Re: Final text of GPL v3 (original) (raw)

On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 01:00:38PM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote:

Free Software, when it's really free and not merely a ruse to sneak some proprietary crap through, makes us free from legal concerns -- both "am I allowed to use X?" and "I wouldn't want people to have a right to use Y without paying me" are legal concerns here. Having legal notices everywhere destroys this freedom.

So the notice "You may play ball games in this park" destroys the freedom to play ball games in the park?

If the notice is posted on a sign at the entrance to the park, no. If the amount of signs is so bad that it interferes with play, then yes, the freedom is hampered.

Well, let's take a system with two user interfaces:

  1. a GUI where you set up rules like "if someone approaches the computer, do X. If someone leaves the room and there's no one else in, do Y.".
  2. hands-free interface where user interacts by moving around, waving hands, etc, and gets feedback using voice.

Interface 1 can have "Help | About" just fine. The problem is, you need to make it possible to get legal notices using every single interface. For interface 2, this could be something like "to unblank screen, approach the computer. To blank it, move away. To get told legal notices, jump".

Yep. Why is this worse than the GUI or command-line versions? You could argue that the command could be accidentally invoked, but that's true of buttons in GUIs or mistakenly typing -V instead of -v on a command-line app. Just pick a sequence of movements that it's very difficult to do without meaning it.

Ok, let's scrap the high-tech detector with enough resolution to tell you're moving your hand and take a more realistic one which can just tell that you're sitting at the computer -vs- being somewhere else in the room -vs- the room being empty. The voice can tell me a lot while my feedback is very limited.

Or, take your common dumb temperature control: you have a box with two buttons and a simple LCD display which can show only two digits. Yet, nowadays everything tends to have a chip inside -- and if anything inside has anything to do with GPLv3, you suddenly need to convey the legal notices...

My point is that the requirement of every interactive interface having a feature to display the legal notices can be a severe use constraint.

-- 1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor: // Never attribute to stupidity what can be // adequately explained by malice.

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