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[20070630]
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Article: GPLv3 license marks GNU's decline
Citing from Jem Matzan's
article:
``The GNU General Public License version 3 is unleashed to the world today, ready and willing to conquer perceived problems with the legal system in the U.S. and other countries. It's been carefully considered, debated, and examined by very smart people with a lot of experience with software license law and advocacy. Programmers, lawyers, and businesspeople have looked it over and petitioned changes until most parties were reasonably satisfied with the result.''
The article goes on into the details of the new version of the GPL, it's
revised definition of "freedom" and esp. how other projects like
NetBSD view the new license, citing
Martin Husemann from the NetBSD board of directors:
``We don't think that the switch of GNU programs from GPL v2 to GPLv3 will affect NetBSD or its users much, since we are not in violation of the additional provisions that GPL v3 stipulates. It is a long term goal of NetBSD to become GPL free, but the potential change in license will not affect the scheduling of that goal. Furthermore, the GPL programs in NetBSD are clearly separated from the rest of the source so one can easily distribute a GPL-free NetBSD system (with missing functionality specially in the toolchain parts).
Since pkgsrc does not redistribute third party packages, it is also not affected. For users of pkgsrc, and creators of binary pkg sets or CDs/DVDs, it has versatile provisions to express licensing restrictions implied by the created packages (like LICENSE=, ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES, NO_BIN_ON_FTP, NO_BIN_ON_CDROM)''.
The author concludes that
``The Free Software Foundation has dumped a load of restrictions on us with GPLv3 and told us that restrictions lead to freedom and that it is good for us. That's a little too Bush administration-like for me.
[...]
GNU, this is as far as we go. I'm breaking up with you. I think we should see other groups of userland operating system tools (or users, as the case may be). I'd prefer it if you took my number out of your cell phone and pretended we never went out.''
[Tags: Articles, gpl]
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