GPL 3: An Open-Source Earthquake?

Free And Open Software: A House Divided
Heading the idealists' side is Richard Stallman, president of the FSF and author of the GPL. For Stallman, free software is a sociopolitical movement and an ethical imperative. His eccentricity runs as deep as his zeal: His personal Web site includes an appeal to boycott Harry Potter books because of an injunction a court granted their Canadian publisher to prohibit people inadvertently sold a new installment before its official release date from reading the book they had purchased. Everyone involved in that injunction is "the enemy of human rights in Canada," Stallman charged.

On the other side are open-source proponents more focused on the practicalities of open code than on advancing an ideology. The Linux kernel developers, including kernel creator and coordinator Linus Torvalds, are in that camp. A position paper posted in September, authored by 10 current kernel maintainers, staked out their objections to GPL 3. Rather than solving genuinely urgent problems, the proposed update unfairly restricts code users' rights in service of furthering the FSF's anti-DRM crusade, the paper argued.

"There's no substantial and identified problem with GPLv2 that [GPL 3] is trying to solve," the kernel maintainers wrote. "Since GPLv2 has served us so well for so long, and since it is the foundation of our developer contract, which has helped propel Linux to the successes it enjoys today, we are extremely reluctant to contemplate tampering with that license."

Torvalds is even more fervent in his GPL 3 animosity. A piece he posted to Groklaw laying out his objections to the update was removed by Groklaw's maintainer, who wrote, "I am sorry, Linus, but I had to remove your comment because you violated our comments policy by swearing so much."

Colorful phrasing aside, Torvalds doesn't want to see Linux used as a weapon in an ideological battle. "By being pragmatic and not being too crazy about it, the 'Open Source' people ended up making open source a lot more accessible to a lot more users, and they made the software better, too," he wrote. "Because when you make your technical choices on technical grounds, rather than on religious ones, they end up being better."

The rift between the free- and open-source factions will have profound implications for the rest of the software industry when GPL 3 is adopted. The GPL is one of the simplest and most restrictive open-source licenses. It requires that all publicly distributed derivative works incorporating GPL code must be released under the same license, which makes the GPL incompatible with later versions of itself. Anticipating that problem, the FSF encourages anyone using the GPL to license their works for use under "version 2 or later." That wording creates a seamless migration path and allows older GPL code to intermingle with GPL 3 code.

But the Linux kernel is licensed under version 2 only, which puts it on a collision path with software created under GPL 3. It's not the only significant project with a "version 2 only" limitation. MySQL recently revised its license from "GPL version 2 or later" to "version 2 only," and Sun is opening Java under version 2.

NEXT: Moving to GPL 3 -- or not.