The community involved in the GPLv3 license revision effort conferred in Barcelona in late June. The presentations are now online, but the important one is Richard Stallman's, since he holds the ultimate pen on the license and will be the decider on what is in or out.

Stallman has not budged an inch on any of the controversial issues. The revision will be designed to make GPLv3 incompatible with DRM, to discourage patenting, to extend the viral application of the GPL as it applies to programs that interact with GPL'ed code, and to allow individual programmers to require sharing of code added on to GPLed programs by ASPs (e.g., Google). (See past posts on the issue -- go here and search for "GPLv3".)

I do not see how the commercial part of the open source community can live with these changes, given the extraordinary importance of the GPL, especially to Linux. The hostility to DRM will be anathema to the content creators, and the ASPs should react badly to any risk of being required to reveal their crown jewel secrets.

So, to me this looks like a slow motion train wreck for the open source community. But so far the world has taken little note, so maybe the corporate types at IBM, Google, Red Hat, HP, Sun, etc., know something that I don't.

Oddity: I accessed fsfeurope a couple of days ago, but now all attempts to connect from PFF fail, even though others can get through. So the above link should work for you, if not for me.

UPGRADE (12:42 p.m): FSF Europe is available again, and the link to the presentations has been upgraded into the deeplink.

posted by James DeLong @ 9:58 AM | Software

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