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Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

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Sunday, July 23, 2006

GPLv3: Mr. Stallman's Hubris.

The

European branch of the Free Software Foundation (FSF Europe) were so kind to provide a

transcript of Mr. Richard Stallman's speech at the

3rd International GPLv3 Conference held on June 22, 2006. Mr. Stallman argued (emphasis supplied, AHH):

"[...] We released the first discussion draft in January after several months of working together on the text, and, we also designed a careful plan for how to request and then study and act on the feedback from various parts of our community. Various kinds of users and contributors. We did not decide to let the community decide what goes into GPL version 3. There is a fundamental reason for this. Because Free Software is very often attractive for purely practical reasons, we have collected tens of millions of users who choose Free Software purely for practical benefits and do not appreciate the freedom that we have given them. These are the kind of people that assume that you should choose between Free Software and proprietary software based on practical convenience, which is another way of saying that they value freedom at zero. How sad. How can freedom ever be safe, when people don't appreciate it. People have had to fight for freedom, over and over.

And when people do not value their freedom, they are very likely to lose it. But that's the fact. Most of our community does not appreciate freedom. Most of the World, lets go of vital freedoms whenever some crooked politician tells them "I'm going to protect you from terrorists, give up your freedom, let me protect you."

So, if we wanted to do a good job of protecting freedom with version 3 of the GNU GPL, we could not let the majority of our users decide what goes into that licence, but we need to listen to what they have to say because there are lots of potential problems and we're not smart enough to see them all. [...]"

This appears to be a slap into the face of those parts of the IT economy relying on FLOSS. It looks as if Mr. Stallman seriously believes that there should be something like an 'inner circle' of FLOSS archpriests under his supervision, conducting the main political business of determining amendments to the GPL. All the others, including small and big companies as well as crowds of programmers are excluded from decisionmaking and sent to the lower ranks. How does, say, IBM think of this message?

It is well known that Mr. Stallman is one of the most prominent anti-patent activists of the world, and during Mr. Pilch's presidency of FFII the latter saw himself as a kind of loyal executor of the general lines of patent policy as provided by Mr. Stallmann. In this context, a

recent statement of Mr. Pilch's successor as FFII President, Mr. Pieter Hintjens, appears to get still more relevance. As it happens now, FFII and FSF are jointly fighting to create a divide within the FLOSS camp, the more fundamentalistic parts under joint control of the said FSF / FFII alliance working hard to influence major decisions in politics whilst marginalising those who might be ready for discussion and compromise as far as possible. Had I known Mr. Stallman's speech before, I would have titled my earlier posting like "The Archpriests, The Bad, And The Ugly" or so. Any sort of a compromise would be seen as a defeat by those folk.

I am not meeting FLOSS in general with a kind of scepticism like

Mr. James DeLong who pointed to Mr. Stallman's speech, arguing that the open source movement is heading for a train wreck because of the different parts of the community have widely varying values, writing:

"[...] This is the language of religion, and of politics as religion, not of economic calculation. It is Savonorola, kindling a Bonfire of the Commercial Vanities. Seeking commonality here is sort of like suggesting that the inquisitors and the heretics just need to talk out their differences.

It is the language of non-compromise. If the commercial users have problems with the proposed changes, that is just tough. They will be made free, damn it! So even if Stallman were talked out of his intentions for this round, what about GPLv4 or v5? The GPL contains a phrase whereby someone using covered software also agrees automatically to be bound by any later version of the license. It is hard to imagine these commercially-savvy companies going further down this road.

On the other hand, powerful internal corporate forces are at work to minimize any problem. Few of the staffers in large companies who told their top management to ride the GPL horse are likely to send up a memo saying "Oops!" Better to hunker down and hope it works out.

This may account for the lack of discussion of what seem to be some exceedingly important issues. The FSF has no interest in telling the commercial allies that they are in trouble, and the commercial entities have no interest in admitting that there is any problem, especially to their own managers. If it is indeed a train wreck, it may come in very slow motion. [...]"

But what plainly is deemed to be necessary are political efforts to stop the fundamentalists of FSF and FFII before they get any serious opportunity to harm the entire ITC industry.

The fundamentalists surely will not refrain from all kinds of propagandist tricks like

"[...] Anyone with an idea was able to implement it. Vast corporate holdings were powerless to stop individual inventors. [...]"

And:

"[...] We like to think of ourselves as 'enlightened capitalists'. Remove the competitive aspects of capitalism, and you're left with a utopian corporate vision of the future. [...]"

But, is there any capitalism without competitive aspects? Of course, this nicely fits into the general scheme of manichaeic interpretation of the world as propagated by FSF and FFII.

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Your "as it happens now" clause is a bit off---Mr. Stallman has been arguing with everybody else for a few decades now. He's famous for having a temper (he'll tell you this much himself) and being a generally off-putting speaker. Why he continues to make high-profile public appearances despite so much negative feedback is a question only he can answer.

But that's all OK, because you don't need a membership card or an initaiton pledge to join the open source community. Ideological differences abound, but everybody is free to write the code they would have written anyway.

The legal manifestation of this is there are literally hundreds of licenses available for the programmer. The GPL is the template for many of them, but nobody is forced adhere to anything the FSF proclaims in GPL v3. It will be focal and the default for most people who don't care to read contracts, but there is no compulsion involved.

Mr. DeLong is incorrect in saying that GPL v2 includes a clause that users are bound by all future releases. It is common custom to begin code with a line like:

(c)2006, Joe Coder. Licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.

But that's just custom. To give a salient example of both points above, Linus Torvalds, the author of Linux, choses to license Linux under GNU GPL v2, and stated a few months ago (in this Forbes interview) that he does not want to move Linux to GPL v3. [I don't know his current thinking on the matter.]

Linus: "I'm the kind of person who hates office politics. I'm pretty happy with the GPLv2, and I just don't have the motivation or inclination to start talking to lawyers. I'm a programmer. I worry about kernel bugs."

Although Mr. Stallman and the FSF would like you to believe that they are at the helm of FLOSS, it has always been a decentralized mess with the FSF as just one more member of the crowd. When they speak, we all listen---and then go back to what we were doing before.

# posted by B : 24 July, 2006 16:40

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Please read the Disclaimer & About This Website (Pflichtangaben gemäss TDG) section. Feel free to contact PA Axel H Horns via e-mail horns@ipjur.com. BEWARE: DO NOT SEND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION UNENCRYPTED VIA E-MAIL. USE OF ENCRYPTION SOFTWARE IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. PA AXEL H HORNS IS PROVIDING SUPPORT FOR ENCRYPTED E-MAIL MESSAGES USING PGP OR PGP COMPATIBLE FORMATS. THE PGP PUBLIC KEY FOR PA AXEL H HORNS IS AVAILABLE HERE. THE GnuPG PUBLIC KEY FOR PA AXEL H HORNS IS AVAILABLE HERE. Dipl.-Phys. Axel H Horns is Patentanwalt (German Patent Attorney), European Patent Attorney as well as European Trade Mark Attorney. In particular, he is Member of:
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