I come now to the point about accountability and open source. Part I described how by mistake or by intent, the current draft of GPL3 potentially potentially requires Google, Amazon and other successful web-based deployers of open source to expose their code to imitators--and have little recourse against them but to download and imitate in turn. GPL3 potentially screws them, assuming upstream adopters and a desire on their part to update their GPL2 code. This presents an accountability puzzle:

Google and Amazon are among open source's biggest success stories. They trusted the letter of the license to allow them to do exactly what they did. But they weren't paying for the open source code that they used... and so future developers of open source have no reason not to mess with their heads. Open source for all its community is missing the simplest of market accountability mechanisms--that users of a product pay for it, and so its developers pay attention to users needs, with most successful users being particularly respected. It is hard to imagine if, say, Novell had developed some of the code that Google relies on and sold it under a traditional license, that Novell's next-generation product would be "out to get" Google.

So, a caveat: if this version of GPL3 is not, in fact, business friendly after all . . . there is a reason this happened. And it is likely to happen again. A cautionary tale.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:38 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation, Software

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