Jaslabs: High performance Software

By Justin Silverton

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users’ rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux variant (from the FSF Website).

In a recent (Back In July) forum posting by Linus Torvald, he discusses his views on the FSF and the GPL 3 (some of his harsher words have been removed):

“My explanation for why the GPLv3 is bad is that if you make your decisions based on fear and loathing, they will be the wrong ones.

The whole point about the changes in the GPLv3 is to be “against” something else. That’s how the FSF has always acted, and I don’t know if you remember (or ever saw) the animosity between the BSD camps and the GPL camps, but a lot of it was because of how the FSF was preaching their religion as if it was “evil” to do anything else, even with the GPLv2.

And [deleted], I’m proud of the fact that Linux helped change that mental landscape. There were other projects (and certainly other people) too, but Linux was one big part of the movement away from that horrible “us vs them” mindset.”

I agree with Linus here. I wrote an article about the badvista campaign a few weeks ago. This is an example of this type of mentality. Rather than focusing on the merits of the GPL and using open source, the negatives of the competition (IE: Microsoft) are showcased.

Here are his views on the DRM:

“Just as a very concrete example, the anti-DRM stance of the GPLv3 is not only anti-Tivo, it’s also anti-security. Exactly because it tries to make a non-technical stand on a technical issue, one that has very real impact on real behaviour.

The fact is, that signed binaries are not only a good idea, they are an integral part of pretty much any security scheme. Every time you do a “yum upgrade”, you tend to be getting a lot of binary packages that were signed with a key that you are not going to get access to, because if you had access to that key, the whole security model would break down.

So a sane person will not say “you cannot stop execution of a binary based on a key that users don’t have access to”, because a sane person realizes that this is very fundamental technology, and that it’s a technical issue, not a political one.”

I don’t agree with this stance. Digital Rights Management by itself is not a bad idea. It allows companies to protect their intellectual property, whether it’s music, movies, or any other type of digital content. The problem is that Microsoft (and other companies with the DRM in their best interest) are trying to force it on us. It may not happen all at once, but eventually, we may only be able to play DRM content on our computers and music players.

also discussed is a passage directly removed from version 2 of the license:

“And I’m trying to protect users from idiots that think that it’s a good idea to make technical choices on non-technical grounds. Notice how the GPLv2 (the good one) didn’t do that. It even made expressly clear that the act of “running” the program was not restricted in any way, shape or form.

Here’s a quote from section 0 in GPLv2 that is totally gone in version 3, and people should think long and hard about the fact that the new version is a big change in this area:

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

So do me a favour, and stop talking [deleted], and start actually thinking deeper about the very fundamental changes that the GPLv3 introduces. Also, do give the people who actually wrote the code that the license is supposed to cover some respect.”

More of this thoughts can be found here