Re: What is the "open web" ?

On 6/5/13, Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org> wrote:
> EME, for example, might not be implementable in GPLv3.  But I wasn't
> aware that it was not implementable in other open source licenses such
> as Apache or MPL (or even GPLv2 for that matter).  What am I missing?

The distinction between an implementation coming with a license
document that is generally accepted as an open source license, and the
distribution terms as a whole (as arising from combination of that
legal document with other relevant realities of the legal system in a
given jurisdiction, such as whether relevant patent claims exist for
which no free license is available, whether there are restrictions
arising from the DMCA or similar legislation) complying with the open
source definition [1] or the Free Software definition [2] (the two are
equivalent for most practical purposes, including the current
discussion).
[1] http://opensource.org/osd.
[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Unless patents or DMCA-like legislation gets in the way, any software
for which source code is made available and a release from copyright
restrcitions is made under a open source licenses / free software
license, is actually open source software / free software.

The goal of the GPL is that it is intended to protect freedoms of
software users from those situations where the author of the source
code puts it under a free license, but in spite of that action, the
software doesn't actually end up being free software.from the end
user's perspective.

GPLv2 did this well for many years, but eventually some problem
mechanisms emerged that were not addressed by GPLv2. For example GPLv2
fails to be incompatible with situations where the DMCA prevents
software changes. This is fixed in GPLv3. (GPLv3 might be doing a bit
of overkill there, but I'm not going to go into that discussion.)

Greetings,
Norbert
FreedomHTML.org

Received on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 11:42:32 UTC