A posição particularmente estranha do Linus Torvalds em defender o DRM contra as alterações propostas pelos rascunhos da GNU GPL versão 3 levou-me a escrever uma variação do poema de Martin Niemöller…
First they took our freedom in Tivos, and I did not speak out–
because I would not buy a Tivo;Then they took our freedom in XBox, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a gamer;Then they came for the MacIntels, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a Apple Fanboy;Then they came for the Appliances, and I did not speak out–
because they either work better or I use “Open Source”;Then they came for the PCs–
and there was no one left to speak out for us “Linux” users.
É o que chamo de falso “pragmatismo”… prefiro bem mais um pragmatismo mais honesto como o do Alan Cox, sobre o mesmo tema, mas ainda pensando no 1º rascunho da GPL V3:
Audience member: What do you think about the Digital Rights Management stuff in the GPL 3 itself?
Alan Cox: Ehm, as the draft stands at the moment, it’s a bit heavy handed. I’d like to think there’s a more elegant way of solving the problem.
(…)
I think a lot of the other changes in GPLv3 are very good. Particularly, for example, where it’s clarifying graphical applications and the web. Because GPLv2 is really in the world of the command line. So it had things in it saying “if the program prints that it is GPL software, you may not remove that”, but it didn’t have anything saying “if there’s an about box… you may not remove that”, or “if the web page says… you may not remove that”. So that’s being clarified. That kind of stuff I support. So I think those parts of the licence are a definite improvement.
But it’s only a draft. You still have an ongoing consultation and will do for quite some time yet. …and we’ll see how it evolves.
Repare-se na diferença de atitude… não concordo plenamente com o que ele diz, mas é um bom exemplo de falso versus verdadeiro pragmatismo.