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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Torvalds explicitly said he doesn't like the GPLv3 because the GNU people tried to subvert the intention of the GPL and lied to people about what it meant. The GNU people are the same ones as the main article refers to when looking for a definition of 'Free Software'.

So we find ourselves in a situation where the article author is apparently arguing against group X because they're trying to subvert the intention of the GPL, and using as evidence a definition provided by group Y, who tried to subvert the intention of the GPL.

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It's kind of hard to make the argument that the FSF tried to subvert the intention of the GPL, since they wrote both the GPL itself and the four freedoms (the philosophical principles on which the GPL is based) .

You can make it, yes, but it's not a very convincing one.

The meaning of a work is determined solely by the interpretation of those who read it and the author's input is completely irrelevant[0]. In effect, what the FSF thought the spirit of the GPL is and what its actual spirit is, are two very different things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

However if an author decides that their work is not being interpreted the way that they intended the author is free to release new work. Hence when the FSF decided that the interpretation of the GPLv2 was not what they had intended they were fully within their moral rights to release the GPLv3.

This is absolutely true within postmodern literary criticism.

Well, have a crack at it, then. Here is Torvalds talking about how he sees the point of the earlier GPL being subverted by v3, and that he thinks that the FSF lied to people about it. In his opinion, it should have been named a different license. He goes into detail about how it's not the license he hates, but how the FSF behaved around it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU

> since they wrote both the GPL itself and the four freedoms

Also, having been part of organisations that have operated against their own philosophical principles and mission statements, I don't accept that the FSF is immune to changing their angle on things. And having hung around plenty of radical progressives growing up, I've seen some handy re-rationalisations of earlier positions.

Overall, I'm on the side of the FSF. But fucked if I'm going to be part of this thing that progressives do, which is piss all over their allies (in this case, ubuntu) just because their opinion is slightly different to one's own. If someone's going to raise the "nuh-uh, subversion of license = evil", then fuck it, here is a video of someone at the heart of the whole licensing debate literally saying that the FSF behaved immorally about licenses too.

Interesting, I hadn't seen that video before. For those annoyed by video, he gets right to the point.

But isn't it healthy to re-examine your core beliefs and made tweaks or even whole substitutions? I don't see anything in GPLv3 that directly contradicts the original four freedoms. It was evolutionary to close loopholes like Tivo.

But you have a second point: how you treat your allies and other sympathetic parties. Sadly, idealism seems to trend towards that behavior and it's pretty counterproductive.

I absolutely agree that you should be allowed to change your opinion over time, as long as you do it 'honestly'. For example, it bugs me when people lambaste politicians for having a different opinion now as opposed to 20 years ago. But at the same time, by 'honest' I mean being open about the changes and not quietly twisting them or hiding them, which is what Torvalds is complaining about in that video. In the organisations I mention I was part of, the same thing applies - lip service paid to the (sometimes stale) principles, but the behaviour was rationalised very baroquely to fit those principles.

Re: the idealism stuff, my armchair psychology take on it is this: conservatives are passionate about things not changing, so minor differences don't matter so much because the overall goal is the same; progressives are passionate about things changing, so if the cart is going to move at all, it really needs to go in my direction. Add in the human predeliction for not seeing the forest for the trees, and the progressives will squabble over what really are minor differences.

Well the whole GNU-Linux kind of sums up the subvert issue :)

I can't see how that matches up with any definition of "subvert" I'm familiar with.

There are reasonable argument pro and con the whole "Gnu Linux" thing, many of them silly and some cogent. But nobody was subverting (or attempting to) anything that I can see.

> Sunvert (def) undermine the power and authority

Seemed like it was to undermine Linus and place GNU on the same level as Linux kernel. (hurd) Don't get me wrong RMS is someone I am glad is alive and engaged with the community but I disagree with him most of the time.

  Seemed like it was to undermine Linus and place GNU on the same level as Linux kernel.

I don't agree with your characterization at all, but let's not go over old ground.

That's not really the GPL though, that's just because very few people run Linux without also running countless GNU utilities. The people that argue for calling it GNU + Linux don't bring the GPL into it at all.

You can start by defining what the intention and purpose of the GPL is and move on to explaining how Canonical's uncooperative and unclear stance towards the community whose contributions enable it to exist serves to further those purposes.

Which version of the GPL? Because there are several, and in the Torvalds talk linked above, he points out that the different versions have different intentions.

> Canonical's uncooperative and unclear stance towards the community

Uncooperative and unclear? The 'flat refusal' linked in the main article is pretty clear and cooperative. "Do this thing at this link and we'll be cool with it, and we have a track record of being so". Sounds clear and cooperative to me.

> whose contributions enable it to exist

This is the kind of shit I mean above when I say pissing on allies. You're painting ubuntu as a parasite rather than an ally. Ubuntu has done plenty to help the community and is part of that community - in particular, they took making a non-techie friendly desktop and driving that goal forward as their specialty. Do they do everything perfectly? No, but none of the major players do.

I mix debian and ubuntu in my work, and the debian/FSF purists really puzzle me sometimes. One friend of mine read mjg's comments on the same issue on lwn and bought it hook, line and sinker. Started arguing with me that there was zero difference between Apple and Canonical, simply because although Canonical provide you with their source code, you need a little more elbow-grease to make a derivative of their whole integrated environment (which is a violation of a very liberally-read 'freedom 2', apparently). You're free to make that derivative, but it's just not as simple as removing one package. Apparently this makes them the same as a corporation famous for it's industrial secrecy and lockdown of user capabilities, and who has had the police raid someone's home because they thought one of their prototypes was there. It's a ridiculously binary view of the world.

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