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."

Version conflicts?

[Ossifer]

Being that 99 44/100% of all GPL'd software originally came out under the current GPL, will there be any version conflicts with currently licensed software? I.e. if the newer license is *less* restrictive on some point, can existing software licensing be "upgraded" to the new license without have to obtain the acceptance of every single contributor?

P.S. This is a real question, not a flamebait or troll...

Re:What's missing from GPL2?

[Baricom]

Some people have expressed concern that organizations can take GPL'd code, modify it, and then run a web site with it. The act of running a web site using GPL code isn't considered distribution by the FSF, and the source code modifications therefore can be kept to themselves.

That's the argument. Personally, I don't know how I feel about it one way or the other.

This is old news

[darthgnu]

Sorry for sounding pedantic, but he announced this at the FSF associate members meeting March 26th. I'm surprised nobody came out with this info earlier.

Re:What's missing from GPL2?

[Anonymous Coward]

The current "problem" with the GPL is that it's very polarized, either all the code in a given application/device is open or it is closed. For better or worse, this is causing a lot of reinventing of the wheel (or just going for different licenses, eg BSD) by companies that don't want to show their core algorithms to their competitors just because they want to use some existing code to do non-core functionality (eg imagine if zlib was GPL instead of BSD. PNG and HTTP/1.1 on the fly compression would be supported by maybe two manufacturers).

Re:Analysis Paralysis?

[Wesley Felter]

Yeah, heaven forbid that the users of the GPL would have any say in how it works.

I've said it before...

[Nuclear Elephant]

All I want is the ability to declare public and private interfaces for GPL products, where public interfaces can be used with any type of license and private interfaces are off-limits unless you're a GPL project.

licence free software

[ZhuLien]

I actually agree with a fair amount of this regarding licence-free software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License-free_software [wikipedia.org]

Fonts

[proxima]

With luck, the GPL v3 will clear up the issue of fonts [fsf.org]. The issue has been discussed on Slashdot before [slashdot.org].Namely, that if I use a GPL font in a document, and subsequently embed that font through a document format (OO's sxw or OpenDocument, pdf, ps, etc), it's unclear as to whether I have the legal ability to do so without declaring the document itself GPL (which isn't really a document license). People sometimes (apparently mistakenly, but IANAL) say that it would force your document to be GPLed, but that's really not the case. You can't be automatically forced to license your work as anything, but you can be guilty of copyright infringement. The issue does also apparently not extend to printed documents and such, since the font itself cannot be copyrighted, only the code (postscript, etc) that generates the font can be.

It's unfortunate that such vagueness persists with the GPL, but it seems to be a trend with copyright issues in general (fair use being the most visible).

Re:Version conflicts?

[zippthorne]

People should start putting time-limits in their code.. like, this code becomes public domain on such-and-such a date or in addition to the rights granted by the GPL, on {date} the rights of {other less restrictive license} are also granted.

This is necessary because the period of copyright keeps increasing and more than 90 years is far too long to wait to change a license in the world of software.

Re:What's missing from GPL2?

[quantaman]

Some people have expressed concern that organizations can take GPL'd code, modify it, and then run a web site with it. The act of running a web site using GPL code isn't considered distribution by the FSF, and the source code modifications therefore can be kept to themselves.

To state the concern more clearly say EvilCompany takes gcc, does some crazy optimizations, and starts running it on their server never releasing the code, call it pgcc (propietary gcc). Then they sell a small app ttpgcc (talking to propietary gcc) which communicates over the internet to pgcc. ttpgcc sends the code and whatever args to pgcc, which then compiles it and sends back the binary (assuming mad bandwidth and stuff). The user never recieves a copy of pgcc, thus they have no rights to the code under the gpl, however through ttpgcc EvilCompany is now selling an app which is effect a forked version of gcc.

I don't know how to disallow this scenario yet allow a webserver in a license but this certainly presents a problem.