Schism in the open-source world: GPL vs. DRM
It’s been brewing for a while, but a fissure in the world of open-source software may be about to widen dramatically.At issue: digital rights management (DRM), the technology that allows copyright holders to restrict how you use the media they publish.On the line: the latest version of the General Public License (GPL), the legal framework that establishes the ground rules for developing, using and distributing open-source software…. The man behind Linux, Linus Torvalds, wants to leave options open for open-source developers to introduce DRM to their software.The positions in a nutshell, as reported by ZDNet:The foundation believes that free software–that is, software that can be freely studied, copied, modified, reused, redistributed and shared by its users–is the only ethically satisfactory form of software development, as free and open scientific research is the only ethically satisfactory context for the conduct of mathematics, physics or biology.
