Jamyskis

I notice that the GPL 3 has finally arrived. For those of you who haven’t been following the news, the v3 has been the subject of intense debate in the open-source community. Intended to bring the GPL up-to-date with today’s issues in the computing world, it had a number of clauses included designed to prevent problems such as “tivoisation” (where the source code was released and could be modified, but the hardware was designed in such a way that prevented the modified code from being run on it) and treacherous computing (Micro$oft prefers to call it “Trusted” computing but there’s nothing to trust about it).

I’ve released all my products either to the public domain or under the GPL. I’m really not sure whether I should release mine under the GPL 3. Not forgetting that it’s probably not really an issue with me, I still believe in the concepts of free software. I believe that my software should be able to be run on any platform going and used in any fashion possible, just as long as the source code remains free. I don’t think the GPL 3 does this. That said, I am just as concerned as the FSF with the abuse of the Linux kernel by TiVo and the Trusted Computing modules being built into the computers these days.

It also prevents these patent deals (Novell, Linspire etc.) that have become all the rage in the last few months. I don’t disagree with them on principle - but it feels like a lot of them are buying into Microsoft’s bullshit that Linux violates Microsoft’s IP. If Ballmer had anything solid to back up his claims, he would have published it, because it would have been a boon for Microsoft’s share prices.