Free software's white knight
Published: 15 Mar 2006 13:20 GMT
...a serious error. I give people advice about licensing, but it's up to my clients to choose their licence — something that requires careful thought.
I have read, I believe, all the statements Torvalds has made in public and some statements he hasn't made in public, but I don't have any beef with him. There isn't any conflict between us.
One point that Torvalds made was that he is "less religious" about the GPL than the FSF, and considers it more about making people behave fairly, rather than limiting people's use of software. Do you agree that your attitude to freedom is almost religious?
I think Linus' point of view on this subject is thoughtful. It can seem to someone who doesn't share our values to their full extent that it must have come from religious conviction. I don't see it as religious, but as a commitment, conviction and principle.
To me there is an importance attached to freedom, which is like the importance attached to any other social value.
Read Moglen's thoughts on the GPL 3 process and licence in our February interview with him on the subject.
Does the Center also get involved in handling GPL violations?
There are a fairly large number of reports to the FSF every year about people who are not abiding by the terms of the GPL. It's not hard to get people to abide by the licence — there are not many cases where you have to write more than one letter, and there are not too many of those where you have to write more than two letters. There are few cases where a lawyer needs to get involved.
We're not turning this into a trap where lawyers make money. The licence works because it's a system for gaining cooperation, not because it's a system for hurting people. You can run into bad propaganda about Stallman and the FSF, but we've never held up a business for a dime in unnecessary royalties. I had instructions from Stallman that I should never let a request for damages interfere with request for compliance.
How much do your lawyers know about software and software development?
The lawyers who work here have high levels of technical expertise — this is a hacker law firm. Our clients are people who write computer code — they respect people in proportion to their understanding of code and tend to be impatient with people that can't write code. One reason why I was an effective lawyer for Stallman was because if I had a question about the code, I simply looked at the code.
If you're a company that has fair amount of resources available, you don't need your lawyers to be computer programmers. Our problem is how to provide a high level of support at a low cost, so we need a high degree of technical specialisation.
How much funding has the Center received? What do you plan to do when this funding runs out?
We received $4.25m for two years from the OSDL [Open Source Development Labs, a Linux consortium funded by IBM, HP, Intel and others]. The OSDL is a fundraising agent and aggregator for us — it collects the donations of members that are interested in the success of this law firm, and gives them to us. This is good as we have an indistinct knowledge of who gives us what and it makes fundraising simple. I'm doing other fundraising as well, which is taking more of my time than I would necessarily like.
My view is that we will continue to...
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