GPL: Linux’s father is pleased, and Google doesn’t see any problem. Everyone is happy?
The GNU GPL draft for the long-awaited third revision has now been read by a multitude of people, and all changes went under deep scrutiny. The blanket prohibition on DRM has been removed, and the SaaS loophole has not been fixed. As a result both Linus Torvalds and Chris DiBona are happy.
Choosing sign by elston
Today reading Fabrizio Capobianco’s post, I understand there is a “minority” that is not welcoming all these changes. Before Funambol wrote the Honest Public License people at Affero worked on the Affero License and also my friends at Partecs spent some efforts to find a countermeasure at the service loophole.
Congratulations to the Free Software Foundation for daring, choosing is always difficult and I believe that it wasn’t easy to take an unpopular decision, but I guess they had to.
Changing topic: Will OSI eventually be able to sort out what to do with the attribution thing? They were supposed to close the issue within February.
Post Scrittum: Steve Mills, IBM Software General Manager, and Matthew Szulik, Red Hat CEO, are happy too. The former said:
At some point you become so shrill and beyond what’s required that you lose the audience and the audience moves on to something else. We’ll have to see what finally evolves through the [GPL] process, it’s going through an update and the Free Software Foundation has a particular view of free software. Free software is a wonderful thing but there’s also a business model.
I think the draft we saw last night was much better than the earlier drafts, especially around patent infringement and TiVo-ization.
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