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Monday, 16 July 2007 06:02

GPL: fear is the key

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The third revision of the General Public Licence has been out for just short of three weeks but plenty of people are already questioning why take-up has been so slow.

This, after less than three weeks.

After the initial question about take-up (in various forums) the talk then tends towards a standard argument - take-up is slow because the licence will hurt developers_and_business.

I've even seen a few "surveys" - you know the kind which the author refers to as "a quick survey." It reminds me of a man I worked with in the Middle East; whenever he wanted to bolster his reports with a bit of vox pop, he would resort to citing a "quick survey among taxi-drivers in ....."

Of course, he was always the person who had done the survey though he never mentioned it.

There's one thing driving this kind of talk.

Fear.

A large number of tech writers - I wouldn't call them journalists and sully my own profession - are fearful that the licence will slow adoption of Linux in the workplace. And that would lead to a lessening of their own importance and influence.

It would also mean a smaller pay cheque.

Hence they are trying to spread this fear among businesses.


 Such fear is largely driven by ignorance. And a lack of information. Some among these so-called pundits have agendas too.

But try telling that to them, the ones who spout these "the_GPLv3_is_going_to_spell_the_end_for_FOSS_if_it's_adopted_on_a_large_scale" prophets.

You'll won't have much success in convincing them - play has to go in one direction for them to move forward.

You do get the occasional sensible bit of commentary, such as a piece I spotted by Brian Profitt, the managing editor of Linux Today. Profitt is one who looks behind the obvious and analyses things before he commits finger to keyboard.

He also has that rare commodity - commonsense - and the ability to look beyond the end of the year. Foresight, a much misused word, is greatly in evidence.

And, of course, there are people like Eben Moglen, the main legal brain at the Free Software Foundation, who is moving on to run the Software Freedom Law Centre.

Moglen is an intellectual. When you speak of him, you need to use adjectives like wise; he has crossed the stage of being merely knowledgeable a long time back.

You only have to listen to a talk he gave in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 26 to understand where this man is coming from.

To the reader I say, take a bit of time and listen to his talk. Or else read a transcript.

If you can be bothered to do so, you'll begin to understand the breadth and depth of vision that he has brought to the task of getting this licence off the blocks.

Detractors - the fear squad - would, of course, say that he's on one side of the equation.

True.

That doesn't mean that his arguments don't have merit.

If they are logical, they deserve a hearing. But that's only if you want to hear logical arguments from his side and have an open mind on the issue.

Else, don't bother.

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Sam Varghese

Sam Varghese has been writing for iTWire since 2006, a year after the site came into existence. For nearly a decade thereafter, he wrote mostly about free and open source software, based on his own use of this genre of software. Since May 2016, he has been writing across many areas of technology. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years in India (Indian Express and Deccan Herald), the UAE (Khaleej Times) and Australia (Daily Commercial News (now defunct) and The Age). His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.

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