Re: GPLv3 comedy unfolding -- Linus: "I am the one looking out for users' rights, not the FSF."

[Alexander Terekhov]

Linus for President! 

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DRM "Misunderstood"
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 28 2006 @ 11:55 PM EDT

    Forget about that old argument between the two camps. That is so
over. Instead please think more about end users, because we are never
anybody's priority in the corporate world, which is one reason we walked
away from proprietary software. And who are you writing your software
for, if not us?

You really don't get it, do you?

I agree that Tivo's behaviour is silly, but that's the worst it is.
Silliness isn't a bad thing, but making rules that disallow it really
mostly is.

In contrast, what the FSF tries to ram down our throats with the GPLv3
is much worse. It's saying that in order for others to not be able to
use our software in silly ways, we'll have to disallow a whole class of
things that are intelligent too. And don't tell me those uses don't
exist - I've given several examples over the whole draft discussions,
and others have given yet more. Ranging from "protect my hardware" to
"voting machine integrity checking" to "medical devices".

When you "fix" a problem by throwing not just that problem but all the
good things out too, it's called "throwing out the baby with the
bath-water", and it's really really stupid. New mothers really get upset
about it, even though clearly all that dirty water really is gone, isn't
it?

When you argue that the GPLv3 protects "users", you're arguing from a
totally flawed premise. You have absolutely zero actual real argument to
back that up with. The fact is, the GPLv2 protects the user more,
because it protects the user from the kind of "we know better than you"
attitude that the FSF is showing with the GPLv3.

I've given you several examples of why secret keys are good things, and
you still don't get it. You still claim that users need to be
"protected" from encryption and security. That's insane.

Please, PJ. Those "bad" things that the GPLv3 tries to protect you
against are not bad! And this parrotting of the "users' rights" is just
that - parrotting. It has absolutely zero basis in reality.

In reality, the only thing that the GPLv3 does is hamstring the uses
that a GPLv3 project can be put to. I've given several examples about
why you would want to have cryptographic keys that enable some
behaviour, and you just ignore them, and others who don't ignore them
spout some nonsense about how you can't make a safe voting machine
anyway, as if that made any difference at all to whether the technology
is valid in that case or a hundred of other valid cases.

The thing is, I actually do know what I'm talking about. The GPLv3
really is throwing out the baby with the bath-water. If you have a
mole-problem in your yard, you don't blow up your whole house with
fifteen tons of TNT. The same way, if you don't like somebody elses
silly behaviour, you don't just disallow a basic technological measure
for security!

The GPLv3 "solution" is literally a question of "We don't like that
user, and we really want to destroy that schenario, and we don't care at
all what else we also destroy in the process". And the sad part is,
they'll really only destroy the good uses of private key signing,
because the bad users generally don't even care, and just decide to
write their own code instead - leaving the "users' rights" right where
it started, but now the GPLv3 also destroyed the good guys.

So trust me. In this discussion, I am the one looking out for users'
rights, not the FSF.
Linus
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regards,
alexander.