The last software licence you’ll need?
- Article 10 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, March 2006
The best-known and most notorious free software licence in the world, the GNU GPL, is being updated for the first time in 15 years. Rob Buckley finds out how businesses have been taking to the news, and how it will affect end-users.
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She was also wary of the licence-compatibility clauses, although was positive about the idea in general. “If this feature of the license is adopted, it would become necessary to track a new class of special licence information; whereas in the past, GPL-licensed projects had much simpler licensing information – just GPL.”
For the most part, though, companies are broadly welcoming of the draft GPL. So far, few have spoken out against any particular terms of the draft, even to each other. MySQL’s vice president of community relations, Kaj Arnö, is on one of the FSF’s discussion committees now studying the draft of new GPL. He says that so far, most companies have said it was a good update. “The effects are mostly positive. It’s clearer, less ambiguous and more compatible. Overall, the draft as far as it was written has now been welcomed by all the different parties, including companies such as HP and Apple.”
So far, his committee has raised 31 comments on the draft that it must now work its way through, but he doesn’t envisage any radical changes being proposed. After considering these, the committee will make suggestions about potential amendments to the FSF; the FSF will then decide whether to include them in a future draft, along with comments from other committees and the public. After one or two more drafts, the FSF will release the final version of the GPL no later than March 2007, but preferably on 15 January 2007. All projects that include licensing terms of “GPLv2 or greater” will be automatically updated to use the new version, while other projects will have to decide whether to migrate to version three, if that’s even possible.
With the decision about the inclusion of DRM and patents clauses in the GPL down to the FSF, it’s unlikely they will be removed during future drafts since they embody so many of the foundations’ beliefs. That means that some vendors that have patents or DRM software, but who are also strong open source proponents, are going to have to make a choice. Given the industry and customer momentum behind open source, many of these companies are going to have to make hard decisions: abandon open source and potentially lose millions or even billions of dollars in revenue; or abandon aggressive use of patents and any use of DRM altogether and potentially lose the same amount of money.
Most will side with GPLv3, whether they like it or not. Some will fudge the issue and try to avoid shipping GPLv3 software while continuing with GPLv2 programs. That will be a stop-gap solution at best as the industry marches on and projects update automatically to GPLv3. Then they’ll be faced with a classic dilemma: which will win – an unstoppable force or an immovable object?
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