Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 12:19:16 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass), tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Here is what IBM thinks about using FreeBSD on their newer Message-ID: <200012011219.FAA23538@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20001201114509.B61418@lpt.ens.fr> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Dec 01, 2000 11:45:09 AM
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> > Also, proponents of the GPL are now opting for an expanded > > requirement based on the notion of "performance for profit." > > Just running the code in a situation where you made money > > from it would trigger a requirement to forfeit one's work. > > Typical Brett bullshit. What some proponents of GPL are suggesting > is that the GPL should cover ASP's -- people who don't distribute > the code itself in either source or binary form, but set it up on > their server and allow other people should use it via the web. > Personally it looks like a bad idea to me, and hard to enforce, but > it's quite different from a generic "situation where you made money > from it". Actually, the ASP scenario was exactly how I'd interpreted Brett's phrase "performance for profit". I just don't think the model for doing that is going to be successful. I'll agree that Brett ratholed into an adjacent topic, though. > There's a sort of preview of GPL v3 at > http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/01/1636202 > which largely agrees with what Stallman seems to be saying in other > places too. Stallman also specifically references the term "performance". His concern is to get people who would not otherwise use the GPL, to use the GPL. The main thrust of his point is scripting languages, but it appears to me to be "the camel's nose", since he doesn't limit the performance to scripting languages. He presumes that the payback of having access to modified (he seems to assume tha this equals "improved", rather than "trade dress") is enough to pay back the original company for releasing the code that is not currently being released, under the GPL. He may have a point on scripts. Scripts are generally in the category "throw away code" (the same place I choose to put "fetchmail"), and so cost relatively little to create. If the creation cost is very low, then the amount one needs to benefit from the code in order to amortize developement costs is also very low, and so it could be that the value they get back would easily exceed the value they lose by releasing the code. If he ties in performance in a general sense, though, he will poison-pill the code: code that elects the license (even if the clause is at the authors discretion) will prevent legal use of GPL'ed code that must be "performed" in binary, by linking against OS libraries, since the requirement becomes providing all necessary code, as source, that is needed to repeat the performance. His ideology may eventually win (IMO, to the detriment of us all), but I don't think that he is going to be able to force the issue this way; it is more likely he will slit his own throat with the attempt. Of course, this was always a danger of the "or later version of the license". I also see it as being problematic for things like Linux, which unlike the FSF tools, accept contributions without having to have the rights granted to a single legal entity. The problem with that has always been that any author could claim version differences for their code contributed to the project. Having a trap-door clause that lets any author do the same with a performance clause will, I predict, open a can of worms that could kill the GPL for good. Increasing the amount of throw away code sitting in FTP archives, being indexed by search engines, can't really be good for anyone, though... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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