People are diverse. IBM wants to do what they've always done: make money
by selling computers and computing services to people. And free software
people want to do what they've always done: develop good software and
make it freely available with source code.
Notice that these two things are not diametrically opposed. So there is
plenty of ground for negotiation there.
Richard Stallman once wrote that free software is his end, and the GPL
is a means to that end. If negotiating a different license for FSF
software leads to an increase in the amount of free software in the world,
then he would do that.
I haven't seen an announcement from Linus about this issue, but I will
bet he's at least as pragmatic about Stallman.
So IBM wants a modification to the license. That's a good thing. It
means Torvalds et al own something that IBM wants. They could identify
something that IBM wants that they would like to have, and negotiate a
trade. Such as: release some more IBM source code under GPL.
While I am spouting advocacy, let me pose another situation. Suppose
the webmasters of www.greedy.com take someone else's GPL program,
add their proprietary features to it, and charge money to access it
via www.greedy.com. They do not distribute any copies of their binaries.
They certainly don't distribute any source code.
Would the people at www.greedy.com be in violation of the GPL?
Michael Elizabeth Chastain
<mailto:mec@shout.net>
"love without fear"
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