Re: [tlug] Bill Gates and the GPL , let the flames begin

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Phillip Tribble writes:

 > Sometimes to be the best of both worlds, you have to restrict freedom to 
 > protect it. The GPL 3 is doing very well so far.

The GPLv3 is "doing" absolutely *nothing*, since even the GPLv1 was
never tested in court.  In practice, all the action is in legal
intimidation by the FSF; we don't even know what the GPL (v-any) means
in a court of law, except maybe in Germany (and AIUI even that case
was a clear violation, the only question was "is the GPL enforceable at
all?")  Many lawyers believe the FSF interpretations way overstep what
U.S. copyright law actually makes enforceable, but we don't know.  The
FSF has enough lawyers and public opinion to get its way regardless of
the law so far, and it has not hesitated to use them.

Even in theory, GPLv3 actually *does* very little that GPLv2 doesn't.
Eg, all of the stuff infringing the user's freedom to run the software
in any way they choose (which the GPLv3 styles as "this is not part of
a technical copy-protection measure") will have essentially no effect
on the DMCA (Stallman admitted this to me, but said "we have to do
*something*"), but does open the door to further politically-motivated
restraints on freedom.  It's political posturing, and ugly (Barack
Obama is a lot more attractive).

Far from clarifying the ambiguities of the GPLv2, the GPLv3 dives into
contempt of court, by instructing the judge that "even if the license
terms are unenforceable, you should find a way to enforce them anyway".

It is claimed that the GPLv3 is more "internationalized", but I don't
really see that.  That might be a real benefit, if true.

My feeling is that if the FSF didn't own all the GNU copyrights, very
few non-fanboys would consider using the GPLv3, because it's not much
of an improvement on, but incompatible with, GPLv2.  But because the
FSF is able to change such a large body of code over to v3 in one
swot, GPLv3 will "succeed" whether it deserves to, or not.