08.11
A bit late to the game with this one, but I have been meaning to write about this for a while now. You may already know about it – the whole XPilot iPhone debacle. If you’re not aware (and can’t be bothered reading the slashdot thread) some programmers, who were fans of the game XPilot back in the day, decided to release a version for the iPhone. Now the game was GPL’d by the original creators, but when they found out they gave this great quote:
After it hit the App store, one of the original developers of XPilot told us he feels adamantly that we’re betraying the spirit of the GPL by charging for it.”
Firstly, it’s very hard to ‘betray the spirit’ of a license. That’s why you have a license in the first place. If it’s written by anyone even half competent they will check for loopholes and problems. Hence the GPLv3 in response to TiVo.
What actually happened though is the original developers GPL’d it after listening to the hippy ‘power of the community’ love fest with no real understanding of the implications. Which is this:
It gives freedom to the software, not the developer. It is the software that is free. You develop software, fine. Release it under the GPL, fine. But you no longer own it. You have no more rights than anyone else to it. By releasing under the GPL you explicitly relinquish all of your control over it. You have freed it like you would free a bird from a cage – it is yours no longer.
It is amazing how so many people fail to understand this. The whole ‘you can sell it’ thing is a red herring as piracy is legally enshrined in the license – everyone else can sell it too as proven by this. There is nothing stopping me recompiling it and putting it on the app store for $0.50, or even for free.
What the XPilot creators actually wanted was one of the Creative Commons licenses (maybe NC-3) as that would appear to be what they think the ‘spirit’ of the GPL is.
The amusing thing in all of this is not only do normal users not bother to read their license agreements (EULA), but apparently neither do the developers of the software either.
GPL – the freedom to say: I don’t want to make any money off my work, but I sure as shit don’t want YOU making any money off it either!!
Except if you’re a large distro company, making money off the combined work of the entire GPL community. This part is allowed, even celebrated.
GPL – reserving the right to bitch and whine since 1989. (Catch ain’t it?)