v.094 of the paper BSD vs. GPL: Part. 1: Social Roots, Complexity and Never Ending Process of Interpretation of GPL
Nikolai Bezroukov
Complexity and Never Ending Process of Interpretation of GPL" is now
available from
http://www.softpanorama.org/Copyright/License_classification/social_roots_of_GPL.shtml
I am interested in further "debugging" the draft and would appreciate
comments and constructive feedback (if possible).
The following seems to be the most important ideas of the first part of
the paper.
1. The growth of the importance of free/open software development
signified the creation of "programming intelligentsia": a social stratum
of programmers who value programming as a social activity and were ready
to advance their own technological and social agenda in this area.
Developers that prefer BSD and developers that prefer GPL are just
different subgroups of programming intelligentsia as a social group. I
also think that programming intelligentsia can learn much from the
lessons of Russian intelligentsia support of radical social ideas. In
this sense academic underpinnings, not intelligentsia extremism is the
vital thing that needs to be nourished.
2. Both BSD and GPL are connected with some underling philosophy. In
case of GPL this is a philosophy of Anarchism.
3. One can view any license including BSDL and GPL as a social contract
(or even a set of rules that regulates this social process) that behaves
differently depending on a stage of the development of the programming
product and the social environment of this development. The other
possibility is to view the license as some algorithm and measure it
complexity by some metric. From both points of view a widely held notion
that GPL is a simple license is an urban myth.
4. Most free/open source developers do not think about those licenses in
purely legal terms. They are usually view them as some kind of social
framework or developer league that a particular developer adopts. In
this sense their primary social role might be in establishing of "the
rules of the game" ("rules of free/open software development league").
5. Due to the complexity of the GPL its interpretation became a
permanent intellectual game of a certain part of "programming
intelligentsia". Moreover completely along the lines of our "programming
intelligentsia" view of the free/open developers community, the ability
to interpret GPL became a subject to constant debates and is widely
considered an important and worthwhile social activity that brings most
active participants additional social status in the most radical part of
the community.
6. A substantial level of fuzziness is not an accidental, but should be
considered as an important social property of the GPL. Software
developers that use or want to use GPL might benefit from awareness of
this property of the license. The process of clarification of GPL is an
unpredictable never-ending social process with one primary (FSF) and
several minor players. Nuances of GPL interpretation can be used as a
weapon in conflicts between groups of the developers and as an
instrument of ensuring of the importance of FSF. The author suggested
that the acceptance of FSF as a "Supreme GPL Clarification Commission"
can serve as a litmus test of belonging to the "software anarchists"
camp.
7. In the next part of the paper we will try to address is the
possibility of "kidnapping" of a free/open software project by some
"evil" commercial company.
--
Regards,
- Nikolai Bezroukov