I have trouble trusting or acknowledging greatness in individuals. Especially in the OSS world which is filled with fanatics. However, besides my scarily intelligent husband, there are some bright spots: Miguel, Havoc, Linus. Even if I don’t agree with Linus on every point (he doesn’t care much about making the kernel more Joe-User-proof in terms of backwards compatibility or better testing), he is a very smart guy.
Currently in the lkml there is a war between a Red Hat engineer/FSF evangelist who wants the kernel to move to GPLv3 and Linus explaining that for him the GPLv2 works best for what he wants to do. The Red Hat guy is an idiot, obviously, bringing the TiVo example over and again without understanding what he’s talking about. He basically endorses GPLv3’s software restrictions to achieve “open hardware” (that’s similar to change the electric current on people’s homes so they all go out and buy a new fridge). However, between the back and forth of emails, Linus said something that showed how smart he is: “The real issue is open content“.
Exactly. The GPLv3 does not take into account at all the core of the issue, which is open content. Especially as more and more apps will become web-based, there is nothing guaranteeing you that you can get back your emails, or blog posts etc from the GPLv3-based web service you signed up thinking that it’s “more free and open”. FSF doesn’t see the real issues at hand to create a modern license that is actually practical. Allowing someone to modify hardware is something that only 1 person every 1000 can achieve with his/her technical knowledge, but everyone and his dog has a blog and they can’t move that data elsewhere, or even archive. THAT’s the kind of freedom the FSF should be striving for, not a high-level utopian kind of thing of social-restructure that it’s impractical.