Freedom Now

And Now … Life After GPLv3

Not that it wasn’t wonderful. I enjoyed almost every minute of it, and I’m going to write about the ones that can be told, some day. But for me and for my colleague Richard Fontana, after months of living and breathing GPLv3, the weather’s beginning to change.

The release of Discussion Draft 3 has been greeted as warmly as I dared hope: all the recorded outrage has been emitted by Microsoft or its surrogates, which is at it should be. We had prepared Discussion Draft 3, after all, with the assumption that it was going to be the Last Call Draft, and I thought, and continue to think, that it would serve beautifully as the final GPLv3. I agree with RMS that it was very important to add another cycle of public discussion, and I’m sure the Free Software Foundation will be making some changes based on that discussion, as it has in response to comments all along. But I think the big issues have been correctly addressed, and that the detail work-which as lawyers we have to take more seriously than everyone else–is ready for the pressure of reality.

So it’s time I began to think about life after GPLv3.

Making the license is just the first phase, to be sure: SFLC and its clients will be using the new license before long. Lots of people have speculated in the press about who isn’t going to switch from GPLv2 to GPLv3. However, I’ve seen much less speculation about developers who might choose to drop other licenses in order to put their projects or commercial products under GPLv3. In fact, in my travels around the GPL-revision process this year I’ve met and talked to many such people. Their views were also taken into account in framing GPLv3, and I’ll bet there will be some notice taken late this summer and early autumn, when interesting and high-profile projects or products change licenses to adopt GPLv3, or dual license under it. And a license once applied to software must be respected; our clients’ copyrights are used to protect freedom, and we will need to help all our GPL3-using clients to get the same respect for their intentions that other free software and open source projects receive.

But this long drafting project, which has displaced most of the rest of my professional life (and, it sometimes seems, all of my personal life as well) is winding down at last. Which means it’s time to return to some of what I’ve missed. Writing and teaching, for example. Time to reorganize time. As I return to teaching at Columbia I need to concentrate more of my remaining spare time and effort on the affairs of the Software Freedom Law Center, which is inevitably going to mean less involvement with the affairs of other organizations I care very much about.

In particular, it’s time for me to leave the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation, where I’ve been since 2000. FSF is in great shape under the continued leadership of Richard Stallman and his executive director, Peter Brown. Completing GPLv3 successfully underlines the credibility with which FSF combines the most uncompromising principle with the depth of knowledge and experience needed to build broad coalitions in our community. Leaving is always hard, but there couldn’t be a more appropriate or less disruptive time.

More than anything else, however, this is a moment to focus on the new. SFLC is a wonderful place to work, for me and I hope for all my colleagues. Great things are happening that haven’t had enough attention, because everyone has been watching GPLv3. The really innovative work is being done by the other lawyers here. They are refining organizational structures, innovating strategies for setting up “project conservancies”–a new type of shared container for multiple free software projects –which gives those projects administrative and legal advantages with minimal overhead. They are counseling young projects making astonishing new free software that’s going to be rocking business’s world three or four years from now. We’re taking risk out of projects everybody is using or is going to want to use. Helping my colleagues do that work, supporting their growth as they support their clients, is the right thing for me to do right now.

Hurrah for GPLv3, and hurrah it will soon be done.

Away from the Troubles of GPLv3

I know everyone thinks that I have given up even the semblance of maintaining a blog, and given what GPLv3 has done to my ability to communicate what I am personally up to in my life, I probably have for the moment. Eventually that massive license negotiation will be complete, and I will only have to cope here with the required discretion necessary for the ordinary practice of law, not also the conduct of industrial diplomacy.

But here’s something we can all take 4 minutes and 31 seconds to appreciate; one of the most lucid pieces of artful public instruction I’ve ever seen. I don’t know of any existing honor appropriate to the merits of this work, but when humanity begins offering the Ted Nelson Prize, I hope Professor Michael Wesch wins one of the early ones.

Link

A Renewed Invitation to Kernel Developers

In view of recent statements by developers of the Linux kernel, and the response by the Free Software Foundation, I would like to offer my personal views as the chief mediator in the GPLv3 process.

To begin with, I welcome the current expressions of opinion by kernel developers. As I have repeatedly said in private communications, and will now say again publicly, I will gladly take any steps possible to include the kernel developers in the ongoing discussion process. I invite them to represent themselves in any way they choose, and pledge to work with them to create, even at this late date, a form of participation in the deliberations about GPLv3 that would reflect their preferred means of work, and be appropriate to their position in the community of developers.

I appreciate the positions taken publicly by the kernel developers. To be clear, the process of deliberation in which FSF and everyone else has been engaged since January is not only a process of taking positions. It also involves listening to the positions others have taken: it’s the effect of listening as well as talking that gives deliberative democracy its effectiveness as well as its legitimacy.

I have been doing a job this year, on behalf of the Free Software Foundation as a client of the Software Freedom Law Center. In this time, I have watched hundreds of serious-minded and busy people take time to listen to one another’s needs, to explain their principles, to deliberate on the arrangements that affect their lives. For my colleagues and fellow citizens who develop the Linux kernel, I have nothing but respect. I ask them please to join the conversation that is going on, to listen to others whose views may not be theirs, and to help the community make the best possible choices about matters of deep common concern.

Why I like Open Source Matters (was Why I Like Mambo)

The Software Freedom Law Center and I have been interested for a while in a PHP-based CMS called Mambo. The more I studied it, the more I liked both the technology and the team. Mambo’s development team struck me as an unusual example in the FOSS world: a particularly cohesive and energetic collection of developers with similar styles and intentions. Therefore we began to talk about the Mambo team’s retaining the SFLC to do their legal work.

To my surprise, when I saw the developers in San Francisco at LWE, they were deeply concerned about the possibility that Miro might be trying to take their project away from them. So our first job for them is to help the developers set their project off on a new direction. As I would have expected, they made that decision unanimously, easily, and with strong spirit of mutual aid. I’m delighted to be working with such grownup developers.

Yet Another GPL3 Rumor

I’ll probably need a whole category for these as the process of updating the GPL begins to gather steam. It began with an article in internetnews.com reporting a conversation with Mike Olson of Sleepycat Software. Mike told internetnews.com that the Free Software Foundation was still thinking about the problem posed when someone modifies GPL’d web services software and goes into business providing competing services using the modified software, but without releasing the modifications to the community. Mike was right; that’s an issue FSF expects to address in GPLv3. Richard Stallman and I have both talked about it publicly.

But internetnews.com understood Mike to be saying that GPLv3 might somehow apply in a new way to the modifications made by companies that customize GPL’d software for their own use but never distribute to anybody else. This was confusing enough, and plainly wrong. We wouldn’t do that. But then someone went even further and posted to Slashdot suggesting that a future GPL might require users of free software, such as Amazon or Google, to pay fees simply for using GPL’d code.

Some Slashdot readers thought this last contribution was FUD or intentional flamebait. I hope it was just a silly but innocent error. Either way, the rumor was nonsense by itself, and I wouldn’t normally write in response to a nonsensical rumor. But the occasion gives me a chance to say something about reading GPLv3 news in general.

All future versions of the GPL will fully protect the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation defined decades ago, and which we believe all software users everywhere should be guaranteed. Freedom zero, the freedom to use software, is infringed if you are required to pay fees or make promises in order to use software, anywhere, anytime. FSF will never publish a license that violates freedom zero. Similarly, freedom two, the freedom to modify a program, and freedom three, the freedom to share, are violated if private modification is prohibited or sharing is required rather than permitted. You can always modify free software for your own use, and decide whether to share it with other people. If you share with others, the GPL says now and always will say that you have to give them the same freedoms you were given by others who contributed to the code you are using, modifying and redistributing.

FSF has promised the free software community generally, and the contributors to FSF-sponsored software projects in particular, that future versions of the GPL will conserve the spirit of the original license and protect the freedoms for which FSF stands. If you read a report claiming that FSF is considering license terms incompatible with the fundamental freedoms laid out in the preamble to the current GPL, you know it isn’t so.

Justice Ain’t the Same as Wisdom

The United States Department of Justice announced today that it would be making a radical purchasing decision: stop dealing with the firm it considers an illegal monopoly. No more Microsoft Word at Main Justice. So they will spend $13 million to acquire Word Perfect licenses from Corel. Did they consider OpenOffice at $0? Why bother—Let’s just cut Social Security benefits instead.

After the Oscars

Okay, the Hollywood crowd have had their party. I didn’t watch; I think they’re entitled to do their preening and gloating by themselves. What they’re not entitled to do is to veto the Internet because it gets in the way of their ownership of culture. Which is what I told the United States Supreme Court in a brief amici curiae I filed today, on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and New Yorkers for Fair Use.

Freedom and the Robot Army

The eighteenth-century British North American aristocrats who created the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights had learned from the English politicians of the seventeenth century that a professional army is the surest pillar of despotism. They hoped that, under North American conditions, reliance on a citizen militia organized by the States, rather than an Army under the control of the Federal Government, would be a sufficient protection against tyranny.

The twentieth century showed that the value of a professional army used against citizens seeking political change was not limited by the balance of military force: citizens armed, no matter how heavily, cannot withstand a conflict with a modern military remorselessly applied. But remorseless application of armies against their own compatriots became difficult in many parts of the world in the latter twentieth century, as new means of communication amplified “people power.” The Chinese Communist Party achieved at Tien An Men what the Polish, East German, Czechoslovak, Philippine, Georgian, Ukranian and other regimes could not: even in crumbling dictatorships, the televised massacre of citizens is more than most armies, however ruthlessly led, will undertake.

The twenty-first century will be different. The United States will lead the way. The Pentagon is investing heavily in the development of robot infantry. Given the resources it will bring to bear, within two decades we will see the introduction of machines that remove all sense of consequences, personal and social, from the business of killing. Robot infantry may or may not prove valuable battlefield soldiers. In specialized roles they will probably succeed in being more cost-effective than human combatants. But at the violent suppression of political unrest they will be unparalleled. A brigade or two will be within the budget of every autocrat faced with a green or orange or red revolution.

We won’t need them to be torturers, however. For that, as we have learned, human volunteers are always available.

Cradle of Liberty

Today LinuxWorld—having left behind its previous East Coast home in New York—opened its winter presence in Boston. Its own press release refers to Beantown as the appropriate locale because, as the home of the Free Software Foundation, Boston is the place where it all started. Even so, the press release blunders, stating that the Free Software Foundation originated the “open source movement.” The foreseeable result? A quick correction from the cradle of liberty, in a lighter style, by the FSF’s new Executive Director, Peter Brown.

A Vigil for Thurgood Marshall

Three days after his death, on January 27, 1993, Thurgood Marshall came to the Supreme Court, up the marble steps, for the last time. Congress had ordered Abraham Lincoln’s catafalque brought to the Court, and on it the casket of Thurgood Marshall lay in state. His beloved Chief, Earl Warren, had been so honored in the Great Hall of the Court, and no one else. Congress was right about the bier, and spoke with the voice of the people: no other American, of any age, so deserved to lie where Lincoln slept.

To him, all day on Wednesday, the people came—a score of thousands, we were told, in the blustery bright Washington winter. The President had said a week before that it was spring, but he was optimistic. I stood with perhaps two thousand of the people myself. They knew it was winter, but there was something that they had to do. With others who had been TM’s law clerks, I kept vigil by the bier for a time. We stood by turns, in motionless respect as the people passed. TM’s son John stood there all day, hour after hour with his trooper’s straightness, full of gentle strength, his father’s toughness in his face. So by turns we stood, on hard cold marble, and the people came to say goodbye. They too came up the steps and through the doors, above which the Court promises the world EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. Later the Chief Justice said, and rightly, that no other individual had done more to make those words reality.

But all the people made the words real on Wednesday, for they did equal justice to his memory, one and all, the fortunate and the unfortunate together. I stood silent waiting for them, and they were silent by and large saying what they had come to say. Schoolchildren came, lots of them, to promise with their teachers that the lessons he had struggled all his life to learn would be handed down to their grandchildren, three generations more. Others came with promises too. I remember most clearly a young man, of seventeen or so, who came with his mother. He walked to the casket, as close as the ropes would let him pass. He turned his palms upward, and he clenched his fists. He put his head down on his chest; his fists were clenched so hard I saw his arms tremble. He stood for some minutes, silent and trembling, in the most solemn place he knew, to make the most solemn promise of his life-whatever it was-to himself. TM would have been happy to see him there. Such youthful moments of passionate resolve can change the world, he knew. Thurgood Marshall had such a passionate determination, and he changed the world.

The world was changed more than he knew, and the people came to tell him about it. They brought him their staggering diversity, and they came before him one last time to say: “You see… This is what equality is; this is who we are. We are the people you strived for. We are the people you protected. We are the People of the United States of America, and we loved you.”

I stood and watched them as they came, and tried to remember each face I saw. I tried to remember out of gratitude and love, for they knew who he was, and came to show him who they had become because of him. I stood by his side and realized that his long journey was over, and that there, in the Great Hall, he was at home. Here was Odysseus returned from all his wanderings, old and crafty, a teller of tales who had been strong enough to strike down the wicked and unjust in his own hall.

At ten o’clock that night, the last of the people passed, and TM left the Court forever. They lifted him from where Father Abraham had slumbered, and bore him out from the Great Hall, down the marble steps and into history, toward the lighted rotunda of the Capitol. Or so they told me; I wasn’t there. I could not bear to see it. I thought of him instead photographed on those same steps-young, confident and strong, grinning with his invariable mixture of irony and joy-celebrating with his comrades in arms the impossible achievement of an entire nation’s dream. I thought of him as he had been, and I could not stand and watch as Odysseus sailed away once more, leaving us all behind.