GNU General Public License has provided the legal foundation for much of what’s been accomplished with free and open source software. Now the license’s steward, the Free Software Foundation, is revising the venerable document to comprehend the complexities of developing and distributing open source software in the modern day. In this exclusive article, Groklaw founder and editor Pamela Jones analyzes many of the proposed changes found in GPL Version 3 and explains what’s in store for you if your name is Joe Coder.
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For more than ten years, the GNU General Public License has provided the legal foundation for much of what’s been accomplished with free and open source software. Now the license’s steward, the Free Software Foundation, is revising the venerable document to comprehend the complexities of developing and distributing open source software in the modern day. In this exclusive article, Groklaw founder and editor Pamela Jones analyzes many of the proposed changes found in GPL Version 3 and explains what’s in store for you if your name is Joe Coder.
The GPL has succeeded in preventing a proprietary enclosure of the commons. So why update it?
Two things have happened that make an update of the GPL desirable: the world has become more complex legally (think of software patents), and the whole world has become interested in GPL’d software. In the first instance, the new complexities must be addressed in the license; in the second, the license needs to be worded to be effective beyond US borders, under other countries’ legal systems, not just under United States copyright and patent law.
As the rationale explains:
“Most countries have followed the direction of the United States, permitting software to be patented to at least some degree. This worldwide shift in patent law has brought about immense harm and injustice… A program’s own license cannot protect it from the threat of software patents. The only real solution to the problem of software patents is to abolish them. However, we can protect against attempts by some participants in a program’s development to use patents against other participants. GPLv3 provides an explicit patent license covering any patents held by the program’s developers, replacing the implicit license on which GPLv2 relies. GPLv3 also implements a narrow scheme of patent retaliation against those who undertake this precise form of aggression.”
Updating the GPL is in part, then, to deal with the new landscape and to make sure that the GPL works internationally.
And as an example of drafting globally, the word “distribution”…
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