« New Open Source Software Company Rolls Out | Main | Untangle Is An Interesting New Name for New Hybrid OSS Firm »

In another life I did marketing communications. This was pre-Web 2.0 of course. In fact it was pre-Internet and even mostly pre-email so the rules have changed. But I can't believe they have changed so much that any PR agency would recommend announcing something on the Friday before the long Canada Day/Fourth of July(really long this year in the U.S.) weekend in North America or the day before the beginning of the two-month-long European holiday season. Therefore, not surprisingly--contrarian as a matter of a principle--the Free Software Foundation (FSF) today formally released the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPL v.3) at its Boston headquarters.

Since there was nothing really new news in the license itself, the interest is in what others say. So far:
- Red Hat--We're thinking about it for the future
- Samba - "a great improvement over GPL v.2"
- Linux Foundation- nada

The press release was loaded with the usual FSF speak (treacherous instead of trusted as in trusted computing, restirictions instead of rights as in DRM, GNU/Linux specificity in contrast to just Linux, and so forth) and attacks against patents. But it was pretty tame overall.

I have commented here and at Research 2.0 (see link to right) in different ways about the fact that the attacks on whatever the opposite of free software is (priced software, proprietary software, closed software, or I think the FSF has settled on the term "non-free software") fall on deaf ears. Those suppliers that have traditionally priced their proprietary software are rapidly moving to software as a service anyways. Maybe not coincidentally, Microsoft Deputy Counsel Marshall Phelps was in Boston yesterday at the Red Herring East conference. One of his opinions was that the monolithic operating system is fading away along with the means by which it has been licensed. Of course, he was speaking about Windows but the same could be said of GNU/Linux.

So, happy Canada/Dominion Day, Fourth of July, Bastille Day, and so forth. When we all get back, I will talk about what Mr. Phelps has to say about patents.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2090