On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Bryce Harrington wrote:
----- Forwarded message from Diane Peters <dmp@...1...> -----
For those of you interested in v3 of the GPL, see the attached. I'm at MIT today and returning tomorrow. Happy to talk with any of you who are interested in the announcement, the provisions, etc.
The first discussion draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3 has been released.
The new draft and web resources are available at http://gplv3.fsf.org. We welcome your comments on the wording of the new version at http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.
Why not call it Freedom Software and save us all a lot of trouble eh? Would clear up a lot of ambiguity.
Some countries have adopted laws prohibiting software that enables users to escape from Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is fundamentally
I love how they change the DRM acronym :)
proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL makes it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
The patent provisions seem quite reasonable, obviously they wont go far enough for everyone but they dont go too far.
c) If the modified program has interactive user interfaces, each
must
include a convenient feature that displays an appropriate copyright notice, and tells the user that there is no warranty for the program (or that you provide a warranty), that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and how to view a copy of this
License,
Sounds awfully like an advertising clause, well maybe not quite yet. I presume it is intended as a reaction to web based intefaces but it sounds equally like it is requiring all programs to include License information in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) like Inkscape already has (but I dont see why it should be required so long as the standard README or COPYING files are provided).
9.[5] Not a Contract. =20=20=20=20=20 You are not required to accept this License in order to receive a copy of the Program. However, nothing else grants you permission to propagate or modify the Program or any covered works. These actions infringe copyright
I've always found this bit fascinating, despite the fact that quite a few programs throw up an installer asking you to "agree" to the GPL anyone can use the program privately without ever needing to agree to anything.
12.[7] Liberty or Death for the Program.
The "liberty or death" description is catchy but a little ominous. This section has been referred to as "Truth in labelling" and is supposed to ensure GPL 3 software really is free (as in freedom) with no lurking traps such as patents.
<snip> long aint it? </snip>
I'm hoping they will provide a really short version for including in individual source files. It is bizarre when the licensing included in source file is longer than the code itself. Even this much (as follows) is pretty long, several screens worth:
To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.
<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.> Copyright (C) <year> <name of author> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USAAlso add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:
Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w='. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.
The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; for a GUI interface, you would use an "About box" instead.
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.
<signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989 Ty Coon, President ofollow the GNU GPL, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses.
The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License.
Should be interesting, GPL 3 extends and updates GPL 2 and in my humble opinion is a nice evolution, nothing too radical far as I can tell.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/