[Sussex] Thoughts On Contrubuting to the Community

[Geoffrey Teale]

Evening all,

I've just seen this thread - I, a once active member of this commmunity
am now the lukiest of lurkers.

This post was rather provocative, if well intentioned, but it reflects
something that troubles me.  One of the reasons I rarely show up at a
LUG meeting these days is that I'm a very busy man - LUG meets happen a
mere 5 minute drive from my office, but whenever I have turned up over
the last year or two I've felt a strong pressure to get involved in the
LUG's activism.   I commend the efforts of the LUG at computer fairs and
at the meetings - it's great that you guys are pushing F/L/OSS out there
in Sussex.  However I do not have the time, nor the inclination to join
those activities.  I am perfectly comfortable with what I do for the
community as a whole however - I simply find it more enjoyable and more
convenient to contribute code, finance and lobbying than to do hands-on
support or grass level activism in general.    

At some level we're all consumers of the communities output, some people
contribute more than others and everyone who does contribute does so
differently.  There is a continuum, and some people will always be 100%
consumers.   If a user of a GNU/Linux system does nothing more than tell
one other person that it's worth a try they've contributed to a
reasonable baseline IMHO.

Now, some points Vic made:

On Sat, 2007-03-31 at 17:58 +0100, Vic wrote:
> > We're not?  The GPL is full of terms that you *must* follow in order to
> > use that software
> 
> No it isn't. Absolutely not.
> 
> The GPL v2 contains a number of requirements that you must fulfill in
> order to *redistribute* the code. It absolutely and categorically sets no
> restrictions whatsoever on how you choose to use that code.


Vic, you're absolutely right.  GPL 3 makes this even more explicit.

> The current draft of the GPL v3 changes that slightly in terms of DRM and
> the like - but that's not been accepted yet.

It hasn't, but it's probably really close now - even Linus has started
to come round with the latest draft.

The DRM restrictions are just part of the distribution restrictions -
the GPL V3 restricts distributers from using non-copyright means to
artificially restrict access to the source (or the right to modify it).
This means patents, DRM or any other restrictive measure be in
technological or legal (within the bounds of applictive national laws).

I spent a good part of Friday morning reading the 3rd release candidate
of the GPL 3, parsing the changes and getting to understand the
subtleties (*yay*, that's actually part of my job these days).    The
document is getting more and more refined, it's actually quite
prermissive in some circumstances - as a maker of an appliance I would
be more restricted if my appliance was sold to the consumer market
instead of the pharmaceutical market, for example.  As with any legal
document there are some akward pieces, and I find some of the specifics
a little overly targetted (probably essential to get the job done, but
perhaps not future proof).


-- 
Geoffrey Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation