GPLv3 sucks
GPLv3 is dumb.
I never liked the Free Software Foundation much to begin with. I have no beef with Stallman or the other GNU project members as programmers—gcc sure is nice, and a system without GNU fileutils is a frustrating one indeed—but as lawyers and activists the organization is just plain annoying. For whatever reason their latest version of the GNU General Public License has made it onto my radar, so I thought I’d take a closer look at the thing. It stinks. The second version of this license wasn’t too terrible; it contained some statements on the intent of the license, a list of freedoms and restrictions that contained enough big words to seem legally sound and a section explaining how to use the license. It was about as straightforward as such things can be and short enough that it could be read on the john. This third version seems to have been transformed into a breathless screed against the perceived injustices of society and the legal system. I guess it’s about the same length as its previous incarnation, but this version of the license contains a lot of language that is either meaningless fluff or just strikes me as very unprofessional.
The most noticed section, of course, is that on Digital Restrictions [sic] Management. Though I think that the free dissemination of creative works is important to the health of a society, I often find myself closer to the Jack Valenti end of this spectrum than to Cory Doctorow. I suppose that by the GNU definitions, I’m a “copyright apologist.” I think that people should be compensated for their creative efforts and have a means of limiting how their works are used and modified. DRM is annoying and unfortunate in that it restricts legitimate usages of a copyrighted work, but, on the other hand, people are assholes. In the context of the GPL, I consider Section 3 harmful in that it places a specific ban on what software may be licensed under the GPL and how licensed software may be used, an action that seems to run counter of the FSF philosophy that free software entails “The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs [sic].” Section 3 of GPLv3 is interesting when compared to other GNU legal documents in that, though this is in the meat of the license, it contains only one sentence expounding upon the limitations and freedoms provided by the license, and half of it is just instruction not to violate criminal law. The rest is an exposition of philosophy and a plea to interpret the remainder of the document not necessarily as it is written, but instead through the lens of specific opinion. Here is that one relevant sentence in its entirety: “Regardless of any other provision of this License, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users’ privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License.” I certainly hope that obstacles to this full exercise can still be built through the means of unusable interfaces, since otherwise transcode might be in trouble.
There’s a part in section 1, the description of what constitutes source code, that tries to further limit the abilities of potential digital restricters by requiring any encryption keys and passwords needed to “install and/or execute the source code of the work…in the recommended or principal context of use.” This is most notable for convincing Linus Torvalds that this could require him to give up his signing PGP key. I can’t recall how integrated signatures are to the Linux source code, but it’s possible that the rest of the paragraph, despite the FSF’s claims to the contrary, could be demanding just that.
There was another part of section 1 that I found interesting. As some of you may be aware, dcantrell had a run-in with Richard M. Stallman a while back concerning the enforcement of the GPL for gcc on IRIX. I won’t try to tell his story for him, but the synopsis was that David argued that, since gcc didn’t build on IRIX as distributed, SGI was required to distribute their modified Makefiles per the demand for “the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.” Stallman’s response was that he didn’t mean Makefiles, or maybe just that he didn’t want to go after SGI. I can’t remember; maybe it was both. Anyhow, GPLv3 includes the following exception for such scripts: “Code need not include a particular subunit if…the subunit serves only to enable use of the work with [a major essential component of the operating system on which the executable runs].” Hmm!
In other news, Sandy Springs has a new radio station, AM 1620. I’ve been listening for a little bit, and the music they played over the weekend sounded like about the same sort of thing I’d do if I had a radio station: just a bunch of random crap. At one point I remember it fading from some blues song to some techno song that sounded like it came off a car commercial. It was like listening to WREK except in mono and, since this station is actually an unlicensed network of 100mW transmitters, with horrible clarity. I just recently learned that it’s unlicensed while trying to find out why I’d never heard their call letters, and this truth isn’t very far from my assumption that it was some guy broadcasting from a van in the North Springs MARTA parking lot. Despite their claim of covering all of Sandy Springs, I’m unable to pick the station up on my drive home—90% of which is through the city of Sandy Springs—until I’m well south of Northridge, and I lose it again once I get to Glenridge. According to the amazingly hard to read schedule on their web site, I’m missing out on the Sandy Springs Health Hour in the morning and some undetermined scheduling abyss in the evening. I think that’s when they let winamp be the DJ.
In more other news, the Movie Trading Company has closed its Georgia locations. This is a sad day, indeed, as I no longer know where to take my bad movies to die. Used music stores often take DVDs, but I don’t think it’s a practice that they encourage, and they certainly carry far less potential for finding crappy movies on the cheap. I visited the dying husk of the store on Roswell Rd this weekend in search of half-off bounty, but I quickly found that every item still in the store was there for a good reason. This didn’t stop me, of course, and I ended up walking out with The Sixth Day, Last Action Hero, one of those Tears for Fears albums that the one guy made after the other guy left, and a copy of Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack that I found in a bin on the way out. It was cheap, sure, but now my options are more limited for places where I can sell it all back.