Re: GPLv3 comedy unfolding -- Linus' disillusionment

[Alexander Terekhov]

My, what a circus. From groklaw:

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DRM "Misunderstood"
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 27 2006 @ 07:11 PM EDT

I'm pretty sure I didn't misunderstand anything at all.

A lot of people are confused by the DRM issue, and the problem comes
mostly from the organization of the first GPLv3 draft itself. It had a
section on DRM, and that section is totally irrelevant and has almost no
semantic content.

(In the new draft, the DRM section has been renamed to talk about users'
rights instead, but it's still the same case - that section isn't
actually the interesting one).

The real anti-DRM thing is the new and bogus language in section 1 - the
definition of "source code". That is the true change in both the
previous and the current draft, and that's my personal beef.

The fact that they had a separate (and largely boring) section called
"DRM" was never the issue, and was (and is) a total red herring. The
real problem was always the re-definition of source code.

Actually, I take that back. The real problem was and is that there are
lots of people who disagreed with the FSF on issues (mine was the
definition of source code, while I know that some commercial entities
felt that the patent language was totally unsupportable). And the FSF
took that input, and then totally ignored it.

So as far as I can tell, the whole GPLv3 "process" has been a sham from
the very beginning. Eben and Richard talk about "discussion drafts", but
it's not "discussion" if you don't actually care what the other side
says. And Richard most definitely doesn't care (Eben probably does, but
has no actual say in the end result).

So forget about this whole "community input" thing. Input has been
given, and then duly ignored.

Oh, well. At least that's how I've seen it, and maybe that explains my
disillusionment with the GPLv3.
Linus
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regards,
alexander.