| When licences clash |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 12 September 2006 | |
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Page 2 of 2
FSF founder Richard Stallman told a recent international GPL seminar in Bangalore, "it (the Tivo) has a list of checksums of authorised versions, and unless your version is in there, you can't run it at all. In other words, tivoisation makes freedom number one into a sham. Theoretically, ostensibly, the users are free to modify the software to make it do what they want, but practically speaking, the freedom is a joke. It's not supposed to be a joke, it's supposed to be for real. So we've made changes in GPL version three to resist tivoisation."Featured Whitepaper
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Stallman says he has not prohibited DRM. "You can modify a GPL covered program to do anything at all, including restricting the person using it. And you could distribute that to other people, but we insist that they have the four freedoms so that they are free to take out the malicious feature that you put in," he told the Bangalore conference. Patents are another problem. The GPL says that anything touched by it has to take on the same licence. A company that bundles software licensed under the GPL with its hardware would then lose the right to enforce any patents. The Linux kernel, the poster child of the whole software movement that was kicked off in 1984 by Richard Stallman, is not going to be released under the new licence - creator Linux Torvalds has made this much clear. While Torvalds feels that the existing GPL - version 2 - is a fair licence, he is of the opinion that version 3 asks for more than it gives. "It no longer asks for just source back, it asks for control over whatever system you used the source in," he told CNET's Stephen Shankland earlier this year. There have been several instances where the conflict between the two camps has come to the fore. Last year, when Torvalds was forced to stop using a proprietary version control system call BitKeeper - he had been using a non-commercial version to manage development of the Linux kernel - the two camps clashed openly. There will be more one more international seminar in the Far East on version 3 next month; after that a third public discussion draft will be put out. The earliest date for adoption of the licence is January 15, 2007.{moscomment} |
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