Subject: Re: GPL V3 and Linux - Dead Copyright Holders
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel
Date: 2006-02-03 21:33:35 GMT (3 years, 21 weeks, 4 days, 3 hours and 36 minutes ago)
* Linus Torvalds <torvalds <at> osdl.org> wrote: > It boils down to this: we wrote the software. That's the only part _I_ > care about, and perhaps (at least to me) more importantly, because > it's the only part we created, it's the only part that I feel we have > a moral right to control. yes, that's how i feel too. Quid pro Quo. But we are in the minority. The majority of Linux users, and the vast majority of commercial Linux players doesnt give a rat's a** about giving back a Quid, as a fair compensation for our Quo. (i dont see a problem with that by the way - i consider it a basic moral right to have different moral rules. The moment i'd require others to share exactly the same morals i'd become just another crusader. But i digress.) what the others see is the black and white letter of the GPL [or just some free software they can download and install], not a moral situation with us, which they would have to understand and meet. They are and will increasingly try to give back as little as they can get away with - depending on their own moral rules. Some will also try to employ tactics that we see as "immoral", and they wont see it as immoral, under their own rules. (one extreme example for a community with very strong moral rules is the Sicilian Mafia. They had (and still have) extremely strong inner rules, and everyone within a given family is loved and is being taken care of for a lifetime - in the positive sense of the word. Still the external effect on the rest of society is perverse and disastrous. But i digress again.) so the only solution is to convert our moral rules to an objective set of rules, as accurately as possible. This in our society would be the (neutral) letter of the law, and a copyright license in particular. after that act of conversion we can only hope for the best that no detail important to us gets lost in the process. Our (your) initial approach to that was the GPLv2, and it was a pretty accurate (and lucky) first approximation. what do we have today? We've got bin-only kernel modules, much of which are clearly immoral, they are clearly hurting us and still we do things to keep them going - e.g. the refusal to remove 8K stacks from the .config. We are increasingly getting into a situation where loopholes are found and utilized to give back as little as possible, upsetting the balance. so i believe _something_ should be done to tip the balance, because the negative effects are already hurting us. I'd support the move to the GPLv3 only as a tool to move the balance back into a fairer situation, not as some new moral mechanism. The GPLv3 might be overboard for that, but still the situation does exist undeniably. > I _literally_ feel that we do not - as software developers - have the > moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. [...] yes, and i do share your morals on that. OTOH i do think there are a few more aspects: - most of the known violations of the Quid pro Quo comes from the space of closed hardware that is pushing for DRM best. So there's some itching in me to just make things more strict in the area that is causing us the most problems. - can they give us the source code for the modifications on Linux on a DRM-ed medium that we cannot read on any open hardware? From a moral POV they cannot, but can they do it legally? Could they argue in 5 years that SHD-DVD version 10 is a 'widely used' medium, and that they met the letter of the GPLv2? If we never enforce that the source be actually compilable and usable on real hardware, how can we suddenly claim to have a right to run it on open hardware? We might create a legal waiver or estoppel situation if we dont enforce the usefulness of the source code given back to us. Even cockroaches are surprisingly creative - after all there is a business entity on this planet that thought it to be fair to produce source code in discovery by printing it out to a ton of paper and then scanning it back inAnd they even got away with it! - we really grew up on the supposition that there is a fundamental ability and right to tinker. Business entitities were simply not able back then to restrict that, technologically. Today there are business models that seem to be working just fine with closed hardware. Content and programmability restrictions via crytography are more and more practical, and the day will come when the Xbox will be truly cryptographically safe and totally closed. NOTE: i do know that the elimination of tinkering is bad for society down the road - so in theory we should win in the long run. But society might not care! Maybe only 1 civilization out of a 100 get past this stage of development - the rest destroy themselves and create a burned out shell of a planet with some proto-civilization and no resources left. Nature is really, really cruel. Do we have the moral right to restrict (in the worst case, eliminate) our children's ability to tinker _at all_? Doesnt our software become totally useless if the possibility to tinker gets eliminated? Only 1-5% of all people have the brain structure and desire to tinker (and to think creatively), so if it were up for a vote today we'd lose in the polls, badly ... Dont you think we have the moral obligation to support all the "infrastructure" that gave us this ideal paradise of tinkering with Linux in the first place? Dont you sense we (programmers, tinkerers) are a minority that could _easily_ be opressed by society at large, without them even noticing? Supporting fact: society is heading towards a nice big greenhouse effect right now, with 99% of the scientists crying bloody murder already - and basically nothing is done. Crushing these 'geek dudes' which would indeed result in lost productivity a few decades down the line, but right now it wouldnt even be a blip on the policy radar i'm afraid, as long as it results in blockbuster movies getting on to the TV screen faster, and as long as it results in a 5% cheaper HD-DVD player ... Thinking about those issues and current trends, i'm really getting an urge to grab some bigger protective gear, like the GPLv3! Ingo