Hi, it was point 18 of the TCPA/Palladium FAQ that concerneed me: Quote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> TCPA will undermine the General Public License (GPL), under which many free and open source software products are distributed. The GPL is designed to prevent the fruits of communal voluntary labour being hijacked by private companies for profit. Anyone can use and modify software distributed under this licence, but if you distribute a modified copy, you must make it available to the world, together with the source code so that other people can make subsequent modifications of their own.
At least two companies have started work on a TCPA-enhanced version of GNU/linux. This will involve tidying up the code and removing a number of features. To get a certificate from the TCPA corsortium, the sponsor will then have to submit the pruned code to an evaluation lab, together with a mass of documentation showing why various known attacks on the code don't work. (The evaluation is at level E3 - expensive enough to keep out the free software community, yet lax enough for most commercial software vendors to have a chance to get their lousy code through.) Although the modified program will be covered by the GPL, and the source code will be free to everyone, it will not make full use of the TCPA features unless you have a certificate for it that is specific to the Fritz chip on your own machine. That is what will cost you money (if not at first, then eventually). You will still be free to make modifications to the modified code, but you won't be able to get a certificate that gets you into the TCPA system. Something similar happens with the linux supplied by Sony for the Playstation 2; the console's copy protection mechanisms prevent you from running an altered binary, and from using a number of the hardware features. Even if a philanthropist does a not-for-profit secure GNU/linux, the resulting product would not really be a GPL version of a TCPA operating system, but a proprietary operating system that the philanthropist could give away free. (There is still the question of who would pay for the user certificates.) People believed that the GPL made it impossible for a company to come along and steal code that was the result of community effort. This helped make people willing to give up their spare time to write free software for the communal benefit. But TCPA changes that. Once the majority of PCs on the market are TCPA-enabled, the GPL won't work as intended. The benefit for Microsoft is not that this will destroy free software directly. The point is this: once people realise that even GPL'led software can be hijacked for commercial purposes, idealistic young programmers will be much less motivated to write free software.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> End Quote
Best wishes, Rob Lennart Regebro wrote:
From: "rra42" <rra42@yahoo.co.uk>
Will developers who make a living from Zope/Python be out of work when TCPA comes next year?
Uh? Of course. It doesn't have any impact on Zope at all, at least not on the short term. Assuming you are talking about the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, at least. In the long term it might even be beneficial, since TCPA is created to stop pirating of software, and since Zope is free, people might choose free open source software more than they already do. :-)
In the long term Zope might need to be able to support license distribution with TCPA, and I have no idea how hard that will be.
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