[ale] Open-source software license manager

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 13:26 -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:

> I think you are misguided.  "Free" has many facets.  Even the GPL,
> from
> certain angles, limits your "freedom".


[A word of warning; this is a bit verbose.]

Given that the largest possible freedom that we as a species have is the
freedom of choice, yes, the GPL can be viewed as being quite restrictive
(at least in the fact that it limits one's choices in what they can do
with a piece of software that is licensed under its terms).  The GPLv3
is even more "restrictive" than the GPLv2, but the restrictions that the
GPL places on software are more-or-less trades of one type of freedom
for another type of freedom---the freedom to study and modify software.
Granted, I have personally never understood studying the software, since
I can't make sense of much of the GNU project's code, but I am sure that
there are people out there that can intuitively look at code, spend next
to no time trying to build a mental model of what the code is doing, and
go "Hrm.  So that's how that works."

The BSD license is probably the most free license, simply because code
licensed to someone under the terms of the BSD license (specifically,
the most recent, modified version without the advertising clause) can be
closed off if the person wants.  There is nothing (legally) stopping me
from taking the PostgreSQL server, forking it, closing the source to it
and selling it as my own, proprietary product.  I can extend it and so
forth, and relicense it under a standard commercial EULA if I so choose.
However, I think that there can also be fundamental problems with having
the freedom to restrict freedom, if you get what I mean.

Sure, this is how many software houses make their money.  But Canonical
seems to be doing quite well for itself, as well as the many independent
service vendors that are providing support for the operating system
distribution.

Ironically, I find it interesting that in today's /., there was a story
regarding Microsoft distributing Ubuntu.  Personally, I think that it's
too bad that the GPLv3 wasn't already released and that software in the
Ubuntu distribution wasn't using it.  This would have made for a very
fascinating first legal test case of the GPLv3, since the distribution
of the software by Microsoft would, as I understand it, invalidate the
patents that they allege Ubuntu systems violate (but only those
particular patents, not all of their patents, even though RMS wanted the
license to be that broad; I think they decided against that for reasons
of practicality).

In any case, the freedom of choice is something that people very much
have, and I find it totally possible to be an avid supporter of Free and
Open Source software while still permitting people to have the choice to
go proprietary if they want to.  I will personally not choose
proprietary software if I can help it, simply because while I may not be
an expert programmer, having the source code to the system is a useful
thing to me.  I can still fix bugs that creep up in my system(s), even
if those fixes are ugly as sin and would be embarrassing to distribute.
Even better is the fact that I don't have to distribute my bug fixes if
I never distribute the fixed binaries, so I can avoid being embarrassed
entirely by simply not sharing my ugly fixes which probably violate many
tenants of professional programming.  I find it much easier to write
clean code in my own software, simply because I know it well (and I
can't ever seem to figure out how to learn the internals of other
software---anyone seen the source code contained in the GNU coreutils?
Just check out the source to GNU ls sometime.  I certainly cannot follow
all of it, and it isn't just because the GNU Coding Standards make the
code hard to read, either.).

On the up side, there are sometimes things that I can fix and send back.
I submitted a patch for sysvinit back to its maintainer (though I found
out that the maintainer had already implemented much better
functionality across the entire package for the patch that I submitted,
he just hadn't released those changes yet at the time.  As a matter of
fact, I am not sure that he ever released those changes).  'twasn't a
bug fix but a feature enhancement---regardless, try doing that with a
piece of proprietary software.  Perhaps the best way to summarize the
flavor of free that the FSF pushes is that it is a double-edged sword:
Sure, you lose money in sales of the licenses, but you also gain free
help, and can sell support for the software since you most likely know
it better than anyone else.  In fact, by selling the support, software
creators and vendors compete on merit alone, and the best support
provider wins in the long run---even if that support vendor isn't the
original creator of the software.  If Windows were GPL'd, I can't
imagine that Microsoft would be alive unless they truly were Borg-ish in
nature and adapted to having to actually compete on merit.  Assimilation
wouldn't be sufficient any longer.

    --- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
           michael.trausch at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
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