Defending the world's freedoms
Published: 20 Jan 2006 16:10 GMT
...of the 1990s, others in the free software world were criticising GPL on the grounds that it didn't go far enough to solve the problem against which it had sounded early warning.
That's not the only change for the worse in law, however. In addition, there is the movement toward what many of my colleagues in the teaching business refer to as paracopyright: the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], the European Copyright Directive, [and] the reinforcement of the traditional principles of copyright law by technology regulations designed to protect specific businesses.
It's a form of legal subsidy to business — in the form of regulatory rules — which is harming trillions of dollars of business on behalf of the few tens of billions of dollars of business for certain entertainment industries. This creates enormous trouble for makers of software and hardware technology around the world, and it makes a special trouble for the free software movement.
What exactly is wrong with software patents?
Patents, unlike copyright, are said to control ideas rather than expressions. The soul of the free software movement is the re-implementation of neat stuff we thought up, no matter how we learned it or where we came by it; and in the world of copyright, there's nothing wrong with that. You can re-implement or redescribe or re-express anything you want however you please. When you write a newspaper story or a Web site story tomorrow, the question isn't: Are you reporting news somebody else owns? The question is: Did you write your own story?
Imagine a world in which news was owned in such a way that once one guy reported it nobody else could report it for 20 years because the first guy to report it owned it. That's the problem that the patent law proposes to software.
You said the social environment for free software is better. What changes were made in the licence because of the relative success of the free software movement and free software?
The globalisation of the movement — the immense geographical cultural spread of free software — means the licence has to work in more places, more completely, more strongly for more people who do more diverse things. We have rewritten many provisions of the licence to remove US-centric vocabulary or legal concepts, to neutralise the language of the GPL so it can be used more effectively in more countries with less legal uncertainty.
Second, there are also more programs under more licences which, while free, are incompatible with GPL. To enable broader technical collaboration, we have added the enhanced compatibility provisions of the license to allow more people to share more code across more projects than ever before. The ability to share Eclipse License code and Apache License Code... means that GPL now reaches far more broadly across the world of programs and projects than it ever did before. We are doing what we wish everybody would do with the problem of licence proliferation: We're expanding our compatibility in the hope that people can use fewer licenses to do the same amount of work, and we think that too is a response to success.
Under the new license draft, may GPL software be included under software governed by the Apache Software licence?
No, the GPL is still a copyleft license, and the Apache Software licence and the Eclipse License are still permissive licenses. They permit code under those licenses to be used in proprietary ways, and it is therefore not possible to open up a two-way street.
One of the questions with the GPL is about how tightly you may link GPL code with non-GPL code, for example, when you compile a GPL program and it uses other code in a software library. Have you done anything to define how tightly GPL code may be linked with non-GPL code? Under what circumstances is that permitted and not permitted?
We have made one clarification, as we see it, of what we believe was always the rule. We reasserted that code dynamically...
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