My FSFE Blog

Linus has made some comments on the GPLv3 and it’s anti-DRM stance:

"Say I’m a hardware manufacturer. I decide I love some particular piece of open-source software, but when I sell my hardware, I want to make sure it runs only one particular version of that software, because that’s what I’ve validated. So I make my hardware check the cryptographic signature of the binary before I run it," Torvalds said. "The GPLv3 doesn’t seem to allow that, and in fact, most of the GPLv3 changes seem to be explicitly designed exactly to not allow the above kind of use, which I don’t think it has any business doing."

Hardware vendors could take advantage of Free Software for their devices but then refuse any modifed versions of the code to run. I think this would be a huge shame and if vendors had started doing this we might not have great projects such as Linux on iPod, OpenWRT and OpenZaurus

I found an example today of why the ambiguity of the term "Open Source" can be dangerous.

Some folks have written a web management interface for MySQL (similar to PhpMyAdmin) and announced it on Digg.com

The article headline read "MySQL Quick Admin Becomes Open-Source Freeware" which is rather unfortunate as no-one had any idea what they could do with the code.

Even worse they didn’t state on their website (or apparently in the code itself) how the code was licenced so it was all a bit of a mess

Although their intentions were good they got a rough ride on Digg.com in part for some UI design and functionality reasons, but also because their message about their intent for the code wasn’t clear.