Re: GPLv3 comedy unfolding -- Viro: "_that_ is a final draft?"

[Alexander Terekhov]

Al Viro wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 02:56:24AM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> > Can you please acknowledge that it doesn't, such that I can feel I've
> > fulfilled my goal of dispelling the myth that the GPLv3 changes the
> > spirit of the GPL?
> 
> No.  I don't do metaphysics.  This thread alone has shown that the
> notion is not well-defined *at* *all*, to the point of being useless
> and seriously misleading.  I.e. the phrase about similar spirit
> should be replaced with something far more explicit and very, very
> hard to miss.  I don't think you need more proof that people *do*
> interpret it in very different ways, with quite unpleasant results.
> 
> > > GPLv3, with your involvement in its development or not, sucks rocks,
> > > thanks to what you call anti-tivoization section.
> >
> > Is it correct to say that you share Linus' opinion, that the only
> > problem with the GPLv3 is the anti-tivoization provision?
> 
> No.  If you want a basic splitup by sections compared to GPLv2,
>         1       -       at least not better; attempts at being precise
>                         end up creating a no-common-sense-land *and*
>                         turn out to leave serious unanswered questions
>                         in that area.
>         2       -       no opinion on actual changes
>         3       -       more or less an improvement
>         4,5     -       about on par with v2, modulo wording in (5)
>         6       -       much worse
>         7       -       if I want to give additional permissions, I don't
>                         want them stripped, for fsck sake!  There is a
>                         bog-standard mechanism for _that_ (dual-licensing),
>                         thank you very much.  I.e. that section looks like    
>                           
>                         a pile of dishonest PR games, pardon the redundance.
>         8       -       on par
>         9       -       on par, modulo piss-poor attempt to define "modify"
>                         backfiring here (e.g. prelinking constitutes
>                         modification according to it, so does running rdev(8),
>                         etc., etc.)
>         10      -       no opinion on actual changes
>         11      -       improvement
>         12      -       on par (aside of basic bad writing, but there are
>                         much worse problems *not* with wording, so that's
>                         not interesting)
>         13      -       special-case kludges are fun, aren't they 
> (specifically
>                         "linking"?), but in any case, that's secondary.
>                         FWIW, I'm not fond of ideas behind Affero, so if
>                         anything, that's a point against v3.
>         14      -       ... and thank you very much for keeping such a lovely
>                         source of periodic clusterfucks in v3 as well.
>                         I think it's painfully obvious for everyone in this
>                         thread that reference to "spirit" is a recipe for
>                         massive disagreements down the road.  If you want the
>                         words you are using to be interpreted your way, use
>                         ones that have commonly agreed upon meaning.  The
>                         measure is "do other people read it differently?",
>                         not "how sure I am in deriving the meaning I want from
>                         the words I've used?".  Related problem is that
>                         version choice rules _must_ be stated in maximally
>                         unambiguous and hard to miss way.  Look through
>                         Bernd-produced parts of this thread and you'll see
>                         the reason why it is needed.
>                         Moving that into terms and conditions is a good step,
>                         but it's still not enough.  E.g. you really want
>                         to be explicit on the form (in)sufficient to specify
>                         the version of license.
>         the rest        on par.
> 
> Overall: definitely worse than v2.  v2 + (3) + (11) would be an improvement,
> provided that v2 section 9 is cleaned up.
> 
> > To make this more concrete, if there was a hypothetical GPLv2.9,
> > consisting of GPLv3dd4 minus the "installation information"
> > requirements for user products, (i) Would you consider it a better
> > license than GPLv2?
>         Negative, see above
>  (ii) Better for Linux?
>         Negative, for kernel as well as for userland
> (iii) Enough to go through the trouble of switching?
>         See above.
> 
> In other words, I don't see any chance for v3 to be a good choice
> for anything I write, kernel or userland.  If I end up sending patches
> to v3 projects, I'll put the patches under BSDL and let them convert
> on merge.
> 
> Note that this is *not* about the problems with wording; those also exist,
> of course (_that_ is a final draft?), but that's a separate story and it
> interests me only inasmuch as it is caused by inherent problems with meaning
> of section in question.
> -

regards,
alexander.

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