Chill about GPL v3 - Alan Zeichick

If you talk to anyone about open source software these days, the topic of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License v3 is sure to come up. People – or rather, those people who think about open source licenses – generally fall into three categories:

• GPL v3 is the worst thing since Rome was sacked by Alaric, King of the Visigoths, and will result in the destruction of the open source movement. This seems to be the majority opinion, and is argued very passionately.

• GPL v3 is an improvement over GPL v2, primarily because it might do a better job of reining in Microsoft. This seems to be the minority opinion, and is expressed without much passion.

• GPL v3 is just another open source license, use it if you want, and don’t if you don’t. Not too many people express this opinion, but it’s the one that I hold.

My own preference would have been that the Free Software Foundation, which “owns” the General Public License, had spawned GPL v3 as a brand new license, rather than presenting it as a simple update of the very successful GPL v2. For example, there is already the LGPL, the Lesser General Public License. Perhaps what we’re seeing as GPL v3 could have been called the GGPL v1, for the Greater General Public License, or SGPL v1, for the Strong General Public License.

Why does this matter? Well, some software (I don’t know how much) is written to say that it conforms to “GPL v2 or later.” Thus, such software will automatically will fall under the provisions of GPL v3 when that license is finalized, which I doubt is what the people who wrote “GPL v2 or later” intended.

Note: I think that Richard Stallman and the FSF knew exactly what they were doing, and see the automatic migration of all “GPL v2 or later” projects to GPL v3 as essential to swiftly establishing a base of GPL v3 intellectual property.

I was pleased that at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (which I attended on June 13), many presenters held a level-headed view of the GPL v3 issue. One speaker, Dan Frye for IBM, seemed to speak for many there when he said, “Just chill when v3 comes out. Let’s just see how things go.”

In all fairness to those who were appalled by the first drafts of GPL v3, the initial versions were terrible, and would have done tremendous harm. Richard Stallman deserves kudos for his uncharacteristic flexibility. A kinder, gentler Stallman – who’d have thought it?

So, chill, everyone.

However, IANAL: I am not a lawyer.

There was a panel of attorneys at the Summit discussing intellectual property and license issues, and it was fascinating. McCoy Smith, a senior attorney at Intel, made the point that while individuals and even companies can try to adhere to what a community generally believes that license says, that’s only valid as long as people are working together directly. As soon as a dispute goes to court, he said, decisions are made by the specific language in the license – and not by what everyone “knows” the licenses supposed to mean.

Smith, who worked on the GPL v3 project, said, “This came up a lot with GPL v3. The FSF said we had this v2 license for a number of years, but there are potential issues with the way that it was written that could be exploited by its enemies. So, there’s a problem where amateur lawyers might not capture their intentions property. However, this largely polices itself. If everyone in the community abides by the intention, and it’s not going to court, you’re okay.”

But if Linux does go to court – perhaps in cases involving Microsoft or SCO – licensing terms like the GPL v2, which were written by amateur lawyers, might not be good enough.

As Jason Wacha, general counsel for MontaVista Software, said, “Sometimes amateurs are better at describing what they want to do. The five most dangerous letters in the English language are IANAL, especially when you try to interpret copyright or patent law. If you’re not a lawyer, don’t try to interpret the law. You have to go by the actual words in the statutes, not by how people have been interpreting that statute.”

So, chill – carefully.