[luau] News - Washington State Congressman attempts to outlaw GPL

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Thu Oct 24 22:36:00 PDT 2002


Oh sure, Washington state doesn't have any special interests opposing
the GPL.

I personally am opposed to proprietary intellectual property from
tax-payer funded research, but the unanswered question here is whether
GPL or BSD licensing is "more free" and which should be used for
government research.  I don't know the answer to this.

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/02/10/23/1247236.shtml?tid=4
An anonymous reader writes: "Leaders of the New Democrat Coalition
attempt to outlaw GPL. A call to sign off on explicit rejection of
"licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of
promising cyber security technologies developed through federal R & D."
has been issued by Adam Smith, Congressman for the Ninth District in the
State of Washington.

It's already signed off on by Rep. Tom Davis(R-Va), Chairman of
Government Reform Subcomittee on Technology, and Rep. Jim Turner (D-TX)
Ranking Member of the same committee, with the backing of Rep. Jim Davis
(D-FL), and Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI).

It's a note to fellow New Democrats under the guise of protecting
commercial interest's right to make money from the fruits of federal R &
D, and to sign off on an attached letter to Richard A. Clarke, Chair of
the President's Critical Infrastructure.

They are attempting to convince Clarke, Chair of the President's that
licensing terms such as "those in the GNU or GPL" are restrictive,
preclude innovation, improvement, adoption and establishment of
commercial IP rights.

Let's take a look at the highlights:

1) They use the Internet, by virtue of TCP/IP, as "proof" of their
thesis.
2) They state that you cannot improve OR adopt OR commercialize GPL
software.
3) They state that you cannot integrate GPL'd software with proprietery
software.
4) They say you should keep publicly funded code away from the public
sector, so that proprietary interests can make money from the work.
5) They equate a lack of understanding of the GPL with valid reasoning
against it.

(continued in article)

Slashdot: Congress Members Oppose GPL for Government Research
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/23/1320238&mode=thread&tid=117




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