At Tue, 16 May 2006 10:16:47 -0400, "Jonathan S. Shapiro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am very very concerned about the extremist ideology of transparency > here. This goes ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE beyond what is required by GPL or > FSF. GPL does not say "if you run my program, you must disclose all of > your data". It does not even say "if you modify my program, you must > give away the modifications".
These are all caricatures of things that have been said. Nobody said anything like that, so there is no need to comment. > It says: if you *redistribute* the > modifications *then* you must disclose. It notably does NOT say that if > you connect two programs that you run with an IPC pipe then you must > disclose. But it does also not say that if you connect them only with an IPC pipe then you do not need to disclose. In fact, it does not say anything about mechanisms. The intent is to get maximum protection by law. A court will look at all the circumstances and the intent of the involved parties. > GPL works extremely hard to strike a careful balance between privacy and > disclosure. It is instructive to note that it protects *both* very > strongly. Just as I cannot modify GPL to reduce your obligations of > disclosure, I also cannot modify GPL to *increase* your obligation of > exposure. Another way to say this is that I cannot modify GPL to > *decrease* your right of privacy in the context of private use. I cannot > narrow the conditions under which privacy holds. > > The "no encapsulation" or "transparent storage" policy is fundamentally > a step that increases the users obligation to disclosure by reducing the > conditions under which private execution can be accomplished. Your position is inconsistent. When I pointed out to you that the opaque storage policy decreases the rights of the user, your response was that it's all voluntary, so there is no problem. Well, I do not agree with this argument, but because it is your argument, let me float it back to you: It's all voluntary. There is no obligation to anybody imposed by any policy we make up for the design of the operating system that we write. There may be obligations imposed by the GPL v2 and the upcoming GPL v3. > It is based on an assumption that the conditions under which privacy > should hold should be narrowed greatly, and that users of GPL > software should, by default, be required to publish their uses. That's not an assumption I am making. However, I may have a different understanding of what "private" means. There is an old discussion if use of a GPL-derived work within a company constitutes distribution or private use. As far as I know, this discussion has not been conclusive. However, it is pretty clear to me that as soon as more than one company is involved, or a company and customers, or people not closely related by family (like, living in one house), one is leaving the private area. > I believe that this proposal fundamentally violates the privacy > protections that are built into the GPL, and I question whether it is > appropriate for an FSF-hosted project to do that. Jonathan, I am in contact with Richard on these issues since last autumn. I have probably exchanged a hundred emails with him on this subject matter. As a result, I have a pretty good idea what the FSF policy on these matters are, as far as they are articulated. This idea is not perfect, because the matters are complex and the discussion has not been exhaustive. I am not representing the FSF. But if you have any doubts that what I am doing here could be inappropriate for an FSF-hosted project, I would encourage you to contact Richard and talk to him about it. He is taking a keen interest in these matters. Because the DRM threat is relatively new, we have to look at the GPL v3 draft to find out the intent of the FSF, because the GPL v2 does not speak on these issues. The new draft contains the following language: "As a free software license, this License intrinsically disfavors technical attempts to restrict users' freedom to copy, modify, and share copyrighted works. Each of its provisions shall be interpreted in light of this specific declaration of the licensor's intent. Regardless of any other provision of this license, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users' privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License. No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other software capable of accessing the same data." http://gplv3.fsf.org/ The sentence "No permission is given for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License" is pretty clear. There are legal questions involved, for example if copying a program over the network from a provider to a client constitutes distribution, or if requesting a constructor constitutes "running the program", but I think that the answer to both questions may very well be given as "yes" by a court, especially if it looks at the intent of the parties involved. The second paragraph has a slightly different twist to it. It specifically forbids to use covered works for things like locked-down gaming consoles or other proprietary devices, which do not allow changes be made by the owner. Thanks, Marcus _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
