[Committee-d] Meeting tomorrow?/rallying cry

[Brett Smith]

It's been a while since we've had any kind of good discussion about the
remaining GPLv3 issues people are interested in.  Time is running pretty
tight now for the next and likely final draft, so if you want your
suggestions for improvements to be heard, we need to start talking about
them now so they can be written up and escalated in time.  Can people meet
at the usual time (6 PM USA Eastern) tomorrow?  If not, name some times
that would work for you, and we'll see if we can arrange something else.

I'd really like to see some good stuff come out of this committee, because
I've seen the great ideas you all have, and it'd be a shame for RMS and
Eben not to hear about them because it seems like we all collectively got
tied up in other commitments around this time.  I'm not criticizing
anybody; I haven't been especially helpful myself, and I know how hard it
is to volunteer time and effort for something like this.  But as Fontana
pointed out recently, the committees who have made the most suggestions are
the ones who have had the most influence on the draft so far.

The other committees are talking about things like how there should be a
patent license rather than a covenant not to sue, because the latter causes
patent exhaustion.  Patent exhaustion is a topic so obscure, you can't even
look it up on Wikipedia.  One of the other committees wants to scrap
section 7 entirely and replace it with a list of compatible licenses, a la
MySQL's GPL exception -- and they don't want the Affero GPL on that list.
These are the kinds of things RMS and Eben are going to be hearing as they
work on the final draft.  I'd feel better about that if I knew they were
hearing from you all, too.

Here are the issues that I know are open in some way:

* System libraries exception
  (http://gplv3.fsf.org/pipermail/committee-d/2006-August/000129.html): I
  already passed this along to RMS because it came up in another context.
  But both of us would be very interested in feedback on the specific
  language, and suggestions for how to improve it.

* The Affero compatibility clause, section 7b4: Last I heard, Mako was
  going to discuss the underlying goals and philosophy behind the Affero
  GPL with Henri Poole, to see what kinds of changes might be possible for
  GPLv3.  Has this happened yet?  If not, it might be a good idea to just
  make whatever suggestions we want, and assume that there's a chance the
  Affero GPL can be updated accordingly.  RMS has already made statements
  suggesting that this will have to be the case, so I don't think it will
  be a problem.  But I've lost track of what changes we wanted to make
  here....

* DRM: Hm, we never did do Seth's thought experiments.  Does anybody think
  there are cases caught by the current language that shouldn't be?  Or
  cases that aren't caught that should be?  Does anybody have any general
  ideas for improving the language, or idea behind it?

If there's anything else, now would be the time to bring it up.  No need to
wait for the meeting; just send it to the list.  We're mostly hacker types,
after all, so we shouldn't be afraid of some mailing list organizing.  :)

Thanks everyone,

-- 
Brett Smith
Licensing Compliance Engineer, Free Software Foundation