The Free Software Foundation has published a draft of version 3 of the General Public License, thus kicking off a planned year-long process of discussion and debate in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

There are a number of significant substantive changes (which will be taken up here next week, hopefully), but it is already clear that one of the most important figures in the open source realm, Linus Torvalds, High King of Linux, is not on board the effort. He posted his disagreement with some of the proposals and said he will not convert the Linux kernel to v3. (C|News analysis here.)

This could create a very complex situation, because, while Linux is very much the flagship of the FOSS fleet, the kernel is only part of a full-bore distribution of Linux; it is surrounded by other programs which are under the jurisdiction of the FSF, and different parts of the bundle could be subject to quite different license requirements.

Torvalds is not the only potential defector, because other proposed changes disturb other parts of the FOSS coalition, especially the corporate players who provide the m-o-n-e-y. Since, as was said about Gandhi, it costs a fortune to keep the FOSSers in poverty, any loss of support from IBM, HP, Sun, or other corporate sponsors would be serious.

Members of the FOSS community downplay the possible conflicts on the ground that this is only a draft and the issues will be hashed out, the language changed, etc. But this seems a bit disingenuous; the issues have been known for quite a while, and the choices made by the FSF have not been made in ignorance.

A veteran bureaucratic warrior once advised me on tactics: "Always write the first draft; always emphasize how preliminary it is and how much it needs the input of your audience; always keep the pencil firmly in your own hands." On GPLv3, Richard Stallman and FSF have the pencil firmly in hand.

Those of us who do not belong to the church of FOSS are probably in for an entertaining year. To the extent that we know what is going on, that is. The GPLv3 website does not even name the discussion committees involved -- they are called A,B,C, D -- and their materials are behind passwords. So the public discussions will be secret? An interesting concept.

posted by James DeLong @ 3:30 PM | Software

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