| Where, Oh Where, is the GPLv3? |
Mar. 18, 2007
Almost two years ago, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) started work on the first update of the GNU GPL (General Public License) in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing.
The FSF announced at the May 2005 LinuxWorld Expo that the GPLv3 would be out soon . The project has taken a little longer than expected. At last report, the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License 3) was to be out by early 2007 .
According to Peter Brown, the FSF's executive director, "We continue to work on the details of the GPLv3 as it relates to the situation presented by the Novell and Microsoft deal. We are researching issues related to potential unintended consequences of the language we plan to adopt. As soon as we are satisfied with the results of our research we plan to bring forward the next draft."
As written, the patent clauses in the Novell/Microsoft agreement do not violate the current terms of the GPLv2. The leader of the FSF and chief author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, explained at a GPL meeting in Tokyo in November 2006: "What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone." Stallman went on to say that "perhaps it's a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it's not too late and we're going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals."
Sources close to the creation of the new version of the GPL believed that correcting this language wouldn't take long to craft. If so, the GPLv3 would still have appeared by its last scheduled delivery date of January 15, 2007. That did not prove to be the case.
It now appears that there may be one more draft of the GPLv3 before the final version is released. [Sources believe] that the next draft should appear on or immediately before its annual associate member and activist meeting March 27 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
While these legal licensing language debates linger on, there is considerable debate about the GPLv3 in the open-source community. Linus Torvalds, Linux's chief creator, has made no secret of the fact that he prefers the existing GPLv2 license to the weaker patent language in the most recent GPLv3 draft. Other leading Linux developers, including Andrew Morton, James E.J. Bottomley, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Christoph Hellwig, have announced that they expect to "reject the current license proposal" for Linux.
In a position paper, the Linux core developers wrote: "As far as we are concerned (and insofar as we control subsystems of the kernel) we cannot foresee any drafts of GPLv3 coming out of the current drafting process that would prove acceptable to us as a license to move the current Linux kernel to."
On the other hand, some groups have come out in favor of the GPLv3. The Samba Group has announced that it intends to move its codebase to the new GPL . At least two important open-source companies, Sun and MySQL, are also seriously considering using the GPLv3. It remains to be seen whether or not they will have made their decisions by the time the new version is released.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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