Charlie Babcock has a funny (if it weren't so sad) blog entry about his efforts to write a piece on GPLv3. He interviewed me for the story, and I'm looking forward to its release this coming week, but I gave him nowhere near the trouble that his other interviewees apparently did. Little did he know when he started:GPLv3 has been through two drafts, each of which stirred up its own hornet's nest of criticism. Now Charlie Babcock has a funny (if it weren’t so sad) blog entry about his efforts to write a piece on GPLv3. He interviewed me for the story, and I’m looking forward to its release this coming week, but I gave him nowhere near the trouble that his other interviewees apparently did. Little did he know when he started:GPLv3 has been through two drafts, each of which stirred up its own hornet’s nest of criticism. Now we’re approaching draft 3, the much anticipated finale. Many criticisms have been heeded and remedies included by authors Richard Stallman and attorney Eben Moglen. So its supporters are curious: how will the GPL’s third draft deal with a ban on digital rights management? How will it bar patent work-arounds like the Microsoft/Novell deal? What about the little known Affero provision? You don’t fully understand Affero? Well, neither do we. I…got a somewhat formal response from Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer there. “I should point out here that we at the Free Software Foundation and the Gnu project aren’t part of the Open Source movement, but the free software movement. This movement has been campaigning for computer users’ freedom since 1984. We discuss the ethical issues surrounding… ” and so on.It is the Free Software Foundation’s biggest asset and biggest liability that it is so intransigent on its nomenclature and policies. On the one hand, it has kept the FSF from making compromises that would weaken the GPL in favor of commercial interests (precisely when commercial interests are discovering that the GPL, in all its supposedly communistic guise, is actually software capitalism to its core). But on the other hand, it has kept a wide swath of people from befriending the FSF. It is important to Stallman that he get credit for Linux/GNU-Linux/whatever you want to call it. It’s not really important to anyone else, including Linus Torvalds. It’s important to him that we call it “GNU/Linux” instead of Linux. But it’s not important to anyone else. People are interested in the code, not the credit. Anyway, I’m sorry that Charlie had to beat his head against this wall of rigid nomenclature and pride. I love the FSF, but I do wish it would recognize that others have good intentions, too. Open Source