David A. Harding
Wednesday, 24 Oct 2007
At the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) Compliance Lab IRC1 meeting today, Brett Smith described recent attempts to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about the GPLv3. He then asked for questions, and I provided him with a couple, which ended up being the only questions he answered about GPLv3 FUD. His answers are below; I've put them into paragraph and HTML format and made bold the parts I found most interesting. I've also added footnotes.
harda asks, I accept that no metric is perfect, but does the FSF have any GPLv3 adoption metrics?
We're keeping track of that information internally as part of the Free Software Directory—licensing information is available there, and we're hoping to make that more readily available in the future, so it's easy to see who's adopted the new license.
Right now, at least, you can search the Directory by license, which is helpful. But, like I said before, adoption isn't the be-all end-all metric for the license's success. We judge the license primarily by how well it protects freedom2—and right now, it's the best license out there in that regard. And between the adoption numbers we do have, and the interest that we're seeing through channels like questions to the Compliance Lab, we're happy with the way things are going.
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harda followed up with: Does the FSF think the FUD is being encouraged or sponsored by anti-free software organisations? If so, who are they trying to make afriad, uncertian, or doubtful? Developers? Businesses?
I don't personally have any opinions about whether or not this is part of a coordinated effort or not. If I had to take a guess I'd say it's probably one of those things where there's no centralized effort, per se, but people feel compelled to speak out for various different reasons.
At any rate, the best strategy with FUD is to spread as much of it as you can, as far as you can. So, I think it's targeting basically everyone. Different attacks probably do better with different audiences, but even then they usually figure they might repeat the same points to everyone. So, they try to make developers nervous by making it sound like the GPL's copyleft rules are unclear, and you'll never be sure whether or not you're following them properly. And they try to scare businesses by talking about the anti-tivoization terms, and making it sound like you'll never be able to make money selling consumer electronics again. But even when they do that, developers get concerned because, hey, they work for the companies that make consumer devices, and they (very understandably) don't want it threatening their livelihood.
I think part of the reason FUD is so insidious is that the people who know it's FUD tend to just dismiss it out of hand. Which is generally the right reaction, but it can mean that people who don't know better don't hear a response. That's why the Compliance Lab has been working to raise awareness about this, and we've asked people to let us know when they see this kind of misinformation out there, so we can address it.3 Just send the reference to licensing@fsf.org, and we'll take it from there.
Footnotes