GPL v3 Coming Out in 2007?

gentoo1337 writes "Eben Moglen of the FSF speaks out in this ZDNet article, noting that GPL v3 may be publicly drafted in early 2006, and in force one year later. The process is very sensitive (noting concerns of forking in the Linux world), but Eben Moglen is optimistic: 'When it's all over, people are going to say, "All that talking for just that much change?" [...] We will do no harm. If we think (some change) may have any unintended consequences, we will not recommend making it.' Controversies aside, there is some good news -- Richard Stallman aims to 'lower barriers that today prevent the mixing of software covered by the GPL and other licenses.' The earlier Slashdot discussion contains complementary info about the intentions of FSF."

Clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in Eben's talk. The following sentence from the summary is a but unclear:

lower barriers that today prevent the mixing of software covered by the GPL and other licenses.

What RMS means by this is compatibility with other Free software licenses (such as hopefully the Apache license), rather than compromise with proprietary software.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What's missing from GPL2?

[Brandybuck]

Personally, I think that making internal changes and not sharing them with the world is against the spirit of the GPL.

Why do you think that? Do you think the same of companies that use GPL software *internally*? You've said yourself that this is okay, and in addition, RMS has gone out of his way to reject licenses that demand this. But what's the difference?

Applying the restrictions only within the legal domain of copyright **IS** the spirit of the GPL! To subsequently extend it beyond the domain of copyright to encompass the execution of software on servers is what is against the spirit of the GPL.

Uh, why can't you have that now?

[mcc]

All you have to do is distribute your program under the GPL, and provide a file saying "you are granted the rights to redistribute under the GPL, however you also are granted the right to link against this program and redistribute freely so long as you do so only via the interfaces declared in public_interface.h."

It is as simple as that. The Linux Kernel, as it happens, does almost exactly this.

Another option is that you could put some parts of your program (the "private" parts) under the GPL and other parts (the "public" parts) under the LGPL. I have seen programs that did exactly this.

The GPL does not restrict rights. It only grants them. As the copyright holder, you are of course free to grant as many other rights as you want in addition to the GPL rights. Of course, you can't speak for any other copyright holders that may have provided material in the program...

Re:Analysis Paralysis?

[Waffle Iron]

I don't need a licence to use a knife and fork, why a computer program?

You don't need any license to use a GPL'd program. You only need a license if you want to redistribute it.

The reason you need the license to redistribute the computer program is because copyright law says you have no right to do so otherwise.

Re:Uh, why can't you have that now?

[mcc]

Sure you can.

If there's GPL and LGPL code mixed in a program, then the program as a whole is licensed under the GPL.

However, the LGPLed parts are still just as LGPLed as they were before. The LGPL parts may then be detached and used in anything else you like. An example of this in action would be the KDE web browser Konqueror. Konqueror is under the GPL. However, portions of it (specifically the KHTML web rendering component) are licensed under the LGPL. You can't take Konqueror (or anything built using any of the GPL-licensed files in Konqueror) and distribute it without obeying the GPL. However, you can take KHTML-- which is an extremely useful piece of software-- build a new web browser around it, and resell it completely free of GPL obligations. Several commercial groups, such as Apple Computer, have done exactly this.

This obviously only works under some circumstances (for example, when the LGPLed component is something which can be detached and still be useful), but under some circumstances this is exactly what you want. I considered it worthy of mention because the toplevel post seemed to me to be very vague about exactly what it was he wanted.

Re:Where else have you heard talk about the GPLv3?

[Dionysus]

How about Slashdot posts?

Newsforge previews GPLv3, part 1 [slashdot.org]
Preview, part 2 [slashdot.org]
FSF's Bradley Kuhn interview [slashdot.org]
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 2/03/1359232&tid=117&tid=156&tid=17 [slashdot.org]
Debian and ZDNet discusses GPLv3 [slashdot.org]
Business impact of GPLv3 [slashdot.org]
Purpose of GPLv3 according to RMS and Moglen [slashdot.org]

Re:Version conflicts?

[majiCk]

Well, the recommended wording reads (emphasis mine):

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or

(at your option) any later version.

As an author you needn't worry about having to pay licensing fees, since the GPL governs redistribution and doesn't take away the author's copyright. Furthermore, you needn't worry about people being forced to pay licensing fees to redistribute your software, since they can always elect not to apply the terms of the new license.

This issue is covered in the GPL FAQ [fsf.org].

(ex post facto disclaimer: IANAL)