Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

GPLv3: Yes, I ignored it, let some dust settle, and now for my thoughts… if you care ;-)

I obviously was not ignoring the GPLv3 launch, but by not blogging about it, I was simply taking Dan’s advice to “just chill”. In the meantime, Luis Villa has posted a print-worthy analysis of what all the GPLv3 hype, changes, hoopla are about. He also offers his views and commentary which I found refreshing. I recommend reading Luis’ four part analysis starting with Part 1. After part 1, you will probably be hooked enough to take in Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Luis’ post-analysis Link Dump.

I will offer a couple comments on what I observed. First, I think the press had higher expectations of the “rolling support/relicensing” announcements would be. Let’s be realistic here: the text changed up until the final version (you can see the red-line version with changes from the “Last Call Draft” to the Final here). Obviously organizations, communities, projects, and vendors participating in the community will now only begin to evaluate licensing under GPLv3 (it’s hard to decide to license based on a changing draft license). You can see what GNU projects are beginning to relicense under GPLv3 here (June 29-30) and here (July).

I personally would not predict a major “ecosystem relicensing effort” to get all GPL licensed software under GPLv3. This process has surely brought to light a common understanding that GPLv2 is certainly good enough, and as Linus has pointed out… what’s the rush? Certainly there are some provisions like the patent “fix”, but whether that really “fixes everything” is doubtful anyway. So a few GNU projects have already gone to GPLv3 - the only point I’ll make here is you don’t need all of them to go to GPLv3 and you certainly don’t need the kernel at GPLv3 to have an impact. Just one package under GPLv3 is sufficient to have an effect and that’s already done. For patent issues… perhaps OIN is doing enough to keep predators at bay…

Does this minimize the importance of GPLv3? Not at all. If you ask me, the greatest output of all this debate, hype, FUD, clarification, drafting, and discussion is something amazing - a license built and agreed upon by the community. When was the last time you saw that happen? This is a true testament to the power of community innovation and the interest and support for GNU/Linux.

So if this is so great and the community is largely in agreement, why don’t we see everyone adopting it? I suspect the reality in many open source projects is simple… they don’t have an immediate need for a new license. Let’s say you have a laptop that you bought two months ago and someone is willing to trade you that laptop for one bought today that has a slightly better configuration. You know it will take you another 12 hours to migrate everything over and get up and running on the new one and while there’s potentially a slight benefit, there’s nothing on this new model that you really need. Perhaps you decline on updating to the latest model… that’s where I see GPLv3 - broad adoption will happen if those communities still on GPLv2 (or another license) have a need for any license change. The driver won’t be a new license, but a need for any change in their current license (and many won’t find one) I suspect Linus has been searching for what if any need he has for GPLv3 and there’s really not much that will “change the world” by changing licenses.

Anyway, head over to Luis’ place for his analysis, and in the meantime, remember: