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04/17/2004 Archived Entry: "The GNU General Public License (GPL)"

There is no joy in FUDville. BayStar Capital, who invested $20 million into SCO after SCO started their IBM/Linux lawsuit, now wants their money back. Evidently SCO has done something which, according to the terms of the deal, allows BayStar to immediately redeem all of their preferred stock...for cash. SCO says they won't pay; expect another lawsuit soon. Royal Bank of Canada, which invested $30 million under similar terms, hasn't said yet if they'll ask for a redemption. Even if RBC stays in, SCO will have a hard time raising more funds.

A Slashdot poster summed it up best: "I think this is the first recorded instance of the ship leaving the sinking rats."

Since I've mentioned FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), let me digress to the GNU General Public License (much maligned by SCO, but used when it suits them). Groklaw's Pamela Jones wrote an excellent explanation of the GPL a few weeks back:

To put it in terms that they [journalists] might grasp easily, the GPL works more like this: If I write an article and publish it, and you want to add material and publish the combined work, then you must get my permission, because I am the copyright holder of part of the combined work you have in mind to publish, and you cannot publish it without permission of all copyright holders. That's true whether my article was published under the GPL or not.

Normally, you would offer me money in order to get my permission as copyright holder to get me to agree to let you publish my work in combination with yours. But if I published my article under the GPL, then there is a simpler, cost-free way to get my permission. All you have to do is to publish the combined article under the GPL. You don't have to contact me or pay me.

Whether you want to do this is entirely up to you. You may have good reasons not to want to publish the combined article under the GPL. That's fine. However, you still need my permission to publish a combined article that contains my copyrighted work, and if the simple method of publishing under GPL is not for you, and you can't convince me in other ways to give my permission, then you can't publish the combined article.

After all, you are using my work, so it's only fair. The GPL is not public domain. It's a license that I have chosen to protect my work and direct how it may be used.

However, if they don't use my article but instead just publish the part they themselves wrote, even if inspired by my thoughts, they don't have to publish under the GPL.

It's their work in that case, 100%, so they can do whatever they want with it. But if they take my work, 50%, and add their improvements and changes, their 50%, then they have to respect the terms for using my work with theirs. Alternatively, they can leave my 50% out and just publish their part. The GPL doesn't take away anyone's rights. But you can't use my work, if it's made available under the GPL, unless you agree to do the same. The GPL is designed to build up a community pot of knowledge. You can draw from the pot, but only if you put something back. If you don't want to put something back, don't draw from the pot. [Quoted per the terms of the Creative Commons license.]

I could not have said it more clearly. Contrary to much FUD, the GPL does not destroy any rights. It enables uses of the work that might not otherwise take place, and it encourages similar permissions, but it takes nothing away from anyone.

In hindsight I'm starting to see the GPL as a truly brilliant innovation. If you are a believer in "intellectual property," the GPL protects the interests of the authors, by preventing others from using their work without first obtaining permission. (As a firm in Germany just learned.) Authors are always free to license their own work commercially if they wish.

If you are, like me, not a believer in state protection of intellectual property, the GPL points to a viable, alternate future. Because as long as you stay within the terms of the GPL, you can distribute GPL'd code freely. And those terms are not onerous in the least to one who does not accept copyright protection.

To my eyes the GPL is a delightful paradox. Relying on copyright law for its enforcement, it creates a realm in which copyrights are irrelevant. Both pro- and anti-IP advocates can applaud it.

And, starting with the work of one man, it has demonstrated overwhelmingly that talented people will produce "intellectual property" even when there are no restrictions on sharing and duplicating, thus knocking the prop out from one of the commonest justifications for copyright law.

brad