The bad FSF

guido

Thursday 29 May 2008

I stumbled across this odd article: "All OSS Developers Are Equal, But Some OSS Developers Are More Equal Than Others!" where the FSF is criticized for being unfair to software developers and failed to close the "ASP Loophole".

For the authors of this article, the Affero GPL does not fix the problem, because "GPL developers won't use it". Well, if so, why should they switch to any other licence that addresses the problem?

And the accusation of unfairness goes in the same direction. They blame the FSF to aggressively sue software developers who don't provide the source code in their distribution, but don't sue google for benefiting from Free Software without showing their sources.

I don't really see what they want to tell me beside that the FSF is just a bunch of "extremists" who "deny the value of intellectual property rights."

I am contemplating to write them, but it's probably not worth it. What do you think?

This document is in public domain

Comments

The article's argumentation isn't convincing

cle

Saturday 31 May 2008

Software as a service is not a loophole in the GPLv2 or in the GPLv3: it's a use of software that is not within the scope of the licence. From the ongoing debates in the Free and open software community on the topic, it shouldn't yet be within scope.

For the authors "intellectual property rights" appear to have an obvious value. That is not an easy starting point for discussion as the authors seem quite convinced. I won't bother writing to them unless you are prepared to write a very long letter.

On the one hand, the authors say that "FSF's ideological extremism [...] harmed the IT community generally". On the other hand, they seem to be criticizing the FSF for not going far enough by replacing the GPLv2 with one with significantly increased scope, presumably similar to AGPLv3. They also argue that the AGPL is a niche licence that is irrelevant because it would not by widely adopted by GPL developers and corporations.

The main argumentation seems to be: "the FSF are ideological extremists (a bad thing) and they betray their principles by not being more extreme and irrelevant, so don't listen to them". Even without the false claims about the FSF, the argumentation isn't convincing.

The bad FSF

Comments

The article's argumentation isn't convincing

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