Karl Jonsson’s Weblog

GPLv3 Launched Today

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world’s most popular free software license.

GPL-violations.org wins court case against D-Link

GPL Violations wins case against D-Link. D-Link had argued that the GPL was not leagally binding.

On September 6, 2006 the district court issued its judgement, confirming the claims by gpl-violations.org, specifically its rights on the subject-matter source code, the violation of the GNU GPL by D-Link, the validity of the GPL under German law, and D-Links obligation to reimburse gpl-violations.org for legal expenses, test purchase and cost of re-engineering. Only the amount of the legal expenses was considered too high by some insignificant amount of 300 EUR. Therefore, this decision marks a clear-cut victory for gpl-violations.org. D-Link may file an appeal against the judgement.

Thru Slashdot

Modified “no military use” GPL

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.

Nytt utkast till GPLv3

FSF har i dag publicerat ett andra utkast till GNU GPLv3 och ett första utkast till ny GNU LGPL. Man har även publicerat en “guide” till dem som ska förklara vilka ändringar som gjorts.

GPLv3 Video Online

The FSF have now put video from the GPLv3 conference online. Grab the torrent and watch Stallman and Moglen explain the first draft of GPLv3 (OGG Theora video)

I have just downloaded it and I look forward to watching the “full walk-through of the new license text by Eben Moglen, FSF general counsel and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center” tomorrow.

GPLv3 Draft Published

In case anyone missed it, the first draft of GPLv3 has been published, along with a 25 page “rationale document”. Perfect for my 2×3 hours train ride on thursday.

And if you feel you just have to discuss it with someone right away, there seems to be plenty of people hanging out in #gplv3 on irc.freenode.net.