Aug 14

Modified “no military use” GPL

English commons, copyleft, English, GPL Add Comment (1)

NewsForge reports that GPU (some kind of Gnutella related super computing project) have created their own modified version of the GNU GPL. They have added a “patch for no military use”:

This patch restricts the field of endeavour of the Program in such a way that this license collides with paragraph 6 of the Open Source Definition. Therefore, this modified version of the GPL is no more OSI compliant.

The Program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed. This is Asimov’s first law of Robotics.

This is interesting and not very surprising. However, it obviously makes the program non-free as it restricts freedom 0, the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

Another important effect, that the Newsforge article does not mention, is the fact that it makes the license incompatible with the GNU GPL. A work that is derived from a GPL work must be licensed under the GPL. This is the basic principle of copyleft. So by writing their own license the GPU team have lost access to the “commons” of GPL code. They have build a fence around their own litte garden. They cannot use existing GPL code and their code cannot be reused in GPL projects, ever.

Although I can sympathise with their goal, I do not think that this is a good idea.