SOURCE: WIRED Magazine
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,55989,00.html
02:00 AM Oct. 25, 2002 PT
An attack on the software license behind the Linux operating system has
stirred up a free software controversy in Washington.
Earlier this week, three members of the House of Representatives, Adam
Smith (D-Wash.), Ron Kind (D-Wis.) and Jim Davis (D-Fla.), sent a note
to 74 Democrats in Congress attacking Linux's GNU General Public License
(GPL) as a threat to America's "innovation and security."
The note urged members to support a letter written by Reps. Tom Davis
(R-Va.) and Jim Turner (D-Texas) to Richard Clarke, who heads the board
in charge of hammering out U.S. cybersecurity policy. Davis and Turner's
letter asks that the plan explicitly reject "licenses that would prevent
or discourage commercial adoption of promising cybersecurity
technologies developed through federal R&D."
There's only one problem.
Tom Davis and Jim Turner say their letter has absolutely nothing to do
with open source or the GPL.
"The (Tom) Davis letter was not intended to address the open-source
debate," Tom Davis spokesman Dave Marin said. "All this letter does is
request that the status quo be maintained, so that we can maintain
interest in federal R&D."
Smith, whose largest political contributor is Microsoft, has come under
fire for his involvement in the controversy.
But Smith's spokesperson, Katherine Lister, says the congressman was
motivated by a desire to foster innovation. "In no way, shape or form
does Microsoft ever drive our technology policy," she said.
The GPL's creators disagree. "The rhetoric is almost word for word what
Microsoft has been saying for 19 months," said Bradley Kuhn, executive
director of the Free Software Foundation. "How is it that that kind of
rhetoric ends up in a congressperson's letter?"
Red Hat general counsel Mark Webbink speculated that some members of
Congress may have signed the anti-GPL note without fully realizing what
they were doing. "I think they were probably hastened into something
that most of them would now recognize as not being that well advised,"
he said.
Created in response to last year's Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke's Critical
Infrastructure Protection Board recently released a draft of its plan to
secure America's technology infrastructure.
The draft plan makes no mention of the GPL, and only one mention of
Linux. In a section of recommendations for home and small-business
users, it advises that Windows, Macintosh and Linux users regularly
update their operating systems.
In their note, Smith, Kind and Jim Davis asked for the cybersecurity
plan to be modified to reject the GPL.
And while Davis and Turner's letter urges drafters of the plan to
"explicitly reject" licenses that would discourage commercial adoption
of technology, representatives from both congressmen's offices declined
to say what licenses should be rejected.
"If you believe that government-funded R&D is a good thing, then you
agree with the principles of this letter," Marin said.
Computer security expert Gene Spafford said Congress should look beyond
the free software license if it wants to encourage companies to adopt
federally developed technology.
"Why don't we also reject any software patents and copyrights that could
discourage the adoption and use of software developed under federal
funds?" Spafford asked.
Open-source advocates say this controversy is just one of the opening
salvos in what they expect will become a major struggle to define the
role of open-source and GPL software in the federal government.
Some divisions of the U.S. government already run Linux and open-source
software, and federal research dollars are beginning to trickle into GPL
projects like the National Security Agency-funded Security-Enhanced
Linux project.
End of story
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