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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new draft of their General Public License last month, the GPL version 3. The previous version was pretty successful: it's lasted fifteen years and is the license chosen by over seventy percent of all Free Software projects including my own project, Samba. I went to Boston, Massachusetts to take part in the publicity around the launch, and to help form “Committee A”, one of three groups who have been asked to raise any issues that reviewers of the new license might find and pass them on to the original author and founder of the FSF, Richard Stallman, so he can decide if they need addressing.
The GPL has always been a somewhat contentious software license. It was born out of anger over Non-Disclosure Agreements imposed by proprietary vendors and has come under much criticism for it's “viral” nature: in essence, if you distribute software under the GPL any modifications you might make to it must also come under the same license terms. Rather than the pejorative term “viral” I prefer to call it the nursery school principle of “share and share alike”. But it's getting a little old to confront some of the direct threats that Free Software is coming under from the new opponents of freedom, the “Intellectual Property” crowd, whose ultimate goal is to apply property law and ownership to every idea and expression of human creativity.
The GPL version 2 wasn't written to address the world of 2006. Back in 1991 when it was written the main threats to freedom came from proprietary software vendors, who wanted to lock up all software code in “black boxes”, preventing any studying of code, or education from it. Those people are less of a threat these days, as the healthy ecosystem of Free Software developers and companies encourages more and more old proprietary vendors to join in to gain the benefits of an ever expanding pool of open code. I think that's a battle that we can say we're ultimately going to win, or at least create a world of peaceful co-existence, where people have the choice of a Free Software alternative for ultimately all of their computing needs. Don't forget that “computing needs” are fast moving out of the realm of luxury and into that of necessity for basic communication between people, as more and more of our daily lives move online. This is no insignificant feat for Free Software.
The main changes proposed for the GPL version 3 are to combat two fearsome new threats, and to make some changes to help expand the Free Software universe by bringing more Free Software licenses into compatibility with the GPL. After seeing an early version several years ago which was a very different document to what was published last month I must confess I'm extremely happy with the proposed new license. It makes what Isaac Asimov in his wonderful science fiction novel “The End of Eternity” might have called the “minimum necessary change” to the license to achieve these goals. Of course he was referring to the dangerous changes to reality that could be caused by time travel, and I'm only talking about license texts, but the principle is the same :-).
The two threats are those of software patents, which have become a worse scourge on the industry than could possibly have been imagined back in 1991, and the true evil of what is called “Digital Rights Management” or DRM, but really should be termed “Digital Restrictions Management”. Software patents threaten to choke off the very building blocks of all software, not just Free Software, but DRM threatens the very existence of an open society: moving towards a world where the public library cannot exist, as the viewing of all digital books, music, movies and art is restricted by their owners and permission must be explicitly granted for every “performance”: that's reading a book to you and I.
The GPL version 3 is just a license after all, and on it's own can't cure the sickness that leads to either of these things. But it can make sure that software that implements DRM restrictions isn't ever allowed under the GPL version 3 license. In other words, people wanting to implement DRM have to write their own code, not get a free ride on GPL software. Whenever you hear apologists for the “content” industries decry the additional prohibitions on DRM code in the GPL version 3 - remember this, it's only requesting that they write their own code to restrict your freedom. Use of the pool of software created under the GPL is a privilege granted to those who play by the rules, not a right for people wishing to destroy it.
I urge all to readers take a look at the online comment site for the GPL version 3, at :
and get involved by reading and reviewing the proposed license. You've got a year to do so, so there's no rush. If you see a bug in the license please add a comment to it and explain the problem. One important matter to realize is that most of the Free Software projects out there contain language allowing them to be distributed under the terms “either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version”. What this means was pointed out to me in Boston by Andrew Tridgell, the original author of Samba and someone who tends to think of language in the same way as code (and who incidentally was awarded the FSF Free Software award at the same meeting). If the GPL version 3 has a problem with it that allows someone to figure out a way around the intent of the new license, this essentially creates an exploitable “security hole” in all Free Software published under the GPL and prevents the “share and share alike” principle. It's extremely important that the new license be completely bullet-proof when first published, we won't get a chance to recall a mistake. Please help us to pore over every possible meaning to get this right the first time. Unchecked, DRM will affect all of us, we need to fight to protect our Free Software digital future.