard time believing the fork would be able to effectively compete with the original for any purpose other than internal uses (such uses are already mostly unconstrained by the GPLv3 anyway). It would have to move into a different market niche altogether, and personally, I don't really have a problem with that happening.
The project voluntarily continues under the new license. In this case, there's no problem. If people want to put their software under a "bad" license, that's their choice. Maybe it gets forked and most or all of the developers leave (bringing us back to case #1), or maybe not.
The software is not actually maintained, which is functionally equivalent to case #1 (no upstream support, this time because no there's no upstream in the first place).

To my mind, the real question mark here is the GNU project. If we're about to see a mass-forking of all of those projects at once, it'll be far more disruptive than the Sun acquisition by Oracle. OTOH, it might finally put the "GNU/Linux" naming argument to bed if everyone stops using GNU code to do everything...

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:52 UTC (Fri) by murukesh (subscriber, #97031) [Link]

They still do and, will probably continue to, ship that ancient bash (which is also their /bin/sh). Zsh just became the default user shell.