GPL 3.0: A bonfire of the vanities?
March 9, 2006 Leave a comment
In this perspective article, Jonathan Zuck makes a couple assertions, at least one of which I disagree with and at least one of which I agree with. The articles raises into question whether the GPL V3 has gone too far, which given the comments from multiple promininent Open Source leaders, is a very fair question to raise. It does it with that kind of attention grabbing journalistic panache, though, that you wonder if it was just written to get eyeballs. Not being familiar with Mr Zuck, I found it interesting that he is the “president of the Association for Competitive Technology”, which according to Wikipedia is:
The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) is an American technology lobby group. ACT was founded in 1998 in response to the Microsoft antitrust case. Its chief goals are
1. to limit government involvement in technology (such as antitrust actions or open source requirements); and
2. to support strong intellectual property rights in software.
Currently, ACT is lobbying strongly against the Massachusetts endorsement of the OpenDocument standards.
Now, that certainly doesn't make him automatically wrong, but the fact that the president of a association that lobbies against Open Source finds fault in the GPL V3 is hardly news, is it?
–jeremy
GPL, GPLv3, Open Source