-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Greg Ewing wrote: > Jan Ciger wrote: >> Compared to v2 that tried to deal only with issues of distribution and >> copying, v3 tries to go into restricting certain uses > > But the GPL has always been about restricting uses. If it > weren't, it wouldn't be much different from any of the > other, more liberal open source licences.
You are wrong here. GPL gets triggered *only* by the act of distribution, not by use. You can use a GPL-ed product in any way you want, including commercially, without triggering any of the GPL restrictions if you do not distribute it. Google is a stellar example of this. > If I were a GPL enthusiast, I would probably answer that > you have a right to restrict your hardware however you > want, but not necessarily to use *my* program to help > you do it. Well, as a hardware vendor I am not using your program to help me to restrict my hardware - that would be IMO silly. The only concern I could see would be if I used your product as means to sell my HW or how to make it work (e.g. by bundling copies of it with my product), otherwise you have no legal beef with me. I do not think that specifically Soya falls in neither of these two categories. >> making my HW tamper-proof ... brings me more revenue (and perhaps > > it is even a legal must - e.g. medical equipment!) > > Tamper-proofing for reasons of safety or security is one > thing. But doing it for the reasons that Sony or TiVo do, > i.e. simply to lock out competitors, is kind of opposite > to the whole spirit of free software, and it rubs the > GPL people up the wrong way. Right, but unfortunately the license "solves" it by a "carpet-bombing" approach. "Kill them all, God will know his own", if I was to cite one papal legate from the crusades. That we do not like something doesn't mean it should be made illegal to do so. > Personally I think the whole GPL business is more trouble > than it's worth, and I prefer to use much less restrictive > licences for what I release. But I can understand the GPL > community's point of view -- they're trying to operate a > gift economy, and they see someone who only takes gifts > and never gives any back as being parasitical. I think that this tit-for-tat view is what most people take from GPL, but that isn't what it was about. It is *not* a "gift economy" - selling free software is perfectly OK and the whole deal is not about price but about the freedoms as defined in here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html I think that the concept of a "gift economy" and such is confusing the consequences with the cause is in my personal opinion the leading cause for most GPL-related problems. People use GPL to restrict commercial use and then they are surprised to discover companies happily (and legally!) selling their products. People use GPL to enforce the "tit-for-tat" contributions, just to discover companies like Google to profit immensely from GPL-ed work, without really contributing their changes back. This leads to a lot of unhappy people and calls for GPL revisions, but I think that the problem is that they chose a wrong license to begin with or didn't understand all the consequences of it. GPL was not intended to prevent those uses and if that is what they want, they should have chosen a different license. Regards, Jan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFH1A2Xn11XseNj94gRAuZxAJ0cSRrJfeRmNf+ZEyu9YlRxvVrIgwCeIaOx lJV9kI6+vyu+YwVosaLb0hk= =NuKB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Soya-user mailing list Soya-user@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/soya-user
