FLOSS Weekly 13: Eben Moglen on GPL 3.0
| Eben Moglen on GPL 3.0 (2006) by |
FLOSS Weekly 13, September 27, 2006
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This is FLOSS Weekly with Chris DiBona, episode 13 for September 26th, 2006. Eben Moglen on GPL 3.0.
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FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by VISA – safer, better money. Life takes VISA.
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[Leo Laporte:]
It’s time to, surprise, surprise, if you’ve just turned on your iPod and you say “My god, there’s a new FLOSS Weekly”. [Laughter] It’s time for FLOSS – what had been FLOSS bi‐monthly, for a while. This is Chris DiBona, we’re back, baby.
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, we’re really sorry. Sorry guys. And gals.
[Leo Laporte:]
No apology necessary, you work hard, you’ve got a lot to do, you’re doing a great job…
[Chris DiBona:]
And you’re in Canada all the time!
[Leo Laporte:]
And I travel a lot as open source major, but we want to tell everybody we’ve got three full FLOSS Weeklies ready to go, and we’re going to have three in a row. starting with today’s episode, and I think a really exciting one, with…
[Chris DiBona:]
It’s really quite remarkable.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah, Eben Moglen. Who is Eben Moglen?
[Chris DiBona:]
So Eben is sort of the legal godfather of free software. So, I’ve known Eben for a number of years, blah blahblah blahblah, I always say that. But, he’s just, he’s a remarkable lawyer, he’s a remarkable speaker, and he is a true idealist…
[Leo Laporte:]
You’re going to hear that, really eloquent. He may get a little technical at times, ’cause he is a lawyer, and we’re talking about legal issues, but this is stuff that is fundamental to free software going forward.
[Chris DiBona:]
It really is. And I think we ha… You know, it’s a pretty… We’re going to talk about the version 3 of the GPL, we’re going to talk about sort of how he got into free software, it’s pretty neat.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah. Actually, that’s how we started, we asked Professor – I’m going to call him “Professor Moglen”, ’cause he was a professor
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, you ought to.
[Leo Laporte:]
and he sure sounds like one. I feel like we’re taking a great class, a great legal, a class in law school. We asked him how he did get started in this field.
[Eben Moglen:]
I started working for Richard Stallman in the fall of 1993, so this is 13 years now.
[Leo Laporte:]
Wow. Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
So, in a lot of ways, Eben’s been a fixture in the free software movement; when you deal or talk with the Free Software Foundation, often you’re talking with Richard and/or with Eben, in some form or another. And he’s been involved in the writing of different, you know, free software licenses now for, you know, as long as he’s been around. So.
[Leo Laporte:]
So, are you, you’re an attorney, Eben?
[Eben Moglen:]
Yes, that’s correct, I went to law school and got a history Ph.D. after a career as a computer programming language designer.
[Leo Laporte:]
Oh, so you’re perfect, you’ve got the computer background.
[Chris DiBona:]
You’re perfect, Eben.
[Leo Laporte:]
You’re perfect in every way.
[Eben Moglen:]
I fit, at any rate, into a certain odd‐shaped hole where there are not many other pegs that will work.
[Leo Laporte:]
Was your practice always IP law focused, or?
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, yeah, basically. I mean, what happened was that after I got out of my salad days jobs, which were judicial clerkships – I worked for a trial judge in New York, and then for Thurgood Marshall at the U.S. Supreme Court – I went…
[Leo Laporte:]
Holy cow!
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, holy cow!
[Leo Laporte:]
Holy cow!
[Eben Moglen:]
I went to become a law professor at Columbia, and then I was hired as, and academically was carried on the books as, a legal historian, I taught old law from medieval English law through my own specialty which was the law of the American colonies and the early national United States. So I worked at that, I wrote legal history for several years full time.
But I was interested in freedom and technology and how to use technology not to extinguish freedom in the 21st century, but to make it. I decided that the first thing that needed to happen was that there needed to be strong encryption in civil society, both so that governments would not be able to spy on everybody about everything, and so that there could be electronic commerce.
But the United States’ government had rules that prohibited the exportation of encryption technology, which was significantly impeding people’s ability to use the technology which we had seen developed in the mid‐1970s, and even in the mid‐1990s there was still not much of it around.
In 1991 I saw a guy called Phil Zimmermann release a program called Pretty Good Privacy on a Fido bulletin board network, and I wrote him, and I said: “Congratulations, you’re going to change the world, but you’re going to get in a heap of trouble.”
[Leo Laporte:]
That was prophetic.
[Eben Moglen:]
“Here’s who I am, and here’s why I can help.” I was a couple of weeks ahead of the nice FBI agents who came and knocked on Phil’s door in Boulder, Colorado. So we went off to work trying to stop crypto export regulation, and that’s when I started to do this sort of practice.
Around the time that the case between Zimmermann and the United States’ government seemed to be sliding towards indictment, Richard Stallman got in touch with me and said he had a personal legal problem, he’d read something in The New York Times about the work I was doing for Zimmermann, and he thought I might be the right guy to help him. And I said “Well, I use Emacs every day, and so it’ll be a long time before you’ve run out your entitlement to free legal help from me.”, and I did what he wanted. But I realized that when I…
[Leo Laporte:]
There are few lawyer who doesn’t use WordPerfect but uses Emacs to create his pleadings.
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, yes. It was, then, unusual, and it’s still not quite as usual as I wish it were. In my firm, the Software Freedom Law Center, I should say, we have now a majority of LaTeX users, we are divided between OpenOffice and LaTeX, but LaTeX is coming ahead. So, just in case, you want to know someplace where you can find lawyers who use Emacs, you can find them here.
[Leo Laporte:]
I bet you have the prettiest pleadings in the entire world.
[Eben Moglen:]
You know, it’s odd, there are, it’s not uncommon that I emit some document on behalf of a client and on some Slashdot or other, somebody says “Well, at least he uses LaTeX.”
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter]
[Eben Moglen:]
And I find it remarkable that everybody in the technical world can see the prettiness of free software documents.
[Leo Laporte:]
They didn’t look inside the file, they just could tell from the way it was printed.
[Eben Moglen:]
That’s right. On the page, free software generated documents look better because Knuth was a genius, and we are – or is still, but was then, even in his younger life, a genius – and we now face this fringe world in which everybody has decided that word processors make documents looks ugly. When the Word franchise has disappeared and Open Document Format is really being put through its paces, the question will be “Do people make Open Document Format documents look as good as LaTeX documents have been working all these years?”
Anyway, so I went to work for Stallman, at first just in the sort of “you deserve help” in a barter sense, but once I’d worked with him a little while I realized that he had… He had a unique way of seeing what was going on in the world. And that way of seeing what was going on in the world was a way that would allow me to know what’s happening in the world of free software far more easily than any other. So, I went to work doing all his work, to understand what he did and why he did it and what the people who wrote to him thought, and that developed into this whole line of work that I’m now in.
[Chris DiBona:]
So, what does the Software Freedom Law Center actually do? I don’t think a lot of people know.
[Eben Moglen:]
Software Freedom Law Center is a counseling and advising law firm. Its job is to help people think through their options and make good decisions, and to help them get governments’ structure and licensing decisions right. So our goal is to help free software and open source makers and distributors who are non‐profit entities make wise decisions. That could be a project just forming up, which needs to make good decisions about whether to have a separate foundation or to shelter itself inside some other organized system, whether to have a contribution agreement among contributors, if so, what?, how to make sure that the copyrights are well taken care of, how to be sure there aren’t work for hire claims, how to distribute under a license which correctly meets the developers’ goals, and whatever else it is that the projects who are our clients need.
We’re not a litigation firm; our primary task is not going to war for people. Indeed our standard retainer says that “if you are suddenly attacked, we will help you defend yourself, and we will help you find and finance long term counsel.” But our primary goal isn’t to fight wars, we’re not funded for that. We’re funded for the less exciting and more routine job of keeping people out of trouble.
[Leo Laporte:]
Who funds you?
[Eben Moglen:]
Our funders are almost entirely the IT vendors and related industry heavyweights who recognize that having good lawyers for hackers is a rational benefit to them in their businesses. That means IBM, Hewlett‐Packard, Intel, Nokia, a whole range of familiar names, including Google, whose insight it is that there is enormous capital value built up in free and open source software projects, and that that value is more certain to be realized and more safe to employ if the people who made the software that produces that value had good, early, legal advice. Sometimes decisions made in the early life of a project are hard to change later; sometimes they may even be impossible. If you’re not careful about how you put a project together and somebody later raises an ownership claim, as happens for example in SCO, you can wind up spending a lot of money defending against a problem that could have been avoided at very low cost.
So what we really are is the legal equivalent of preventive medicine docs, and what our job is, is administering the right vaccinations to free and open source software projects so that they grow up big and strong and can avoid disease and surgery.
[Chris DiBona:]
Did you just call SCO a disease?
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter]
[Chris DiBona:]
I’m kidding, Eben. So, one of the things that you did say…
[Leo Laporte:]
You didn’t answer, by the way, I just want to point that out.
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, no, I mean, I, it’s not a, it’s sort of, it sounds like the acronym for a condition rather than the condition.
[Leo Laporte:]
[Eben Moglen:]
Yes.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte:]
If, if… This sound like a movie.
[Eben Moglen:]
Curvature of somebody’s spine,
[Leo Laporte:]
That’s right.
[Eben Moglen:]
by compression, right, yeah.
[Leo Laporte:]
Exactly, it sounds like almost an Arnold Schwarzenegger film.
“If SCO is the disease, Eben Moglen is the cure!”
[Eben Moglen:]
Oh dear…
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter]
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Eben Moglen:]
Actually, as you may understand, the cure for SCO is Cravath, Swaine & Moore and what, when all is said and done, will probably have been between 100 and 150 million dollars in
[Leo Laporte:]
Sheez…
[Eben Moglen:]
expenses.
[Leo Laporte:]
[Whistle]
[Eben Moglen:]
When you consider that, as the alternative to a few million dollars a year, split among many companies in order to provide the kind of legal advice that might avoid one of those per decade, you can understand why it’s rational for people to fund us to give legal services away to someone else.
[Chris DiBona:]
And, it’s worth pointing out, one of the legal services you’re doing is the GPLv3 with the Free Software Foundation.
[Eben Moglen:]
Yes, that was understood from the beginning of this, when we began talking with the funders in the fall of 2004 about making the Software Freedom Law Center, GPL3 was one of the projects that we indicated we would certainly undertake.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right, I think that it’d be really interesting to our listeners sort of how that’s going. We’re in the second draft now, and how’s it being received? So, just…
You should probably give a little bit of background on GPL.
[Eben Moglen:]
Yeah. The GNU General Public License was the most important non‐technological outcome of Richard Stallman’s invention of the Free Software idea. Stallman conceived first GNU, a reimplementation of prevailing software ideas about operating systems and the structure of userland, and he conceived writing it from scratch so that people could share it.
That was a conception which took him from 1982 to 1985. By that time, there was actually some software, and the question became how to license it. Stallman realized that the mechanism of licensing was not only for himself, for the software he was writing, but for a world of free software that he hoped would eventuate. And so what he needed was to write a document that programmers could understand, that they could self‐apply to software, which specified the rules by which that software could be perpetually known to be copyable, modifiable, and shareable by all users without restriction.
In order to do that, he invented the concept of the “copyleft”, which is the central working feature of the GNU GPL. The copyleft says: “Here’s some software. You can copy it any time you want, you can modify it any way you please, you can study it and do anything you want with the ideas it contains, but if you distribute this software, either unmodified or as part of something else you’ve built, give the people to whom you give your stuff all the rights that you got in this software from which you started.” In other words, it says “Share and share alike, not only this software, but what from you make from it.”
That principle came to be enshrined, first in 1985, and then in 1991 in successive versions of the license called the GNU GPL. That license came to cover not only the work of Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, or most of the work of Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, but tens of thousands of other programming projects around the world. Including most notably the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel written by Linus Torvalds and many other people, which has become the basis of an operating system revolution around the planet.
So, the GNU GPL is in that sense both historically a very important part of the development of shareable software, and a crucial unit in the current business and social uptake of free software. If governments and enterprises all around the world using free software for public and private benefit, and they do so on the terms of sharing that the GNU GPL presents.
But the GPL was last updated 15 years ago, in 1991, at a time when there were a few hundred places in the world where free software was used or produced, and almost all of those places were in the United States. It was a license written by Mr. Stallman in cooperation with U.S. lawyers and it thought about the question about how the license needed to work altogether in terms of U.S. copyright law. It didn’t make any particular provision for the patenting of software, because the patenting of software was only an infant bad idea in 1991, instead of the full‐blown bad idea it is today.
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter]
[Eben Moglen:]
And it didn’t make any provision for an interaction between free software and a world of multiple interacting copyright systems, because the Internet was new, the web was still unthought of, really, and the enormous globalization of information movement, that really was the 1990s’ hallmark in the history of human beings, hadn’t happened yet.
Now we face a situation in 2006 In which the GPL covers software which is traded in a level of tens of billions of dollars a year. Good current estimates suggest that the commercial trade in GPL’d software will be in the order of 20 billion dollars next year out of about 40 billion dollars, or a little less, the total trade in free software So, half the trade in commercial software that is shareable and modifiable by its users.
And that trade is a global trade. It is occuring in every nation, under every copyright system in every system of law. So updating that license in order to take account of the enormous expansion in the use of free software since 1991, the immense amount of value it holds, the extraordinary geographic reach of the system, and the complexities of the interaction between patents and copyright on software, all mean that it needs to be updated.
It has needed it for a while. But the Free Software Foundation moved very slowly towards a revision process, because the Foundation recognized that with a license this important to as many people of this wealth and power and status around the world, devising a process to revise it publicly and to give people a chance to involve themselves in that process, needed some careful study on top of the effort needed to make a better license.
So for the past two years, we have been first devising process, and then going through the process with a draft license. As Chris said in his question, we are now in the second public discussion draft, well past the far turn in the process, which began last January at MIT, and which I suspect is going to end this coming January, right about January 15th, with the promulgation of the third version of the license.
We have some discussion committees, which are engaged in public and private discussion about the license in many places, physical places around the world and many metaphorical places in the net. We have a public comment system at gplv3.fsf.org, where people can read the license and see what other people have said about each passage and sentence in it, and leave their own comments, and we have a process of allowing people to see what happens to the comments that they leave, where those comments are discussed, when, and what changes made in the license are attributable to individuals’ comments.
So we’re attempting to create a kind of 21st century consultative structure in which people from all around the world in different social locations can use the net to cooperate with one another to discuss the terms on which they live. And the GPLv3 process is in my mind, therefore, a very primitive example of a kind of social activity which I think is going to be much more common in the 21st century – a kind of global democratic event.
[Leo Laporte:]
You’re quite the optimist. You think there’s evidence that that’s going to happen?
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, I’ll say this: When we began the process, people said “It’s just going to be one big Slashdot flamewar, isn’t it?” And we built some technology, carefully, to get people to come to the license text and not sort of scrawl all over it with their purple crayon “I hate this”, or “You dummy” or something like that. We built a little web interface to the document that allows you to highlight a particular passage and attach a comment to that particular passage. So in order to participate in the program, you needed to know what language it was that bugged you, and what you wanted to say about it. And…
[Leo Laporte:]
You had to be very specific.
[Eben Moglen:]
Yeah. And although I think that that, to some extent, limited the number of participants, that is to say, we had a lower volume of activity than I forecast, the quality of the participation was superb.
[Leo Laporte:]
Mmm.
[Eben Moglen:]
And as we sort of redeveloped the software, we build a kind of intensity highlighting system in this software which we call “stet” and which is free software and which we think is really helpful for this kind of public deliberation on a document, so just by calling up the image of the document at gplv3.fsf.org, you could use the intensity of color in which particular passages were highlighted to determine how much other people had said about those passages. So people could see what were the hot and cold passages in the discussion, if you like, and that helped people to moderate their own efforts. If lots of people were thinking about a thing, it was helpful to say something specific and move on.
So while I don’t by any stretch mean to suggest that “media are message” or that if you have the right media, intercontinental collaboration is easy, I do think that this process, like the Slashdot process in the making and distribution of news, and like other processes we see going on in the net, are optimistic. I do think that there are ways in which large scale power in the 21st century can be reduced, by the voluntary activities of people doing what they care about. The YouTube revolution is messing up the control of television. And that seems to me to be another example of what used to be a comparatively centralized hierarchical process, beginning to be replaced by more multilateral and more decentralized processes.
[Chris DiBona:]
So with regards to GPLv3 though, it’s like there have been a lot of… There’s b… It’s funny, ’cause I’ve been going around speaking to different groups about open source and free software and the GPL. And it’s funny how the people who are, let’s just say, incented to not like open source, tend to glom on to the worst of the restrictions options in the version 3.
[Eben Moglen:]
Sure. Sure.
[Chris DiBona:]
And having to correct them is getting… Well, I’m not going to say it’s tiring, because, you know, honestly I’ve been doing this for what, ten years now, right, so, I’m obviously OK with it, right? But…
[Eben Moglen:]
Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
You know, they tend to [Unintelligible] , you know.
[Eben Moglen:]
What I agree with you, it’s not an evangelist’s best subject. Well, one of the things I think is true about this, Chris, is that a characteristic of 21st century media is their immediacy, is their speed. And an oldfashioned process in which you issue a document draft and you talk about it for a few months, and then you think about what you’ve heard, and then you make some changes and you talk about that for a few months; it moves too slowly for people who think that when they’ve expressed a criticism they should immediately see a change.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah.
[Eben Moglen:]
That the process of drafting should be like the process of submitting, click, point, done. And it just isn’t like that, right? So people have identified stuff that they have problems with, and we think “Yeah, that’s important, people’re having problems with that. We’ve got to find a way to be more clear about what we need.”, or “We have to go back to the drawing board altogether and think really hard about what is the minimum that will accomplish what we think needs to be accomplished, so that people won’t have to worry about the gray area that’s bothering them right now.”.
But it takes you a few months to go through that process, think it through, make some tentative decisions, talk about them more, and then go ahead and issue another draft. And so both you and I have spent a lot of time this year helping people understand that there are two sides to a question on which they feel strongly, even if you suspect that in the next draft you may be very much closer to their position than you are right now. And I too have spent a lot of time talking to people about provisions in the first or the second discussion draft, that I thought very well might change later, but I listened to them, and I made sure that they knew what other people had said, and what the other arguments were on the other side, or other sides, of the issues they were talking about, all the while thinking, you know, “I’m pretty sure this won’t be in the next draft in this form.”, but it’s important for all of us to go through the conversation on an equal basis.
So I’m sympathetic to your point; people have attached themselves to the controversial stuff, or the stuff that seemed controversial at the moment, and that inevitably means that we focused a lot of attention on the things that were most likely to change.
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte:]
We’re talking with Eben Moglen, who is a professor of law and history of law at Columbia University, he’s also pro bono general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and the chairman of Software Freedom Law Center. We’ll talk more with Eben in just a bit. In fact, we’ll ask him what he and Richard Stallman prioritize as the most important parts of GPL 3.0, the things they really wanted to fight for, in just a bit.
But I want to remind you that this podcast, as are all the TWiT podcasts this month, is brought to you by VISA. VISA wanted to get the word out that’s it’s a great way to shop online, it’s safe, they do a lot to prevent fraud and identity theft, including their kind of specialized fraud protection software that monitors transactions and automatically pinpoints suspicious transactions, so that they can call you and say “Hey, were you really in Brazil on Friday?”. Actually I had that happen to me the other day, a $7,000 charge that was easily reversed because I was smart enough to use my VISA card. That’s why they say: Safer, better, money. Life, and TWiT, takes VISA.
Now back to Eben Moglen.
[Chris DiBona:]
If you had to prioritize the things that were most important to you, and to the FSF, and to Richard, in version 3, would it be the patent stuff, would it be the DRM stuff, would it be the license compatibility stuff? I mean…
[Eben Moglen:]
Yeah, I think those are three of the four, and the only one I would add, and in fact, these days I would put it first, is the internationalization aspect. I think it is really important to decouple the GPL from a reliance on the concepts and processes of U.S. copyright law. I know it will work in the United States, but I have a lot of experience in why I don’t have to take it to court in the United States.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right.
[Eben Moglen:]
I know that the GPL is strong here, and I know that being strong here, I don’t have to worry very much what American courts are going to say about it. I know that because German courts have spoken favorably of GPL in rulings in the past, that it is likely that in Germany soon the same thing will be true. The GPL will gain a spontaneous compliance in Germany, because everybody knows the courts have spoken, and that’s the end of it.
So I know that I’m going to need to think about the GPL in its application in Bangalore, in India, or in Thailand, or in Singapore, or in Taiwan, at least as much, for the next decade, as I thought about its application in the United States in the last decade. And therefore I want to know that the license that we are using to protect the freedom of free software has been thought of in global terms rather than in the U.S. terms which, like it or not, are the only terms that version 2 is consistently aware of.
[Chris DiBona:]
Mmm.
[Eben Moglen:]
I agree with you about the other priorities of the Free Software Foundation. The Free Software Foundation sees itself as responsible for protecting the freedom of free software, and it sees three threats to that freedom that need to be dealt with as best we can in a software license, which isn’t necessarily very well.
In the first place, we need more attention to the question of patent right. We need to be sure that when people publish free software, modify free software, use free software in their equipment, or in their products that they pass along to others, that they do not reserve the control of those programs through patent rights. We need to be sure that programs that seem to be free software aren’t made de facto unfree software by somebody who is distributing them but keeping patent rights.
There are forms of patent attack on free software we can’t do anything about: Outsiders to the free software ecology who have patents and may wish to use those patents either in order to make royalties or in order to block free software for it own sake. But that’s not something a software license can do anything about.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right.
[Eben Moglen:]
For that we need general patent law reform.
What we can do is to say that the people who are part of the ecology need to share their patents to the extent necessary to protect the freedom of free software. In order to write such a provision we need to talk to the people who have the patents, in order to get their view about what form of sharing will work, effectively, will get them to use the software, and also to be content to allow their patents to be shared for the software’s use and modification. So that’s a complicated negotiation. And sometimes I hear it discussed by non‐patent‐holding parties under assumptions which I know to be wildly wrong.
The patents holders in the IT industry, by and large, are now deeply aware that patenting of software causes harm. Because they are deeply aware of the value of free and open source software, and they see why the two systems at their edges create conflict with one another. Most of the large IT businesses in the world want, deeply want, to help the free and open source software world avoid trouble with their own patents. Their problem is that they are concerned about the other aspects of their business, which are not free and open source software aspects of the business, and they are concerned not to give up the rights in their patents that apply outside the context of free and open source software. And this becomes the reason that the negotiations are complicated. Because they have different businesses, and different philosophies about how to apply their patents, in the different businesses they have outside the free software world. So, the patent issue is a complicated one of high priority, but it also involves discussion with highly sophisticated parties who know what their positions are.
The DRM issue or the tivoization issue is also, from the Free Software Foundation’s point of view, an issue of fundamental survival. I think that people have assumed that there were anti‐DRM provisions in GPL3 because the Free Software Foundation didn’t like Disney, or was for movie sharing. Or, resented anti‐piracy activity by movie studios. But none of that is true.
Anti‐DRM provisions are in GPLv3 because the Free Software Foundation is deeply concerned, I think justifiably concerned, that the strategies that content providers, as they call themselves, are using to protect their businesses will directly destroy the ability to make free software.
The problem is that if every general‐purpose computing device that is sold to a consumer that has multimedia capability, which is every computing device sold to consumers nowadays, if every computing device that has multimedia capability is required to assure the bitstreams passing through it, that the software running has not been modified, consumers will not have access to machines that they can use for hacking on software. There won’t…
[Leo Laporte:]
And of course Congress is absolutely about to do that, so…
[Eben Moglen:]
Congress
[Leo Laporte:]
It’s…
[Eben Moglen:]
has been on the verge of doing that several times.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah.
[Eben Moglen:]
And one of the things that stops Congress from doing that is that it’s IBM and Hewlett‐Packard, as well as the Free Software Foundation
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Eben Moglen:]
that lobby against it when it’s done by congress. The IT industry is willing to resist being ordered to truckle to the content manufacturers, but the IT industry is not unwilling to make a deal of its own with the content manufacturers. Their anger at congress is at being forced
[Leo Laporte:]
Ah.
[Eben Moglen:]
to make business decisions. They’re prepared to make business decisions. Those business decisions can be tricky. Right? If you are, say, Sony, you have literally billions of dollars in products destined to come to market, that are already in your pipeline, that make heavy use of free and open source software. But you also have music and movie businesses, and television business, which strongly urge the locking down of the network. And so if you’re Sony, there’s a fight inside.
If you’re Disney, you might use free software to do advanced computer graphics, to make expensive special effects movies, but that’s a small price that you would be willing to give up in return for getting rid of the free software which might allow a twelve‐year‐old to modify the computer on which a movie might be playing.
That difficulty has been compounded for us, because by and large the companies which have that interest in locking down the network have refused to participate in the GPL3 process altogether. Disney, though it is a member of the Open Source Development Lab, and a sophisticated one, does not participate in the GPL3 process. Sony has essentially withdrawn from the GPL3 process.
Because they do not negotiate over these questions, because we cannot explore with them questions of how we might each achieve our aims, we find ourselves instead dealing with industry parties in GPL3 who are afraid to lose the entertainment industries as customers, and who therefore are reluctant to see them not get what they want, and hackers elsewhere in the world, particularly in the south, who think that any compromise with DRM is simply a compromise with American cultural imperialism and the control of their technology by foreign corporations. So, it’s…
[Leo Laporte:]
Why are Disney and Sony not at the table?
[Eben Moglen:]
Because they believe, I think, that it is more effective for them to rely upon the companies who supply them and threaten them that “Nobody will supply us who supports GPL3.”. We have…
[Chris DiBona:]
[Unintelligible]
[Eben Moglen:]
We have seen a very difficult time talking openly among the members of even the discussion committee representing vendors, let alone the parties who represent other users of the DRM issues, because people have been very reluctant to engage.
I actually had a negotiation session with a lawyer for a major world consumer electronics company earlier this year. I flew a long way to talk to that lawyer, we sat down together, and the first thing he said to me was: “Disney’s position on GPL3 is…” and I stopped him, and I said “I’m sorry, I didn’t come all this way”
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter]
[Eben Moglen:]
“to hear what Disney’s position was, [Unintelligible] ”
[Leo Laporte:]
By proxy.
[Eben Moglen:]
“I can hear that at home. I came to find out what your company’s position is.”
And he said “Our position is: We don’t have one yet, because we don’t know whether you’re crazy enough to ignore Disney’s position.”
[Leo Laporte:]
Mmhmm. Interesting.
[Eben Moglen:]
So that’s been the way that we have encountered the primary opponents of what we wanted to do.
A lot of people have said that we were, in what we wrote, concerned to deal with encryption of mail, or security of networks in hospitals and so on, and to some extent, every time a person whose computer is running free software is unable to change it, but somebody else has reserved the power to change it, we’re concerned.
But the primary concern is a concern not even with the bad social policy of locking down other people’s computers – “We always opposed that policy.” the Free Software Foundation says – but our primary concern is that end user lockdown of all the consumer hardware by people who want to save multimedia businesses, is putting at risk the very way we make the software.
Now my guess is that as the license draft narrowed from draft one to draft two – it will narrow further from draft two to draft three as the Foundation gets more and more specific about what are the problems that it wishes to see abated. And my hope continues to be that as that happens, we will pick up support, as parties realize that we are not asking something unreasonable – we are asking that the GPL’d software in the world not be used to extinguish the freedom on the network that make GPL’d software possible in the first place. And we think that’s a really quite moderate request.
The last thing that you mentioned, Chris, was the provision for enhanced compatibility – for mixtures of code under different provisions. The strength of the GPL has been the copyleft. The idea that whatever you do with the code you’ve got to release it under the same license. And if, as Stallman originally thought, there had been just one free software license set in the world – the GPL and its Lesser GPL cousin – that would have worked fine. There were also licenses that just said “Here’s some free or open source software. You can do whatever you want with it.”, within very, very broad limits, like the BSD license or the first Apache license. Now, it’s easy to see how you combine that kind of code with GPL’d code; you put the BSD code inside a GPL’d program, and you release the whole under GPL, and everything works.
But where you have licenses that over time collect their own little bits and pieces of provisions, combining code becomes harder. And that’s disadvantageous to programmers.
In the seventh section of the new GPL draft, we find ourselves coping with this hypertechnical problem of how to combine code which has different provisions that govern it, but allow the whole to exist inside one program without breaking the copyleft altogether. And we think we’ve done that job, and we think it allows some useful outcomes.
As the patent system has gotten worse around the world in the last ten years, for example, developers started adding patent retaliation clauses to their licenses, to try and head off people suing them over patent claims. And those retaliation clauses varied from one place to another. One license said “Retaliation can occur under such‐and‐such terms at such‐and‐such a time,” another license said something else. That made it hard to put the code together under those two licenses, ’cause it wasn’t clear what patent retaliation applied to the program as a whole.
People kept saying “Why don’t you add patent retaliation clauses to GPL?”, and the Free Software Foundation kept saying “Because we’re not sure they do any good and we’re pretty sure they sometimes do some harm.”. So, what we discovered after a while, in thinking about how to make GPL2 [sic], was that we wanted to allow code to be combined with GPL’d code despite having different patent policies, so as to allow GPL to be an umbrella under which Apache code and GPL could live together. Under which Linux kernel code could be mixed with web server code, in order, for example, to provide a hybrid that might consist of an ultralight web server embedded in a slightly larger than usual kernel.
Whatever may be the fate of those kinds of combinations, by putting such provisions in the GPL, we avoid the GPL having to make a policy decision.
Before we issued the first discussion draft of the license, people thought it was very likely that the Free Software Foundation was going to make some error concerning what people called web services. That the Foundation was going to apply GPL to every copy of a GPL’d program, that the public interacted with. So that if you made a private modification of free software at, say, Google, or the Bank of America, and then used that modified GPL’d software to offer people services over the net, as for example home banking or web search, that somehow you would therefore be responsible for publishing those modifications to anybody who used the service. Many financial industry users of free software wouldn’t want to do that, ’cause they practice security by partial obscurity. And companies like Google wouldn’t want to do that, ’cause they’re service companies making use of public utility software, and their competitive advantage is in private modifications.
But the Free Software Foundation thinks that private modification is a right that has to be protected. Just as we think it’s understandable when people want to say “If you use my code for services, you should share.”. So what we tried to do was to use the compatibility provision in a way that says “Code that has either policy can work together, provided that the parts that actually implement this ‘If you communicate with me over a network you have to show your modifications’ part can always be removed and that the remainder will not have that responsibility built into it.
So if Google finds a program which is subject to the additional restriction “If you provide services with this code over a wire, make public your changes.”, Google can simply remove the “over the wire” communication part of the code, take the other part of the code under GPL, write a new, TCP/IP or other protocol, element that sticks in between, and use the GPL’d code in a different way.
Similarly, if somebody finds some GPL’d code lying around, that does something they would like to put into a “If you surf with this you must reveal the modifications.” code, they can do that. They simply can’t impose that restriction on the GPL’d parts they took from somewhere else, their only restriction is on their own code.
[Leo Laporte:]
Don’t you think, Eben, though, by putting these restrictions on companies, that you’re just pushing them towards a more open license like the BSD license?
[Eben Moglen:]
I think that what actually happens here is that people don’t change licenses, they just combine code more freely. I think that what’s actually going to happen is that mostly this provision will be ignored, except that it will be used to combine some Eclipse code with some GPL code, in a corner of Eclipse, and there’ll be some GPL/Apache hybrid code around the edges of the Apache universe; that is to say that particular licenses and the GPL will converge a little bit together.
[Leo Laporte:]
So it’ll give ’em more flexibility, it won’t be a disadvantage.
[Eben Moglen:]
That’s right. I think that although there is a possibility of fractionation and a lot of administrative difficulty, I think that’s not actually the way it works out. If I thought that was the way it was going to go, I’d be a lot more unhappy at the choices that the drafters have. Because on the other side I see a real problem, too. I see way too much license proliferation, I see way too many little licenses covering a single project, way too much code trapped inside small license universes which it’s hard to get out of.
[Leo Laporte:]
Well, that happens because people feel they need their own particular “flavor”?
[Chris DiBona:]
It’s kind of absurd, though, kind of, say, that’s, I mean, we came under some fire with our hosting on Google Code because we only allowed a certain, some comparatively small subset of the open source and the free software licenses that the Open Source Initiative qualified, and so a lot of people were like “Hey, we really want this license!”, and we’d tell them over and over again “No. Your license is not unique enough.”.
[Leo Laporte:]
So that’s one way to, kind of prevent this proliferation of licenses is for the big players like Google or SourceForge to prohibit it, essentially.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, they…
[Eben Moglen:]
Yeah, and, of course, there are certain kinds of communities you can build that way and other kinds you can’t. But I don’t want to suggest that license flexibility in the GPL is either the whole answer or a unique answer; I want to claim that the Free Software Foundation sees a problem and wants to contribute to a solution…
[Leo Laporte:]
So you’re designing the GPL to be more flexible.
[Eben Moglen:]
Yeah, that’s right. The goal is to make more code sharing possible so as to make it less necessary for people to craft licenses for individual purposes.
Let’s take some big example. Let’s suppose there’s somebody out there now who wants to put an operating system kernel, or a new programming language or some other fairly large project, under GPL. But they find that there’s one thing that isn’t in the stock GPLv3 discussion draft that they think that they really need to do.
If it’s an additional permission they think they really need to give users, GPL shows them how to do it. If it’s an additional restriction they want to give users, GPL3 lists categories of places in which such requirements may be added, and explains how to add them so that other GPL code can mix with you, without picking up requirements it’s not supposed to have on it.
So that the flexibility for people who want to use GPL and the flexibility for people who want to combine their code with GPL’d code substantially increases. We think that’s a positive contribution to a bad proliferation situation; we know it won’t solve the proliferation situation, but like Chris’ example of Google Code, we think everybody’s got a community responsibility to do something about a community problem.
[Chris DiBona:]
So, one of the things – I don’t want to get too inside baseball here, ’cause I’ve been accused of doing that –
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter]
[Chris DiBona:]
One of the things that I worry about, as you know, with GPLv3 is that the flexibility of the license could end up being a problem, because it introduces a lot of complexity in how you manage
[Eben Moglen:]
Yup.
[Chris DiBona:]
incoming and outgoing code, so have other people expressed similar concerns? How concerned are you of this, really? You know, I could’ve…
[Eben Moglen:]
I think this is the big downside of this aspect of the license, and I think if this were the world of 1991, and we did not have a whole lot of automated ways of dealing with code, that it would be a very serious and possibly fatal objection. But we live in a world now where Google has provided some really important code management tools, public code management tools and compliance assessment and license analysis tools are coming into being, and there are some commercial compliance and engineering firms that do an excellent job selling a product to people for code and license management.
Many of those enterprises and efforts depend upon large databases, not just of licenses and their terms but of code snippets carefully encoded in such a way that searching and comparison is easy and fast, and that will help to manage some of the risks if the worst befalls.
As I’ve said, I actually think that what’s going to happen with this is what happens with most kinds of legal flexibility: There’ll be an initial spread of experiments, reduced after a fairly short period of time to a small number of stereotypes. So that we’ll see a few examples of customized versions of GPL under section 7, one which might have been used for the Linux kernel, for example, which would have said: “We give an exception from the DRM provisions because we don’t agree with them.”. Another variant, as I say, which I think will spring up between Eclipse and GPL and between AXL 2.0 and GPL in order to allow intermixtures of code from those universes in an easy way, and I think the number of such hybrids will be comparatively small.
Therefore, although I think the administrative problem is a significant problem, I think we have tools with which to manage it, and I think the sociology of the license’s use is likely to lead to happier rather than sadder results on that point.
[Chris DiBona:]
OK.
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter] You’re buying it, huh? [Laughter]
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, actually, you know, so I’d say that if it does go, if the final version of the GPLv3 goes with all these options and everything, the way we’ll probably go on Google Code – I haven’t talked to Greg about this; Greg Stein is my peer –
[Leo Laporte:]
So this is not an announcement.
[Chris DiBona:]
This is not an announcement. But if, you know, we’ll probably go more the route of, you know, “We basically support GPLv3 ‘pure’, no options.”
[Eben Moglen:]
Right. Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
You know, I just deal with that because honestly I’m thinking about: How do we write tracking code for dealing… Yeah.
[Leo Laporte:]
It’s much more straightforward, but it’s good to have the options in there for those that are capable of implementing it.
[Eben Moglen:]
I think that that’s a perfectly understandable approach, Chris, let me just…
[Chris DiBona:]
At least so we can think about, you know, how we would do the…
[Eben Moglen:]
Let me just explain why I think that’s a better outcome than taking the provisions out of the license, which I take to be the other alternative. If we took the optionalization provisions out of the license, we would then have to make some policy decisions: “What is the patent retaliations clause in GPL? What is GPL’s position on the question of of the Afferoization, or the web services declaration component?”
GPL would then have to make “Yes” or “No” choices, “up, down, left, right” choices, on some hard policy questions. The flexibility provision, to be blunt about it, allows GPL to straddle some policy questions,
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Eben Moglen:]
making itself available to developers who have several different points of view. And if it weren’t for that we’d have to choose between them, and there would be unnecessary unhappiness.
So I prefer a situation I think, from the point of view of the Free Software Foundation, in which you or other parties choose, as is your right, to limit which software you use or publish, but we don’t make the license choose on policy questions where people should be free to choose.
Linus Torvalds has been right in saying that licenses should not choose political positions for the guys who use them; I think that the Free Software Foundation entirely agrees with Linus about that. We think the license should be flexible enough to accommodate different points of view.
As we have pointed out to Linus and his colleagues, we think there’s enough flexibility built into GPL3 to accommodate their concerns without making changes in the license, and we’re sorry that they haven’t seen fit to agree with us about that.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, it is worth pointing out that currently, the kernel team isn’t really interested in going to GPLv3, it seems?
[Eben Moglen:]
They have published a document today, this morning, in which they give some reasons why they are sure that GPLv3 is not a good license for the kernel, and is a less good license than GPL2. I have just begun reviewing that document, and I find it interesting.
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte:]
[Laughter] You ever thought about a political career, Eben? [Laughter]
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Eben Moglen:]
The kind of politics I want to do is the kind of politics I do do.
[Leo Laporte:]
In which… And it’s making a big difference, in that…
[Eben Moglen:]
It’s, you know, it’s freedom for people who make technology, I think that’s a real political program in the 21st century.
[Leo Laporte:]
I agree.
[Eben Moglen:]
When you see how our colleagues in Europe responded to the attempt to put patents on software down on top of their heads, or when you see what the agitation is in Brazil or India over DRM and pharmaceutical patenting and other forms of technological control over freedom, you see that we really do have a politics.
I think Stallman was right about this from the beginning; free as in freedom is a really important concept.
[Leo Laporte:]
Mmhmm.
[Eben Moglen:]
That is, technology really has to be free, in some important ways, if people are to have political freedom. So I think that what we do is political, I’ve always agreed with Richard about that. I think it’s a kind of politics which generates good arguments, too, because when these people are waving their arms and jumping up and down about the license, what they’re really talking about is what kind of technological freedom they care about.
And almost any way that dispute comes out I think is good for the world, ’cause I think the real risk to freedom is that people won’t understand that technology limits freedom at all, that they’ll give away their freedom without ever seeing the issues. And one of the things I like about the free and open source software world is that whenever the fight is going on, no matter who wins or loses, no matter who gets the palm for the best speech made today, everybody is the room is thinking about technology and freedom, and that’s the important subject.
[Leo Laporte:]
What do you see as a time frame for v3?
[Eben Moglen:]
I think we’ll be done on January 15th, or thereabouts. I think we will be ready to issue a last call draft at the beginning of November. I think we’ll then give people 60 days for last call comments, take those comments into account, make any last changes which are proved to be urgent, and that the license will issue in mid‐January.
[Leo Laporte:]
The opposition of people like Bruce Lehman, how important is that?
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, alright. So, my view is that answering particular criticisms outside the domain of the process is a bad idea for me – I’m a mediator and a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, but I think if I become a public controversialist at this stage, I lose my effectiveness. That’s why I gave what you consider to be a political summary of my response to the kernel developers’ document. I want to let people come into the process and say what they have to say and be carefully and respectfully treated there,
[Leo Laporte:]
That’s…
[Eben Moglen:]
And where people try and address us outside the process, I would just as soon be as minimalist in my response as possible. I want to encourage people to use the public process, otherwise we’d wind up with the wealthy and powerful interests, who have access to the megaphone of the press, completely overrunning the hackers, who can use a web browser and the Internet to communicate with the Free Software Foundation, but who will have a really hard time getting their ideas out in The New York Times.
[Leo Laporte:]
Excellent. And a great way, I think, to wrap this thing up.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, for sure. That was… Thanks a lot for coming, Eben.
[Eben Moglen:]
I really appreciated the chance. Thanks very much, I confess it was a lot of fun.
[Leo Laporte:]
That’s Professor – [Laughter] I call him “professor” again – Doctor, Attorney, Historian, I think there’s… You know, I…
[Chris DiBona:]
Historian?
[Leo Laporte:]
I think that’s what’s… That actually kind of piques my interest, because I think given his background in the history of law, he’s very well aware of the importance of what the GPL is in terms of history, I mean, this is not merely, you know, trying to, make a, you know, an end user license agreement for today, he’s really trying to do something that makes a big difference.
[Chris DiBona:]
And, you know, over his career he’s clearly done that, you know, I mean… Yeah. Actually I kind of want to go and find his work on early law.
[Leo Laporte:]
I want to read it!
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte:]
Is there a book? I’d love to read it.
[Chris DiBona:]
You know,
[Leo Laporte:]
because,
[Chris DiBona:]
I don’t know, I’d like to find out.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
You know, I think that lawyers tend to write a lot and thus, they sort of say, oh, “Go publish this” or something,
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
you know, to their minions or whatever.
[Leo Laporte:]
Well, in the history of common law – it’s fascinating, I could see why he got sucked into it – and, in a way, really what the Free Software Foundation has done and what the GPL has done is create a whole new body of law around freedom.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, and it’s remarkable too, because people don’t realize, you know, when you’re talking about GPLv3 the impact it’s going to have, so, because they’re like “Oh, how many people are really going to use the GPL?” or whatever, right? Well, there’s this clause in GPLv2 that you can have, that’s optional, called “or any later version”…
[Leo Laporte:]
Ahh. So many people are doing that.
[Chris DiBona:]
And, so… Yeah, well, actually, the vast majority of free software has that clause. And so what’s going to happen is when GPLv3 comes along, later versions of software is going to adopt it, they’re going to use it.
And so, objective studies of open source and free software will show you that something like 48% to 52% of it is under the GPLv2. So, that means, world wide, you know, billions of lines of code, all these software packages we all use every day. And so, when… v3 is insanely important from a computer industry, the future of the computer, you know, the Internet, I mean, it’s going to affect everything. So,
[Leo Laporte:]
He didn’t touch it.
[Chris DiBona:]
it bears, you know, paying attention to.
[Leo Laporte:]
He did not want to get too political, and I completely agree and understand, I mean, I think
[Chris DiBona:]
Sure.
[Leo Laporte:]
that made a lot of sense what he said, but you don’t have that same constraint.
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte:]
How important is it that the Linux kernel team is now saying they will not use version 3?
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, the funny thing about the Linux kernel team is, they never adopted the “or any later” language. So, it’s actually extremely difficult for them to change anyway. So, if I were Linus, but I’m not, I would have said “Listen, we’re all v2 because we’re all v2. it’s going to be insanely hard for us to switch to v3, we’d have to change everything.”
[Leo Laporte:]
Can’t just change every… Yeah, you’d have to relicense everything.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right, exactly, and you have to get everyone’s permission to do that, and you have
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
to remember this is thousands upon thousands of people, many of whom aren’t so interested in the new version, right?
[Leo Laporte:]
Right, right.
[Chris DiBona:]
So I think that, you know, the kernel probably will never change to version 3,
[Leo Laporte:]
Just because of the lack of…
[Chris DiBona:]
unless Linus decides this is something he really, really wants.
[Leo Laporte:]
You’d have to really want it.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, and then he’d have to bring in, you know, probably some large organization like OSDL just to manage the transition, ’cause it would be enormous.
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
Now, that said, you know, the kernel team has some very real reservations about version 3, like their, the thing that, you know, is sort of bandied about, is this idea of “tivoization”, which is a terrible word, but…
So TiVo’s box, their machine, runs Linux, but it also signs the binaries, so it’ll only run cleared kernels, right, so only what the company wants to run will run on this box, right. And they do that so they can protect the DRM on the machine.
[Leo Laporte:]
That’s quite a loophole.
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, yeah. You know, so basically… And if you look at, like, the origins of the Free Software Foundation, it’s really about people being able to do with their hardware and software what they want.
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right.
[Leo Laporte:]
Right, ’cause he’s often, it’s often, in fact I think that’s sometimes the complaint that people like the Apache group and the BSD people have about the GPL is the viral side of it, the thing that if you make
[Chris DiBona:]
Yes, exactly.
[Leo Laporte:]
new software, it has to also be GPL’d, that seems to me to be the chief complaint. Am I wrong?
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, it’s the chief complaint, but it’s also the genius of it, right? I mean, would the GPL have spread as much without it? Of course not. You know, there would be no need for it.
[Leo Laporte:]
It is genius, but it’s pursuing an agenda that not everyone wants to pursue.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right, and that’s why we have the rich, you know, collection of licenses that we do. Right?
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
It’s why we have the Apache licenses,
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
It’s why we have BSD, so. But, yeah, so, but… But I think I think ignoring v3 is a huge mistake, for companies and for people, because it’s the future of so much software.
[Leo Laporte:]
Well, and when people like Google, and I don’t know what SourceForge’s policy will be, but when people like you say “We’re going to accept this license and no other.”, I think that’s significant, I mean I think that is actually very important to the success of if. It’s saying, you know, “This is a good license and we’re supporting it.”
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, I mean, it brings challenges on how we support it,
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
but, you know, for the most part, you know, version 3 doesn’t give us much in the way of a headache.
There’s one clause in there that’s a little weird for us, the one that says that we have to provide a a “mechanism” for the download of GPLv3 when it’s expressed in certain ways on the network. And if that’s the case we probably won’t be able to use that code, ’cause we’re not going to cut holes in our firewall for some strange
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
download mechanism.
[Leo Laporte:]
Right. Yeah, I’m surprised they specify a mechanism, that seems odd.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, now, it is a little weird, I don’t know, let’s see if that survives, right, I think that will drive people away from him.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
So, for instance, you know, what we do is we have a mirroring area on code.google.com where we provide mirrors and we do all of our compliance work there, right? It’s easier to manage, it’s easier to secure…
[Leo Laporte:]
You firewall it off and you say “This is just a bad area.”.
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, it’s a very specific way of serving the data at Google, right. But if we have to add like a hole to Gmail and to all the rest of them, I don’t think we’d do that, so.
[Leo Laporte:]
No. No.
[Chris DiBona:]
It’d be too weird. Right, so.
[Leo Laporte:]
Well, I’m sure they’re taking it under consideration.
[Chris DiBona:]
You know, that’s a, you know, what I’ve also found is that open source software developers and free software developers, when I call them and I say, “Listen…”, you know, look, like for instance, the Apache and the BSD licenses require you have effectively a file in the file space in the distributed program, something that says “There’s Apache software here.”.
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right?
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
And the way you would do that for, you know, say, our shipping products, like the Google Earth, whatever, is you just have a drop inside the directory space.
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
But how’s that work with, like, JavaScript? [Unintelligible] Maybe in sort of…
[Leo Laporte:]
Right. Where there is no local file system.
[Chris DiBona:]
Right.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
And you, and I, as you, I’m sure you know, you know, Gmail is seen by, you know, many many people a day. Right, so, if we have a kilobyte of Apache license in there, or BSD license, downloaded millions upon
[Leo Laporte:]
Right. That’s…
[Chris DiBona:]
millions upon millions times a day. That’s
[Leo Laporte:]
That’s a lot of bandwidth.
[Chris DiBona:]
kind of stupid, right?
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
And so what we do instead is, we just say on code.google.com… We email to the guys, we say “Is it cool if we just list it here?”,
[Leo Laporte:]
Right.
[Chris DiBona:]
and they’re like “Oh yeah, no worries.”, we send’em a T‐shirt, it’s all happy.
[Leo Laporte:]
“Here’s a link…”, yeah. Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
It’s mostly a matter of respect, you know?
[Leo Laporte:]
I think that’s right, and I understand why they want to make that license available, and you see that all the time now in distributions, you know, “If you need the license you can get it here.”.
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, it’s also, it’s kind of hard, sometimes. And, so the way we deal with those is we just ask, we say “Hey, [Unintelligible] is this cool?”, and they say “Sure, yeah, whatever, right
[Leo Laporte:]
They’re flexible. Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah. The thing is, the whole point of this is, people want to share. And since we’re a good actor in this space and we’re always sharing and we have things like Summer of Code, it’s all cool.
[Leo Laporte:]
Well, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t need these licenses.
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte:]
But we are in a far from ideal world, and so you have to have some law, you have to make some contracts.
[Chris DiBona:]
Well, I have to tell you, I think that having license is an ideal, and let me tell you why. When I interact with somebody outside the company, or when I personally interact with another developer, it’s really nice to have this understood,
[Leo Laporte:]
Yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
you know, mechanism, right, for me to interact with them.
[Leo Laporte:]
You have a groundwork, yeah.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah. I know that when I do something and I give it to that person under this license, they know exactly what I mean.
[Leo Laporte:]
Well, that’s the point of contract law. It makes everything explicit.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, exactly. It makes things explicit, it makes trust possible, honestly, in my mind, so.
[Leo Laporte:]
Yes. Yeah. So. Well, Chris, it’s been really fascinating.
Next week we’re going to talk about OpenNMS, Jeremy Allison, we’ll try one last time to record an interview on Samba,
[Chris DiBona:]
He’s been so patient with you.
[Leo Laporte:]
and I promise it will not be lost; I sent him an entire gift basket of gourmet foods, so…
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter] Did he get it?
[Leo Laporte:]
I don’t know, we’ll have to ask Jeremy, but I’m hoping he did, because I feel terrible, we actually lost two interviews, now we’re on our third, but third time’s the charm, as I always say.
[Chris DiBona:]
Yeah, exactly.
[Leo Laporte:]
That’ll be coming up. We’ve got lots more FLOSS Weekly, we have not abandoned the program, I believe in it, very strongly.
[Chris DiBona:]
[Laughter] Neither have I.
[Leo Laporte:]
I don’t think anybody thought we had, but
[Chris DiBona:]
No, no. [Unintelligible]
[Leo Laporte:]
Time for me… Well, I get a lot of email saying “Where is it? We want it. We miss FLOSS Weekly!”, so it’s back.
[Chris DiBona:]
[Unintelligible]
[Leo Laporte:]
We’re back, baby! Thank you
[Chris DiBona:]
So we’ll see you next week.
[Leo Laporte:]
for your patience. We’ll see you next week on FLOSS Weekly.
[Unknown:]
[Music]
