On Schwartz And The GPL

I haven’t had a chance to read everything that’s been going around about Jonathan Schwartz’s latest comments about the GPL but I wanted to pick on David Jericho for a moment because his response irked me a little.

The problem with attacking something like the GPL is that it makes the attacker generally look stupid.

And the problem with defending something like the GPL is that it makes the defender generally look like a zealot.  There are multiple valid viewpoints for this argument, suggesting that the GPL is infallible and beyond criticism (which is how I would interpret David’s statement) is a pretty tough argument to sell.  The key difference here is one of philosophy, the GPL was explicitly created to force software to be open and kept that way.  It was created on the belief that all software should be free.  If you agree with those principles the GPL is very clearly a fantastic license and probably is from your viewpoint, infallible.  If however you happen to believe that intellectual property should be leveraged to make money and that this process fosters innovation then you probably think the GPL is bad for innovation or bad for the economy.  Neither side can be clearly proven to be right or wrong at this stage, and it’s quite possible that there will never be a definitive answer.  There are however plenty of opinions going both ways, but they are just opinions.  There are also case studies supporting both sides.  David mentions India and China as examples of the GPL doing wonders for the economy, I’d mention the current economic super powers as examples of traditional intellectual property approaches doing wonders for the economy.

In general when you find yourself calling a very senior officer of a very large corporation stupid you’ve probably missed something.  Perhaps you’re wrong or perhaps you have just failed to realize the direction they’re trying to take, either way they are very unlikely to be outright stupid despite the fact that they will still make mistakes.  Jonathan Schwartz has been pretty consistent in his comments about intellectual property, open source and the GPL so I’d suggest he’s thought it through and has pretty good reasons for the stance he’s taking and the statements he’s making.

I find it particularly irksome that David makes such a fuss over Schwartz’s use of the third world to stir up emotions when he himself then ends with:

Sun would do very well to gag Jonathan, lest people start equating Jonathan’s anti-GPL evangelism with SCO’s We-Own-Linux story

If there’s one thing that will stir up a more emotional response than the third world it’s SCO.  Cheap shot indeed.  Sun has very clearly played by the rules of licensing, they aren’t attempting to lay claim to anyone else’s code, they are merely arguing that licensing code under the GPL isn’t a good idea.  There’s a very big difference there and it is just bad form to try to twist that argument and pull on the emotional string labelled SCO.

At least with Schwartz’s comments relating to the third world you can dig down and see his point – he believes that intellectual property should be used to make money, not given away and his argument follows from that viewpoint.  The GPL has the disadvantage that if you build upon it, any intellectual property you generate yourself (when building on it) has to be given away.  In essence the GPL gives you a leg up by providing intellectual property but if you subscribe to Schwartz’s belief that IP should be used to generate income directly then it’s pretty clear that the leg up is totally useless since you can’t use it to generate income.  If you subscribe to a viewpoint more like RMS’s or believe that supporting services are more profitable than directly selling the intellectual property, then you’ll believe that the leg up the GPL provides is of huge benefit.  It’s all in the initial view point.  Having said that, Schwartz was definitely taking the opportunity to pull on a few emotional strings which I don’t approve of, but if you take the time to understand his viewpoint you’ll see that his argument is not stupid even if you believe it to be based on incorrect principles.