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Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic -- and a great many universities do not -- that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser. But wait, you say: Wouldn't someone need to know the domain name or Internet address of the Web server that's running the toolkit? Yes. However, anyone familiar enough with the file-naming convention used by the toolkit could use Google to search for the server. But surely there are ways a network administrator might keep this information from being available to the entire Web, right? Yes. The toolkit allows an administrator to require a username and password for access to the Web server. The problem is that the person responsible for running the toolkit is never prompted to create a username and password. What's more, while Apache includes a feature that can record when an outsider views the site, that logging is turned off by default in the MPAA's University Toolkit.

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The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.

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The 144-page document posted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Web site contained redacted versions of Novell's business, patent and technology agreements with Microsoft, which it signed in November 2006. While much of what was officially released is known, Novell did express concerns that the final draft of GPL 3, which slipped its March 2007 deadline, could see Microsoft halting the distribution of Suse Linux, having a financial impact on Novell. "If the final version of GPLv3 contains terms or conditions that interfere with our agreement with Microsoft or our ability to distribute GPLv3 code, Microsoft may cease to distribute Suse Linux coupons in order to avoid the extension of its patent covenants to a broader range of GPLv3 software recipients," Novell stated in the document.

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"Will you GPL Solaris, Mr. Green?" Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz asked Green. "We will take a very close look at it," Green said. "The familiarity and comfort level with the license we've chosen for Java doubtless is going to drive a lot of the decision-making, going forward, with the existing technologies that we've open-sourced." Green also said he wasn't averse to changing Solaris' license and that outsiders responded warmly to Sun's decision to use GPL for Java. "I think today's event and the feedback we received today really cast a very, very positive light on our choices going forward," he said.

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But while Torvalds has been enshrined as the Linux movement's creator, a lesser-known programmer--infamously more obstinate and far more eccentric than Torvalds--wields a startling amount of control as this revolution's resident enforcer. Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge. He and a band of anarchist acolytes long have waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants "evil" and "enemies of freedom" because they rake in sales and enforce patents and copyrights--when he argues they should be giving it all away.

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In addition, GPLv3-based software will be completely off the table for medical devices. Government safety and efficacy testing is rigorous and very specific. A device must be tested in the exact configuration it will operate in, and regulators won't take, "Well, we hope it will be this one" as an answer. More importantly, the lawyers would have a field day with "open" devices. Perhaps most ignored, however, is the effect this policy would have on software where privacy protection is important. For example, the government document creation and management market is a key target for the open-source community. Yet the definition of DRM in the new license would cover key-based access control for tools that create documents as well as music and movies.

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GPLv3 "basically says, 'We don't want access just to your software modifications. We want access to your hardware, too,'" Torvalds said. "I don't think it's my place as a software developer to judge how hardware works around it." But the Free Software Foundation argues that it's modernizing the license, not changing its spirit. It's seeking to prevent hardware makers from using DRM as a technological end-run around the license's legal requirements for programmer freedoms. "If you're keeping the right to modify and not conveying that right to modify, you're violating the license," said Eben Moglen, the foundation's top lawyer, in an earlier interview.