Al Viro wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 02:56:24AM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> > Can you please acknowledge that it doesn't, such that I can feel I've
> > fulfilled my goal of dispelling the myth that the GPLv3 changes the
> > spirit of the GPL?
>
> No. I don't do metaphysics. This thread alone has shown that the
> notion is not well-defined *at* *all*, to the point of being useless
> and seriously misleading. I.e. the phrase about similar spirit
> should be replaced with something far more explicit and very, very
> hard to miss. I don't think you need more proof that people *do*
> interpret it in very different ways, with quite unpleasant results.
>
> > > GPLv3, with your involvement in its development or not, sucks rocks,
> > > thanks to what you call anti-tivoization section.
> >
> > Is it correct to say that you share Linus' opinion, that the only
> > problem with the GPLv3 is the anti-tivoization provision?
>
> No. If you want a basic splitup by sections compared to GPLv2,
> 1 - at least not better; attempts at being precise
> end up creating a no-common-sense-land *and*
> turn out to leave serious unanswered questions
> in that area.
> 2 - no opinion on actual changes
> 3 - more or less an improvement
> 4,5 - about on par with v2, modulo wording in (5)
> 6 - much worse
> 7 - if I want to give additional permissions, I don't
> want them stripped, for fsck sake! There is a
> bog-standard mechanism for _that_ (dual-licensing),
> thank you very much. I.e. that section looks like
>
> a pile of dishonest PR games, pardon the redundance.
> 8 - on par
> 9 - on par, modulo piss-poor attempt to define "modify"
> backfiring here (e.g. prelinking constitutes
> modification according to it, so does running rdev(8),
> etc., etc.)
> 10 - no opinion on actual changes
> 11 - improvement
> 12 - on par (aside of basic bad writing, but there are
> much worse problems *not* with wording, so that's
> not interesting)
> 13 - special-case kludges are fun, aren't they
> (specifically
> "linking"?), but in any case, that's secondary.
> FWIW, I'm not fond of ideas behind Affero, so if
> anything, that's a point against v3.
> 14 - ... and thank you very much for keeping such a lovely
> source of periodic clusterfucks in v3 as well.
> I think it's painfully obvious for everyone in this
> thread that reference to "spirit" is a recipe for
> massive disagreements down the road. If you want the
> words you are using to be interpreted your way, use
> ones that have commonly agreed upon meaning. The
> measure is "do other people read it differently?",
> not "how sure I am in deriving the meaning I want from
> the words I've used?". Related problem is that
> version choice rules _must_ be stated in maximally
> unambiguous and hard to miss way. Look through
> Bernd-produced parts of this thread and you'll see
> the reason why it is needed.
> Moving that into terms and conditions is a good step,
> but it's still not enough. E.g. you really want
> to be explicit on the form (in)sufficient to specify
> the version of license.
> the rest on par.
>
> Overall: definitely worse than v2. v2 + (3) + (11) would be an improvement,
> provided that v2 section 9 is cleaned up.
>
> > To make this more concrete, if there was a hypothetical GPLv2.9,
> > consisting of GPLv3dd4 minus the "installation information"
> > requirements for user products, (i) Would you consider it a better
> > license than GPLv2?
> Negative, see above
> (ii) Better for Linux?
> Negative, for kernel as well as for userland
> (iii) Enough to go through the trouble of switching?
> See above.
>
> In other words, I don't see any chance for v3 to be a good choice
> for anything I write, kernel or userland. If I end up sending patches
> to v3 projects, I'll put the patches under BSDL and let them convert
> on merge.
>
> Note that this is *not* about the problems with wording; those also exist,
> of course (_that_ is a final draft?), but that's a separate story and it
> interests me only inasmuch as it is caused by inherent problems with meaning
> of section in question.
> -
regards,
alexander.
--
"Live cheaply," he said, offering some free advice. "Don't buy a house,
a car or have children. The problem is they're expensive and you have
to spend all your time making money to pay for them."
-- Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman: 'Live Cheaply'
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