Eben Moglen — GPLv3 Not About MS and Novell

Linux.com's Joe Barr was recently able to sit down with Professor Eben Moglen at the San Diego Red Hat Summit and discuss the GPLv3 and what it means beyond the Microsoft/Novell deal on video. "Professor Moglen explains briefly about GPLv3's work on globalization of the software license, preventing harm to others by members of the community, and the most contentious in earlier drafts, DRM."

Re:GPLv3 Not About MS and Novell

[HappySmileMan]

"Open Source" is about securing people's freedom...

And pretty much the only difference between GPL and proprietary licenses is that it's open source...

You can still charge for the use or purchase of a program made with it, however the source must be available at the same price as the binary.

Re:Opensource software sucks.

[jeevesbond]

This is such a hilarious troll, normally I wouldn't feed but the parent post is so ridiculous that it's gone beyond trolling into some random fantasy land.

Go to hell, communists.

The GPL is not Communist in nature, in fact when I distribute software under the GPL it's all about me and my choice to share work with others. In a Communist scenario all the sofware would belong to the state, the choice of sharing would not be mine. Secondly, nowhere in the GPL does it say you cannot charge for your work, Studio to Go [ferventsoftware.com] is a good example of this.

You democrats are trying to destroy the United States' only hold over China: They need Microsoft software. When they can get crappy free solutions to do the same, the United States will just continue to become indebted to China and other countries. And it will be all your fault, you Hillary fanboys.

Right, because Free software is all a conspiracy to ruin the US. Of course most of the people who answered the survey in this MIT study [mit.edu], when asked what their motivation is, said: 'I'm a Hillary fanboy and want to ruin the US!' Or could it be that FLOSS developers enjoy coding and want to share stuff they like? Which do you think is more likely?

I like FLOSS but am not a Hillary fanboy. In fact am not really interested in your elections, suprise: there are people who live outside the US!

For the sake of national security, free software efforts must become against the law.

This is the funniest thing I've read for a long time. It would be interesting to see this happen, my hypothesis is that this would ruin software development in the US. Am pretty certain your country would suffer rather badly if it outlawed FLOSS but the rest of the world continued developing it. Think of all those savings your corporations would be missing out on! What about the US corporations who're distributing FLOSS, e.g. IBM, Sun, HP, Dell, RedHat et al?

Besides, free software destroys our free market, creating monopolies, by selling at excessively low prices. Would Microsoft get away with giving away free products to take competitors' market share away? No. Neither should these ****ing tree-hugging, Prius-driving free software zealots. The captcha is appropriately "planking."

Oh dear, that's funny. Free software does not destroy the free market, but encourages it. With FLOSS there's much less possibility for vendor lock-in (since everything is out in the open and I can't imagine the many volunteers working on FLOSS projects being happy with creating proprietary file formats etc.). Theoretically Microsoft would not get away with giving away software for free, yet that's exactly how they gained their monopoly: by turning a blind eye [arstechnica.com] to piracy. Your point is invalid in another respect: Microsoft is a company whereas Free software is an ecosystem/licensing model. If all proprietary software disappeared tomorrow there would still be plenty of competition, this is one of the things people complain about with GNU/Linux: there's too much choice!

I'd almost like to see your post modded up as 'Funny', just because it's so stupid and full of hilarious vitriol. Also I feel it's important to debunk rubbish like this sometimes, just in case someone else read your post and thinks that you've got a point (a scary prospect).

Re:Opensource software sucks.

[lixee]

In a Communist scenario all the sofware would belong to the state, the choice of sharing would not be mine.

Communism, as preached by Mark, has never been implemented. What you're thinking of, is some kind of Bolshevism.

Re:Nice but

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox Repagination [mozilla.org]

Not very elegant(it simply mashes pages together, so you don't get a one page layout, but you do get only one page), but it works pretty well.

Re:LOL

[bnenning]

Someone needs to sit a few people from Novell down at some point and explain to them that a desire to ensure that businesses suffer harm was arguably one of the main motivations behind the GPL having been written at all.

Tell that to the thousands of companies saving billions of dollars by using GPL software.

For once, I wish someone could actually give me a reasoned rebuttal on why they believe that I'm wrong in believing that (at least the intention behind) the GPL is largely anticapitalist

The GPL is neither capitalist nor socialist. Capitalism and socialism are systems for allocating scarce resources. Free software attempts to bypass that issue by removing scarcity altogether, specifically the artificial scarcity imposed by copyright.

Re:LOL

[multisync]

Someone needs to sit a few people from Novell down at some point and explain to them that a desire to ensure that businesses suffer harm was arguably one of the main motivations behind the GPL having been written at all. For once, I wish someone could actually give me a reasoned rebuttal on why they believe that I'm wrong in believing that (at least the intention behind) the GPL is largely anticapitalist

Please explain to me how a developer choosing to license software with the GPL is "anti-capitalist?" All the GPL does is grant additional rights to the user, provided they abide by the terms of the license. If they don't abide by those terms, they are not entitled to those additional rights.

How is this different from commercial software? It comes with a license as well, outlining the terms under which you may use it. If you do not wish to abide by the terms of the license, you are free to try another product with a different license (BSD, for example). Nobody is forcing you to use this particular software. And nobody is preventing another business from releasing software under the license of their choice.

What is "anti-capitalist" about users and developers having choice?

Re:Opensource software sucks.

[Freed]

>You do realize that's a choice FSF doesn't believe you as a developer, have a right to make? Just read what Freed wrote in reply to your message, or some of the quotes from Kuhn or Stallman.

Of course, by "have a right" you mean "should have a right". In Freedom or Power? [gnu.org] they write:

However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom.

It seems they merely reject advocating the power, especially as a freedom, the same way I might reject advocating the power to punch a stranger in the nose (excepting self-defense, etc.). If, in the above phrase, "license" were modified to "license that respects the four freedoms", then I would bet that Stallman and Kuhn would see it as a legitimate choice.

Stallman himself is also on record as saying that he does not care whether proprietary software is ever made illegal. Thus, he does not particularly care about constraining developers _through the law_. The GPL, of course, is no such constraint because no one is forced by law to either use it or use GPL software(*). In any case, regardless of Kuhn's and Stallman's beliefs about a developer's right to choose their software license, such a right has been and will remain outside the scope of the work of the FSF, including the licenses of the FSF.

(*): Various national or local governments around the world have mandated use of free software within that governmental body. Whether or not this is decided through a democratic process has nothing to do with the FSF. Indeed, given FSF's meager finances, such mandates in the typical climate of monied lobbying are remarkable.