Raymond T. Nimmer wrote:
http://www.ipinfoblog.com/archives/licensing-law-issues-gpl-30-and-third-party-patent-owners.html It is a new and highly restrictive license.
It's restrictive for people who don't want to respect free software and seek to use free software as a convenience for themselves while aiming to deny those freedoms to their users. Good.
An intriguing part of GPL 3.0 is how it singles out particular practices or parts of an industry for special treatment.
It singles out those practices which serve to deny users the four freedoms.
So why does the Free Software Foundation (FSF) dislike an arrangement that protects users of open source works from patent claims by Microsoft? It is not clear to me that the reason is anything other than a visceral dislike of Microsoft as epitomizing the so-called proprietary software realm and the fact that this arrangement allows Microsoft to participate more in the open source without adopting all premises set out by FSF.
Because such arrangements allow protections to be given only to some users, not to all of them. This means that someone could use the combination of GPL and a patent to deny some users the freedoms which the GPL gives while still making use of GPLed code. This has nothing to do with disliking a particular company. (It is true that Stallman does dislike Microsoft in this way, leading him to erroneous dislike of Mono and C#). So Nimmer doesn't much like the GPL. But this article doesn't distinguish between dislike of the GPL and effectiveness of the GPL. And it does nothing to address the "double-speak" question - the GPL speaks clearly on behalf of its goals. The only "freedom" it seeks to deny is the ability to deny users the four freedoms. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
