Right man for the job
September 28th, 2005
License proliferation committee? Will companies presenting new licenses have to wait 5 days for a background check?
Body photos are starting to arrive. Thanks for the contributions so far. I’ll be using them at some point soon.
The ELER t-shirts are making steady progress. I’ll have photos for you and be taking pre-orders very soon.
Bua ha ha ha ha!!!
Its so evil its hillarious!!! Perhaps it is the other way around.
Keep up the good work :-)
Hope you’re going to do a cartoon or two about RMS’s plans for GPL3 and how it features restrictions on what we can do with GPL software in order to maintain our freedom (a little bit of Orwellian double-talk if ever there was one – seems to be the way of the world right now).
Is it just me or does GPL 3 appear to be an ego trip for RMS? Version 2 isn’t broken so why fix it? Should the GPL be used as a political platform to make people aware of what RMS considers good and bad? It feels like RMS is using the GPL, his greatest and most well-known creation, to bash the software industry over the head. “Hey, everybody! Listen to me! In my opinion I’ve got a lot of important things to say!”
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5884172.html
I’m not going to comment on GPL3 until I’ve seen the finished version. But if you don’t like it, you’re free to stick with GPL2, or BSD, or whatever floats your boat.
Maybe people is angry about GPL3 not being good for them because they like having always the latest version of everything, just like me.
I almost fainted past week because I noticed that I couldn’t upgrade from mysql-4.0.20-1 to 4.1.12-2 for a whole month. Can you imagine? I don’t actually need any feature from 4.1, but I am still angry I couldn’t get it.
If I don’t get a proper 3.0 version, I demand a 2.1 version of GPL to calm my cravings for the newest version of anything!
Repeat with me: “if it doesn’t have a new version every 6 months, then it’s dead and unworthy”
OMG, I’m behaving like such a troll… I like it :)
P.D.: what about a new version of eric s raymond. One with subselects, and maybe some flash menus and other cutesies.
Randy Sparks, I’m not sure you’re right about the GPLv2 not being broken. The advent of dynamic shared libraries and the vast size of recent software projects has made the “derivative works” parts of the GPLv2 very hard to figure out – it doesn’t really account for the way people use software these days. Yes, there is the LGPL to deal with some of these issues, but the effort people and especially businesses have to put into understanding these issues makes it less likely that they’re going to adopt the GPL.
If the GPLv3 addresses the way software is used now, it could become much clearer and not take people any effort to figure out what they’re getting into when they GPL code. I think that’s important.
Randy, the GPL has *always* been about RMS’ politics. There are plenty of free software licenses that don’t include the copyleft clause, but you can hardly claim that RMS is hijacking the GPL with 3.0. He’s merely updating the license to better protect the principles of copyleft in a changing software climate (hope that doesn’t sound too pretentious). Now, whether he’s going about this the right way is up for debate, but it’s a different question.
Also addressing Mr. Sparks:
There will be a 12-month public consultation about the proposed changes, and RMS has barely talked to the press about GPL3.
I recommend getting your info from the horse’s mouth (and not the other end).
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/gplv3/2005-August/000000.html
http://www.fsf.org/news/gpl3.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#GPLv3 (which has a transcript of some comments RMS made)