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Linux World also did the same article which got a groklaw link sometime later.
If these guys really think they can get their doubletalk to pressure the FSF into watering down the GPL they should get the wishful thinking award for this year. But at least the article comes with a certain element of humor:
Can religion and money coexist in the long run?
Is the Pope a Catholic?
More than doctrine, economics will control the evolution of Linux
Economics has controlled the evolution of Linux right from the start, and very successful it has been too. The doctorine of the GPL and Open Source is a very simple one, and it has an economic basis: people who share their ideas and guarantee an intellectual commons that new players and established players can work with equally are more productive, produce higher quality work and create a more vibrant and active intellectual community than people who hoard their ideas, keep secrets and work in isolation.
The above statement is a common belief amongst the Open Source community but unlike religious beliefs that are notoriously difficult to prove or disprove, the belief in the power of an intellectual commons has excellent evidence supporting it... and continues to gather supporting evidence.
The new reality must be reflected in open source licenses, such as the GPL
What new reality? When did it change? Did I miss something?
Hearing the words new reality
is a bit like hearing paradigm shift
or rewrite the rulebook
or beginning of a new era
. These are
magic prefix words requesting an extreme level of gullibility in the reader.
The business world as a whole will not embrace a vehicle which does not provide balance and flexibility and does not safeguard its intellectual property. Modifications to the GPL, the license that governs Linux users' rights, will be necessary to assure economic soundness if the corporate world is going to make ongoing contributions to Linux
The whole point of the GPL is that the best way to safeguard intellectual property
is to put it all into a common pool. It is demonstrating economic
soundness using its existing methodology. There is no desperation for a few
extra corporate contributions -- the linux kernel is getting more contributions than
the existing management team can cope with right now. As a full operating system,
there are so many Open Source tools and applications being written that it is
a major challenge just to keep up with what is available (I know this because
I try finding and downloading new Open Source programs on a regular basis and
still I run into people who found something that I missed).
Of course, this was the point all along... there never was a shortage in intellectual output within the software industry. The whole idea of closed source, proprietary intellectual "property" was to deliberately engineer a shortage so that a small handful of companies could become very powerful whilst the computer users were subject to an overpriced, underperforming and unreliable product.
The economics of the situation is clear: when you produce a better product at a lower price than your competitor, you get the customer.
The new GPL will have to address the combination of open and proprietary code better, if it is to succeed.
The GPL was designed from the ground up to prevent proprietary exploitation of open source code. That is the one job it does well. The only possible improvement would be to close some of the existing loopholes to toughen up the exclusion of proprietary code (e.g. make binary-only Linux kernel modules explicitly illegal).
you can't expect companies to irresponsibly abandon valuable rights without a plan to derive substitute value.
Of course the Open Source community understands this. Once they systematically bring the computer using customers over to non-proprietary technology and divert the revenue stream they will ensure that proprietary intellectual "property" rights have no value whatsoever so it won't be difficult for companies to abandon them. Yes, this is taking the gravy train out from under some wealthy individuals. Yes, everyone fully expects a fight and quite likely it might get nasty in places -- that's part of economics, and always has been.
neither can one expect a developer community or customers to support a license that leaves them at risk of infringing the original developer's patent rights when they modify open source code
The patent system is a minefield, every experienced software developer is used to walking through this minefield. It would be nice to have a bit more protection but there are only two ways to achieve this. One option would be to build an intellectual commons for patents, either a defensive disclosure system or a license exchange system or both. The GPL is fully compatible with this idea in its present form. The other option is to make software patents illegal (as they originally were) and hopefully that is were thing go towards.
Linux is the first, biggest and perhaps will be the last major bazaar-style open source development project to get traction in the commercial sector
Ummmm, Firefox?
Hmmmm, perl, BSD, apache, TeX, LINPACK, X11, gcc, rfc standards, MySQL, ssh, etc...
Henry is regarded as one of the country's top intellectual property lawyers specializing in electronics, computers and software
Appeal to authority doesn't fix flaws in the basic argument.
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