On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 03:25:18PM +0200, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
I think nearly everyone agrees (except, perhaps, for the person who
is
most directly responsible for the error) that the communication between
the GPLv3 drafting committee and the Linux developers was completely
botched. I regularly deliver an apology directly from RMS to every
Linux developer I meet. RMS told me explicitly: "Please tell the Linux
developers I'm sorry and that my intent was to take very seriously their
feedback in a friendly way and if we failed to do that, we made an
error".
Botched how? Anti-lock-down was clearly non-negotiable, on both
sides. It's a fundamental philosophical divide. Whether or not the
GPLv3 drafting committee could have been more "friendly", I don't see
how it could have changed the outcome.
The question is whether increasing the developer community (by
inviting companies like Tivo to use and enhance, and contribute their
changes back to Linux), versus how important is it that consumer
electronic devices should be considered not general purpose computers
but more as disposable devices where the desireability of allow users
to be able to hack and replace the firmware of said devices was not so
critically important a priority that it's worth it to dissuade
companies like Tivo from using Linux, and have them use BSD instead.
RMS has one view on this question, and Linus Torvalds and many other
Linux kernel developers, who arguably collectively hold copyright on a
very large majority of the Linux kernel, have a different view.
So whether the GPLv3 drafting committee was "friendly" or not, and had
told the Linux community "no" versus "hell, no", it wouldn't have
made
much of a difference as to the Linux community rejecting a copyright
which would have caused us to turn away from our development community
many companies who are comfortable with the "stone soup" model of
software development (i.e., one where sharing code is more important
than mandating that the code always be installable on some arbitrary
consumer electronic device), but where said company which might have
strong business/legal/contractual reasons why an anti-lockdown clause
would be a show-stopper for them.
Regards,
- Ted