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Open source overhaul: GPLv3 on the way
Patents and DRM among the issues likely to be addressed...
By Stephen Shankland
Published: Thursday 12 January 2006
A major revamp of the General Public License (GPL) is scheduled for public release next week, a move that's expected to kick off a long and vocal debate over the key foundation of open source programming.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) will release and describe the first public draft of version 3 of the document on 16 January, at the First International Conference on GPLv3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the organisation said.
FSF founder Richard Stallman released the current version 2 in 1991. Since then, it's been used to govern Linux, MySQL, Samba and thousands of other open source projects. The new version is expected to address a host of technology issues that have arisen in the last 15 years, including patent issues and software running on a remote server.
The GPL is a seminal work. It's not just a legal document but also a manifesto of the free software movement and its offshoot, the open source movement.
Tom Carey, an intellectual property attorney at Bromberg & Sunstein said: "It's tremendously important. Probably most lawyers who have an active practice in the software area have read the GPL and committed its essence to memory, which is something you can't say about any other licence."
At its foundation, the GPL requires several freedoms: a program's underlying source code may be seen, copied, modified and distributed.
However, if someone makes changes to a program and distributes those changes, the GPL requires that the modified source code be made available. That tenet is absent in other open source licences, such as the BSD-style varieties employed to cover Apache. The language in those other licences makes it possible to convert an open source project into a proprietary one.
The FSF plans several milestones in the revision process after the release of the public draft. First will be a second discussion draft, due in June. The GPL version 3 could be released as early as September but the schedule allows for a third discussion draft in October.
The group also hopes to complete GPL version 3 by 15 January, 2007 but is giving itself until March, 2007.
Among the issues likely to be addressed by the new GPL, Stallman said in an earlier interview, are the following:
The FSF said in a GPL background document: "Changes to the GPL, for whatever reason they are undertaken, must not undermine the underlying movement for freer exchange of knowledge.
"To the extent that the movement has identified technological or legal measures likely to be harmful to freedom, such as "trusted computing" or a broadening of the scope of patent law, the GPL needs to address those issues from a perspective of political principle and the needs of the movement, not from primary regard for the industrial or commercial consequences."
The group is also working on revising the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a variant that allows tighter links between open source and proprietary software modules. LGPL drafts may be presented after the GPL revision process begins.
Changes to the variant licence should be a priority, Bromberg & Sunstein's Carey said. "I'm less concerned about the GPL than I am about the LGPL. I've read it 10 times and I still don't know what it means, and I was a programmer as well as a lawyer. If I can't understand it, I'm not sure who can. It doesn't have the ease of use the GPL has."
Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com
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