[QD-Filosofia] Toward true open source

Mais lenha na fogueira das licenças...

[]s

Alexandre

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http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/15/163208


<http://www.newsforge.com/search.pl?topic=150>


      *Toward true open source
      <http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/15/163208>*


          Friday July 16, 2004 (12:00 PM GMT)

By: Tom Walker <mailto:tomwalker-XZoyATsUNX5Wk0Htik3J/[email protected]>

In the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt> 
(GPL), Richard Stallman was working toward a noble purpose. Software 
should be free-as-in-freedom, and every user should be able to obtain 
the source code for the software they use. Unfortunately, that isn't the 
way things have turned out. The GPL has come to resemble digital rights 
management (DRM) more than it resembles freedom. Does that sound a 
little extreme? I'll explain.

When

I buy music protected by DRM, the seller intends is to stop me from 
making copies of songs. When I use software that is licensed under the 
GPL, the developer intends to stop me from making the software "closed," 
or non-free. The intentions obviously aren't even slightly similar, but 
the consequences are. Both the GPL and DRM want to restrict my use, and 
re-use, of the music or source code that I obtain. Neither does what it 
was designed to do. Both have unintentional harmful effects.

*The GPL has unintentional harmful effects*

    I have been discussing the effects of preventing people from
    copying, changing, and building on a program. I have not specified
    how this obstruction is carried out, because that doesn't affect the
    conclusion. Whether it is done by copy protection, or copyright, or
    licenses, or encryption, or ROM cards, or hardware serial numbers,
    if it succeeds in preventing use, it does harm. -- Richard Stallman
    <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html>

In trying to stop you from copying, DRM introduces many unintentional 
harmful effects <http://ukcdr.org/issues/cd/quick/>. CDs with 
copy-protection typically won't play on PCs, and may even refuse to play 
on some modern car stereo systems. Whenever you introduce restrictions, 
there are side effects -- and so it is with the GPL.

The first side effect of the GPL comes from its legal complexity. The 
GPL scares business users and their legal departments, to the extent 
that many have a policy that boils down to "no GPLed software may be 
used anywhere in this company." They are unsure of the conditions under 
which they might be obligated to re-license their own proprietary source 
code under the GPL, and for the sake of competition they want to stay as 
far away from those conditions as they can.

The main harmful effect of the GPL is the "gated community" it creates. 
When you release your source code under the GPL, the only people who can 
re-use it are those who also license their software under the GPL. GPL 
users are quick to complain when other licenses are "incompatible" with 
the GPL, but the GPL itself is incompatible with just about everything.

If I'm part of the GPL community, I can re-use code from any other piece 
of GPLed software, no matter how small and insignificant that piece of 
code might be. It might not be a large part of my program: I might, for 
example, be taking a compression routine to add to my new open source 
Web browser. Then I just add credit to the documentation.

    The Readline library implements input editing and history for
    interactive programs, and that's a facility not generally available
    elsewhere. Releasing it under the GPL and limiting its use to free
    programs gives our community a real boost. At least one application
    program is free software today specifically because that was
    necessary for using Readline. -- Richard Stallman
    <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html>

What if my Web browser is proprietary? I'll have to write my own 
compression routine (or hack around the restriction in some odd way, 
like making the compression routine into a stand-alone GPLed program and 
then calling it from my proprietary program), or make my program free 
software. "Well, that's good," you say, pointing at the Stallman quote 
above. Ah, but what if I want to release my program under the BSD 
license, or some other alternative open source license? Then I'm 
screwed. I can't use your GPLed compression routine, unless I try behave 
in the same way as the proprietary software maker might -- but that 
would be frowned upon.

The rest of the open source community is standing at the gates of free 
software, denied access to the masses of GPLed source code within. Is 
this free-as-in-freedom?

*The GPL doesn't do what it was designed to do*

    In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to
    redistribute and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off
    the freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not
    have freedom. So instead of putting GNU software in the public
    domain, we 'copyleft' it. Copyleft says that anyone who
    redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along
    the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that
    every user has freedom. -- Richard Stallman
    <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#WhatIsCopyleft>

DRM doesn't really stop me from making copies of my music: as long as 
people want to share their music, they will find ways to circumvent DRM 
measures. Likewise with the GPL. You can't force some people to keep 
their software free: they want it to be proprietary, and they will 
circumvent the license.

Earlier, I alluded to "hacking" the GPL's restrictions. Here's an 
example. Say someone has produced a program under the GPL that takes a 
document from any version of Microsoft Word as input, formats it as 
HTML, and spits it out again. I want this functionality in my 
proprietary word processor, Wordwalker 2004. I have two choices: write 
my own version, or release Wordwalker as free software under the GPL. 
Right? Wrong. I can just include the GPLed converter program (with its 
source code) on the distribution media with my proprietary software (the 
GPL specifically allows this). I can run it silently as a subprocess 
(this is a grey area, but is generally believed to be allowed by the 
language of the GPL), sending it the Word document files and using its 
output in my proprietary program.

This is not what Stallman intended. I would have made use of advances 
made by free software, and yet my users would not ever get to see my own 
source code. If they want support, they've still got to come to me -- I 
could even stop them from hiring someone else to make changes to the 
source of the document conversion component, by making my proprietary 
routines reject any version of it that has the wrong checksum.

Want more? Let's look at the KDE/QT situation. KDE source code is 
released under the GPL, but it is linked to Trolltech's cross-platform 
QT library. GPLed versions of QT are available for X11, Macintosh, and 
embedded platforms -- but if you want a Windows version, that'll be 
$1,550, please <http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html>. It's 
another GPL exploit: GPLed code links to software that is proprietary on 
one platform, and suddenly that code isn't looking so free any more.

There is no way the GPL can stop this sort of thing from happening, any 
more than it can stop me from writing a free software program that 
relies on the proprietary Windows API. But the worst is yet to come.

More and more often, the applications we use aren't on our desktop -- 
they're on someone else's server. Say I'm running a Web site called Tell 
Your Fortune. All my site does when you visit it is run a GPLed version 
of the fortune <http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man6/fortune.6.html> 
program that I modified to listen on port 80 and respond to HTTP 
requests. Can you get the source to my modified fortune? No. I haven't 
redistributed it in binary form, so you have no rights to the source.

This could be happening all over the Web. You could be relying on 
heavily modified versions of GPLed software every day: at Google, at 
Amazon, at eBay -- you have no real way of knowing. You are a user of 
the software, but you have no access to the source code.

*You can't stop undesired usage, so leave it open*

If you can't stop people from sharing your copy-protected CD, then why 
inconvenience your normal customers? We have seen how crafty proprietary 
users can make use of GPLed code without distributing their changes, and 
we've seen how the GPL stops others in the open source community from 
re-using your code. Why restrict your friends for the sake of 
non-working measures against your enemies?

This is where BSD and MIT-style licenses come in. These are licenses 
that, basically, say you are completely free to re-use the source code 
anywhere you like, even in proprietary software, as long as you give 
credit to the original authors.

Just imagine not having to worry about licenses any more. If I want to 
take a compression routine from BSD-licensed code, I can just use it, 
and add credit to my documentation.

You might notice the parallel with how people in the GPL community can 
re-use GPLed code: put simply, BSD-style licenses knock down the 
community's gates and let everyone use open source code for whatever 
they like. Here's the ultimate test of freedom: can I use GPLed code in 
my BSD-licensed program? Can I use BSD-licensed code in my GPLed 
program? (No I can't, and yes I can).

If you really want to share your code instead of jealously guarding it, 
use BSD-style licensing. If you care about receiving credit in other 
people's documentation, then you could even put your source code in the 
public domain! Imagine an open source community where software can be 
re-used like SQLite's public domain database code:

    Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or
    distribute the original... code, either in source code form or as a
    compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and
    by any means. -- SQLite copyright <http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html>

That's true freedom, and that's true open source.



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