It's About Time the GPL Was Revised
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Ziff Davis - Opinion: eWEEK.com Senior Editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks although there will be a bitter battle, there's no way around it: The GPL must be revised.
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Blog: The Free Software Foundation raises the specter that the iPhone's software will violate its new GPL 3 license.
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No one is forcing anyone to put their work into the public commons. But, once you do, you need to accept that you no longer can wholly control how it is used. The open-source software world understands this to its benefit.
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All aboard Open sourcerers at Samba have signed up to GPLv3 for all future releases of the Samba software suite, describing the new licence as "better [suited to] the needs of Free Software in the 21st century".â¦
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According to this new post on the symfony blog today, a major event in the live of this popular application framework has just happened - magic_quotes_gpc set to "off" is no longer required.   It makes symfony easier to install and to run for the first time, and we hope it will leverage its adoption rate among PHP beginners. This modification is present in the trunk and in the latest alpha, and will be present in symfony 1.0 - the next stable release.   To "celebrate", they've also released two new version of the framework - stable - 0.6.3 and alpha 0.9.2288).
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The worlds of Open Source and proprietary software have collided once more with the news that Debian - builder of a version of the GNU/Linux operating system - announcing it cannot live with the terms of Microsoft&#39;s licence for its technology in the
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(InfoWorld) - The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel's thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations. Although the earlier GPLv2 has been used with Linux, GPLv3, released by the Free Software Foundation June 29, presents problems, according to James Bottomley, gatekeeper of the Linux Kernel SCSI Maintainership, which governs disk storage access in the kernel. The Linux kernel is not owned by any one person; it is owned by all the people who submit patches to it, Bottomley said. This means the kernel is now owned by anywhere from 3,500 to 10,000 people, he said. "In order to change the kernel, we'd have to get everybody who owns the kernel to sign off on the re-licensing," said Bottomley, who also is CTO of SteelEye Technology and a member of the Linux Foundation board of directors. This would be required under copyright law, he said. This presents obvious practical problems should the keepers of the kernel decide they want to move to GPL v3. "We'd have to find all of the owners, first of all," Bottomley said. The lack of a compelling advantage to GPLv3 "means we're not going to bother," Bottomley said. A plebiscite could be announced to decide the issue, but a code contributor still could object to any switch, said Bottomley. "The choice at that point would be to rewrite their code or abandon the process," he said. The GPLv2 and v3 licenses are incompatible, he said. The Linux kernel will stick with GPLv2 for the foreseeable future, Bottomley said. Previously, Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds has objected to GPLv3 because of concerns that digital rights management stipulations in the new license would be burdensome. The Free Software Foundation did not provide a response to Bottomley's claims on Thursday. The founder and president of the foundation, Richard Stallman, has advocated migrations to the new GPLv3 license for free software, emphasizing improvements in such areas as digital rights management and patent protection. Microsoft posted a statement on its Web site Thursday that said the company is not a party to GPLv3 and that none of the company's actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of the license. The company also said it assumes no legal obligations under GPLv3. "While there have been some claims that Microsoftâs distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPLv3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law," Microsoft said. "In fact, we do not believe that Microsoft needs a license under GPL to carry out any aspect of its collaboration with Novell, including its distribution of support certificates, even if Novell chooses to distribute GPLv3 code in the future," Microsoft said. Under a multifaceted agreement with Novell, both companies agreed to not sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues; Microsoft through the arrangement can sell Novell subscription certificates for Suse Linux. Microsoft has decided the support certificates will not entitle the recipient to receive support or updates relating to code licensed under GPLv3. The full statement can be found here.
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Mark your calendar: November 22. That's the day, barring something unforseen, that OPML 2.0 will move from a draft to a final frozen spec. If you plan to use OPML 2.0, or you're already using it, please set aside a few hours to carefully review the spec, between now and the end of September, or at the latest early October, to be sure it makes sense to you.  We're doing this very slowly and carefully so people will believe in the quality of this spec. If you don't think it's a good spec, now is the time to say why. Speak now or forever hold your peace. You may not like the format, that's not the issue now -- it's the spec we're trying to finalize.  Thanks for your help!
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The Free Software Foundation will release GPLv3 at 9am Pacific on Friday, the group said this week. The event ends a contentious 18-month process that pitted several key open-source players against each other.
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Sun's announcement that it would be releasing Java under the GNU GPL confounded many of its critics (including myself) who had feared that the company was incapable of making such a bold move.&nbsp; Quite rightly, it has garnered praise from across the hacker world.&nbsp; But Sun's relationship with free software has not always been so idyllic.
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The older version better matches his vision of what a license should do. Plus, he said, "Because I have accepted code over the last 15 years by people who kind of accepted my original choice of the GPL Version 2, I'm not just, I think, ethically bound by those people's choices, I am also actually legally bound."
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Microsoft shot back at the open source community Thursday, saying it would not provide support for software licensed under the GPLv3. The third version of the GPL was officially launched a week ago by the Free Software Foundation.
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Blog: U.S. attorney general makes another pitch for a dramatic new rewrite of criminal copyright laws.
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Linus Torvalds is in a bit of a rage as to the politics of GPLv3, and writes accordingly. Check out this blog and other original content from CNET's Blog Network.
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Blog: Microsoft wants to declare its independence from one of open source's biggest licenses, the GPL.  Here's why it will fail.
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Open-source spam blocker gets legal makeover with switch to Apache license. Oh, and tech upgrades.
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I'm sorry to see that my blog entry on recent controversies over freedom turned into a thread about TiVo. But since TiVo seems to be such a hot button, I would like to address that issue directly. I made the point in the discussion that TiVo did not license its hardware under the GPL (duh, GPL is a software license, after all), or even a GPL-like license.  So all the fuss about what rights you have with respect to TiVo hardware is nonsense.  Sure, you have the right to modify the hardware because you bought it.  But you will void your warranty, and TiVo is under no obligation to provide you with the schematic, BIOS, or anything else to make it easy to modify the hardware.  Having said that, let's cut through all the posturing about what rights we have, and get to the real issue here, which is what motivated TiVo to use a digital signature, and what would motivate people to modify the TiVo software and run the modified version on a TiVo box.