Discount Competence

I’m personally not a fan of the GNU GPL or of the FSF for that matter. I do support them in in a theoretical sense, but the FSF is famous for the same if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us mentality that the US has become so unpopular for lately (and in the past). This is nothing new. Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the OSI and coined the term “Open Source” as a way to disassociate themselves and the movement from the idealistic views of the FSF and the Free Software movement.

And now they’re at it again. With the release of the GPL 3, users and developers alike can look forward to a license that goes even further to enforce the FSF’s ideology. The advent of Digital Rights Management has been a controversial issue over the past few years. I do, however, think that most people in the open source world view it as a hindrance if not worse. I am one of them. The GPL 3 includes a set of restrictions in section 3. They are written to prevent the interoperability of any GPL 3-licensed software and any DRM’d content. This would prevent, for example, a GPL 3-licensed iTunes Music Store browser, as if Apple hasn’t done enough to dissuade that already. Linus Torvalds, original author and copyright holder of the Linux kernel, makes a good point. He states:

…I personally think that the anti-DRM clause is much more sensible in the context of the Creative Commons licenses, than in software licenses. If you create valuable and useful content that other people want to be able to use (catchy tunes, funny animation, good icons), I would suggest you protect that content by saying that it cannot be used in any content-protection schemes….

The GPL already requires source code (ie non-protected content). So the GPL already does have an anti-DRM clause as far as the software is concerned. If you want to fight DRM on non-software fronts, you need to create non-software content, and fight it there.

I realize that programmers are bad at content creation. So many programmers feel that they can’t fight DRM that way. Tough. Spread the word instead. Don’t try to fight DRM the wrong way.

I agree. I do not think that it is the business of a software license to designate what IP protection can exist in the media that it operates with or on. I also don’t see how its any of the developers’ business.

Lawrence Rosen, attorney for the OSI, has offered his opinion of the GNU GPL 2. In his book “Open Source Licensing” he states:

The Free Software Foundation also describes copyleft as a rule that, when redistributing a program, one cannot add restrictions to deny other people the central software freedoms. The word restriction is very vague in a licensing context; almost any of the terms and conditions in a license can be described as a restriction of some sort. This limitation on restrictions in the definition of copyleft causes some attorneys, including me, heartburn. We contend it would be helpful to add some restrictions to open source licenses that the GPL’s authors didn’t think of when they wrote their license. For example, provisions for defense against patent infringement lawsuits or to protect the licensor’s trademarks can be very useful; both provisions are missing from the GPL.

In practice, the Free Software Foundation’s restriction on adding restrictions has had the effect of allowing them to veto any restriction they find unacceptable - even those that are improvements over the GPL. Their avoidance of restrictions has delayed the adoption of new and useful licensing concepts for open source software.

On that note, I will make the same recommendation to anyone considering the GPL 3 that I would to those considering its predecessor: use the Open Software License, it was written by Lawrence Rosen, an actual lawyer, it has a much better chance of standing up in court, and it is a true open source license.

But, what do I know ?