6. The lost battle of the GPLv3

I am one of the believers in the idea that the BSD licenses and the closely related MIT/X11 license are the true promoters of freedom in software, and not the Gnu Public License (GPL). Some may argue that the status of the Linux today, as compared to *BSD, is the best proof that copyleft licenses in general, and GPL in particular, are the only licenses that generate progress in the FOSS world.

I will not waste my time with endless arguments leading nowhere, but I will notice that in GPL, Freedom Three is an Obligation! As stated by Richard M. Stallman, «Freedom Three is the freedom to help build your community by publishing an improved version so others can get the benefit of your work.» All the freedoms that define the GPL are offered by the BSD-style licenses too, but GPL makes an obligation out of it. You must give away the modified code, should you want to redistribute the built binaries.

This is not the best definition of freedom by my book. What resembles the most with the GPL is the way the Communist governments in Eastern Europe started the social reform after 1945, inspired by the Bolshevik ideology: only the poor should have access to the available resources, the rich shouldn't have anything and they should go to jail and to detainee camps!

The way the GPL denies any proprietary usage of the licensed code looks really Bolshevik. The BSD license doesn't make any discrimination.

But what is the most useless part of the whole process of creating a GPL version 3 is the futile attempt to prohibit "TiVoization", DRM, Novell-MS-like agreements, binary-only drivers and whatever else would make RMS happier.

A few optimists like Bruce Perens happen to believe that GPLv3 will force Microsoft to give away the right for all GPL software to use any of their patents that are presently in GPL software distributed with SUSE. I wouldn't be that optimistic, but I am not a lawyer. Novell is not that pessimistic about GPLv3, which makes me stand to my beliefs.

Instead of spending so much energy on the contradictory GPLv3 (which is unlikely to be adopted by the Linux kernel, as it is under "GPLv2", not "GPLv2 or later", and the majority of the kernel team is against going with GPLv3), the Free Software Foundation should have focused to better ways to fight the real enemy: software patents.

Speaking about open source and the FSF: does anyone have any news of the legendary and illusory GNU Hurd operating system? I guess not. What a triumph of the FSF...