Here is my grounds for poo-pooing your concern.
Darl McDLT, runs a business as an application service provider. Let us say that he has a potential customer that is having performance problem at the current provider they are using. They are using a CMS written in PHP and backended by MySQL, both released under the GPLv2. Pretty straight forward. Pretty much all the bells and whistles, just slow as hell, maybe becuase of not enough bandwidth to service the full load, or maybe just not enough processor umph for the job... in any case, said prospective customer says that if Darl can demo a faster system they'd switch in a heart beat.Plain and simple explanation of events that happen all day long in Business, right? Right.
Darl goes and does his stuff. Through his amazingly awesome programming skills, he, discovers a speedup for the SQL engine of MySQL. Solid, so solid in fact it reduces the time to start by half and speedsup SQL queries by a factor of 10. Muahahaha... nice coup there. Then Darl starts on the CMS. There he also discovers, just by removing a one line sanity check (that is prone to slow-down because of the massive amount of data it is checking against) in a file, and adding 3 quick-checks in 3 other files, doing the same thing but with constraints, gives him the same results and also significantly speeds up processing time by another factor of 4.
He then decides to rollout and deploy this customized-to-his-needs version. Does the Demo, lands the contract for the application providing. He makes lotsa money. All well and good. He has a huge competitive advantage.
Followup questions for you:
- Is there any doubt he is well within the rights of the GPLv2?
- Is there any question that he is distributing the use of the CMS backended by MySQL?
- Is there any question, that he changed the code?
- Are you satisfied, that were you Darl's competitor, that he is using nearly identical hardware and bandwidth, that trounces your setup you pride yourself in being as "Good as it gets" in regards to tweaks and making the preoper optimizations for you platform?
- Yet Darl is using the same software and nearly the same hardware, yet his site is better than 20 times faster then yours and due to that can handle many more customers on that setup, stealing business away from you. Do this seem fair?
- Do you agree, that "technically" he *IS* distributing a binary usage, being used by hundreds (if not thousands) of people?
- If you do not think he is providing / selling / distributing / making-available-for-pay the Binaries of this CMS and MySQL, then what is he selling or providing?
- Based on you answer, please tell me how you can defend this? (yes I presumed you would not agree)
What if both MySQL and the CMS were actually YOUR programs, that YOU copyrighted and released under the GNU GPLv2? What effect would that have on your stance? Would this affect your willingness to continue developing these programs, pro-bono?
You see, what Moglen and the FSF are trying to accomplish here, are trying to close those corporate welfare usage problems that are existing right now. There are companies using so heavily modified software packages (the actual source for these programs, not the "implemntation of them") that are selling them as a service. This is literally allowing the corporations to feed off the goodwill of the "FOSS Community". Look at Sun and how it is trying this same thing with Solaris, don't get me wrong, it is cool for them to try and grab a piece of the Free Developement available out there, but at what expense to other things?
I guess by now, you'll have ignored anything after the thrid numbered question. I am very upset, that you of all people don't get what this is calling for. It is NOT, ANTI-BUSINESS, just that it closes the loophole that has already been closed for the "distributors of binaries compiled from GPLv2 source", if it were so anti-business, why are so many businesses, starting to actually release source under the GPLv2, and more than likely will start using GPLv3, when the misunderstandings are worked out and everyone understands what "Web Services" really means.
