| Is GPL 3 dead on arrival? |
Aug. 03, 2006
We've been talking, meeting, and arguing over GPL 3 for nearly two years. Recently, the second draft of the long-awaited rewrite of the popular free-software license arrived. The debate has begun all over again. If we're lucky, we'll see a finished GPL 3 some time in early 2007.
It will have address DRM (digital rights management), patent concerns, clarify the existing language and, who knows, bring forth a new generation of software freedom never seen before. Or, it could sit there like a rock and not matter a whit.
Guess which one I'm betting on?
It's not that I think they're doing a bad job. Some of the best and brightest people I know, like Columbia University law professor and general counsel for the FSF (Free Software Foundation) Eben Moglen, have been working hard, very hard, on the GPL.
It's just that it's not going to matter.
On the one hand, some of the major companies that support open-source, like Hewlett-Packard, aren't happy with how the latest draft handles patents.
"HP had hoped that the second draft would clarify the patent provision such as to ease concern that mere distribution of a single copy of GPL-licensed software might have significant adverse IP impact on a company," said Christine Martino, HP's VP of open source and Linux, in a statement. "Unfortunately, the concern lingers in draft 2."
What exactly are these problems? Good question. HP isn't giving any further explanation, right now.
That's important, but the real deal-breaker for the GPL 3, as it's currently written, is Linus Torvalds's clear dislike for the new license.
Torvalds, the primary creator of Linux, wasn't happy with the first draft, and nothing has been modified in the second draft to make him change his mind.
In an email exchange with yours truly, Torvalds wrote, "Nothing fundamental seems to have really changed, so GPLv3 is pretty much irrelevant for the kernel."
He explains why he feels this way in detail, in a comment posted at Groklaw.
First, Torvalds sees the FSF as having its own political, almost religious, agenda that has little to do with what's right for open-source technology.
"The whole point about the changes in the GPLv3 is to be 'against' something else. That's how the FSF has always acted, and I don't know if you remember (or ever saw) the animosity between the BSD camps and the GPL camps, but a lot of it was because of how the FSF was preaching their religion as if it was 'evil' to do anything else, even with the GPLv2."
Instead, Torvalds suggests that "by being pragmatic and not being too crazy about it, the 'Open Source' people ended up making open source a lot more accessible to a lot more users, and they made the software better too. Because when you make your technical choices on technical grounds, rather than on religious ones, they end up being better."
Moving from the general to the specific, Torvalds wrote, "Just as a very concrete example, the anti-DRM stance of the GPLv3 is not only anti-Tivo, it's also anti-security. Exactly because it tries to make a non-technical stand on a technical issue, one that has very real impact on real behaviour."
Torvalds continued, "And any time you let your fears or your politics make what should be technical choices, the end result is inevitably crap, crap, crap. And the GPLv3 makes exactly those kinds of technical choices, on exactly that kind of non-technical basis."
By contrast, "Notice how the GPLv2 (the good one) didn't do that. It even made expressly clear that the act of 'running' the program was not restricted in any way, shape or form."
Now, you can argue, as some have, that Torvalds is mistaken about what the GPL 3 means by digital signatures and their relationship to running software and DRM. I'm no programming expert nor a lawyer, so I'm not going to venture a guess.
Here's what I do know, though, as someone who's been following open-source software since before the term existed.
Without the support of Torvalds, and without the Linux kernel moving from GPL 2 to GPL 3, the new license is a dead license.
We all know that the GPL needs revision. Software patents are a spreading poison that could kill off technology innovation in all software development, not just open-source. A stake needs to be buried in the heart of software patents, and the GPL 3 is an ideal place for an attack to be made on them and all their ills, such as patent trolls, that go with them.
But, the DRM and digital signatures language should be dumped. DRM is another battle for another day and another license. If these provisions are kept as they are, the GPL 3 will be a still-born standard from the day of its birth.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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